Hemp Wars, Part II – M. Wizard

Posted on April 17, 2007 by RagBlog

RESULTS OF ‘DRUG WAR’: SINCE THEY MAKE OUR LICENSE PLATES IN HUNTSVILLE, SHOULDN’T THE MOTTO ON THEM BE: ‘TEXAS, THE PRISON STATE’?

For taxpayers, the incentives are in the very act of relegalization: save money and increase public safety. The number of Texas prison inmates rose from 25,635 to 62,049 between 1985 and Dec. 6, 1993, necessitating the nation’s largest new prison construction program. With 62,645 inmates in Texas county jails on Nov. 1, 1993, and 12,128 inmates of federal institutions in the state on Dec. 10,1993, that’s a total (excluding city lock-ups) of ONE HUNDRED AND THIRTY-SIX THOUSAND, EIGHT HUNDRED AND TWENTY-TWO incarcerated persons, as the rest of us gave thanks for our freedoms. Davy and Col. Travis would be proud…

It’s fair to note that a lotta Texas turkeys were served, all dried out, on woodpulp plates, to those prisoners, and that’s just the tip of that particular wing. Prison building and supply are big business, and getting bigger with every brick. Hemp-based building materials could help house Texas’ homeless, providing jobs in the process, but that switch will no doubt require incentives, too.

Figures for marijuana offenders are not kept separately from those for other illegal “drugs,”but the Texas Criminal Justice Policy Council’s Sentencing Dynamics Study found that drug offenders made up 33.5% of all convictions in Texas in 1991, and 37% of all offenders,of any kind, sentenced to prison. Drug sale, manufacture, and possession cases accounted for about 25% of the total criminal caseload of Texas’ district courts, compared to 14% in 1985. While admissions to Texas prisons for violent crimes and crimes against property increased by 49% between 1985 and 1991, drug-related admissions increased
by 324%. During the some period, there was a 347% increase in early releases, for all offenses, on parole. Revolving-door justice has arisen to meet the crowding crisis, and is the basis of justifiable fears on the part of the law-abiding majority: violent criminals do roam the streets.

Annual operating costs for one Texas prisoner range from $16,000 to $21,500. Maintaining existing prisons costs more than $4 billion every two years (without the massive tax-and-build program now underway). Overcrowded prisons — Texas’ are under continuing federal court scrutiny — brutalize inmates and guards alike, and increase pressure for early releases of violent offenders who may repeat their violence. They also increase acceptance of ineffective “solutions” such as the death penalty, the bloody hand of Gov. Richards’ “New Texas.” The fastest growing job field in the public sector is that of prison guard; the fastest-growing in the private sector is security guard. Is this what we want for our children?

Many police and most defense attorneys favor decriminalization. The “drug war” wastes resources that could be better used against the roots of criminal behavior, and creates a climate for official corruption. Austin’s most decorated police officer, Robert “The Legend” Martinez, nationally known for anti-gang work,opposed consolidating an anti-gang unit into a general narcotics unit, stating that anti-gang officers working with narcotics officers would inevitably focus less on gangs because “police can seize assets in drug cases,” the Austin American-Statesman reported. Martinez said, ‘There’s money in narcotics. Arresting gang members doesn’t get you money.”

Others must be assured that anti-marijuana funds can be reallocated for other police activities; that efforts against harmful drugs such as crack cocaine and methamphetamines can be stepped up, and even find some success, without the protective coloration of marijuana traffic; and be reminded of the prison and court gridlock and its consequences.

BY-PRODUCTS OF RE-LEGALIZATION

Commercial hemp will provide environmental and economic benefits for Texas. Non-toxic, biodegradable fiber (paper, textiles, rope) and fuel products are made from hemp using non-polluting technologies. Delicious hempseed food provides the only two fatty acids (linoleic and lenolenic) required for human nutrition (flaxseed oil, removed from wide use by commercial cooking oils and their need for shelf-life, also has them), as well as edestin, a complete protein, unique among vegetable foods. Marijuana medicine brings relief to sufferers of countless diseases and halts the progress of others. It is safe and proven. Taxes on marijuana use can pay for education programs about dangerous drugs, including legal ones. Four million Texans have tried marijuana at least once, and over 750,000 used it in 1991. Taxed at the same rate as cigarettes, that’s about $I billion per annum.

Texas farmers need this new crop! Hemp is environmentally-friendly, suitable for marginal and crop-depleted soils. It replenishes soil nutrients as it grows. The Platform Committee at the 1992 State Democratic Convention in Houston passed a resolution urging relegalization and the development of a hemp pilot project in Hays County.

Relegalization must include strong tax incentives to plant marginal and depleted farmlands in hemp, to plant chemically-dependent cotton lands in hemp as preparation for “green” (organic) cotton, to develop and use hempseed in animal and poultry feeds, to develop hemp-based foods, to cultivate medical-grade Cannabis sativa, and to use hemp ropes, sails and other gear in commercial fishing operations; and provide Department of Agriculture/County Extension Agent training and support for hemp cultivation; as well as subsidize the purchase of hemp harvesters to be sold at cost, one per operator, to hemp farmers.

CANNABIS AS MEDICINE

Cannabis helps people with AIDS and those undergoing chemotherapy by stimulating appetite and digestion. It is the most effective medicine known for glaucoma, and many other medical conditions. Hemp has been used for thousands of years by human beings as medicine and for religious and sacramental purposes. No one has ever died from using Cannabis. The American Medical Association opposed making Cannabis illegal in 1939. Doctors lost that battle to the pharmaceutical concerns. Now losing faith in synthetic “wonder drugs,” they are ready for change. As the AIDS crisis overwhelms community resources, San Francisco’s Proposition P is only one of successful local initiatives to protect use of medical marijuana.

Relegalization must include recognition of and provision for medical-grade Cannabis. It is safer to use than aspirin; safer than crossing the street.

That, of course, is the fallacy the “War on Drugs” comes back to: we are to imagine that our streets are dangerous because drugs are creating criminals; rather than seeing that criminal laws are endangering humans. We are to think that ‘no one goes to jail for marijuana anymore’ while the facts tell a different story. We are to believe that the drug war aims at violent crackusers, while crack and other, weirder, highs overflow the niche once benignly filled by Reefer: when the People ain’t got nothin’; they got nothin’ to lose.

Environmentalists, entrepreneurs, civil libertarians, party Libertarians, and one million Texans who use marijuana are “already there” for relegalization. Where will the Left be when the petrochemical-spewing, timber-slaying dragon of ‘Pot’hibition is cut down to size? Too many still snurl up their lips at ending the drug war by restoring personal choice, saying, “Oh but that would be self-indulgent. Everyone to the right of Molly Ivins condemned US. Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders’ remarks favoring a study of drug legalization. It brings me full circle, to the fear of guilt by association which the vicious drug war has inspired. The net result: a visible-tip-of-the-iceberg hemp movement, dismissively stereo-tie-dyed rather than evaluated on the merits; allowing legislators to pass the buck to a supposedly drug-free constituency. If we don’t speak, they can’t listen.

That is changing, however, as pro-hemp forces recruit from all of the groups suggested above and more. Higher visibility for marijuana’s medical uses attracts supporters among physicians and patients’ families. Rural residents increasingly favor trying hemp as a cash crop. An opportunity exists for seasoned progressives to reach groups, which may have been beyond their grasp, on environmental and social justice issues. A need exists in the hemp movement for people who can find a meeting place, put out a newsletter, organize a rally, or are willing to host information and fund-raising events. Work with us to relegalize hemp by the year 2000, and let’s see if it doesn’t move us all a few steps closer to the dream: Liberty and Justice for all!

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Understanding the 2002 Venezuelan Coup

Posted on April 16, 2007 by RagBlog

An Account of April 11-13, 2002, in Venezuela: The 47-Hour Coup That Changed Everything
by Gregory Wilpert
April 15, 2007
Venezuelanalysis.com

The April 2002 coup attempt against President Chavez represented the perhaps most important turning point of the Chavez Presidency. First, it showed just how far the opposition was willing to go to get rid of the country’s democratically elected president. Up until that point the opposition could claim that it was merely fighting Chavez with the political tools provided by liberal democracy. Afterwards, the mask was gone and Chavez and his supporters felt that their revolution was facing greater threats than they had previously imagined. A corollary of this first consequence was thus that the coup woke up Chavez’s supporters to the need to actively defend their government.

Second, the coup showed just popular Chavez really was and how determined his supporters were to prevent his overthrow. They went onto the streets, at great personal risk (over 60 people were killed and hundreds were wounded by the police in the demonstrations that inspired the military to bring Chavez back to power), to demand their president’s return to office.

Third, the coup woke up progressives around the world to what was happening in Venezuela. It forced them to examine why a supposedly unpopular and authoritarian government would be brought back to power with the support of the county’s poor. As such, the coup shone a spotlight on what was happening in Venezuela and eventually rallied progressives around the world to support the Bolivarian (and now socialist) project.

Fourth, and perhaps most importantly for the future evolution of the Venezuelan conflict, the coup was the third nail in the political coffin of the country’s old elite. The first such nail was Chavez’s election in 1998, which brought an explicitly anti-establishment figure into Venezuela’s presidency for the first time in forty years. The second nail was the passage of the 1999 constitution and Chavez’s confirmation as President, in 2000, which democratically swept the country’s old elite almost completely out of political power, such as the governorships, the Supreme Court, and the National Assembly. With the third nail, the failure of the 2002 coup, the opposition lost a base of power in the military and a significant amount of good will in the international community. The next three nails, the failed 2002-2003 oil industry shutdown, the August 2004 recall referendum, and the December 2006 presidential election, only further solidified the old elite’s demise as a political force in Venezuela.

Each of these victories against the opposition heightened consciousness in Venezuela about the need to take the Bolivarian revolution further and thus also allowed Chavez to further radicalize his political program. The coup attempt represented a crucial moment in this process because it was the most dramatic expression of the Venezuelan conflict between a charismatic President and a mobilized poor population on the one hand and the country’s old elite and their supporters on the other.

Preconditions for a Coup

With Chavez’s popularity rating apparently sinking in late 2001 and early 2002,[1] especially among the middle class, and the general inability of the country’s old governing elite to accept Chavez as the legitimately elected President of Venezuela, it became just a matter of time for this old elite to form an alliance with dissident military officers and to organize a coup. The events in 2001 that led up to the coup can be summarized as the following:

* The departure of key former supporters from Chavez’s coalition (half of the MAS – Movement towards Socialism – party, Caracas Mayor Alfredo Peña, and MVR – Chavez’s party Movement for a Fifth Republic – co-founder and Minister of the Interior Luis Miquilena).
* The business sector’s uproar over 49 law-decrees passed in November 2001 that revamped the country’s banking, agriculture, oil industry, and fishing industries, among other things.
* The union federation’s (CTV) anger over the government’s push for union elections in October 2001.
* Chavez’s opposition to the Bush administration’s “war on terrorism.”
* The mass media’s active participation in the political conflict, largely taking the place of the discredited centrist and conservative parties.
* A developing recession, due to a rapid decline in world oil prices following the September 11, 2001 attacks in the U.S.

Many of these development were a consequence of Chavez refusing to play along in the “politics as usual” game of accommodating the established powers in society, whether the old union leadership, the church, the business class, the private mass media, or the government of the United States. In his first three years in office (1999-2001) Chavez thus proved himself to be a political leader of a completely different sort than the kinds the country’s old elite and the middle class had expected. Until 2000, following the mega-elections, it still looked like Chavez could perhaps be the kind of leader who talked tough, but who acted like a moderate. However, with the 49 law-decrees, especially the land reform and the new hydro-carbons law, Chavez proved that he was a different kind of leader.

Read the rest here.

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Cindy Sheehan

Posted on April 15, 2007 by RagBlog

Number 3291
by Cindy Sheehan
April 15, 2007
CommonDreams.org

Out of war nations acquire additional territory, if they are victorious. They just take it. This newly acquired territory promptly is exploited by the few — the selfsame few who wrung dollars out of blood in the war. The general public shoulders the bill. And what is this bill? This bill renders a horrible accounting. Newly placed gravestones. Mangled bodies. Shattered minds. Broken hearts and homes. Economic instability. Depression and all its attendant miseries. Back-breaking taxation for generations and generations.

Major General Smedley Butler
From: War is a Racket

I met the aunt of number 3291 today. I was sitting in seat 11E and a flight attendant gave me a note from a woman in seat 33C: “My nephew was killed in Iraq yesterday. I would like to meet you.”

Seat belt light or not, I headed back toward the rear of the airplane. We held each other and she said: “What can I do? My brother was in the Army and he initially supported the effort. Yesterday, he made a sign with a picture of his son saying: ‘Murdered by George Bush.’” I prayed for the Universe to give the families strength yesterday as I do everyday our soldiers are killed, as I pray for the Iraqis and their families who are also murdered unnecessarily. I don’t often get to meet the people I pray for in such a timely manner.

Four of our brave and abused troops were killed in King George’s escalation of the conflict in Iraq. Ten over the Easter weekend while George was hiding out at his ranch in Crawford. George Bush and his bloody gang of war-bandits have caused so much pain and heartache in the world without so much as a blink of the eye. Number 3291’s aunt recounted how she heard her sister ‘screaming for her son,” on the other end of the phone. Number 3291’s family is just beginning to realize the true meaning of broken heart and betrayals.

Number 3291 has a name: Brian. The only thing I know for sure about Brian was that he was in the army, he was probably blown up by an IED (which could have been avoided with an IED detector in his vehicle), and he has a loving aunt named Sheryl. His family lives in North Carolina and that’s where his body will be returning to under the cover of darkness to hide the shame of the Bush Regime.

Brian will never be a number to his family or friends. To the few people in this country who still incredibly support this horror and his war, Brian’s sacrifice will be noted as “freedom isn’t free,” or “he volunteered.” To the anti-war movement, Brian will be commemorated in a candlelight vigil when the 4000th troop is killed in Iraq. To the man sitting next to me in seat 11D, Brian is a non-entity because he: has no opinion on the occupation one way or the other because he has no “time to worry about it.” Trust me though, that’s all Brian’s mom did for the entire time he was in Iraq and there are 160,000 moms who lie awake at night worried about their child and Iraqi moms who never know when the last “I love you,” is the last one forever.

To me Brian represents a failure. I have been struggling with all my energy and resources to insure that Brian’s mom never had to fall on the floor screaming in agony or so that Aunt Sheryl would never have to take a sad and lonely trip across the country to be with her family in this terrible occasion for mourning. Every death since Casey’s has hit me with a fresh assault of suffering. How can my wounds heal when so many new ones are being opened up on a daily basis in three countries that are being devastated by the Bush doctrine of inflicting immeasurable damage with his war for profit being masqueraded as a war on terror?

The anti-war movement is failing in many areas. First of all, like the man sitting next to me, there are too many apathetic people in this country. How can anyone still be so indifferent to so much death and destruction? Even the people who are still confused and support the war have an opinion. The anti-war movement is also failing in its lack of influence on the policy makers. When such pro-occupation entities as MoveOn are being hailed as the “anti-war left” and our Congressional leadership are listening to them and using their corrupt polls as tools to hammer theoretically anti-war Reps into voting for a bill that would extend our troop presence in Iraq indefinitely, then the true anti-war movement has not been effective in getting our message out.

Another goal that the anti-war movement should have would be to move the overwhelming majority of Americans who are against the occupation of Iraq off of their couches and into the streets. The leaders of our country are in the obscenely deep pockets of the war machine and are exceedingly comfortable there. Only a massive electoral revolt will be able to pick the pockets of the war profiteers and force our elected officials to represent us and not the wealthy.

Brian’s family, my family, 3293 other families, our military families who are financially and emotionally strapped by the constant deployments and getting ready for deployments are sacrificing too much on the altar of greed. The Iraqi people who did not ask for Bush’s help are sacrificing horribly on this imperial altar. The rest of this nation is not sacrificing the way that so many others have. I am working so you don’t have to.

But if we, as a nation, want to end the farce of false patriotism to justify wars for profit and empire, we will have to sacrifice until it hurts. In this cleansing act will come redemption, because we can be assured that all of the children of the world are safe and sound. If we don’t work to end the absolute stranglehold of violence we are clutched in, then we deserve what we get.

Our movement has to move toward peace…at all costs.

Please go to The Camp Casey Peace Institute for info on things we can do to end this occupation!

Source

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Politicking Fear, The End

Posted on April 15, 2007 by RagBlog

Hijacking Catastrophe: Politics of Citizenship (10 of 10)

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Hemp Wars, Part I – M. Wizard

Posted on April 15, 2007 by RagBlog

WAR ON HEMP: No PEACE, No JUSTICE
by Mariann G. Wizard

“Scratch a stupid law, find a special interest.” Liberals, progressives, and leftists know this. Stupid laws serving special interests get our goat — we fight ’em, and often, we win. But one set of stupid laws, serving some of the most powerful, corrupt, and controlling special interests in the U.S. and the world, seems exempt from progressive criticism.

Most progressives privately agree that hemp/”marijuana”/cannabis prohibition is a senseless effort if ever there was one. Yet many people who use pot, activists or passivists, fear to join efforts to relegalize it. Public employees, high tech workers, and busdrivers fear for their jobs. Carpenters, salesmen, and bank executives fear for their liberty and/or homes. Unlike some movements for social change, espousing hemp relegalization doesn’t only imply the exercise of one’s Constitutional rights to independent thought and expression. There is a flat assumption that anyone favoring legalizing marijuana smokes it. People who don’t use it don’t care to be identified with those who say they do, for fear of being tarred by the same smoke.

And they’re right to be wary not smoking doesn’t guarantee immunity from government seizure of property or consequences of a faulty urine test.

But in a room with a few dozen movers and shakers sharing their goals for the new year, the social or economic problems that most engage them, one says, “I want to end world hunger; end prison crowding; stop deforestation; reduce use of petrochemicals and their consequent pollution; save the American family farm while improving the economic condition of hundreds of thousands of peasants and farmers worldwide; relieve suffering AIDS victims and other ill people with a harmless, natural, thousands-of-years-old medication; reduce substance abuse by adequately funding truthful drug education and treatment programs; provide a superior substitute for cotton, the most chemically-intensive crop grown; reduce landfills by increased use of biodegradable materials, including plastics; and, finally, increase prospects for world peace by the combined, multiple, and synergistic interactions of all the foregoing. I want to relegalize hemp.”

Here come the nudges, the winks, a whispered, “Oh, wow, do people still get high?” Someone laughs; someone else gets the tight-lipped look of the terminally moral. But it’s not self-indulgence, not anymore, folks! We are losing lives, liberties, and livelihoods for want of a God-given plant that can, truly, contribute to saving life on Earth! Wake up and smell the ganja: what if there isn’t anything more important, in the long run!

“Scratch a stupid law; find a special interest.” A real stupid, harmful law in this case; a big bad combo of the toughest, most entrenched, most destructive — to human life and to the Earth — special interests we have. Yet progressives fear them all less than they fear being seen as “frivolous!” Fear no longer, friends! You don’t have to smoke marijuana to want hemp relegalized!

WHY Is HEMP/CANNABIS/MARIJUANA ILLEGAL? How CAN ‘POT’HIBITION BE DEFEATED?

Marijuana prohibition was driven by specific commercial interests. Hemp re-legalization is driven by broad economic, environmental and civil libertarian interests, and commercial interests must be led to follow.

William Randolph Hearst, “Father of Yellow Journalism,” started the whole racist “reefer madness” scare. He owned timberlands as well as newspapers. Hemp paper competed with timber, and, with hemp-harvesting equipment patented in 1937, could also have cut costs for Hearst’s news competitors.

Relegalization must include strong tax incentives to set aside woodlands from harvesting for pulp (clear-cutting), especially in the Big Thicket and similar areas; to grow hemp for paper on marginal farmlands; to convert paper mills from wood pulp to hemp fiber, including re-training funds; and, for major paper users, to use hemp paper instead of wood pulp paper (including favoring such products in public purchasing).

The DuPont chemical and Lilly pharmaceutical firms — increasingly reliant, as were industry counterparts, on petroleum — also pushed Cannabis prohibition. Cannabis sativa was used in dozens of cheap, safe, effective medicines Lilly et al, could not patent or control. DuPont had just introduced Nylon® and needed to market its svnthetic fiber. While we can hardly detail the consequences of world over-commitment to a scarce, irreplaceable, and dangerous resource and its attendant technologies here, suffice it to say that the Exxon Valdez spill, and hundreds like it, might never have happened if research into hemp-based products had progressed during the past sixty years. The December 1993 Austin Sierran, newsletter of the Austin Sierra Club, includes a chart comparing energy resources by cost of extraction and transport, pollution caused, relative abundance, and ease of disposal. Overall, biomass fuel outranks ail but solar energy on this chart. And hemp is the most rapidly and widely growing, self-renewing biomass on Earth.

Relegalization must include strong tax incentives to develop hemp fuels for all applications and to convert facilities to their production, including retraining funds; to develop hemp oil for inks, paints, varnishes, and other products now made from petroleum and to convert facilities to their production, including retraining funds; and, for major users, to use hemp fuel and hemp-based products (including fevering such products in public purchasing).

As for tobacco interests and beer, wine, and alcohol interests (distillers were just recovering from their own prohibition when ‘pot’hibition gave them a chance for new addicts), relegalization may cut into their profits. Let ’em whine — their products kill people; Cannabis does not!

“Moral guardians” also favored hemp’s prohibition, following Hearst’s lead. Federal anti-hempster Harry Anslinger, convinced of the debilitating effects of “killer weed,” testified that its use would make (horrors!!) pacifists of military age men.

Today, hemp activists take the moral Initiative, pointing out that truth in drug education is better than lies; that marijuana-only “offenses” are nonviolent, victimless crimes (Anslinger was right about something!); that everyone’s privacy is eroded by a public “war” against personal choice; and citing The Lord’s commandment to use “every seed-bearing plant” (Genesis 2:29-30, Reo. St. Ed.).

To chronicle the diverse ways in which the illegality of hemp has supported both the covert operations of the CIA and those of intelligence agencies of other nations, while not neglecting the criminal interests which benefit from all drugs’ black market status, would require more words and wild allegations than are available to or advisable for a homebody like your present writer. With these forces, I am not hopeful of accord, but confident that their adaptability will see them through relegalizalion! But if hemp foods, fibers, medicines,and fuel products fulfill their potential, we may see a decline of the centralized, stratified State in which such farces arise. Does any other single change in public policy offer this hope?

To be continued …

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Judy in Montana

Posted on April 15, 2007 by RagBlog

Bottom-Up Power
Laura Flanders

This article is adapted from Laura Flanders’ new book, Blue Grit: True Democrats Take Back Politics From the Politicians (The Penguin Press).

An odd thing happens on the way to an American election. For months politicians talk about the importance of voters, voting and the power of majorities. Then on election night–wham–suddenly the only person who matters is the candidate. Thanks to media that cover elections as if they were races, all the attention goes to the horses; there’s little left for the people in the stands. Consider what happened in the wake of the Republican rout in the 2006 midterm elections. Just days after election night, the Sunday-morning TV talk shows were in full gallop, training attention away from the hordes of people and the organizing that had just flipped both houses of Congress and focusing instead on the few politicians who might be expected to run for President.

The brighter the spotlight on the candidate, the dimmer the darkness that falls on everyone else. Take Montana. The first Democrat to win the governorship in sixteen years, Brian Schweitzer, sparked breathless talk about a “Montana Miracle” when he won office in 2004, the same year that Democrats gained power in both chambers of state government after twelve years of GOP dominance. The national public heard more about Schweitzer’s bolo tie and boots than they did about his politics–but no matter, when his protégé Jon Tester pulled off a nail-biter win in the Senate two years later, Democratic hopes rose even higher. Maybe the Montana magic will rub off and herald Democratic victories across the West.

When the Democrats hold their national convention in Denver in 2008, Schweitzer and Tester are bound to be headliners. “The future is wearing a turquoise bolo tie wrapped around the open collar of a blue-and-white-striped button-down dress shirt,” began a typical article on Schweitzer in Salon. Tester, an organic farmer with a big frame and a flattop haircut, has stimulated similar style-over-substance talk. But the big men are not all that’s going on in the Big Sky state. To talk about a one- or even a two-man miracle is to ignore what’s really interesting about politics in Montana. As two local feminists, Judy Smith and Terry Kendrick, put it in their essay “Revisiting the Montana Miracle,” “rather than a miracle [what happened in ’04] was closer to a perfect storm.” As I discovered during my travels out West last spring, what’s been happening there may indeed have lessons for national Democrats–but not if the analysis stops with the candidates.

The day I arrive in Missoula, in March 2006, I meet a bright, blond athlete named Betsy Hands. As we drive around town, Hands tells me she is a former Peace Corps volunteer and environmental scientist who spent years in various African countries and once led wilderness trips for Outward Bound. She is program director at homeWORD, a community housing organization that helps low-income women and families buy affordable homes. She’s also a competitive telemark skier and, oh yes, she’s running for office, a seat in the State Assembly. “Somebody’s got to step up, and why not me?” Hands tells me cheerfully. It’s an attitude I hear a lot in this state.

On March 8 at the Missoula Women’s Day Potluck, trestle tables sag under the array of food. A cheerful noise spurts from a childcare room next door. Around the hall, women’s groups working on violence, healthcare and workplace discrimination are scattered about. What they have in common, I gradually learn, is that they are all members of something called Montana Women Vote, a coalition of ten statewide women’s organizations focused on increasing women’s participation in elections and encouraging women to run for office. This isn’t presidential election season; it’s eight months before a Congressional midterm race, yet on just about every table there is something about voting, a flier for a fundraiser or an invitation to attend a training for candidates. Voter registration forms are everywhere.

“The thing I often say about electoral politics is that I never thought I’d find myself doing it,” Judy Smith told me the next day. Smith is a longtime activist and a founder, with Terry Kendrick, of Montana Women Vote. “I was part of that radical contingent in the 1960s and ’70s which thought that electoral politics was not something that would make real change,” continued Smith. Her beliefs haven’t changed that much, but the possibility of affecting policy-makers through movement pressure has. In 1994 the Democratic Party in Montana found itself in the same fix that national Democrats woke up to in 2002: Out of power in both houses of the legislature and the governor’s mansion, “we were out in the wilderness, lost, trying to figure out why we were lost,” Tester’s state director Bill Lombardi, a longtime Democratic consultant, recalled. Montana was once a comfortably Democratic state that had only returned one Republican to the Senate in its history, but its demographics and its economy had shifted such that a whole lot of traditional Democratic voters (women, blue-collar workers, low-income urban dwellers) had abandoned the Democratic Party, or the state. Republicans, meanwhile, were reaping the benefits of years of investment in Western states by the organized right, including the Christian Coalition and the corporate-backed Wise Use anti-environmentalist movement. In 1994, the year that swept Newt Gingrich to power, Montana Democrats won just thirty-three of 100 seats in the State Assembly and nineteen of fifty in the Senate.

Local women’s groups, like homeWORD, had no allies left to lobby. “Instead of running into that wall over and over, we had to crack that wall open,” said Smith. And they weren’t the only ones who felt that way.

For most of the past 150 years, Montana was a mining and timber-run state. Pit-head derricks still rise above the dusty streets of Butte, once called “the richest hill on earth.” Next to the mines today lurks a huge lake of acid-laced water, part of the nation’s largest Superfund site. With the decline of mining and logging, an environmental movement has grown up that’s part conservationist, part hunters and fishers and part citizens concerned about the toxins in their water. By the end of the 1990s, as Theresa Keaveny, executive director of Montana Conservation Voters, explains it, good environmental laws passed in the 1970s “had been gutted, and just working on lobbying and rule-making wasn’t enough. We realized we had to change the policy-makers, and that demanded a political response. We had to elect people.”

Read the rest here.

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The Zimmers Are Singin’ On Sunday

Posted on April 15, 2007 by RagBlog

The Zimmers “My Generation”

The oldest and greatest rock band in the world – meet The Zimmers and their amazing cover of The Who’s “My Generation”. Lead singer Alf is 90 – it’s quite something when he sings “I hope I die before I get old”. And he’s not the oldest – there are 99 and 100-year-olds in the band! The Zimmers will feature in a BBC TV documentary being aired in May 2007. Documentary-maker Tim Samuels has been all over Britain recruiting isolated and lonely old people – those who can’t leave their flats or who are stuck in rubbish care homes.

The finale of the show is this group of lonely old people coming together to stick it back to the society that’s cast them aside – by forming a rock troupe and trying to storm into the pop charts. Some massive names from the pop world have thrown their weight behind The Zimmers… The song is produced by Mike Hedges (U2, Dido, Cure), the video shot by Geoff Wonfor (Band Aid, Beatles Anthology), and it was recorded in the legendary Beatles studio 2 at Abbey Road.

Look out for the single being released from May 21 – with proceeds going to a good cause. And check out more photos and info at: www.myspace.com/thezimmersband

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U.S., The Terrorist Organization

Posted on April 15, 2007 by RagBlog

The crux of the matter is what you call a “terrorist organization.” If it is simply an organization that terrifies civilians with violence or its threat, then the biggest and most vicious terrorist organization in the world is, without question, the US Army, followed by the US Air Force and the US Marines. The USA has combat troops stationed in 57 countries and has invaded or attacked Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Panama, Grenada, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan and a few others in just your adult lifetime. Who else does anything similar???

When you refer to Iran’s alleged aid to “numerous terrorist organizations,” but I could only think of two – Hezbollah and Hamas. Your Al Qaeda references are just so much US government propaganda. I read they laundered their Saudi money mostly in Dubai. Given that Al Qaeda is ultra-Sunni and Iran is ultra-Shia, it doesn’t compute. Faced with intransigent Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands, I don’t begrudge Hezbollah and Hamas of any tactic at their disposal. Nor do I accept, as you seem to do, the US government definition of what and who is a terrorist organization. One person’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter. However, all the bombs those organizations have ever set off are collectively trivial compared to what the US military does routinely.

You say, ‘there’s no question they are enriching uranium for the only purpose that’s “worthwhile”.’ That’s unfounded. There is no tangible evidence.

Actually, attacking Iran would be very much worse than attacking Iraq. If you think the US is in deep shit now, attacking Iran will unleash a sewage tsunami, probably World War III. To do so with nuclear weapons would confirm the US as a pariah state and Bush as an international war criminal in the eyes of most of humanity.

I’m trusting that as an old Direct Action guy, you’ll quickly sign the “Pledge of Resistance” to any attack on Iran.

David Hamilton

Just a note tagged onto David’s observations. He might as well have said “2+2=4″. I’m saying,”1+1+1+1=4”.

I was in Panama recently. The word on the street is that outgoing president Ms Muscosa was paid $8 million to let Posada walk out of prison there. “Our terrorist” Posada is now somewhere in the U.S. but I can’t find him on Goggle. The Bush administration was anxious not to have Posada stand trial in Cuba or Venezuela or any place else for the crimes he committed for “us”.

The U.S. and France trained, armed, paid and sent into Haiti a gang of terrorists to overthrow Aristide and democracy in general. The U.N. is now completing the eradication of democracy in Haiti. Aristide is in exile in South Africa. As far as I know Iran has taken no part in this obvious travesty.

Guantanamo, need I say more? Abu Ghraib? World Wide Extraordinary Renditions. Stop me!

The U.S. is paying North Korea to arm Ethiopia’s army, our proxy army, which has invaded Somali. Can it get weirder than this? I think it always can get weirder. There is oil in Somalia. The same oil field as is under south Yemen. There is oil in Darfur/Sudan and the U.S. wants it. The U.S. is happy for the Sudanese government to kill anyone who isn’t going along and so the genocide (large scale murder) will not stop until all “rebel” factions are neutralized. If and when the U.N. is sent in it will be to enforce what the U.S. wants, as in Haiti. Only the unobservant do not understand this.

There is not an IDEAL U.S. with moral standing and a pure intent. There is only this capitalist cabal trashing the world. There is no Exceptionalism, no Camelot. So when anyone calls for the U.S. to “do something” about this or that I wonder what U.S. they are talking about, certainly not the one that exists. The government we have works for and is the giant energy corporations. There is a majority of people who want the U.S. military out of Iraq but so far our democratically elected representatives are dragging their collective feet (Democrat and Republican feet) until the bogus Iraq oil contacts allowing the U.S. and others to own controlling interests in Iraqi resources are signed into “law” by “our” puppet regime in Baghdad. A trillion dollars has not been spent to bring democracy to Iraq or any other fantasies like that. There are 100 billion barrels of oil under Iraq.

The U.S. overthrew the leader of Iran for nationalizing Iran’s oil. The Iranians would be fools, within the rules set up by the world’s nuclear powers, not to develop atomic weapons and a means to deliver them wherever a likely threat might come from. The likely threat has overthrown their government once already and is threatening to do so again. The U.N.’s permanent members of the Security Council is the largest gang of terrorists ever. Do they consider themselves “The Elect of God.” I think they do. Just as George W. said he is.

Where is it that the U.S. has supported a democratic country that did not go along with U.S. foreign policy because that was the right thing to do? Where is it that the U.S. has supported the struggle of the majority to overthrow a despot who supported U.S. foreign policy? Quibbles anyone?

Perhaps Steve has moved from “My country, right or wrong” to “My country, less wrong” or maybe even “If there is going to be a winner it might as well be my country”.

“Imagine there’s no countries…” there really are not any countries. In the direction we are going there will not be any oceans, or air either. The ticket on the last ego trip will soon be punched.

Alan Pogue

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Many a Black Hawk Will Go Down – Escobar

Posted on April 15, 2007 by RagBlog

The Baghdad Gulag
By Pepe Escobar

04/13/07 “Asia Times” — — DAMASCUS – There are three overlapping wars in Iraq: the Sunni Arab guerrilla struggle against the US; strands of Sunni Arab guerrillas against assorted Shi’ite militias/death squads; and al-Qaeda in Iraq against the puppet, US-backed Iraqi government in the Green Zone. Make it four wars: the Sunni Arab guerrilla war against the government inside the Green Zone. Better yet, make it five wars: the Sadrists, from Sadr City to Kufa and Najaf, against the Americans.

All strands of these five overlapping wars will never allow the United States – or Anglo-American Big Oil – to control Iraq’s oil wealth. Even if the new oil law is ratified by Parliament before June, implementation will be a certified nightmare, and security for billions of dollars of necessary investment non-existent.

Strands of these five overlapping wars also will never accept the long-term imposition of vast US military bases under a Status of Forces Agreement negotiated with dodgy politicians who spend more time in London than in Baghdad.

Setting a precise date for a total US withdrawal – the crystal-clear demand insistently formulated by Muqtada al-Sadr – would be the only way for the Bush administration to salvage a modicum of not totally humiliating defeat. Instead, the world had better be ready for the imminent arrival of the Baghdad gulag.

Can I leave my condo, please?

US corporate media/think-tanks may think they fool strands of US public opinion (or themselves), but they don’t fool Iraqis on the (dangerous) ground. No realist in his right mind could possibly ignore the 14-kilometer-long throngs compacted all along the Kufa-Najaf road this past Monday, on the fourth anniversary of the fall of Baghdad.

There were hundreds of thousands, perhaps more than a million Iraqi nationalists, waving Iraqi flags – with no room for a religious divide – responding to Muqtada’s call for “Occupation out!” The Shi’ite million-man march proved once again Sadrists rule the Shi’ite street – and are the most powerful political force among Iraqi Shi’ites.

Yet for the administration of US President George W Bush, Muqtada al-Sadr – like every nationalist with immense popular appeal – is nothing but an evildoer who must be squashed by all counterinsurgency means necessary.

Imperial and neo-colonial systems are incapable of thinking laterally. The French failed to do so in Algeria. The Americans failed in Vietnam. The Israelis failed in Palestine. The Americans will fail to do so again in Iraq. Call it counterinsurgency run amok. Thirty of Baghdad’s 89 districts will become gated communities from hell – cellophane-wrapped compounds where only Iraqis with a new, theoretically safe ID will be allowed in and out of this “secure environment”, in Pentagon newspeak. Yes, it will be Orwellian. Better yet, it will be a post-mod, Arab condo version of Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, where the eye of the system is ubiquitous.

In the last chapter of my book Globalistan – titled “Condofornia vs Slumistan” – I argue that the future now revolves around the tension between gated communities and unruly slums, “secure environments” and black waves of anger. Wherever both meet – from Baghdad to Sao Paulo – we may see endless replays of Black Hawk Down.

The Baghdad gulag is a Pentagon-enforced Condofornia imposed over an Arab Slumistan. Let no one be fooled: it’s being conducted as a technical experiment, with live Iraqis as guinea pigs, and is bound to be replicated in other areas of the Pentagon-created “arc of instability” from the Andes to the Horn of Africa to Arabia to Central Asia.

Let no one be fooled (again): guerrillas will IED the system from their underground cells, and many a Black Hawk will go down. But as everyone watches the destined-to-failure experiment, really serious matters – such as three new, crucial US mechanized brigades deploying east of Baghdad on the way to be strategically positioned at the Iraqi-Iranian border – will be taking place under the cover of night.

Read all of it here.

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The Democrats Are No Better

Posted on April 15, 2007 by RagBlog

Awful Truth About Hillary, Barack, John… and Whitewash
By Norman Solomon
Apr 14, 2007, 08:43

The Pentagon’s most likely next target is Iran.

Hillary Clinton says “no option can be taken off the table.”

Barack Obama says that the Iranian government is “a threat to all of us” and “we should take no option, including military action, off the table.”

John Edwards says, “Under no circumstances can Iran be allowed to have nuclear weapons.” And: “We need to keep all options on the table.”

A year ago, writing in the New Yorker, journalist Seymour Hersh reported: “One of the military’s initial option plans, as presented to the White House by the Pentagon this winter, calls for the use of a bunker-buster tactical nuclear weapon, such as the B61-11, against underground nuclear sites.”

For a presidential candidate to proclaim that all “options” should be on the table while dealing with Iran is a horrific statement. It signals willingness to threaten — and possibly follow through with — first use of nuclear weapons. This raises no eyebrows among Washington’s policymakers and media elites because it is in keeping with longstanding U.S. foreign-policy doctrine.

This year, with their virtually identical statements about “options” and “the table,” the leading Democratic presidential candidates — Clinton, Obama and Edwards — have refused to rule out any kind of attack on Iran.

If you’re not shocked or outraged yet, consider this:

On Feb. 22, the national leaders of MoveOn sent an e-mail letter to more than 3 million people with the subject line “War with Iran?” After citing a need to give UN sanctions “a chance to work before provoking a regional conflict,” the letter said flatly: “Senator Hillary Clinton has provided some much needed leadership on this.”

The MoveOn letter quoted a passage from a speech that Clinton had given on the Senate floor eight days earlier:

“It would be a mistake of historical proportion if the administration thought that the 2002 resolution authorizing force against Iraq was a blank check for the use of force against Iran without further congressional authorization. Nor should the president think that the 2001 resolution authorizing force after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, in any way, authorizes force against Iran. If the administration believes that any, any use of force against Iran is necessary, the president must come to Congress to seek that authority.”

But, while quoting Hillary Clinton’s speech as an example of “some much needed leadership,” MoveOn made no mention of the fact that the same speech stated:

“As I have long said and will continue to say, U.S. policy must be clear and unequivocal: We cannot, we should not, we must not permit Iran to build or acquire nuclear weapons. And in dealing with this threat, as I’ve also said for a long time, no option can be taken off the table.”

Earlier this year, David Rieff noted in the New York Times Magazine on March 25, “Vice President Cheney insisted that the administration had not ‘taken any options off the table’ as Iran continued to defy United Nations calls for it to abandon its nuclear ambitions. The response from Democrats was not long in coming. Senator Clinton helped lead the charge, reminding the president that he did not have the authority to go to war with Iran on the basis of the Senate’s authorization of the use of force in Iraq in 2002.

“But what Senator Clinton did not say was at least as interesting as what she did say. And what she did not say was that she opposed the use of force in Iran. To the contrary, Senator Clinton used virtually the same formulation as Vice President Cheney. When dealing with Iran, she insisted, ‘no option can be taken off the table.’”

To praise Hillary Clinton for providing “much needed leadership” on Iran — and to mislead millions of e-mail recipients counted as MoveOn members in the process — is a notable choice to make. It speaks volumes. It winks at Clinton’s stance that “no option can be taken off the table.” It serves an enabling function. It is very dangerous.

The stakes are much too high to make excuses or look the other way.

Source

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Politicking Fear, Part 9

Posted on April 15, 2007 by RagBlog

Hijacking Catastrophe: “Bring it On” pt. 2 (9 of 10)

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MCRove

Posted on April 14, 2007 by RagBlog

MC Rove

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