Weekly Spoon

DLC would rather you not vote

2006-08-09T09:26:00.000-07:00

They don’t really want you to vote

The news today is all about Ned Lamont’s Connecticut Democratic primary victory over Joseph Lieberman, incumbent three-time senator, right wing appeaser and Bush policy enabler. The final tally was fairly close, 52 per cent Lamont to 48 per cent Lieberman, however not much should be read into to this as many of the primary results were similarly close.

I have already witnessed evidence, on ABC’s “Good Morning America” and NBC’s “Today,” that the mainstream media, those defenders of democracy, are portraying Lamont and his blogger supporters in a light similar to what the supports of George McGovern were in 1972: kooks, hippies, peaceniks and out-of-touch-with-mainstream-America. Yet,as the New York Times observed:

The defeat of Senator Joseph Lieberman at the hands of a little-known Connecticut businessman is bound to send a message to politicians of both parties that voters are angry and frustrated over the war in Iraq. The primary upset was not, however, a rebellion against the bipartisanship and centrism that Mr. Lieberman said he represented in the Senate. Instead, Connecticut Democrats were reacting to the way those concepts have been perverted by the Bush White House.
The rebellion against Mr. Lieberman was actually an uprising by that rare phenomenon, irate moderates. They are the voters who have been unnerved over the last few years as the country has seemed to be galloping in a deeply unmoderate direction. A war that began at the president’s choosing has degenerated into a desperate, bloody mess that has turned much of the world against the United States. The administration’s contempt for international agreements, Congressional prerogatives and the authority of the courts has undermined the rule of law abroad and at home.

Lieberman is, or was at least, the poster child for an opposition party that kept edging closer and closer to the majority party’s position, then calling that the middle. It is truer than ever, there’s not a dimes’ worth of difference.

But why do the political appeasers of the Democratic Leadership Council keep repeating a mantra of defeat?

I’m beginning to think they actively want to discourage voting and eliminate our so-called two-party system, which has no basis in law, altogether.

The word bipartisanship slides easily from the lips of DLC candidates, as does middle ground, triangulation, and work with Republicans. Now there would be nothing wrong, in the traditional sense, of working with Republicans on legislation but, in post-Civil War American history, when did that, with the exception of declaring war, ever happen? Without referring to any sources other than my own feeble memory, of what I read in American history, I don’t think that FDR’s New Deal legislation was passed with much, if any, Republican support. Perhaps we can say the Voting Rights Act of 1965 received bipartisan support , but this was due more to white Southern sectionalism, contraryism and racism. (It should be noted that the majority of Southern Democrats who voted against the Voting Rights Act switched to the Republican Party in subsequent years.)

So “bipartisanship” is just a myth, a smokescreen to for politicians of both parties to push through laws favorable to big business. Look as the crap that’s coming from Iowa’s Democratic gubernatorial candidate, Chet “Chester” Culver. He wants to cut corporate property taxes, raise the cigarette tax a dollar per pack, and use the revenue from that tax to pay for health insurance for 58,000 of the states’ kids. He also wants to raise teachers’ salaries, put more state money into the three board-of-regents state universities and more tax credits to parents of kids going to Iowa’s private colleges. Chester also wants to raise the minimum wage, a paltry $2.10 per hour, while at the same time increasing the state’s output of ethanol and biodiesel by encouraging further investment through tax credits and incentives. Other than the increase in the cigarette tax, aimed intentionally or not at lower income Iowans, he doesn’t have the foggiest clue how to pay for all of this. But guess what! Challenger Republican Jim Nussle wants the same things and he’s even more clueless! (See Spoon Letter Anthology,Yepsen Compares, contrats Tweedle-Chet, Tweedle-Nus)

Right now the only real difference between the two major political parties is that the Republicans, after making a pact with the Devil after the downfall of Nixon and upholding of Roe v. Wade, throw some meat to their crazy, “Christian conservative” base, which is neither Christian or conservative. The Democrats throw little the way of social democrats, such as myself.

Look, I’m not the only guy out here in the blog-o-sphere who is a social democrat. I’m not the only one who wants a universal health care system the same as every other country in the world. I’m not the only guy who’s saying the Pentagon budget is dragging down the national economy. I’m not the only guy who says it’s time to stop kissing the Saudi Royal Family’s ass and pull the plug on the America Israel PAC. Jesus Christ they’re both big boys on the international scene, now let’em work out their own problems. I’m not the only guy who wants this nation to embark on a plan to upgrade, update and just put in place a decent mass transportation system, that might just make this country less reliant on foreign oil. And I’m not the only guy who says this country has done great damage, now and in the past, to Mexico and the nations of Central America and it’s time to have a “Marshall Plan” to raise their economies so their young men and women won’t have to trek to El Norte.

But do I, and thousand like me, get that. NO. We hear, read and see Democrats mouth tired platitudes about working together and getting along and working with the Republicans. You don’t have a compromise as your first offer, especially when dealing with fascists.

Second week in a row........

2006-08-02T07:40:00.000-07:00

No update. It have a fellow coming over to start giving me an estimate for a new furnace--price of natural gas isn't coming down anytime soon. And Blogger.com has been cranky of late. Don't know if it's the heat or a plethora of middle school (I remember when this was "junior high") and high school kids jamming the band width, or a combination of both (most likely scenario.) You can still share my demented thoughts at Spoon Letter Anthology.

Oil, war and global warming

2006-07-19T08:37:00.000-07:00

It’s going to be hotter that hell again today. I could say the heat wave is due to global warming, but it’s not. Iowa summers have been this hot, and hotter, in the past that I can remember. So, no, it’s not the summers that worry me but our Iowa winters.

In the last several years, starting in 2000 or so, I have noticed our winters being warmer than what I remembered as a child. That’s not to say that we don’t get the below zero day or week now and then, it’s just that those temperatures are becoming fewer and farther between. In fact it is becoming so clement around here, when I asked a letter carrier, newly moved here from northern California, how he like the Iowa winter, he said he really couldn’t tell much difference and didn’t understand what all the shouting was about. Needless to say, some of the other old hands in Postal blue and I were somewhat crestfallen at his revelation; we were secretly hoping to hear him whine about the bitterness of the Iowa winter.

So what does global warming have to do with the world political situation?

Everything.

Let’s revisit Greg Palast’s Armed Madhouse:

But don't kid yourself -- Bush and his co-conspirator, Dick Cheney, accomplished exactly what they set out to do. In case you've forgotten what their real mission was, let me remind you of White House spokesman Ari Fleisher's original announcement, three years ago, launching of what he called,

"Operation

Iraqi

Liberation." (P.65)

It's about oil," Robert Ebel told me. Who is Ebel? Formerly the CIA's top oil analyst, he was sent by the Pentagon, about a month before the invasion, to a secret confab in London with Saddam's former oil minister to finalize the plans for "liberating" Iraq's oil industry. In London, Bush's emissary Ebel also instructed Ibrahim Bahr al-Ulum, the man the Pentagon would choose as post-OIF oil minister for Iraq, on the correct method of disposing Iraq's crude.

And what did the USA want Iraq to do with Iraq's oil? The answer will surprise many of you: and it is uglier, more twisted, devilish and devious than anything imagined by the most conspiracy-addicted blogger. The answer can be found in a 323-page plan for Iraq's oil secretly drafted by the State Department. Our team got a hold of a copy; how, doesn't matter. The key thing is what's inside this thick Bush diktat: a directive to Iraqis to maintain a state oil company that will "enhance its relationship with OPEC."
Dick and George didn't want more oil from Iraq, they wanted less. I know some of you, no matter what I write, insist that our President and his Veep are on the hunt for more crude so you can cheaply fill your family Hummer; that somehow, these two oil-patch babies are concerned that the price of gas in the USA is bumping up to $3 a gallon.
Greg Palast.com

So now you’re wondering, what does oil have to do with warm Iowa winters?

I think the connection is fairly self-evident. Our modern Western Civilization, and the benighted Third World, save for poor North Korea (though it might be luckier than we think) for that matter, runs on petroleum. Hell, it just doesn’t run on oil it guzzles it. We might as well bathe in the stuff. And in the United States there is no political appetite for going on an oil diet. Too many politicians receive too much money from our end of the real Axis of Evil, Houston, Texas, to tell fat, old Uncle Sucker it’s time for oil gastric by-pass surgery. The price for a gallon of gasoline is, in some locals, three dollars per but has that lead to any fundament shift in the average American’s behavior?

Witness the new Hummer H3 commercial in which a young man is in the checkout line at the grocery store buying tofu, vegetables etc. Glancing over his shoulder, he sees piles of red meat and is embarrassed by his purchase, then rushes to the parking lot and jumps into a Hummer H3. The voiceover tagline: “Hummer: restore your manhood.” The castration anxiety angle is so heavy handed you can almost smell the testosterone; though I wonder how any red-blooded American male can get his chubby with a five-cylinder engine getting an EPA “estimated” 16 mpg/city and 20 mpg/highway. But of course those “estimates” are notoriously loose and the reality can, depending on the driver and conditions, be better or far, far worse. From a person perspective the drivers of Hummers, be they the H1 behemoth, the slightly smaller H2 or the “compact” H3, tend to be the lead-footed variety. GM and Ford certainly know theirmarket and I’m sure they had some help from their Five Sisters.

All this in turn leads me to the current situation in the Middle East and the struggle between poor, little orphan Israel or
"Who prevails with God,” and the international terrorist organization Hezbollah or “Party of God.”

As Tom Incantalupo reports in Newsday:

…[M] ost experts expect prices to remain close to their current levels at least through Labor Day, after which pleasure driving usually declines and cheaper winter-grade gasoline begins a monthlong phase-in at local gasoline stations.
But gasoline futures, representing wholesale New York harbor prices, fell in trading Tuesday on the New York Mercantile Exchange, by 1.83 cents, to $2.267 a gallon.

Gasoline futures were following crude oil, which fell by $1.76 to $73.54 a barrel in New York. Prices had touched a record $78.40 on July 14; the highest since trading began in 1983.

Coincidently, Hezbollah guerrillas snatched the Israel Defense Force, IDF, soldiers a week ago, July 12. And the good news coming out of the Levant is that this little border incident will not escalate into World War III, in spite of everything Newt Gingrich says. So the price of gasoline might go down. Or it might not.

“Peter Beutel, an energy consultant and president of Cameron Hanover Inc. in New Canaan, Conn., says that's quite possible, but he notes that continued high demand by American drivers is keeping supplies tight and prices high. "For some reason, it [the high cost] doesn't seem to be changing anybody's approach to driving at all," Beutel said.

For the four weeks ended July 7, U.S. demand for gasoline was 1.7 percent higher than a year earlier, the Energy Department said last week. Analysts surveyed by Bloomberg News predicted that the department would report Wednesday that U.S. gasoline inventories fell again in the past week.”
op.cit

Which leads me back to global warming. Auto exhaust emissions are not the only cause for the rise in average global temperature, but they are a significant contributor. Yet we Americans seem culturally in capable of making a lifesaving decision even as doom stares us in the face.

I said to a friend of mine, that there will come a time when we, meaning the United States, will have to make a choice between the automobile culture and building environmentally clean mass transportation. His answer was we could have both. He likes to drive. Why can’t we have it both ways?

We can't have it both ways because global warming will force us to change whether we like it, ready or not.

I said, “”You’ve read Collapse?” Of course he had. And I asked if he remembered the part about Easter Island. He recalled author Jared Diamond musing on the thoughts of the man who chopped down the island’s last tree.

Jared Diamond hazarded no guess as to what that man might have thought, but I will. I can imagine the fellow who cut down Easter Island’s last tree to be used as a roller to transport the last giant stone head thought: "Mission Accomplished."

We might as well get used to it; Democracy is dying

2006-07-12T06:16:00.000-07:00

Ever since the founding of the United States, in 1789--and I use that year because it is the first year under Constitutional government--there has been political fissures along party lines. Most conveniently for all concerned, in this country's history politcal division was nearly always bilateral. In fact in the history of Western democracies, or at least in those polities that settled internal political issues by some sort of voting system, sufferage for centuries being the exclusive prerogative of propertied males, two opposing factions, or parties, alway developed.

Without at least two opposing parties, how can a constitutional form of government be concidered a democracy?

Short answer, it cannot.

Which leads me to wonder why any politician would make a statement like this:"This country can't afford further polarization."

The above, and more like it, were uttered by ex-governor of Virginia Mark Warner at a fundraiser in Des Moines, IA for Democratic gubnatorial hopeful Chester Culver. Ostensively this minor light of the Democratic Party is running for president and has amassed a quite healthy campaign warchest, second only it is rumored to that of undeclared front-runner Hillary Clinton. But let us read from Wikipedia concerning Warner's career as governor of the Commonwealth of Virginia:

Warner worked with moderate Republican legislators and the business community to reform the tax code in 2004, lowering food and income taxes, and increasing the sales and cigarette taxes in 2004, despite his campaign pledge that he would not raise taxes.The action saved the state's AAA bond rating, held at the time by only 5 other states, and allowed the single largest investment in K-12 education in Virginia history.

What a wonderful man! And what a wonderful way of funding education!; on the backs of the poor, through an increase in a regressive state sales tax, and the diseased lungs of Virginia's cigarette smokers! No wonder our beloved Governor Vilsack, chairman of the "New" Democrats, tried so hard to follow suit with his proposal to raise Iowa's cigarette tax from$0.36 per pack to a whopping $1.16 for twenty coffin-nails! DLC-monkey see, DLC-moneky do.

Now I supposed I should give Warner a modicum of credit for "...not leading on hot button issues, but maintains he is trying to avoid unproductive posturing and partisanship"(Wikipedia.org cited above) but that's exactly the problem. When the "hot button issues" and the boilerplate is all stripped away, there isn't a dime's worth of difference between "centrist" Democrats and "moderate" Republicans. In fact, I'll even go further and say that once the abortion, "gay marriage" and gun rights is stripped away there's not much difference between the positions of a reactionary knuckledragger like Rep. Steve King and this Warner guy. It's all about the money.

What is becoming clearer is that the non-ideological right in this country, the old money, banking Republicans, is looking for a divorce from the so-called "movement" conservatives, the middle-class religious whacko Republicans. The moneyed Republican crowd is tiring of all the "Christian" posturing by the Reaganites and the "War on terror," except for a few, well all, defense contractors, has been pretty much a bust. Time to trade horses. The preachers and bloviators have done their jobs quite well in driving a generation of Americans into the arms of Mother Reaction. But they've all outlived their usefulness, and a considerable number of their followers and listeners actually believe the bullshit! It is time to sing a lullaby to the Christian Coalition, and mesmerize the rudderless Democrats.

For the corporationist crowd, that so-called "New" Democrats like Warner, et al. are sucking up to, political stability is the watchword ; bipartisanship its slogan. It's time to put the people, the consumers, back to bed, political somnambulance is the preferred state.

Further reading:

Gov. Whodafuck in town for Dempublican fundraiser

Can't the Democrats do better than this?!

Momma, always told me, "If ya stand in the middle of the road, yer bound to get run over!"

Republican wing nuts bum out Centrists

Spoon Letter Anthology

No post today

2006-07-05T06:46:00.000-07:00

Attending a friend's funeral.

Further reflections on the ACLU, Randall v Sorrell & the slow death of democracy

2006-06-29T13:04:00.000-07:00

I am still very upset over the American Civil Liberties Union’s position in the Randall v. Sorrell case in which the John Roberts Supreme Court struck down the State of Vermont’s mandatory campaign spending limits, thereby upholding Buckley v Valeo and maintaining the status quo.

For me the issue boils down to plutocracy versus democracy, oligarchy versus republic. The Des Moines Register wrote: “Spending money to further political views is freedom of expression, pure and simple. Besides, the American people have a ready remedy if politicians are corrupted by campaign cash: They can vote the bums out.”

How facile, but the reality is that “the bums” have almost direct access to means of expression and dissemination, i.e. the media, “voting” them out becomes a nearly impossible task. If corrupt Senator Moneybags, with million of dollars in campaign funds, can dominate the media what chance does Candidate Pureheart, with limited funds, have in getting his message out? After all Senator Moneybag’s friends and colleagues own and operate all the major media outlets. So if the voters are inundated by pro-Moneybags television, radio and newspaper advertisements and psuedo endorsements, can cash-stripped Pureheart be heard? Can the voters make an informed decision?

I think the answer is no. But here is what a Los Angeles Times editorial said in defense of the Court’s upholding of Buckley v. Valeo:

the Buckley ruling said, a candidate spending his own money is entitled to greater 1st Amendment protection because he is espousing his own views. The same point holds of truly independent expenditures by a candidate's supporters.

It's easy to mock this distinction. After all, both campaign contributions and campaign expenditures represent the use of money to produce political results. But Buckley's two-tier approach makes sense. It was a pragmatic attempt to balance a need for elections uncontaminated by large special-interest contributions with the guarantees of the 1st Amendment, which above all protects political speech.

Now let’s re-read one sentence: “It (Buckley v Valeo) was a pragmatic attempt to balance a need for elections uncontaminated by large special-interest contributions with the guarantees of the 1st Amendment, which above all protect political speech.” From the perspective of history, this is an absurd statement. One need only look at any of the campaign disclosure web sites and see that “special-interest” contributions are the engine of the America political process. To pretend that Mr. Gottrocks, major stockholder of several corporations, is not a “special-interest,” even though his is, after all, only one individual is to ignore reality.

The equation: Money = Free Speech, is absurd. Money, after all, is commonly agreed upon as an abstraction of property. When humankind first conceived of agriculture, animal husbandry and organized warfare, an economic system was sure to follow. And in those halcyon days goods were exchanged to goods, or in some case services. For example if I wanted to purchase cheese made from my neighbor’s nanny goat’s milk, I offered him some good or service which was useful to him. We bartered our property. This is a very broad definition of the word, but in the BCE world of ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt and the Indus Valley, where the first civilizations arose, I imagine the very concept of “property” was itself very loose. Now I purchase my neighbor’s goat’s milk cheese with money.

Today money itself is abstract. It is also a commodity. Money is traded. Money, and here I am climbing out on a logical limb, therefore can be thought of as property.

There are no property requirements for federal public office, on this the United States Constitution is quite clear. Abraham Lincoln would have never been able to run for and get elected to the US House in 1846 if he’d had to raise funds comparable to what it takes for the average US House race today (in 2004 an average of $849,000.) Lincoln, a family man with a wife and children, knew the power of money in political campaigning, but in today’s political climate he would have had to walk away from his law practice and devote his entire political career to fundraising. In 1846 Lincoln was relative to the day well off financially, but he was by no means independently wealthy.

So under today’s Buckley v Valeo rules, to run for political office on any level of government above local, the office seeker need either be independently wealthy or devote all efforts toward fundraising; a process little different from the common streetwalker soliciting Johns. It is no accident the US Senate is a rich man’s club.

Will history harshly judge the ACLU’s position in both Randal v Sorrell and Buckley v Valeo? Only time will tell. How does history judge “political hero” Eugene McCarthy?

By successfully knocking a sitting president, Lyndon Johnson, out of a re-election bid in 1968, McCarthy’s quixotic campaign was the direct cause of some of the most horrendous unintended consequences in United States history: The deliberate sabotage of an early peace settlement among the United State, North and South Vietnam and Cambodia, possibly as early as 1968, that was being negotiated by the Johnson administration. The election of Richard Nixon, six more years of war in Vietnam, with increasing violence committed by all sides-- the bombing escalation over North and South Vietnam, the mining of Haiphong Harbor; an illegal incursion into Cambodia, My Lai, plus a host of nameless atrocities— and Watergate.

I am sure the late Senator McCarthy was justifiably proud of his turn on the stage of history in 1968. Yet like some real-life Joe Btfsplk, McCarthy spun the wheel of unintended consequences yet again as a co-plaintiff in Buckley v Valeo, leading once again to what I feel were dire consequences indeed: the election of Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and an invasion and occupation of Iraq. What a triumph of 1st Amendment freedom of speech.

What will be the unintended consequences of Randall v Sorrell be? I am certain the forces of reaction are licking their lips over the prospect of pushing ACLU challenges to Clean Money/Clean Elections laws in Arizona, Maine, New Mexico, New Jersey and North Carolina based on the Buckley v Valeo precedent. Meanwhile, the very same forces of reaction, which will benefit the most from striking down Vermont’s campaign funding rules, are busily undermining the concept of one man/one vote.

Undoubtedly this development, and many others yet to follow, will keep ACLU lawyers busy. It is just business after all.

ACLU on wrong side of history in Randall v. Sorrell

2006-06-28T11:56:00.000-07:00

I am very angry at the American Civil Liberties Union. No, I’m more than angry, I’ve really, really pissed off.

Tuesday, in a 6-3 decision the United States Supreme Court, no longer in the clutches of “liberal” activists, overturned Vermont’s nine-year-old law limiting campaign contributions. In so doing the Roberts court upheld the Burger Court’s 1976 decision, Buckley v. Valeo, equating campaign contributions, primarily by wealthy individuals, with the First Amendment right of free speech.

On the face of it, the saying that money is equal to freedom of speech, as protected by our First Amendment, is absurd. Yet this is the argument the ACLU presented before the non-activist Roberts Court.

In briefs filed with the Court, the ACLU argued that the extreme limits of Act 64 prevent voters from hearing from the candidates themselves, and ultimately magnifies the importance of so-called special interest spending, further undermining the state's asserted interest in limiting the influence of such groups on the electoral process. In addition, the Act blurs the line between discussions of issues by candidates, particularly incumbents, and election speech.

"The state of Vermont would have us believe Act 64 is only about money and not about speech, when in fact the opposite is true," said ACLU senior staff attorney Mark Lopez, who is co-counsel in today's case. "A candidate who has reached the spending limit cannot even drive to the village green to deliver a political speech without violating the law, because mileage counts as an expenditure under this law."
ACLU press release 06//28/06

Said an ACLU lawyer:

"We're obviously very, very pleased. It's a landmark case for freedom of speech," said Peter Langrock, a Middlebury lawyer who represented the American Civil Liberties Union in the case.

"This bill (Vermont’s Act 64) used a sledgehammer to fix a bent nail," Langrock said.

He noted that the court agreed that the law's contribution limits would reduce the voice of political parties to a "whisper."

Vermont Republican Party Chairman Jim Barnett, whose organization also opposed the law, praised the decision as not only a victory for free speech but also "a blow to incumbent politicians."
Burlington Free Press

One fallacy of logic the ACLU presented in its argument is the long held American belief that the smaller the political unit, the less the possibility of corruption.

[ACLU cooperating attorney, Mitchell L.] Pearl noted that Vermont is a small state where constituents tend to know their elected officials personally. "Election corruption isn't a significant problem in Vermont," he said, adding that Vermont ranked 49th in spending in gubernatorial elections across the country. "Act 64 is causing more harm than good to the candidates and people of Vermont."
op.cit.

Obviously no one from the ACLU national office has paid any attention to the Central Iowa Employment & Training Consortium (CIETC) scandal. Here is a perfect example of a relatively small political unit descending into, for the polity as a whole, a state of major corruption.

That small polities are immune to corruption just because everyone knows everyone else is a fantasy, a myth. The opportunities for political corruption, from my experience, tend to increase in small polities precisely because everyone knows everyone else. There is less likelihood of outside oversight and cover-ups, intentional or otherwise, occur. What incentive would cousin Diane, who works for the county recorders office, have to snitch to the county board of supervisors that cousin Sue is embezzling small amounts from the county treasurer’s office, for a swimming pool that they can both enjoy?

So why would anyone think that a small, rural state like Vermont be any less politically corrupt that its southern neighbor New York? Just look at the recent Democratic gubernatorial primary here in Iowa, a state similar to Vermont. The primary qualification for political office these days is not whether a candidate has new ideas or stances on the issues, but is she an effective fundraiser. Even iconoclastic Texas gubernatorial candidate, Kinky Friedman boosts of his fundraising abilities.

But now with the republic in its two hundred seventeenth year, our philosopher kings are, as they fashioned themselves from the first, the wealthiest among us. By that measuring stick Bill Gates should be president for life. And this, seemingly, is the political myth the mover-and-shakers of the ACLU hold dear.

In a 1999 PBS interview with Gwen Ifill, ACLU counsel Joel Gora, who argued before the Supreme Court in the landmark Buckley v. Valeo case, said:

" I'm looking at protecting the different voices. When the ACLU first got involved in these issues, it was because individual citizens were trying to use their resources to run ads in the newspaper and the government tried to stop them saying they were an illegal campaign committee. We got involved in representing Senator Gene McCarthy, a political hero, for having challenged Lyndon Johnson. How did he do so? He got a small number of wealthy contributors who agreed with his anti-war message to fund his campaign(emphasis added). And he took the message to the people and defeated a sitting President. That's why I'm interested in having people use their funds or their contributor's funds to get their message out.

He continues: “So that means if we take John's [ John Bonzifaz] cap and continue to limit contributions, we're going to have a perpetuation of the same failed system that we have now. No limits on expenditures, which is critical under the First Amendment; and then we make it harder for the new voices, the political newcomers, to try to get their message out and that's wrong.”

And all these years I was under the illusion that Eugene McCarthy’s meteoric rise in the political stratosphere of 1968 was due to the so-called “children’s crusade,”-- a dedicated cadres of college age men and women who shed their jeans and sheared their locks to be “Clean with Gene”—and not a few richer than Croesus donors who, more than likely, were playing both sides of the political street (“Here you go, Senator McCarthy, a nice donation of $10,000 to get out your anti-war message.” Which really meant: “My Waldo’s nearing draft age now. Gotta call my broker and see how my shares of General Dynamics are doing. With Nixon in they’ll be worth real money.”)

And how, with media concentration can a lone individual get his message out to the public?

The world’s oldest democracy is sliding into plutocracy. Not only that, it is mutating into an aristocracy. The proof is in Iowa politics itself. Young Chester Culver is the youngest son and political heir of erstwhile US Senator John Culver; former Governor Terry Branstad’s wastrel son, Eric, is an
apparatchik of the Iowa Republican Party. I need not mention the national political dynasties of the Bushes, Rockefellers, or Kennedys. The only way to keep our system of representative-democratic governance from ossifying into a hereditary hierarchy is to level the economic aspect of the political playing field. Let ideas and issues truly be the decider.

25 Democratic Consultants, by Russ Baker

2006-06-21T05:41:00.000-07:00

I don't have anything prepared today. Humidity got me yesterday and I ached all over. So enjoy this report by investigative report Russ Baker. Afterwards you might want to throw up.

Jack Quinn served as Vice President Gore’s Chief of Staff, and later as Counsel to President Clinton. Now he is a partner in a political consulting and lobbying firm with a close friend of Tom DeLay, and together, they have represented clients who want to drill in fragile areas of Alaska, put the screws to already beleaguered American consumers, and prevent the introduction of more healthy dairy substitutes in school lunches.

That’s not to say that Jack Quinn is a bad guy. He’s just doing what lots of folks do in the course of making a very comfortable living in Washington.

In today’s cash-fueled political world, both parties claim they have no option but to function as indentured servants of corporate America. This, not surprisingly, creates a dynamic of dependency and obligation. The Republicans have excelled at this game, especially under the tutelage of Karl Rove and Tom DeLay. But the Democrats have, increasingly, belied their long-assumed commitment to the little guy and the average American by cozying up to the money trough as well.

This pattern accelerated markedly under the Clinton Administration, which, despite some reformist tendencies, often aided the big-business agenda, easing domestic regulations and passing international trade agreements that tended to unshackle the large corporation. Some of these changes were clearly in the public interest, such as streamlining cumbersome and often-antiquated bureaucratic processes. But many others were not: lowering environmental thresholds and diminishing governmental oversight. Once the Democrats turned into the opposition, key Clinton figures found a home in offering their advertising, public relations and arm-twisting skills to industry trade associations and corporations. They retained their links to the party, and have lived a kind of dual life ever since, moving effortlessly from corporate work to campaign work and back. The friendliness with big business has escalated under the reign of Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, who has assembled his own so-called “K Street Cabinet” – named after the street where the lobbying hordes are headquartered.

The consequence of this trend is profound. Although establishment Democrats are, by and large, still more skeptical of the corporate agenda than Republicans, they have become strikingly less so. This has led to the creation of a kind of permanent corporate governance structure that is truly bipartisan. Many of the firms employing Democratic operatives have them working side-by-side with Republicans – often the same Republicans they go up against in political campaigns. In some cases, a so-called conservative Republican and a so-called liberal Democrat are full partners in the same firm. It’s the ultimate expression of what once seemed baffling: the apparently successful marriage of Clinton aide James Carville to Bush-Cheney aide Mary Matalin.

In many firms today, former Democratic and Republican legislators work in perfect harmony on behalf of their clients, something that is all but unimaginable on the floor of the House or Senate, where partisanship has made working effectively on behalf of the public, or on behalf of the Republic, next to impossible. As a result, the self-interest of corporations too often trumps the common interest.

Let’s go back to Jack Quinn. After serving at the top of the Clinton-Gore administration, in January 2000 he left what was still a Democratic White House and formed Quinn Gillespie with Ed Gillespie. This firm was among the pioneers of the one-stop-shopping approach that has since swept Washington. Want to influence the legislative process? Now you can get right to the top of both parties by hiring a single firm.

Quinn helped secure a controversial pardon for the fugitive financier Marc Rich as Clinton was leaving office. Gillespie goes in and out of the firm to help the GOP; from July 2003 to January 2005 he headed the Republican National Committee. In May 2005, Gillespie sponsored a table at a Tom DeLay tribute dinner – at the height of DeLay’s ethical and legal troubles and sat with DeLay at the head table. He also shepherded the Supreme Court nomination of Samuel Alito, and is treasurer of George Allen’s presidential PAC. The firm’s business dropped markedly during a period when Gillespie was away at the RNC, but is now back up. (The new tradition of bipartisan lobbying/consulting firms is perhaps best illustrated by the fact that there are two heavyweight Jack Quinns in the business, playing obverse roles. The other Jack Quinn is a Republican former congressman who works with Democrat Gerald Cassidy.) In 2002, the WPP Group, a global public relations giant that owns many other lobbying and public affairs firms in DC, signed a five-year buyout agreement with Quinn Gillespie.

Firm clients have included: major telecommunications firms; Enron; the American Petroleum Institute (lift federal ban on offshore drilling on the Outer Continental Shelf, including Alaska; oppose proposal to raise taxes for oil companies by changing the way profits are calculated); the Alliance for Quality Nursing Home Care (lobbied against proposed Medicare reform that cut $1.5 billion in add-on payments to nursing homes; Alliance was indicted in late 2004 for $100,000 illegal contribution to DeLay's PAC); the Partnership to Protect Consumer Credit (which wants to preempt tougher state and local laws designed to protect consumers); the International Dairy Foods Association (which opposes the introduction of more healthful dairy substitutes in school lunches), Entergy (big energy bill proposed in 2003, which included provisions to benefit electric industry); "Ax the Double Tax" coalition (tried to eliminate the individual tax on corporate dividends and has worked on legislation that would allow Hewlett-Packard to repatriate profits from foreign subsidiaries at a lower tax rate); Bank of America (fighting stricter consumer data-protection legislation proposed after big data breach at BOA).

What Thomas Quinn (no relation to either Jack Quinn), says about the work of his firm, Venable LLC, applies to the whole politically-neutral K Street scene today: “Here we work very collegially, and I’ve gotten more collegial as there are more Republicans. We work closely with Republicans. All of us are in this together.”

Thomas Quinn has been active in Democratic politics from Sen. Edward Kennedy's (D-MA) presidential run in 1980 to Sen. John Kerry's (D-MA) in 2004. He’s a key player on financial services, taxation and homeland security issues. Venable’s clients have included: Wal-Mart, Tsakopoulos Investments (real estate developer which has worked with Wal-Mart; lobbying concerning the Endangered Species Act); Timmons Real Estate (Endangered Species Act); National Company for Mechanical & Electrical Works Ltd (Kuwaiti firm re contracts in Iraq); Allied Capital (US government ran a criminal investigation of the firm’s largest subsidiary, which makes government-backed loans to small businesses; Venable hired an SEC attorney who grilled a critic of Allied); McWane (Birmingham, AL-based cast iron pipe manufacturer; the company was heavily fined and executives convicted in federal court for environmental crimes).

Now that so many key party operatives earn their “real money” helping corporations exert influence in Washington, they face more and more conflicts when advising Democratic candidates who insist they are dedicated to reform and serving the public interest. Such conflicts speak for themselves. At the very least, it’s tricky to be the strategy adviser to a Democratic candidate who supports publicly-funded universal health insurance when one has spent years working for insurance interests that vehemently oppose any changes. But that is just the scenario playing out every day. The paradoxes are staggering. And, for the most part, they are invisible.

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To assist the public in better assessing this problem, the Real News Project has prepared short biographical sketches of 25 Democratic consultants who earn their scones and premium spread from advising, lobbying for, making ads for, or creating public relations campaigns for large corporations and trade associations. This grouping is not intended to be comprehensive, nor is it some kind of “top 25” list, but rather is meant to illustrate what is happening. The people cited below vary in their influence, professional longevity, and client base, and scores of others do similar work.

A few caveats about the information contained here: It was primarily assembled through publicly-available databases and online sources, including lobbying filings, news articles, company websites, as well as some interviews. All of the individuals listed here were informed of the project, and afforded an opportunity to supply complete client lists. Few chose to do so. The influence industry is in a state of flux. Firms are merging, changing names, forming “alliances” with other firms. They often hand off controversial clients to subsidiaries or in some cases claim to do only legal work, and then subcontract the lobbying. Some clients listed might be connected with the firm rather than the consultant cited; limited available public information makes it difficult to be sure. Some clients are current, and some are not. The issues and public concerns we cite in relation to particular clients do not necessarily reflect the specific work a consultant or a firm performs for the client. And most or all of these consultants represent or have represented clients with charitable or reform-oriented missions; the clients listed do not necessarily constitute the bulk of the work done by any consultant.

As for the issues at stake, they run the gamut from tobacco to military contracting, dumping toxic chemicals to skirting labor laws. Nearly all of these firms serve big clients in ‘homeland security’ and defense work, insurance, health care and pharmaceuticals. Here’s a quick sampling of controversial stances or policies associated with corporate clients employing Democratic consultants.

■ Genetically-modified (GM) food, crops, and organisms. Democratic-associated consultants regularly work for industry groups and prominent firms battling any kind of restrictions or labeling on GM products. One brilliant stroke was to get farm bureaus and farmers to become the chief public advocates of GM, allowing the companies to take a back seat. All this work has clearly paid off. “The GM people are where they want to be,” says Ronnie Cummins, national director of the Organic Consumers Association. “They got their way – there’s no labeling, no safety testing, and the White House has threatened countries that would require labeling or safety testing. Now they are only trying to stop [individual U.S.] counties from banning GM.” Adds Cummins: “You can see the incredible influence Monsanto and the biotech industry had in the Clinton and Bush Administrations. They’ve been able to get genetically-engineered crops planted on one out of every seven acres in the United States, by taking away the consumer’s right to know, and taking away farmers’ rights not to grow GMOs. By deception and coercion they’ve won the battle so far. They announced their policy, called it laissez faire, back when Quayle was vice president – that genetically-engineered foods would not have to be safety-tested or labeled. That basic policy continued through Clinton and Bush Jr, and likely would have continued if Gore had been in there.”

■ Big PHARMA. “With the prescription drug bill, the key provision is that the government does not have the right to negotiate prices with the pharmaceutical industry,” says Robert Weissman, co-director of the corporate accountability group Essential Action and editor of Multinational Monitor. “That position is not sustainable in the long run, but the industry wants that to last as long as possible. It will always be worth it for them to throw more money at it, with the billions of dollars at stake. Internationally, they want to extend patents globally to maintain and extend monopoly protections in developing countries – they’re pushing for the bilateral and regional trade agreements the United States is negotiating around the world.” And the net effect? “People who need medicines can’t get them because the prices are too high, so they suffer and sometimes die as a result,” Weissman says. “Big PHARMA’s global strategy is to try and maintain a worldwide price that will price-gouge those able to afford the drug and leave a lot of people out.”

■ Credit issuers. Helping large credit issuers block measures designed to protect consumers from misleading practices that can lead to an inescapable cycle of growing debt. “In 2003, the industry’s main goal was to preempt for all time state laws regulating the credit and privacy area,” says Ed Mierzwinski, consumer program director for the U.S. Public Interest Research Group (USPIRG). “They put together the Partnership to Protect Consumer Credit. That was a financial industry front group. In 2005, the next main thing they sought was the bankruptcy bill, following an eight-year campaign. The bankruptcy bill was designed by the credit card companies to make it harder and more expensive for consumers to file for a fresh start bankruptcy and instead puts them in a five year debtors’ prison. Their third goal is to ensure that no consumer bills pass.” (It’s worth noting that as First Lady, Hillary Clinton opposed the bankruptcy bill and persuaded President Clinton to veto it, but as a senator, she voted for it.)

■ The spread of gambling, and its social toll. Most of the key backers of so-called Indian gaming are not Indian at all. “These groups are often funded by other gambling interests, and often are playing one tribe against another,” says Rev. Tom Grey, who heads the National Coalition Against Legalized Gambling. “Gambling has a corrosive, corrupting influence on both parties. The Clintons saw Native American gambling as a feeding trough. It was easy money.” It was made easier because Native Americans were a traditional constituency of the Democratic Party, unlike the Republicans, whose recent involvement with gambling on reservations lies at the heart of the explosive Abramoff-DeLay influence peddling scandal.

Among the many other issues touched on below are (1) so-called “free trade”–pushing trading partners, including the European Union, to lower their health, environment and safety standards on all manner of products, from chemicals to finished goods, in the name of unfettered trade, and (2) Wal-Mart – helping this increasingly dominant corporation win a publicity war through a host of techniques, from aggressive tactics to the adoption of measures that soften the company’s image.
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THE CONSULTANTS
One firm in particular that deserves special attention is the GLOVER PARK GROUP.

Founded in 2001, this strategic communications company based in Washington and New York became the chief haven for those exiled by the change of administration. Founders were Bill Clinton's former spokesman Joe Lockhart and Al Gore's top strategists Carter Eskew and Michael Feldman. In 2004, Lockhart and partner Howard Wolfson took leaves to work on the Kerry campaign and at the DNC. Miramax, which financed the movie Fahrenheit 9/11, hired the firm to come up with a major national publicity campaign and handle a very public battle with Disney. In 2005, the firm was ranked the fastest-growing private company in the District of Columbia.

Founding partner CARTER ESKEW served as Al Gore’s chief media adviser in 2000; has done work for senators Chris Dodd, Joe Lieberman, and Tom Harkin. Close to Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid. Was criticized for his work in the 1990s providing media advice to the tobacco industry (through his then-PR firm, Bozell Sawyer Miller Group).

Partner JOEL JOHNSON worked in the Clinton White House as senior adviser for policy and communications, was an aide to former South Dakota Sen. Tom Daschle, and chief of staff to ex-Ohio Sen. Howard Metzenbaum. Served as managing director of the Harbour Group LLC, a Democratic-connected lobbying firm with clients in the oil, airline, pharmaceutical and food processing industries. In 2004 he, along with Glover Park partners Joe Lockhart and Howard Wolfson, went to work for the Kerry campaign (Wolfson went to the DNC), then after the campaign joined them at Glover Park. Johnson has represented the Asbestos Study Group, a coalition of companies seeking to limit liability in asbestos lawsuits, and represented the Major League Baseball Players Association in opposing congressional action on steroids.

Partner HOWARD WOLFSON served as a spokesman for Hillary Clinton and as the executive director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Bounces up and back between corporate and Democratic work. In 2004, he went to work for the Democratic National Committee.

With numerous Glover Park staffers regularly advising Hillary Clinton, expect some if not most of them to be extremely influential if she is elected president, with Howard Wolfson perhaps occupying a position similar to that now held by Karl Rove.

The corporate world’s general receptivity to Hillary may in good part be explained by these connections. Murdoch’s New York Post went from gleefully pillorying Hillary to praising her and attacking her critics and opponents. That’s less surprising when you consider that Rupert Murdoch paid Glover Park about $200,000 for work to block tv ratings changes that could harm ad revenues at his Fox Broadcasting (the attempt was unsuccessful). Glover also got a large retainer for pr work and organizing groups (including the Don’t Count Us Out coalition, initially gave the impression it was an independent group representing the interests of people of color) against the plan.

Firm clients have included: Pfizer and Visa (comprehensive reputation campaigns); the government of Turkey; Think About It (a group waging an unsuccessful campaign to allow casino gambling in Maine); Microsoft (handled media inquiries about Microsoft’s ties to Jack Abramoff’s lobbying team); The Pentagon; Asbestos Study Group (industry coalition formed to fight for limits on asbestos-related lawsuits); The Coalition to Preserve DSHEA (prevent FDA from treating food supplements as drugs or food additives and allow companies to continue making health claims without scientific backing; backed by multilevel marketing firms, opposed by most health and consumer groups); the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA); MoneyGram International (concerns over money laundering regulations).

(And while we’re on the topic of ex-Clintonites, let’s consider President Clinton’s former press secretary, Mike McCurry, who is a partner at the firm Public Strategies Washington, Inc., and serves as chairman of Hands Off the Internet, an outfit created by telecom companies such as AT&T and BellSouth. “Hands off” is subject to interpretation, since what these broadband suppliers want is the ability to favor some content providers over others, potentially favoring those with bucks over those without.)

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One other firm worth singling out is BURSON-MARSTELLER.

The global public relations firm, now a part of a giant conglomerate, WPP Group PLC, which also owns Quinn-Gillespie and other DC firms cited in this report. Burson practically invented the concept of faux-grassroots organizations (known in the trade as ‘astroturf’) that were no more than fronts for corporations and industries pushing embarrassing products and agendas. For example, Burson created the “National Smokers Alliance," a purportedly grassroots movement for smokers rights, on behalf of its client Altria (Philip Morris tobacco). When the NSA dissolved in 2001, it gave $5 million to something called the Center for Individual Freedom Foundation (advocates for "smaller government and greater personal liberties," led by former B-M exec W. Thomas Humber), which has lobbied to block obesity-related lawsuits against fast-food restaurants. One of B-M's clients is McDonald's (recent ad campaigns have sought to give the fast-food chain a healthier image by promoting exercise and balanced diets), which has been the target of several such lawsuits.

Other B-M clients have included major pharmaceutical companies (advised Johnson & Johnson after Tylenol tampering crisis; launched a "corporate reputation campaign" for Merck after its blockbuster arthritis drug Vioxx was pulled off the market); major defense contractors; Royal Dutch Shell (charged with a massive financial fraud in a US class action lawsuit brought by the UNITE National Retirement Fund and the Plumbers and Pipefitters National Pension Fund); the Iraqi National Congress (of the controversial Ahmad Chalabi); Dow Chemical (Dow has refused to compensate the victims of the 1984 Bhopal disaster in India, a liability it inherited when it took over Union Carbide.); National Cattlemen's Beef Association (crisis management to strengthen consumer confidence in beef safety, despite reports of mad cow disease).

Here’s the experience of John Stauber, a longtime consumer advocate, with Burson-Marsteller: “B-M came to my attention in 1990 when a phony organization called the Maryland Citizens Consumer Council infiltrated a meeting I organized of farm and consumer groups opposed to Monsanto's genetically engineered cow growth hormone, BGH. The group claimed to be concerned moms who didn't want their school kids drinking milk from cows injected with this drug. In fact, it was composed of B-M employees who were spying on opponents and critics of BGH. B-M was working for the companies developing BGH. I was outraged and I swore to investigate the PR industry. As a result I founded the Center for Media and Democracy in 1993 to investigate and expose B-M and other corporate PR firms. In 2003 we launched our website www.SourceWatch.org to track PR firms, lobbyists and front groups engaged in the propaganda business of 'perception management.' ”

MARK PENN was recently named Burson-Marsteller’s Worldwide Chief Executive. In 2001, Burson’s parent company, WPP, acquired Penn Schoen & Berland Associates (PSB), the opinion research firm of which Penn is a founding partner. Penn was a principal pollster for Bill Clinton. He continues to do work for Hillary Rodham Clinton.

The trend continues. In spring, 2006, a Washington Post blog reported that WPP was in the process of acquiring the Dewey Square Group:

“Dewey Square emerged as one of the titans of the consulting industry during the last presidential election when it had its hands in the campaigns of John Kerry, Sen. Joe Lieberman (CT) and former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards. Becoming part of the WPP empire will likely enhance the firm's prestige and put more resources at its disposal.

Formed in 1993 by Boston-based operatives Michael Whouley, Charles Campion and Charlie Baker, the firm is again positioned to exert considerable influence on the 2008 race.

Whouley is perhaps the most sought-after operative on the Democratic side due to his grassroots organizing abilities – as demonstrated in Kerry's Iowa caucus victory in 2004. Whouley is expected to be with Kerry should the senator decide to run again, but if the party's 2004 nominee bows out there will be a mad scramble for Whouley's services.

Catherine A. McLean – another member of the Dewey inner circle -- is working on behalf of Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack, who is considering a run for president in 2008. Minyon Moore will be with Sen. Clinton should she decide to run for president. Nick Baldick, who until recently was a partner at Dewey before striking out to form his own consulting company, is the top political adviser to Edwards.”

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THE FOLLOWING IS A REPRESENTATIVE SAMPLING OF DEMOCRATIC-AFFILIATED CONSULTANTS, PRESENTED ALPHABETICALLY

EDWARD AYOOB

Lobbyist with the DC office of the Barnes & Thornburgh law firm. A native Nevadan and former legislative counsel to Senator Harry Reid, he met with Abramoff’s team over their concern about minimum wage legislation that would impact sweatshops in the Northern Marianas islands, and, within a year, was working for Abramoff as Greenberg Traurig’s Director of Governmental Affairs– and lobbying Reid’s office himself. He became a member of Reid’s so-called “K Street Cabinet”. After working closely with Abramoff on his tribal lobbying, he left Greenberg Traurig in 2005 as the Abramoff scandal exploded and joined Barnes & Thornburgh along with other Greenberg Traurig lobbyists. In 2005, Ayoob pushed the senate confirmation of Timothy Flanigan as Deputy U.S. Attorney General. Flanigan is a former Bush White House Deputy Counsel who moved to Tyco International, where he worked with the Ayoob-Abramoff team to successfully block legislation aimed at capturing income that Tyco and other firms pushed offshore Ayoob also has been working with a Gibraltar-based online gambling group, International Interactive Alliance, to oppose legislation aimed at stopping online gaming. In 2005, Ayoob praised Reid’s outreach to K Street: “He’s a good legislator, and in order to compromise you need to know where everybody is coming from. And how can you do that if you don’t use K Street or business as part of that equation?”

BILL ANDRESEN

Senior Vice President in charge of federal lobbying at Dutko Worldwide. Part of Harry Reid’s K Street Cabinet. Served as chief of staff to Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (D-CT), worked at Dutko, then spent a year as a vice president at the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, before returning to Dutko.

Firm clients have included: York Capital Management (an investor in distressed companies with an interest in minimizing asbestos liability; hired Andresen to monitor that legislation pertaining to that issue); Eisai Inc. (this Japanese-owned pharmaceutical company hired Andresen the day after receiving a letter, along with many other companies, from Sen. Grassley, questioning the potentially improper redirection of government educational grants for marketing and sales purposes); Third Way, an advocacy group for centrist Democrats, which is pushing for closer ties to business.

Dutko Group clients have included the Ephedra Committee of the American Herbal Products Association. The controversial Ephedra was blamed in the deaths of scores of people, the best-known being Baltimore Orioles pitcher Steve Bechler; “These herbal supplements are marketed as being all-natural and safe, but in reality they are not safe. They can harm and kill," according to congressional testimony by Dr. Sidney M. Wolfe, director of Public Citizen's Health Research Group); Eastern Pequot Indian Tribe of Connecticut (controversy over the basis for the tribe’s winning federal recognition); Business Roundtable (passage of GATT) ; the Personal Watercraft Industry Assn (wants to assure the right to use wave runners and other motorized vehicles on lakes and rivers and in National Parks); the American Chemical Council (oppose efforts to control pollution and protect public health from toxic chemicals, and push US government to oppose EU efforts to test chemicals sold in Europe for health and environmental risks), and General Dynamics (a huge defense and ‘homeland security’ contractor).

R. LANE BAILEY

Head of the Washington office of Golin/Harris, an international PR company (part of Interpublic Group). Served as chief of staff to Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) for 12 years. (Firm’s Executive VP is C. Michael Fulton, former staffer for Democratic Congressman Rep. Robert Mollohan, also of West Virginia; Mollohan, the ranking Democrat on the House ethics committee, faces scrutiny regarding how he became a multimillionaire over the course of four years while serving on the appropriations committee.)

Firm clients have included: Dow Chemical (appointed in 2006 to run a global campaign to improve the company’s reputation—Dow has refused to compensate the victims of the 1984 Bhopal disaster in India, a liability it inherited when it took over Union Carbide); Dubai Aerospace Enterprise (a newly founded $15 billion venture funded by Dubai government, intending to become “one of the driving forces of the global economy”); Wynn Resorts (Gambling: issues have included getting imported slot machines treated as computers, and getting federal hurricane relief funds for casinos): Donald Tsang (image work for Beijing-backed chief executive of Hong Kong); McDonald’s (concerns include the impact of lawsuits over obesity, popular highly-critical films like Supersize Me and Fast Food Nation, minimum wage, franchising laws).

MICHAEL BERMAN

President, The Duberstein Group. A well-connected veteran Democrat who has played a key role in every convention since 1968. His practice includes healthcare and communications issues. A declared straight on the board of the gay rights group, the Human Rights Campaign. His boss, Kenneth Duberstein, is a former chief of staff to President Reagan.

Firm clients have included Comcast (nation’s largest cable operator, uses aggressive anti-union tactics, trying to block cities from providing cheap wireless Internet access, censored political issue ads it didn’t like); Pfizer (pharmaceutical giant); DeBeers (hired to protect the interests of the huge international diamond mining/trading company as Congress considered legislation that would strengthen bans against the sale of so-called "conflict diamonds" that fund civil wars in parts of Africa); Arthur Andersen (Enron accounting scandal), and something called “Americans for Accountability” (lobbying disclosures for this ‘accountability’ group say it is interested in educational reform but unaccountably does not show up in article database searches or search engines); the oil companies Conoco, Amerada Hess, and USX/Marathon (firms that supported lifting economic sanctions against Libya, named as a state sponsor of terror, to gain access to Libya's vast oil reserves); The Business Roundtable (big business super-lobby—goals include social security privatization, elimination of class action suits, and opposing mandatory reductions of greenhouse emissions).

JOHN BREAUX

Lobbyist with the law firm of Patton Boggs, number one firm in terms of lobbying revenue in 2005. Former Democratic Senator from Louisiana famed for his consistent advocacy of his state’s big businesses and for supporting the Bush tax cuts; said his vote could not be bought “but it can be rented.” Longtime member of Senate Finance Committee, which has jurisdiction over three of the most lobbied topics in town: taxes, trade and health care. After leaving the senate, he was appointed by President Bush as vice chairman of a panel on overhauling the tax code while working at Patton Boggs (though not officially as a ‘lobbyist’ at first) with clients that included two New York investment firms.

LESLIE DACH
Vice president of Edelman World-Wide. Former media consultant for Bill Clinton, former senior advisor for communication for the Democratic National Committee and the Kerry for President Campaign in 2004. Key organizer of the 2004 Democratic Convention, manager of Democratic response to the 2004 Republican Convention. Lobbyist for Environmental Defense Fund.

Firm clients include Wal-Mart – Dach was architect of the Arkansas-based company’s "rapid-response war room" designed to preempt and counterattack criticism of the company from labor, environmental and small business critics. Dach heads Edelman's Corporate Social Responsibility practice where his role has included defending Edelman PR's relationship with tobacco companies, despite the company's pledge not to represent tobacco companies. Clients of his CSR practice include TotalFinaElf, an oil conglomerate with interests in Sudan and investments in Burma which provide revenues to the country's oppressive military regime, along with the foods giant Kraft (owned by tobacco company Altria, it is trying to improve its image and convince the public it is not aggressive in marketing junk foods to kids; the company makes, among other things, Oreo, Chips Ahoy!, and Kool-Aid). Dach is also head of the agency's advertising operation, Blue Worldwide, whose clients include the American Petroleum Institute.

PHIL GOLDBERG

Lobbyist with the law firm of Shook, Hardy and Bacon. Goldberg served as an aide to several Democratic members of Congress. Before coming to Shook Hardy, he headed DC public relations firm Ketchum’s litigation communications section (Ketchum, run by former GOP House star Susan Molinari, is the outfit that channeled $240,000 from the Bush Administration to Armstrong Williams, the prominent African-American radio and television personality, for his support for the president's No Child Left Behind project). He also worked at Powell Tate (described elsewhere; run by Carterite Jody Powell and Nancy Reagan ex-press secretary Sheila Tate). Promotional materials say that Goldberg “educates the public and other important audiences of client issues. Through his work, Phil has become an emerging voice in the moderate wing of the Democratic Party.”

Goldberg personally represents the National Restaurant Association (objectives include making it more difficult to sue over obesity-related issues, and opposition to consumer group efforts for greater truth in labeling).

Firm clients have included: The Pharmaceutical Research & Manufacturers (on medical malpractice liability and opposing class actions); Animal Health Institute (on limiting pet medicine manufacturers' liability for animal health); Philip Morris/Altria (limiting liability in class-action suits); Coalition for Litigation Justice (insurance industry lobby group seeking to limit liability in asbestos and silica cases); the American Tort Reform Association (Victor Schwartz, head of Hardy’s Public Policy Group, also serves as General Counsel to the Tort Association). The firm was named by The International Who’s Who of Business Lawyers 2005 as “the world’s leading firm for product liability defense expertise.”

MARSHALL MATZ

A principal at Olsson, Frank and Weeda. Matz was liberal Democratic Senator George McGovern’s nutrition expert when McGovern chaired the Agriculture Committee. Represents big agribusiness trade associations, whose objectives have included federal approval of controversial food irradiation as way of killing food-borne pathogens. “That’s easier for them than cleaning up their plants,” says Tony Corvo, of the nonprofit group Food and Water Watch. Olsson Frank has separate PACs for channeling money to Democrats and Republicans.

RICHARD MINTZ

Partner at the Brunswick Group, a corporate communications firm. Former chairman of Burson-Marsteller's Global Government Affairs practice. Mintz ran the media operation at the Department of Transportation during the Bill Clinton administration, and served as staff director for Hillary Clinton during the 1992 campaign. Has been quoted as saying that helping controversial or divisive clients is what PR firms were created for, and therefore they shouldn't shy away from them. He states that employees can decline to work for a client.

Firm clients have included: Martha Stewart (insider trading); Shell Oil (exaggeration of Nigerian oil and gas deposits); CNOOC (Chinese oil company which failed in controversial bid to purchase American firm Unocal); Dubai Ports World (controversial takeover of British firm P&O that included American ports).

GEORGE MITCHELL

Partner and Co-Chair of Government Controversies Practice Group at Piper Rudnick Gray Cary. Former Senate Majority Leader from Maine, still one of the most respected figures in Washington.

The firm (which has signed on former Democratic congressmembers Dick Gephardt and Jennifer Dunn; former GOP Majority Leader Dick Armey is a senior adviser to the firm) has represented: Major defense and pharmaceutical concerns; The Abbey Company (Southern California-based Real Estate company, refused to renew lease for an abortion clinic after pro-life groups picketed the site); Ergon (petrochemical refining company; emits neurotoxins suspected of causing a range of mental and physical defects in children); Utility Solid Waste Activities (industry group opposing regulation and bans on toxic pollutants); BDO Seidman (accounting firm accused of promoting abusive tax shelters).

Another client is Altria (Philip Morris Tobacco). “Big tobacco wants George Mitchell as its lobbyist now for the same reason they reportedly paid him millions just a few years ago in an unsuccessful attempt to persuade Congress to grant the industry total immunity from multi-billion dollar law suits; they hope it will buy them both access and some much-needed respectability,” says Prof. John F. Banzhaf III, Executive Director of Action On Smoking and Health (ASH). “They hope that some of his reputation - as an ‘honest broker’ of peace in Northern Ireland and in the Mid East - will help cover up their image as an industry which kills millions by cover-ups and deception. They hope that few will remember that George - along with other K Street rock stars like Bob Dole (whose first wife was killed by big tobacco) - fought to immunize the industry in what was called the largest "stealth lobbying campaign of all time" because it relied on personal access and private assurances rather than a major media campaign and coalition building… One can only hope that George will be no more successful now than when his clients were forced to accept a settlement which cost them almost a quarter of a TRILLION dollars, killed off Joe Camel, and brought an end to cigarette billboards.”

RONALD L. PLATT

Director of federal government relations with the DC office of the law firm Buchanan Ingersoll. Served as an aide to Clinton Administration Treasury Secretary and former Sen. Finance Committee chair Lloyd M. Bentsen (D-TX). Platt was involved in the last three presidential elections, including as state director for the Gore-Lieberman’s successful campaign in Michigan. As senior director of government affairs at Greenberg Traurig LLP, he lobbied for tribal clients of Jack Abramoff. Lobbied Harry Reid for his client the Northern Marianas islands, which were seeking to avoid the application of a minimum wage bill. At Greenberg Traurig, he worked closely with Republican Senator Connie Mack of Florida on the successful passage of legislation directing the Treasury Dept. (after the Clinton Administration had declined) to use frozen Cuban assets to satisfy $96.7 million in damages that families of three slain anti-Castro Cuban-Americans had won in U.S. federal court against the Castro regime. The men, members of the anti-Castro group Brothers to the Rescue, died when their small plane was shot down by Cuban jets on Feb. 24, 1996. Contingency fees for Traurig were considerable, and an aide to Mack was later hired by the firm. Platt also led an effort by Greenberg Traurig in the late 90s helping Donald Trump, a longtime critic of Indian-owned gaming operations, explore joint ventures with several Indian tribes, and to steer him through Washington regulatory agencies that oversee deals with tribal casinos. He also helped Diamond Shamrock, a petroleum refiner, favorably resolve a tax dispute with Argentina, via his former lobbying partner, Ron Brown, who served at the time as Clinton’s Commerce Secretary. On joining his current firm, Platt said he was looking for a Republican lobbyist to team up with. Among his clients is Sportingbet, a British online gaming company, which hopes to legalize online gaming in the US with the government’s blessing. He has a background in tax policy. He has also served as senior vice president of corporate affairs for Burger King and assistant vice president of corporate affairs for Reynolds Metal Company.

ANTHONY PODESTA

Principal, Podesta Mattoon. Brother of John Podesta (Bill Clinton’s final chief of staff and founder of the Center for American Progress, John does occasional lobbying for Podesta Mattoon too). Firm is bipartisan. One associate is Joshua Hastert, son of House Speaker Denny Hastert. Another is Amy Jensen, a former aide to both Denny Hastert (R-IL) and Tom DeLay (R-TX). Firm clients have included major pharmaceutical firms; Vehicle Renting and Leasing Alliance ( opposed holding rental companies liable for injury, death or property damage arising from renter or lessee’s negligence); U.S. Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (lobbying to allow Made in USA labels on garments produced at levels below US minimum wages); Pacific Open Markets Coalition (ditto) , Coalition for Fair and Affordable Lending (nonprime mortgage lenders who oppose state and local laws designed to protect consumers); Altria (Philip Morris Tobacco).

HEATHER PODESTA

Principal, Blank Rome Government Relations. New to the lobbying game, but blessed with a useful name – her husband is super-lobbyist Anthony Podesta, and her brother-in-law former Clinton chief of staff John Podesta. A former counsel to the late Rep. Robert Matsui (D-CA) and to Rep. Earl Pomeroy (D-ND) as well as a staffer for former Sen. Bill Bradley (D-NJ), she raises a lot of money, both in tandem with her husband and on her own. She was Assistant General Counsel at the Air Transport Association, which represents the major U.S. airlines and cargo carriers on industry aviation issues. She also served as General Counsel to the Airlines Clearing House, a multi-billion dollar international banking mechanism by which the world's airlines conduct financial transactions with each other.

Firm clients have included: Comcast, Equistar Chemicals (rated high in national rankings of emissions of recognized reproductive toxicants and carcinogens); Koch Industries (the Wichita-based privately-held petroleum company is a major funder of the GOP and conservative causes including eliminating the estate tax); fined a record sum by the EPA over more than 300 spills from faulty pipelines, was also fined for releasing oil into streams, and fined for concealing illegal releases of the known carcinogen, benzene.

JODY POWELL

Chairman and CEO, Powell Tate/Weber Shandwick, aka Weber Shandwick Public Affairs. Powell Tate, a PR and crisis management firm once owned by Cassidy Cos, was bought in 1999 by Shandwick, a subsidiary of Interpublic (a giant multinational which also owns Golin Harris) that merged with Weber PR Worldwide in 2001 to form Weber Shandwick. Powell was President Jimmy Carter’s press secretary. His business partner, Sheila Tate, is a Republican who was Nancy Reagan's press secretary.

Firm clients have included: major defense and homeland security contactors; the Saudi Economic and Development Co (whose projects must comply with Islamic law; one lobbyist representing them is the daughter of Rep. William Delahunt, a Democrat on the House Committee on International Relations); Crusader Industrial Alliance (lobbied Congress and the Pentagon not to terminate the Crusader self-loading cannon system, which critics called outdated); the Malaysian Rubber Export Promotion Council (opposes a federal ban on latex gloves in food service and health care; some states have banned them based on links to allergic reactions); the Alliance for Better Foods (created to promote public acceptance and to oppose labeling of genetically modified foods); Monsanto (leading source of genetically-modified crops); the Chemical Manufacturers Association, Procter & Gamble, Philip Morris, and numerous other large food, chemical and pharmaceutical corporations. Extensive ‘crisis management’ work, including for Jack in the Box, Hooters of America, and Food Lion (which gained notoriety when an ABC News hidden camera report revealed shocking labor and sanitary practices in its supermarkets); Americans for Safe & Efficient Transportation (represents trucking, road building and manufacturing associations as well as some labor groups in opposing tough state clean air standards); the Japanese Whaling Association; the New Zealand government-owned logging company Timberlands (was involved in controversial rainforest logging on public lands).

STEVE RICHETTI

Principal, Ricchetti Inc. A former deputy chief of staff to President Bill Clinton, Ricchetti remains well connected in Democratic political circles. He was instrumental in creating the Voices for Choices coalition of long-distance companies along with Republican Charlie Black. Was a spokesman on the release of Bill Clinton’s 2004 autobiography.

Firm clients have included: Experian (sought changes in the Fair Credit Reporting Act, which regulates their industry); the Automated Power Exchange (regulatory actions; energy trader accused of rigging artificial shortages a la Enron); the Health Insurance Association of America (opposes universal health coverage); Pfizer (pharmaceutical giant); the Nuclear Energy Institute.

ANNE URBAN

Partner in Venn Strategies, a largely female-run firm set up in 2001. She was economics adviser to Sen. Joseph Lieberman (D-CT) and worked as legislative director and tax adviser for Sen. Bob Kerrey (D-NE) The firm focuses on tax, health care and economic policy. Her specialty is ‘the intersection of taxes and health care.’ She has been rated one of DC’s ‘Top 10’ tax lobbyists by the organization Tax Analysts. Prior to Venn, she was managing director at the consulting firm Clark & Weinstock.

Firm clients have included the American Education Reform Foundation. The foundation, based in Valencia, Calif., is one of the leaders in the nationwide fight for school vouchers. Opponents of the foundation’s efforts include People for the American Way and the NAACP. At Clark & Weinstock (OmniCom), one of her clients was the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants, which opposed new efforts to create outside monitoring of the accounting profession in the wake of the Enron scandal. (Urban worked with a C&W partner, former GOP congressman Vin Weber, an ex-board member at AICPA.) Another client she represented was Microsoft, which was fighting off antitrust concerns.

ANN WEXLER

Principal, Wexler and Walker Public Policy Associates. Served as a top policy aide in the Carter administration, then launched her firm in 1981.

Firm clients have included: Wyeth (Pharmaceutical); Taser International (makers of controversial stun guns); Williams Cos. (a huge natural gas pipeline company supporting drilling in the Artic National Wildlife Refuge); CADIZ (an agricultural firm accused by environmental groups and members of the scientific community of excessive rates of water extraction from beneath federal land); represented both an alliance of local hydropower districts pushing for state regulation of electricity markets, and an industry coalition lobbying for federal regulation through regional markets – and for deregulation of the industry.

ANDREW YOUNG

Head of consulting firm, GoodWorks International. Noted civil rights leader and contemporary of Martin Luther King. In a symbolically freighted move, GWI, which advises corporations on how to be “forward-thinking,” moved in 2005 to K Street.

Firm clients have included: Nike (Young gave a clean bill of health to Nike’s controversial Asian factories; at the time, the company was accused of violating virtually every international labor standard); Wal-Mart (is chairing an organization called Working Families for Wal-Mart, intended to counter the chain's negative image and praise Wal-Mart for bringing low prices and jobs to inner-city neighborhoods).

-------------------

The following two individuals are partners in D&P CREATIVE STRATEGIES, whose motto is “Consulting with a Social Conscience”. D&P stresses that it is owned and run by minorities – and gay Latinas, no less. Among other things, it gives corporations advice on fostering an improved image through philanthropy, outreach to communities of color, etc.

INGRID DURAN

Worked for the Clerk of the US House of Representatives, the House Banking Committee under Rep. Henry B. Gonzalez, ran the Washington, DC office of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials, served on Clinton’s Advisory Committee on HIV/AIDS, and the Minority Veterans Advisory Board; president of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute (CHCI) for six years, where she spent time soliciting funds from foundations and corporations. In 2000, she became the first gay Latina to serve on the Human Rights Campaign Board of Directors, and is also currently a member of the National Hispana Leadership Institute (NHLI) and The Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) Boards.

CATHERINE M. PINO

Served as the Deputy Director of Urban School Reform for the Carnegie Corporation of New York; worked for Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-NM); served on the National Council of La Raza and handled nonprofit issues at the Washington, DC-based Independent Sector. Board member of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute; first Latina co-chair and board member of the Hetrick-Martin Institute in New York City; serves on various philanthropic committees including Hispanics in Philanthropy, Grantmakers for Education, Donors Education Collaborative and Latino Fund of the Tri-State.

Firm clients include: Wal-Mart; Comcast (nation’s largest cable operator, uses aggressive anti-union tactics, trying to block cities from providing cheap wireless Internet access, censored political issue ads it didn’t like); Sodexho (huge French-owned military food contractor, facing class action suit by black employees over racial discrimination in hiring and promoting practices).

##

Finally, a note on hope: This situation need not endure forever. Several organizations are working to reform the political contribution laws that make corporate interests so powerful. And with the election of a president who will appoint democracy-minded federal judges, we may yet see the overturning of Buckley v. Valeo, a decision that ended America’s key experiment with campaign reform, legislation signed, remarkably, by Richard Nixon -- which included federal funding of elections, and limits on contributions and campaign spending.
Russ Baker, The Real News Project, June 14, 2006

Repulicans and the insecure man

2006-06-14T06:03:00.000-07:00

“…The historian George Mosse explained how the process of forming nation-states also required a major redefinition of masculinity throughout Western civilization. The old aristocratic ideal was no longer appropriate to the needs of the great masses of men mobilized and made members of the newly emerging national societies. Therefore, a new definition of maleness had to be devised, and the revised model of masculinity that eventually took shape arose out of an era of war and revolution, heavily influenced by romanticism. As a consequence, observed Mosse, there was a ‘militarization of masculinity,’ resulting in the new ‘manly virtues’ placing heavy value on physical courage and heroic self-sacrifice, and in the belief that true manhood could be most fully realized on the battlefield.
“That, of course, required there to be external enemies to war against—forces and foes believed to threaten women and children and even the life of the nation itself—and in the collective imagination such adversaries became the great monster young men were called upon to battle and slay. In bravely taking on such fight, eager youths might prove to the nation and themselves their true manliness. At the same time, this affirmation of masculinity also required a much sharper distinction between the ‘male’ and ‘female’ spheres and characteristics of life, as well as what Mosse described as ‘countertypes that reflected, as in a convex mirror,’ the image of what a good man was not supposed to be. Those negative roles invariably fell to people and groups marginalized by modern society: Jews, Gypsies, aliens, vagrant, criminals, religious nonconformists, homosexuals, and anyone regarded as weak or degenerate or thought to be a threat to the nation’s social and moral order. Hatred of them, said Mosse, was most intense when ‘good’ men, for whatever reasons, were most insecure about their own masculinity.”

Kerry Trask, citing George Mosse’s book The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), in his book Black Hawk: The Battle for the Heart of America (New York, Henry Holt & Co., 2006) pp 172,173

I’m staring with this long quotation, from a book that has nothing to do with contemporary politics but goes a long ways toward explaining it, what the Republicans seem to get that the Democrats don’t. Reread, carefully, that last sentence, paying particularly close attention to the final clause:”…when ‘good’ men, for whatever reasons, were most insecure about their own masculinity.”

The insecurity of masculinity is a constant subtext of all Rovian Republican politics. Karl Rove himself, a chubby, balding and very non-traditional figure of American machismo, did not formulate this theme on his own; it was festering in the middle of the Nineteen Sixties when young women began burning their bras and young men began growing their hair long, but the Democratic Party did itself no good by embracing the likes of the abrasive feminist Bella Abzug. For all the good Bella did, and it was significant, her style played right into the hands of right wing fear mongers. She was a castrating monster in the eyes of reaction, an anti-mother. And so, indirectly and unintentionally, her alliance with the Democratic Party inadvertently led to its self-emasculation. Sure, Bella wasn’t the only cause for the Democratic Party’s current decline, but as the stars of feminism, civil rights and abortion rights rose, the Party of Jefferson and Jackson retreated. The disastrous presidential campaigns of Walter Mondale and Geraldine Ferraro in 1984, followed by Michael Dukakis in 1988, precipitated the founding of the “centrist” Democratic Leadership Council. With likewise disastrous results for both the Party and the country, rather than leadership and new ideas we got Bill Clinton, “triangulation” and Monica Lewinsky.

Democrats ceased being rabble-rousing, fire-breathing demagogues in the mold of William Jennings Bryant, Huey P. Long and Harry S. Truman; they became effete, latté drinking, East Coast intellectual snobs, certainly not “real” men. Even after 2004 Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry rode a Harley Davidson motorcycle, American’s premier phallic symbol, on stage on the Jay Leno Show, he still could not shake the “fag” tag.

But when you look at the reactionary Republican hierarchy, a gaggle of frat-boy slackers, draft-dodgers, 4-F’ers, weasels, weenies and closet queens, you realize something is terrible wrong with how the American male, mostly white but not exclusively so, perceives reality. How has the party of Lincoln, whose own sexuality is the subject of recent debate, Ulysses S. Grant, Theodore Roosevelt and Dwight D. Eisenhower fallen into the hands of the likes of the Pillsbury Doughboy incarnate, Rove, and our former-high school cheerleader president?: By understanding the archetypal personas that resonate with the Party’s core supporters. Daily we are bombarded with these archytypal personas.

This is where I think, the Republicans get it right. They not only understand the archetypes, the party’s politicians actually play the part. For example, Newt Gingrich is the sneering/smirking know-it-all, Gerald R. Ford was the amiable bumbler, Ronald Reagan the avuncular strongman/father-figure; Trent Lott, before his fall from grace, was a passable tent-revival preacher and John McCain, with his chest full of Vietnam War medals, is the hyper-masculine Ramboesque hero. George W. Bush, however, has been is the perfect empty vessel in which all these archetypes are poured. In this regard Bush is even a better actor than was Reagan.

While the sneering/smirking know-it-all is not usually an advertising persona, or more accurately caricature--usually this archetype, if she appears in commercials at all , usually gets her comeuppance by the avuncular strongman/father figure—it is one readily adapted by the so-called pundits. Tent-revival preacher, though rarely found in popular advertising, has been an authority-figure fixture on the American cultural landscape for two hundred years. The rest, however, have been popularized and positively reinforced over the last fifty years by the popular media: television, movies, and that highest of cinematic art forms, the TV commercial.

Just watch TV for a while any given day of the week. Beer commercials, especially, and commercials for home improvement stores feature the amiable bumbler either in the guise of the “dude” slacker/stoner or the inept “daddy” do-it-your-selfer. Rambo, meanwhile, is seen driving his big four-wheel drive pickup truck or cruising the highway on his Hog. Rambo also hawks, amazingly enough, men’s toiletries. The avuncular strongman/father figure is regularly featured in commercials selling auto and homeowner’s insurance, as well as home security alarm systems.

And even though George Bush may be a physical coward himself, he represents the party of masculine values that Mosses outlines above. True, the Republicans always stab the white American males, who feel threatened by “women’s lib,” gay marriage and “illegal” aliens, in the back politically, but what’s important is not the end result, it’s the message. That message is that the white American male, despite his physical prowess, is always at the mercy of forces beyond his control that want to symbolically castrate him--take away his firearms, make him wear a helmet while he rides his motorcycle, etc.—and only the Republican Party can save him, and his family, from chaos.

And it is no coincidence that non-profit, supposedly apolitical, organizations that support, and in return feed vampire-like off donations and dues, of these threatened white American men-- the National Rifle Association (NRA), the anti-immigrant Minutemen, even Pentecostal churches—project and maintain an image, an illusion really, of being at society’s fringe.

Wayne LaPierre daily may walk the halls of Washington, D.C. power, but to the NRA true believer he represents the voice of the little guy whose voice is rarely heard in Congress.

Look, a lot of current Democratic ineptitude can be laid at the feet of DLC CEO Al From and the politicians who have followed his lead. It’s apparent From never read any histories about the rise of Hitlerism in Germany; moving the political center to the right does not stifle the growth of reactionary politics, on the contrary, that tends to encourage it. From, and the DLC, make the same mistake Weimar-era liberal political parties did, trying to appear fascist without the testosterone. Why vote for an ersatz Nazi in a frock and pinafore when you can vote for real ones in brown shirts, jodhpurs and jackboots?

But the biggest mistake the Democratic Party makes is trying to play with the Republican Party’s deck of cards. It’s stacked against them.

I really don’t give a shit if, “ Democrats… led the fight to create the Department of Homeland Security and continue to fight to ensure that our ports, nuclear and chemical plants, and other sensitive facilities are secured against attack.” There are things I do give a shit about which the Democrats address, but in my book they’re all halfassed centrist attempts at pleasing as many constituents as possible without offending anyone; especially big corporate donors who, might get jittery at the merest whisper of re-regulating “free market” capitalism.

As I’ve said before, the Republican Party listens to its fringe, phony though it may be, runs on its platform and then dismisses it. The Democratic establishment just dismisses it.

Further reading:Charles M. Ashley, "Bush’s cornpone sophistry"

I don't feel like posting today...

2006-06-07T06:41:00.000-07:00

...So I'm going to be brief.

My buddy in Oregon send my a link to the neonatal political party Unity08. Catchy, what?

Now there a couple of things I like about Unity08's agenda, but, of course, being "bipartisan" and "centrist" there should be something for everybody. I do, for example, partially agree with the following statement:

Unity08 divides issues facing the country into two categories: Crucial Issues – on which America’s future safety and welfare depend; and Important Issues – which, while vital to some, will not, in our judgment, determine the fate or future of the United States.

In our opinion, Crucial Issues include: Global terrorism, our national debt, our dependence on foreign oil, the emergence of India and China as strategic competitors and/or allies, nuclear proliferation, global climate change, the corruption of Washington’s lobbying system, the education of our young, the health care of all, and the disappearance of the American Dream for so many of our people.

By contrast, we consider gun control, abortion and gay marriage important issues, worthy of debate and discussion in a free society, but not issues that should dominate or even crowd our national agenda.

In our opinion – since the disintegration of the Soviet Union – our political system seems to have focused more attention on the “important issues” than the “crucial issues.” One result: The political parties have been built to address the interests of their “base” but have failed to address the realities that impact most Americans.

Well, I'll give'm that. Gun control, abortion and gay marriage are "...not issues that should dominate or even crowd our national agenda." In fact I wouldn't even consider these "Important Issues". They're just plain stupid. Anyone who votes for a political candidate based on what Unity08 calls "Important Issues" is stupid and deserves to get screwed.

As for Unity08's "Crucial Issues", yeah, they sound good but watch out. If you take a gander at the group's "Founders Council" you'll see that it's heavily larded with disaffacted Republican moderates, entrepreneurs, (probably rich) college kids, a sprinkling of lawyers and Carter administration chief-of-staff Hamilton Jordan (pronounced Jerr-dan). So don't expect any denunciations of a "free market economy," or anything that might fundamentallly upset the socio-economic status quo, i.e. Rockefeller Republicans and the "New" Democrats of the Democratic Leadership Council.

But what is most destrubing, to me at least, is this statement:

Goal One is the election of a Unity Ticket for President and Vice-President of the United States in 2008 – headed by a woman and/or man from each major party or by an independent who presents a Unity Team from both parties.

This is my worst nightmare. But, of course, Unity08 is honest in dissolving the illusion of a "two-party system." But what man, and what women fit Unity08's bill?

Hopefully, my last post on "illegal immigration"

2006-05-31T08:05:00.000-07:00

I’m hoping this “illegal immigration” thing will just go away. I mean it is a stupid and boring topic, does nothing to improve my life, or that of millions of other Americans, and will never be solved. It will never be solved because those corporate enterprises benefiting the most from the North American Free Trade Agreement, and their lackeys in the Republican Party and Democratic Leadership Council, do not want it solved. Keep the brown skins around for a ready scapegoat while working out a law keeping them in the status of indentured slaves.

The best thing that may come out of the entire belligerent posturing of the Republican Party over “illegal immigration” would be the election of left-leaning former Mexico City Mayor Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador. A hostile government on the other side of the Rio Grande might be the best thing to happen to Mexican-American relations in decades.

The simple fact of the matter is that the United States created the “problem” of “illegal immigration” by going to war with Mexico in 1846 in order to grab Texas and California. And ever since that bit of naked imperialist aggression, this country has treated the sovereign nation of Mexico like a redheaded stepchild. Norte Americano shit has always flowed downhill into Mexico.

Ever since the misrule of Porfirio Diaz, approximately from 1877 to 1911, when the nation was little more than an American colony, Mexico’s economy has been tied to the United States. In fact the economies of both countries are so symbiotic in nature, should one fail so goes the other.

And yet, like a whipped cur, the Mexican people are not resentful. In fact, I was in Mexico in January 2002 and tee shirts proclaiming US-Mexico friendship were everywhere. Perhaps the most poignant, or ironic, tee shirt design featured the Mexican Eagle dropping a cartoon Osama bin Laden onto a very prickly cartoon cactus, with a slogan something to the effect of “Hey! US, give’m to us! This is Mexican justice!”

But now with xenophobia all the rage, how much longer will US-Mexican camaraderie last?

Not much longer if the gentlemen and women of US Border Patrol Local 2544 have anything to say about it.

“…[W]e stand firmly against illegal immigration. We strongly oppose any attempts to reward illegal alien lawbreakers. We have risked our lives to keep them out of this country. The slick politicians can call it 'guest-worker' or 'earned legalization' all they want, but it's amnesty. Some of these politicians have missed their true calling. They need to be working down at the County Fair selling innocent children tickets to try and shoot a 14" basketball through a 12" hoop so they can win the big stuffed animal.”

The hostility is evident, and it fairly well echoes the House Republican line. Reports journalist Kevin Hall, in the May 28, story published by The Detroit Free Press:”… there's contempt for Bush and Democrats as they work on immigration law.” I should add, in all fairness the union local also has contempt for Arizona Senator John “He’s a GOP-Centrist” McCain. And also to be fair the same story quotes the local’s president, Mike Albon, saying: “Washington's solutions…are bound to fail because they don't punish employers.”

Ah, yes, Local 2544 President Albon has hit on the crux of the problem. But is he, and his union local’s rank-and-file, so stupid to expect a sneak of free market worshipping, pro-corporate House Republican weasels like Jim Sensenbrenner, Peter King of New York, Tom “Tommy da Wop” Tancredo and Steve “the blue-eyed Tom Tancredo” King of Iowa to really crack down on big business? Well, the Sensenbrenner/King bill, passed in the House last December, increases the employer fine for knowingly hiring “illegals” from $10,000 per violation to $40,000 and up to 30 years of prison time for repeat offenders. Do you really think this item has a snowball’s chance of surviving a Senate/House bill reconciliation committee? Don’t make me laugh, hahahahaw!

As I pointed out last week, peckerwood US Representative Charlie Norwood let the cat out of the bag, saying that a “good” guest worker program, meaning a sort of legalized indentured slavery without the slimmest possibility of US citizenship, would pass in the House.

So is all this brouhaha about illegal immigration merely a revolt, and they are revolting, of the Republican House rank-and-file? Or is it all merely a slimy, Rovian scheme to rile up the bigoted, ignorant neoFascist Republican base?

The evidence that the “illegal immigration” issue is a Rovian con job comes from a May 22, 2006 post on the FactCheck.org Web site, titled “Test-marketing the ‘Amnesty’ issue”:

Summary
Republican House candidate Brian Bilbray is providing an early test of how the immigration issue will play with voters.
He's running a TV ad accusing his Democratic opponent in a June 6 special election of supporting "amnesty" for illegal immigrants. Actually, Democrat Francine Busby would allow illegals to remain only after paying a fine and securing a temporary worker visa.
The ad also says Busby "says children of illegal aliens get automatic citizenship." That's true, and she's right. The Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution also says that. Bilbray says he'd deny birthright citizenship, but fails to mention that it would probably require another Constitutional amendment
Analysis
Bilbray's ad, financed by the National Republican Congressional Committee, began airing May 15. (emphasis added)

That’s pretty clear. But as usual the MSM blithely ignores this bare fact. After all, it’s nothing more than a local California Congressional primary race. But usually when an ant farts in California we hear about it in the Midwest.

So will the Republicans win the fall elections or be swept out by a tide of resentment? If a nearly month old analysis by the Los Angeles Times is an accurate assessment, Democratic chances for capturing the US House aren’t all that great, what with Republicans successfully gerrymandering several states and their own fecklessness.

In sort of a sick, demented, twisted way I kind of hope the Republicans keep control of the US House and Senate. I mean really, now, when you get right down to it there really isn’t that much different between the establishment positions and policies of either party. They both worship at the altar of the “free” market and “free” trade, oxymorons if ever there were two.

Yes, a guest worker program without a mechanism toward full US citizenship is a surefire formula for resentment south of the border and future trouble north of it. So c’mon, Republicans, do your best!

Further reading:Tim Wise:"Of Immigrants and "Real Amurkans"

Illegal Immigrants, the GOP's gift that keeps giving

2006-05-25T06:43:00.000-07:00

Caught a few fish yesterday. I gave what I caught to my friends, in the hope that they will have a fish fry and I will be invited. Got to keep the mercury levels in my blood elevated, you know.

Now on to another pressing topic, one I’m getting tired of, that won’t go away; the suddenly pressing issue of Mexican Mestizos and Central American Indians crossing the US-Mexico border, “illegally,” to pick our lettuce, wash our dishes, bus our tables, pour our concrete and a host of other jobs which young, white suburban slugs will never deign to do.

So anyway, the MSM is all-agog that the US Senate and House will reach a compromise soon on their competing immigration reform bills. Please, don’t bet the farm on that. The Republicans in control of Congress know they are in hot water, deep doo-doo, and, if the election were held today, likely to lose. So, as I’ve written before, the GOP is attempting to ride the wet backs of poor Indians and Mestizos back into control of the US House.

Remember that one of the main tenets of reactionary Republicans is, compromise is weakness. Therefore, House Republicans will not, in any way shape or form, come to any type of compromise with the Senate bill, just passed, before the summer recess and fall elections.

However, cracker Rep. Charlie Norwood of GA revealed the real intentions of reactionary Republicans, in both the US House and Senate, on NBC’s Meet the Press, acknowledging,”…that a ‘good guest worker program’ was needed, though he appeared to draw the line at any path to citizenship for the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants currently in the United States.”

So there you have it, the Rovian strategy in a nutshell. Incumbent Republican congressmen, and what few GOP women in habit the US House, will race bait all summer long, promising to round-up, incarcerate and deport all illegal aliens and ship’em back to where they came from. This rings clear and true to the mostly white Christian right, who’ve seen their economic status steadily erode under their feet for nearly thirty years, but who also remain faithful to a “free market” economy as they do to Jesus.

If all this race baiting works and Republicans hold on to majority control of the US House and Senate, despite all the party’s ethical woes, look for an “immigration reform” law which codifies indentured servitude as a “guest worker program.” Our ersatz-cowboy king in The White House has been pressing for a guest worker program since 2004, so look for it to be a reality, should the GOP retain control of both Houses of Congress, after the November elections, probably sometime early next year. That way reactionary Republicans can look like they are having their cake and eating it too; a law with plenty of jail time for any unfortunate caught crossing the borders after a certain date, a slightly stronger slap on the wrist of those who hire them and a guest worker program to legally exploit cheap labor for now and into the foreseeable future.

Further reading: King*: Illegal-immigration apologists ignore its consequences

Raw Data: Comparison of House, Senate Immigration Bills

*Ranting of Iowa 5th US Congressional District Representative Steve "the blue-eyed Tom Tancredo" King (note: spells out the word "illegal" in all capitals in "schoolgirl style.")

No Wednesday update

2006-05-24T05:41:00.000-07:00

Gone fishin'

Are Democrats headed for another election year wimp-out? Chances are good

2006-05-17T06:47:00.000-07:00

Democratic Leadership Council apologist and Clinton butt-boy, Joe Klein, has outlined how the Democratic Party will blow a sure lead in the lead-up to this November’s election in a Time.com web exclusive May 14 column.

Writes the non-author of 1996’s political satire "Primary Colors" of Congressional Democrats, beyond the “New Democrats” pale:

Conyers will be chairman of the Judiciary Committee if the Democrats win control of the House in November, and he has already threatened impeachment hearings against President Bush. This is one of the few scenarios that might rouse the demoralized Republican base from its torpor. It is also likely to alienate independents, who are sick of the hyperpartisanship in Washington and will be less likely to vote for Democrats if the party is emphasizing witch hunts instead of substantive policies. But the ugly truth is that Conyers is a twofer: in addition to being foolishly incendiary, he is an African American of a certain age and ideology, easily stereotyped by Republicans. He is one of the ancient band of left-liberals who grew up in the angry hothouse of inner-city, racial-preference politics in the 1960s, a group "more likely to cry 'racism' and 'victimization' than the new generation of black politicians," a member of the Congressional Black Caucus told me.

The Republicans will not be so crude as to mention Conyers' race; they will simply paint him as an extremist and show his face in negative ads. Nor is Conyers likely to be the only target. We'll probably be seeing a lot of two other potential African-American committee chairmen: Charles Rangel of New York and Alcee Hastings of Florida.

Holy shee-it, dem niggas is off da plantation!!!

Klein’s lambasting three popular leaders of the Black Democratic Caucus is just another example of the DLC and its surrogates exercising its considerable political muscle. Recently we’ve been treated to the sight of ’08 presidential hopeful Senator Hillary Clinton hobknobbing with the evil emperor of FoxNews, Rupert Murdoch. Of course this sucking up to corporate power should come as no surprise to anyone who has followed la grande dame Clinton’s career. She was, after all, on the board of Wal-Mart when her husband was governor of Arkansas, and, no doubt, participated in vetting the legality of Bentonville, AR retail giant’s dismal employee rights and benefits practices, while her husband courted union support.

In short, the Clintons’, Bill and Hillary, joint political career is one of duplicity in the classic sense of the word. As is the political journey of the DLC heir apparent Governor Tom Vilsack, who has assiduously courted and counted on organized labor’s vote and dollars while handing over the combination of the of Iowa’s treasury to every Tom, Dick ’n’ Harry corporation willing to set up shop in the state. Witness his latest stunt of “dangling more than $20 million and a new modern factory in front of Whirlpool Corp.” That’s $20 million taxpayer dollars, folks, in the slim hope that the appliance maker would not close the factory of recent acquisition Maytag. I’ll bet Vilsack’s stock portfolio wasn’t hurt by Whirlpool’s Maytag buy-out.

But I’ve stayed with my feckless Democrats too long, on to the nefarious Republicans.

The Republican Party gained control of our government by running, for the at least the last thirty years, against the Washington elite, the insiders, the establishment. Well, now the Republican Party is the establishment, its operatives are the insiders and its politicians are the elite. So how does the GOP retain, at least enough to fool the gullible, that outsider image?
By running against itself or, rather, their president.

Do not for a second hold any credence in the belief that Congressional Republicans are worried in the least by their mildly retarded president’s dismal showing in the polls. He is a lame duck, and they know it. He knows it. His term ends on January 20, 2009. The Twenty-second Amendment is still in force, so Dubya and Laura are just keeping the bed warm for his younger, smarter brother, Jeb and future first Hispanic First Lady, Columba. Any apparent disunity in Congressional Republican ranks is just that, apparent. It is just an illusion to get the Democrats to make a critical error, misstep or just wimp out.

As evidence by Klein’s racist polemic and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s public statement last weekend that the Democrats would not seek to impeach President Bush after the November elections, the Republican strategy looks like it’s working. If there is any president in modern history, including Richard Nixon, who deserved impeachment it is this one. Bush’s high crimes and misdemeanors go beyond the illegal armed occupation of another country, and we, at least those of us who consider ourselves leftist, all know this.

The Republicans got where they are by running against the Washington establishment. And beginning as long ago as the 2004 presidential election reactionary critics have been questioning our ersatz cowboy-king’s conservative bona fides. The good, old boys on the Republican side of the US House can go back to their home districts and run against the mincing frat boy in the White House. Why look at all of the major and important issues of the conservative agenda this wildass liberal Bush has left undone! No anti gay-marriage amendment to the United States Constitution, Roe v. Wade is still the law of the land; “liberals” still want to take our guns away from us, Terri Schiavo still wants to live!! These and many, many other “cultural” issues have not been addressed by this president and his administration.

So over the summer and into the fall, as Democrats paint pictures of Republican corruption (all true by the way), but without addressing major lobbying or campaign financing reform problems. The corruption theme really won’t play in Peoria, because unless a reactionary Republican US House incumbent is directly linked to Jack Abramoff, it ain’t gonna stick.

Meanwhile, Republican slime balls will continue beating up on those who can not fight back, because they can not vote: undocumented workers from Mexico and Central America working hard to put food on our tables and roofs over our heads. Because all federal congressional races, as the late Tip O’Neill said, in the end are local, the immigration issue is already eliciting the desired effect for Republicans.

Further reading: Let's deport immigration myths, Jesse Jackson, Sr.

Extra! GOP to run on wet backs!

2006-05-12T09:54:00.000-07:00

Thanks to the HuffingtonPost.com for this timely extra:

Bloomberg.com:Boehner Ridicules Senate Republicans as Party Tensions Rise

On immigration, the House last year passed a measure designed to bolster security at U.S. borders. The Senate is debating a more comprehensive version that would create up to 400,000 guest-worker visas for unskilled workers and provide a path to legal status for many of the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S.

[House Republican Majority Leader John] Boehner told reporters late last month that it would be a ``big mistake'' for Congress to approve a bipartisan Senate compromise that would allow illegal immigrants who have stayed in the U.S. more than five years an opportunity to remain if they meet certain conditions. He said that would amount to amnesty.

Anger at `Amnesty'

Representative Walter Jones, a North Carolina Republican and a member of a 96-member House Immigration Task Force that wants to crack down on illegal immigration, said the notion of ``amnesty'' angers voters in many Republican-held House districts. Jones said there will be strong opposition to the Senate version if it reaches the House.

``The people in my district want us to secure our borders first,'' Jones said.

Oh, my! The Republicans are in disarray. Bullshit!

The Democratic establishment is dancing for joy at the mere prospect of GOP disunity. But what the numbskulls in the DNC, the DLC, the DSCC, and the DCCC, the MSM and the loyal Democratic blogosphere are all forgetting is legendary Democratic House Speaker Tip O'Neill's oft quoted axiom that once that voter gets in the voting booth, all politics are local.

The issue of illegal immigration is extremely local. Mestizos and Indians from Mexico and Central America working in restaurants, packing plants and in construction are a way of life in nearly every city of size and many small rural towns in the Midwest and mountain states. And many white Americans, even many claiming to be "liberal" Democrats, are appalled by the influx of brown-skinned workers. The most oft told lie among "liberal" closet bigots is that they are willing to pay higher prices for groceries, especially fresh vegatables and fruits, and for other goods and services, if that cost increase were due to higher wges for native born American labor. Again, bullshit!

Congressional Republicans are going to hammer the theme of punishing the immigrants, not those who hire them, all summer long, on the radio, in churches, at gun shows and any other place scared-as-shit badasses congregate. The punishment theme resonates with the well within the GOP base. Americans in general are in love with punishment, and the Republican Party knows this. Americans are also cheapskates, and this the Republican Party also knows well.

Don't bet farm on Democratic win in November

2006-05-10T07:12:00.000-07:00

The fall elections are nearly six months away and the Democratic Party is sounding like it has everything in the bag, at least as far as winning back the US House.

Don’t mind me if I sound a discordant note, but I do mean to be pessimistic. In the political time of the United States, six months is an eternity and, as the old saying goes, “there’s many a slip 'twix the cup and the lip.” So, oh, yes, gentle reader, the Democrats still have time to fuck things up.

Let’s look at the possible pitfalls, which may be fall our “party of the people.”

First is the Republican generated fear that a Democratic House majority might impeach our glorious leader. Yesterday I just heard the shar-pei of Republican attack bitches, Bay Buchanan, sister of wing nut Pat and head hose-queen for Congressman Tom “Tommy the Wop” Tancredo’s Team America PAC, say that current Democratic House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi was playing right into GOP hands with talk of impeaching our mildly retarded president. Yes, you read that right, Democrats calling for President Bush’s impeachment will energize Republican voters who fear “liberals” running America.

Don’t believe me? Here’s what “journalist” Jim Roberts of the reactionary-leaning National Ledger Web site has to say:

“[Karl] Rove has his work cut out for him. Communication between this White House and its base has been abysmal on the war in Iraq, opportunities have been missed in the gas price hikes and on illegal immigration - they are on the complete opposite side of the conservative base.
Turn out is key and Rove believes he's up to the task.

Using the idea that the Dems first action would be to impeach a war-time leader may be his best bet.”

Look, I think Bush deserves impeachment. I feel that John Dean, former Nixon era White House counsel and Watergate defendant, has lain out the case for impeachment as clearly as anyone, it only takes political will to pull it off. The question is: Do the Democrats have the political will power?

And sadly, thus far, the answer is no.

The Democrats are betting the farm that the American people will respond to changing the “culture of corruption” in Washington, D.C. Well, that’s a fairly nebulous platform, while true to a large extent, it’s not the attention grabber like “illegal aliens taking our jobs” or a “bird flu epidemic,” not to mention the never ending “war on terror.” Nor does it address the root problem, which is the prevalence of corporation money that translates into lobbying influence that, in turn, produces laws designed to line the pockets of America’ s upper one percent while leaving scraps for the rest of us.

I hate to admit it, but Ralph Nader and Gore Vidal were right, this is a one-party nation. We have our choice between the “Nice” Nazis and the “Nasty” Nazis.

And the biggest difference I can see between the “Nasty” Nazis, read Republicans, and the “Nice” Nazis, read Democrats, is that the Nasty party listens to its base more. True the Republican base is ignorant, racist, selfish, and xenophobic, and white as newly fallen Vermont snow. But at the very least the Republican bosses pretend to listen to this narrow-minded lot, and at the very least give lip service to their, often bigoted, concerns. So anything that grabs the headlines, which echoes the Republican base’s inherent racism, greed or militarism, GOP leaders appear to leap into action.

Witness the stunt of Iowa’s Fifth Congressional District Representative Steve “The Blue-Eyed Tom Tancredo” King, “sitting on the U.S.-Mexico border, armed with night vision goggles to watch immigrants cross into Arizona illegally.” Now remember, this clown owns a scab construction company, but no one questions his hiring practices!

So Republican politicians jump around, chest thumping about “illegal immigrants,” who are taking “our” jobs and overcrowding our hospitals and schools and bring in diseases and on, and on, and on ad nauseam, getting the “base” fired up. The Republicans say they’re going to build a fence; they’re going to arrest and deport all 11 to 12 million workers in this country illegally. Oh, they say they are going to do a lot of things, except the right thing. And the only thing that just might work: a Marshall Plan for Mexico and Central America. But that wouldn’t be mean spirited enough and just might solve a problem. Heaven’s no, the Republican Party can never let that happen. Once they are back in their phony, baloney jobs safely retaining control of the US House the whole thing will be forgotten, for this election year at least.

So what does the Democratic base want? That’s a good question, with no easy answer. From my perspective the answer is campaign finance reform, publicly financed and free from corporate influence. I garner this information from my own experience, completely unscientific and anecdotal. At the Iowa Caucuses in January of this year, I volunteered for the local county platform committee and, got on the government and law sub-committee. Overwhelmingly, public campaign financing was the number one issue at this, in-your-face, grassroots level of participatory politics.

But campaign finance reform is merely a blip on the political radar. It’s an issue best left for the kooks, misfits, “the pitchforks and torches crowd,” not real Democrats. Real Democrats know the only way to win elections is to kiss the same rich asses the Republicans kiss.

So here, to me at least, is the essential difference between Democratic Party philosophy and the Republicans: The Republicans pay attention to kooks, misfits and “the pitchforks and torches crowd.” Sure, they stab the kooks, misfits and “pitchfork and torches” folks in the back at every turn, but the GOP always has a ready scapegoat for apparent policy failure: Liberals.

Democrats, on the other hand, tend to ridicule its party’s kooks and misfits. As a friend, who has been deeply involved with the local Democratic Party establishment for many years, explained: He did not know why the Party’s state convention even bothered with drawing up a platform because the candidates always ignored it. To me, this statement illustrates the essential difference between the parties.

Republican Party leadership listens to the fringe, nurtures the fringe and incorporates the often loony, kooky ideas of the fringe into its overall party policy and strategy. Democrats, on the other hand, merely tolerate its fringe elements, humor them and ultimately ignore them in its quixotic quest for the ever elusive center. New ideas, philosophies, religions, political movements, what have you, never develop in the comfortable, moderate center. That is where political rot begins.

Further reading:How to Keep Democrats From Blowing the November Election. An interesting read, however, I do not share writer Bernard Weiner's optomism.

Is this the end, or just the beginning of the end?

2006-05-03T11:36:00.000-07:00

I don’t have much sympathy for the American people. I can guess I can be smug because the current pain at the gasoline pump doesn’t affect me all that much; I no longer have to drive to work, punch a time clock, drive home; I live in what is quite possibly one of the last pedestrian friendly neighborhoods in my city. When I do drive, I drive a 1997 Ford Ranger that has only recently turned over 45,000 miles: How many middle-aged white American males can say that.

So I must admit, that went watching a Today Show segment on the plight of a young white suburban couple, living in the Phoenix area (the husband in typical nonproductive employment, the wife a typical blond of the trophy variety and two point three children) and their struggle with rising gasoline prices, I felt not one whit of sympathy. Why should I. They were, after all, what is commonly accepted as the average white-suburban American couple. This youngish couple owned not one, but two SUVs. Oh, poor babies.

Well they, and millions like them, have made their bed so let them lie in it. I am sure the Today Show piece did not garner much sympathy from the brothers and sisters of inner city America either or the reservations in South Dakota for that matter. The price of gasoline and its effects on family income and budget has been a fact of life for the poorest citizens, and non-citizens, in this country since at least the original OPEC oil shock of 1973. The undereducated, or even adequately educated, poor of this nation’s inner cites, who thanks in large part to President Bill Clinton’s welfare reform, have to travel to where the minimum-wage jobs are, in Suzy Snowflake’s suburb.

Poor Suzy Snowflake. Stuck in the suburban wilderness with one tank of gas, a credit card and a very hungry SUV.

And yet the establishment Democratic response is that something should be done for Mr. And Mrs. Snowflake or they will vote, if they vote at all, Republican in the fall elections. Their decision to live a parasitic lifestyle in the suburbs was not wholly their choice. They were influenced by bankers, realtors and maybe ever their parents that new houses can only be found farther and farther out in the country and that only out in the suburbs and exurbs will their children receive a “good” education (read very few Negroes.)

And what gave Mr. And Mrs. Snowflake the freedom to squat on formerly productive farmland? The automobile.

Let me quote a passage from Morris Berman’s “Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire” where he draws on “The Car Culture by James Flink:

“What the private passenger car plugged into, in the United States, was the core value of individualism. The car promised to put the cost of an urban transportation system, not on the state. In fact, the combination of car and highway promised to preserve and enhance American individualism. Finally, the car offered something dear to the American ways of life: a technical as opposed to political solution to the problems of the nation---a panacea, as it were, for some of the country’s major ills. (Page 253)”

That, in essence, is at the heart of the American dilemma: the reliance on technology to overcome a political problem.

Nowhere in the current discussion of the current energy crisis, ostensibly unforeseen by government or industry (and if you believe that I have property in Florida I wish to sell you), is there any talk of any effort to fundamentally change the American way of doing things. No talk of high-speed passenger rail service, thereby getting Mr. And Mrs. Snowflake and the little Snowflakes off the Interstate Highway system for sort to intermediate range trips for business or pleasure. No talk of limiting the growth, sprawl if you will, of suburban or exurban areas, which would also have the salubrious effect of spurring development in the decaying inner cities. Of course, the sort of change I’m writing about would have been achieved with less pain and more cheaply had it been acted upon in the second Carter administration. But we all know that we Americans were too smart to fall for Jimmy Carter’s un-American vision.

So let the price of gasoline rise and rise and rise. I’ll continue to walk to the neighborhood grocery store. And, thanks to the observant interpretation of a little noticed provision of the 1978 Tax Revenue Act by tax consultant Ted Benna-- whose ideas were latched onto by Ronald Reagan’s handlers for the 1980 campaign that successfully unseated the hated Carter -- my individual retirement account, IRA, is waxing fat off Mr. And Mrs. Snowflake’s gasoline woes. I feel like a rich American pig. I’m a member of the investing class.

So I will continue to walk, and improve my health. And as the price of gasoline skyrockets, the deficit created in my IRA by the Enron-Arthur Anderson accounting and energy price gouging scandal of 2001 is now history. Isn’t capitalism grand?

But, as Karl Marx so presciently observed, capitalists will sell the robe for their own hanging. And so we do. So devoted are the vast majority of Americans to a bankrupt mythology based, not as real mythologies on a kernel of truth, but on fabrications of the entertainment and propaganda industries (real advertising and marketing), intended more to induce the American people to buy, buy, buy.

The mythology of the free market, the rugged individual and a shop-‘til-ya-drop economy has blinded we Americans from the disaster just over the horizon, and it is not from bloodthirsty terrorists. The real terrorists are in the boardrooms of all the major companies in my mutual fund account. They have painted America into a corner which they, and the rest of we hoi-polloi, cannot get out.

What's there to say

2006-04-27T08:34:00.000-07:00

I don't know were to start. But I can see that the United States is standing on a precipice from which there's no turning back. I'm just waiting for the fall.

Go to Hell, America!

2006-04-12T09:02:00.000-07:00

God, I tell myself, over and over again not to post on Internet discussion forums, and like a moth to the flame, I do, and I always wind up getting angry over it.

This doesn’t do my heart any good, nor my ego, psyche or mood.

What often happens is that right wing trolls slither over onto a liberal discussion board and pose as liberals while spouting obvious right wing nonsense. Now the bleeding-heart liberal response is nearly always to let them have their say, try and see their point and never, never attack them personally, intellectually or morally.

Well, you know, I’m tired of that attitude.

Ever since the end of the Vietnam War and the end of that era’s protests, the left has taken this attitude of “we can’t offend anybody,” “we can’t break laws,” “we must respect other’s viewpoints no matter how vile, racist and stupid.” I’m sick of it.

The right has no problem with ad hominem attacks. Sure they are illegitimate, speculative, half-truthful and sometimes downright mendacious. But they work! Look at what the Swift Boat Veterans for “Truth” did to John Kerry in 2004!

The time of civil discourse is dead, if there ever was a time of civil discourse in this country. Before the Civil War fistfights would break out over politics, but not now. We, mostly meaning Democrats and any others who espouse the liberal agenda, must be genteel and respectful of others’ opinions, no matter how vile, racist or stupid. Jesus, I’m sick of that attitude.

I’m sick of the, “we can win ‘them’ over with logic and beat with the issues” rhetoric.

Bullshit! They, the dunderheaded right of this country, don’t listen to logic; they don’t listen to the issues. God gives them all the answers they need, so why do “liberals” even tolerate these people. It’s like Bill Maher says: Why do Democrats keep trying to fish in the pond of people who’ll never vote for them anyway and neglect the bigger pond of those to don’t vote at all.

On a lighter note, it looks as if our mildly retarded president is looking for an excuse to nuke Iran. Oh, yes, those turban-wearing devils are just out to get us, so we got to get them before they get us. They might nuke Israel, you know.

Truly, in a perverse sort of way, I hope Bush does bomb Iran. Then the Shiite south in Iraq will explode, in and around Basra, the out manned British forces will be overwhelmed. And Sadr City in Baghdad will erupt with elements of the Mahdi Army of Moqtada al-Sadr will clash with American troops stationed there. The price of oil will double, treble, maybe even quadruple and Americans will be paying more that $5.00 a gallon for gasoline.

Of course, the downside of this scenario is that a US bombing of Iran could trigger a terrorist attack within the “Homeland.” Whether another terrorist attack on the United States would truly come from outside forces, or a CIA or FBI front organization under the control of the White House, will never be discovered. If a terrorist attack of scale happens on American soil it will be surely be blamed on either the Shi’a Hezbollah or good, old Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda. Regardless from whom an attack comes it will give the Republicans and our ersatz-cowboy king an excuse to finish off The Constitution and declare martial law.

The only thing that can possibly save the republic from this dire consequence is a military mutiny or massive assassinations of Republican politicians, from the president on down, committed by disgruntled CIA operatives. We are running out of alternatives.

There is no real anti-war movement because there is no draft. There is no real Democratic opposition to Bush, with the exceptions of maybe Russ Finegold, John Conyers, Tom Harkin, Dennis Kucinich and a hand full of others. College kids are money-grubbing, business school, bullshit libertarians, reactionary right-wingers or “demonstrating and anger never solved anything” liberals. Nobody, including myself, wants to be inconvenienced or inconvenience anybody else.

I’m in no position to do anything anyway. I’m no leader and I don’t want a leadership role. I would rather retreat from the world and live a monastic existence, I’d be very happy with that.

But the world keeps intruding. And as much as I’d like to ignore it like the vast majority of up-to-their-necks-in-debt Americans I can’t. I’m already disillusioned.

Go to hell, America!

Tom DeLay Quits

2006-04-05T08:14:00.000-07:00

That's the news today.

Don't have that much to say about it. The weasel liked to characterize himself as a fighter but when the chips really got down, he ran.

The punctuated equilibrium of America's collapse

2006-03-29T10:00:00.000-08:00

The late Stephen Jay Gould and paleontologist Niles Eldredge developed the punctuated equilibrium theory of evolution as a critique to traditional Darwinian gradualism. They posited that evolution or speciation occurs in bursts, relatively short periods of geologic time in millions of years, followed by long periods of stability. Changes to plant and animal species, they held, were in large part due to rapid, often sudden, environmental change.

Likewise, geographer Jared Diamond in his best-selling book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014, 2005, points to environmental degradation and/or climate change as the signal causes of societal collapse. Diamond focuses is on civilizations little known or understood by the general public, though the implication is clear: Civilizations past rise and fall in a pattern similar to Gould and Eldredge’s punctuated equilibrium, an initial short burst of cultural development followed by a long period of stability, then a rapid and sudden decline often brought about by human degradation to the immediate environment or uncontrollable forces of nature, such as drought.

As layman it seems clear to me that a sort of punctuated equilibrium theory can apply to human history. Look at a well known, though often misunderstood, ancient civilization: Rome. Roman engineers knew many engineering principals that would be rediscovered in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. Yet the Romans slavishly preserved the peculiar institution of slavery for the basic machinery of empire even as that source of manpower dried up. The question has anyways been why?

I don’t think I can answer that; I’m not a Classicist. But we only have to look at our current events to witness a similar wrong-headedness to that which added Imperial Rome’s collapse.

The United States continues to be the world’s biggest consumer of petroleum products, with a gargantuan appetite for oil in excess of 20,030,000 barrels per day. This far outstrips the next voracious consumer, China, by 4,388,00 barrel per day!

We are even scolded by our mildly retarded son of a living ex-president that we are a nation of oil gluttons. Yet nothing is done.

I am sure, like the ancient Romans, that there are too many equestrians and senators making too much money off the increasing scarcity of oil. I imagine influential Roman slave mongers, as the process of imperial conquest ground to a halt under Emperor Hadrian, realized greater and greater profits as the flow of newly captured labor dried to a trickle, halted and ultimately could only be had through trade with the surrounding barbarian states. Yet, like the frog in the teakettle, no one could foresee that any fundamental change in Roman technological usage was required.

Perhaps the collapse of Imperial Rome could have been staved off by a massive application of industrial technology, perhaps not though most historians agree that manpower shortages in the Legions during the latter stages of the old Roman Empire, which for our purposes I’ll arbitrarily set at the ascension of the Emperor Constantine to the death of Emperor Justinian in Constantinople in 565 CE.

And so we Americans sit like the Romans in the teakettle not realizing that the water temperature is rising. The signs of impending doom are all around, yet all we get from Washington, Detroit and Huston is hot air, and this does not power much of anything.

Politicians of both major parties, the Republicrats and Dempublicans, talk a good game about "new technology" that will, in the not too distant future, free us of the junkie dependency our nation has on foreign oil. And even though the United States only a fraction of its daily oil requirements from the Middle East, since the 1940s the federal government, Texas oilmen and oily Persian Gulf sheiks have entered into a mutually masturbatory relationship of keeping profits high for all insiders involved. They even like to tell us that even though a gallon of gasoline for Americans now stands at something like $2.85, when inflation is taken into account it’s still a bargain! Why should we American have to change!

The saddest fact of all is that the technology, that could make the United States less dependent on the whims of oil company executives and foreign leaders, has been around for many years. Electrical generation by wind turbine is hardly new. There was a farmer near the small Iowa town of Polk City who powered his home with wind generated electricity, even selling the excess back to the regional electrical utility, until his death some twenty odd years ago. Somehow the regional electrical utility strong-armed the farmer’s heirs into dismantling all the wind turbines he made before the property could be sold. Now any and all trace of that little monument to ingenuity and self-sufficiency is merely another exurban housing development choking our landscape.

And the development of biofuels is anything but new technology. George Washington Carver and Henry Ford foresaw in the Twenties that the United States would be sucked dry of what many then thought unlimited supplies of petroleum. But once those two crazy as a bedbug old coots were safely in the grave, buying what America needed in the way of oil from our “friends” overseas was easier, and far more profitable, than changing the fundamental way of doing business. Look how the intelligent American voter turned out our worst president, Jimmy Carter, for asking that we sacrifice a little to kick the oil habit! In the monster Carter’s place we got the genial Ronald Reagan who made Americans proud to be Americans again by knowing when to suck OPEC and the Seven Sisters’ oily cock. SUVs for all!

So despite all the rhetoric from Washington politicians, mainly coming from the Dempublican sided of the Congressional aisle, do not expect much action of “energy independence” any time in the immediate future. Human societies, like biological entities, want stasis and will do all in its power to stave off the inevitable collapse. Our American culture is now in period of denial and retrenchment.

We are in for a long, slow decline before the tipping point is reached. And by then we may be extinct as a nation.

Additional reading:Gibson Consulting Online

New Hard Drive!!!

2006-03-24T13:59:00.000-08:00

Use got a new Western Digital 120 gig hard drive. Runnin' like a striped-assed ape. Woo-Hoo!!

Until next week.
ETS

If Bush invades Iran, Israel cheers

2006-03-15T09:07:00.000-08:00

Our esteemed President is ratcheting up the rhetoric on the danger of Islamic Republic of Iran’s nuclear program, or as he intones it “nu-cu-lar,” in his sonorous West Texas honk, the end goal of which is the production of weapons grade uranium, or perhaps plutonium. Suffice it to say whatever comes out of those Iranian reactors is the stuff that goes on the top of missiles and goes boom. And as many commentators have pointed out it is the same rhetoric that heralded the United States government’s invasion of Iraq.

I do hope this mildly retarded son of an ex-president gets the invasion of Iran underway soon, as it will hasten the demise of the United States as a world superpower. The waiting for the ax to fall is worse than the stroke itself, or so the inventor of the guillotine would have us believe.

Iran will definitely be a tougher nut to crack, as I have pointed out myself on the old Spoon Report, with a standing army of 500,000 plus civilian reserves, a larger national territory than Iraq, greater overall population and an infrastructure that has not been subject to twenty years of neglect. The shrinking U.S. Army and Marine Corps will have its hands full for more than a mere three weeks if it expects to topple the regime of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. A digression: Some one should investigate if this wild-eyed radical received aid from either the CIA, as farfetched as this may seem, as bungling and bumbling outfit as it appears, or the Israeli Mossad, a competent outfit, the Cadillac of espionage. Ahmadinejad is the perfect foil to our belligerent ersatz-cowboy king and won the Iranian presidency just at the moment in history when the mullahs were becoming, how we say, more moderate in their pronouncements toward the West and the United States.

The question is why this most unpopular president would even contemplate national suicidal with a war with Iran when he has definitely screwed-the-pooch in Iraq?

Simple answer, to secure Israel’s existence. The proof is in Israeli television and radio news reporter Michael Karpin’s new book, The Bomb In The Basement: How Israel When Nuclear and What It Means for the World.

Kerpin is quite honest in his assessment in what the Iraqi occupation means for Israel:

From Israel’s point of view, the war that the United States declared on international terrorism, the end of the Saddam dictatorship and occupation of Iraq by the U.S. coalition, had caused some favorable changes. They wiped away the eastern front that had threatened Israel for years, expedited the waning of the Palestinian armed uprising, and accelerated the pace of the peace process. (page 341)

The NeoCon dream is achieved. Israel’s existence is secure. Democracy is spreading like margarine over the Middle East. Of course, Kerpin wrote this before the recent Palestinian elections which vaulted the terrorist organization Hamas into a position of leadership. But much of what he writes holds true. Israel’s existence is de facto recognized throughout the Muslim world; the calls for its destruction is so much boilerplate, by regimes both friendly and unfriendly to the Jewish state, to show solidarity with the Palestinians.

However, Israel can not abide another nuclear power in the region. Writes Kerpin:

”When David Ben-Gurion first unveiled the reactor that he had built at Dimona in the emotional speech he made from the Knesset podium on December 21, 1960, he utter only one sentence that referred to Israels neighbors. He offered them ‘comprehensive and absolute disarmament in Israel and the neighboring Arab counter, with mutual supervision.’ At that time, the construction of the reactor had not been completed and the nuclear option was a distant dream. Nevertheless, the understanding the ‘absolute disarmament’ was necessary was a fundamental principle of Israeli policy. This has not changed in forty-five years since, although it is possible that Iran’s efforts to achieve nuclear capability will make the fulfillment of the principle more difficult than ever, tougher even then the hardest issues between Israel and the Palestinians.” (op. cit. p 355)

What we have is a case of the Israeli tail wagging the American foreign policy dog. However that tail wags an oil hungry dog and Iran, like its neighbor Iraq, is slopping over in the crude. And the oil company executives, currently taking a pillow-fight beating in the Senate, can’t wait to get their hands on more of the that black gold, Texas tea. And those terrible Iranians for some reason believe their sand-blown country should get the lion’s share of the profits for selling the juice we Americans crave. And those dirty no-goods will start accepting euros for their oil in less than a week. What’s an oily Texan to do?

If you are President Bush, you follow your born-again Christian, West Texas oilman instincts: Secure Israel’s boarders with the premise of fighting an “international war on terror,” having the salubrious effect of cowing the American people into obedient stupidity. Hope that the end result means high profit margins for your friends in the business of pumping and refining and selling petroleum to the cowed American people once the petroleum assets of those countries which have fallen victims to our tender mercies are privatized. Handshakes all round for a job well-done. This is all dependent on young Iranians, chaffing under the yoke of the repressive mullahs, shows the liberating Americans with flowers and kisses as the ungrateful Iraqis did not.

Yet no one dares name the joker in the deck of armed confrontation between Iran and the United States. American pundits dare not at the risk of being anti-Semitic, save for a few brave souls on what counts for an extreme left in this country. We Americans have born the guilt for the Holocaust more than any other nation on the planet, Germany and Israel included. Israel’s existence is a fact, it is not going away any time soon. So it is time the United States let Israel stand on its own two feet rather than indulging it like a spoilt child, letting it build nuclear weapons of mass destruction without United Nations inspections or sanctions while demanding its Arab neighbors submit to the same. Then maybe true peace in the Middle East can be discussed.

Further reading:Uncle Chutzpah and His Willing Executioners on the Dire Iran Threat: With Twelve Principles of War Propaganda in Ongoing Service, by Edward S. Herman

Dems and lobby money: Because it's legal doesn't make it right

2006-03-09T07:35:00.000-08:00

The other evening at dinner I got into an argument with a friend over the Abramoff Scandal. It started innocently enough with his observation that the Democratic Party will pick up seats in the fall elections because of Republican corruptness in accepting money from Jack Abramoff’s lobbying firm. I replied that Democrats had taken money too. He took the position, of the Democratic Party establishment, that it was just Republican spin in saying Democrats had taken money for Abramoff.

I answered no, it isn’t just spin, our Democratic U.S. Senator accepted money from an Abramoff client, an Indian gaming lobby, as did Minority Leader Senator Harry Reid. I added, too their credit they returned the money, somehow, unlike our Republican Senator Chuck Grassley, who also accepted funds from one of Abramoff’s Indian casino clients.

My friend responded that the Democrats got their ill-gotten gains legally. To which I replied that if murder were legal does that make it right?

“That’s two different things!” my dinner companion shot back.

I pressed my point saying that, no it wasn’t two different things, that if a law is bad that doesn’t necessarily make the legality of it right. If the system is corrupt that doesn’t necessarily mean that operating under its aegis is moral. There has to be some type of morality, I added, doesn’t have to be the Bible-thumping variety but something. If the Democrats want to win they have to say something more than “we got our money from Jack Abramoff legally.”

He still would not concede his point so we dropped this topic for discussion.

The next day I discussed our conversation with a mutual friend, who is a lawyer, because it upset me so and because my dinner companion is so deeply involved with the state Democratic Party machine that he has apparently drunk the metaphorical Kool-Aide. My lawyer friend said that in his opinion my position was the more politically astute observation. If the Democratic Party really wants to make inroads on the political corruption issue then they have to come up with something new and not merely distance themselves from the excesses of the U.S. House Republicans and Jack Abramoff. He also observed that the Abramoff Scandal will be out of the news cycle by the November elections so it won’t have much impact.

In fact my friend the lawyer is right. I discussed this with another friend just the other day, and while she felt I was correct in the Democrats couldn’t win the political corruptness issue without addressing it, she didn’t have the foggiest idea who Jack Abramoff is.

So evoking the name of Jack Abramoff in November won’t get the Democrats much traction. Unless, that is, they present clear solutions to solving the corrupting influence of lobbyist money. Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold’s “Lobbying and Ethics Reform” bill is a step in the right direction. But, unfortunately, too many "New" Democrats* in Congress are addicted to business as usual.
*For a comparison of "New" Democrats with "Rockefeller" Republicans, I refer the reader to economists Thomas Palley's blog entry Old Democrats vs. New Democrats: Faux vs. Sperling and the Wikipedia.org article on Rockefeller Republicans.

Does this mean anything?

2006-03-02T06:34:00.000-08:00

Last week I posted my friend’s nightmare scenario (see below) of a possible terrorist attack in the United States on June 6 of this year, a date that would soon be annotated into journalese shorthand 6/6/6, the so-called mark of the beast in Christian superstition. It now seems that there is more to this than just my friend’s fevered imagination.

From Buzzflash.com comes this news by way of ThinkProgress.org that in 2002 the United Arab Emirates received a letter from al Qaeda confirming that it had infiltrated the UAE government.

You are well aware that we have infiltrated your security, censorship, and monetary agencies along with other agencies that should not be mentioned. Therefore, we warn of the continuation of practicing such policies, which do not serve your interests and will only cost you many problems that will place you in an embarrassing state before your citizens. In addition, it will prove your agencies’ immobility and failure. Also, we are confident that you are fully aware that your agencies will not get to the same high level of your American Lords. Furthermore, your intelligence will not be
cleverer than theirs, and your censorship capabilities are not worth much against what they have reached. In spite of all this Allah has granted us success to get even with them and harm them.
However, you are an easier target than them; your homeland is exposed to us. There are many vital interests that will hurt you if we decided to harm them, especially, since you relyon[sic] shameless tourism in your economical income!!

The letter was translated by the West Point Combating Terrorism Center and is available at their Web site.

So at this juncture in time we have a document dated in May or June of 2002, the rushed approval of the handover of six, maybe even more, U.S. port container terminals from the British-owned P&O Ports to Dubai Ports World following a buy-out in February of this year, much to the acclaim of shareholders on both sides of the transaction. The investing class, after all, is above politics and nations, just as long as their position atop the geopolitical dog pile remains sacrosanct. They are above ethics, religion and, so it seems morals. As long as they can keep the rest of us shooting one another the investing class goes right on running things, much to everyone else’s detriment.

Now comes breaking news that investors from Dubai and the United Kingdom are in cahoots yet again, and in an industry supposedly vital to the US of A’s security interests.

“The administration notified congressional committees this week that its secretive Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) is investigating the security implications of Dubai International Capital's $1.2 billion acquisition of London-based Doncasters Group Ltd., which has subsidiaries in the United States.
“Once again, a state-controlled Dubai company with deep pockets is purchasing a British firm with U.S. holdings. Doncasters has operations in nine U.S. locations and manufactures precision parts for defense contractors such as Boeing, Honeywell, Pratt & Whitney and General Electric.

“Doncasters' expertise is in forging, fabrication, machining and alloy production. The company owns a plant that makes aerospace turbine blades and components in Farmington, Conn.; a turbine and generator plant in Rincon, Ga.; a steel foundry in Springfield, Mass.; and a metal-rolling plant in Groton, Conn. The company's Web site says the Georgia andConnecticut plants manufacture ‘engine ready airfoils,’ for aircraft, helicopter and tank engines.”
Washington Post March 2, 2006

It’s merely a simple business deal. Happens everyday. The investors are happy, happy, joy, joy!

So why should we be concerned? Well really I’m not nor should anybody else be. This sort of thing happens all the time in the “new” global economy. Free trade! Borderless corporations! The end of nation-states! That all sounds good. Perhaps the end of conflict.

But that’s not what the investor class wants. They actively promote conflict. Just look at the so-called defense/security industry in the United States. Talk about your lazy welfare bums! They only have one, and one only major customer, the Pentagon, and that customer is definitely not a careful consumer. I mean look how many times the defense/security contractors have ripped-off General E.Z. Pickins for toilet seats, hammers and defective armament.

And remember when the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact collapsed in 1989, effectively ending the Cold War, we American should have been given a “peace dividend.” This should have meant that our Congress, in its infinite collective wisdom, would appropriate fewer funds to the above mentioned defense/security contractors; who in turn would have to focus more of their mighty research, development and technology on the civilian sector, i.e. us, bring new products to the “free market” to the benefit of all; thereby also producing the salubrious effect lessen the federal budget without resorting to tax increase. Prosperity was just around the corner. Save the likes of The Carlyle Group, a private investment banking firm famous for “…eleventh largest defense contractor in the US because of its ownership of companies making tanks, aircraft wings and other equipment[,](GlobalSecurity.org)” and a board of directors that is a who’s who of ex-presidents, UK prime ministers and U.S. cabinet members.

Peace dividend?! Why would these guys want a peace dividend? If there isn’t a real threat out there make a new one. Let some bozo son of a wealthy Saudi family, with ties to a family with not one but two US presidents to its (dis)credit, talk 19 stooges into hijacking and flying three American-owned airliners into some buildings on a date that coincidently can be notated in journalese as 9/11, the universal emergency telephone number in the United States and Canada.

You have to hand it to these pricks, The Carlyle Group, the Republican Party and the White House. They have manipulated events in the “homeland” with such mastery that half of us think everything’s cool. Sure the other half of us are pissed but the 2006 elections are coming up and we're counting of the Democrats to sweep clean with a new broom.

You know, in other countries people would be out on the streets enmasse. But this is America, our two-party system works, doesn’t it?

DP World and 666

2006-02-22T09:47:00.000-08:00

Well, here I am in the second week of my new blog. I intended to write about grand and universal themes but the stupidity of current events has crept in and, like a sick dog, puked on the carpet of history.

I had intended to write something about the on-going controversy surrounding “TouchPlay” lottery machines here in Iowa. Suffice it to say when the forces of vice are aligned with the forces of virtue nothing good will come of it.

No, no. Instead the controversy surrounding our august president’s deal handing over management of six major US ports to a company, Dubai Ports World, centered in the United Arab Emirates has intruded into our landlocked solitude.

What seems to have caught the White House off guard is the vehemence of the opposition within Republican Congressional ranks to the planned sale of British-based P&O Port commercial port management firm to a company owned by the cabal of oil-rich sheiks. It should be noted here that one of DP Worlds’ top executives, one Dave Sanborn, was quietly tapped last month by our ersatz-cowboy king to head the Maritime Administration within the Department of Transportation.

There is some concern that Bush and Co. broke, if not the letter, the spirit of a 1993 Federal law stating that any and all foreign owned port management companies must be investigated for 45 days. This time the investigative phase was over in 25. Of course, the fact that just before he entered government service Treasury Secretary Snow sold the port management business of CSX, the railroad company, to DP World for $1.15 billion in 2004 has nothing at all to do with this current imbroglio.

But what is a mildly-retarded son of a living ex-president to do in the face of opposition from his own political party, which makes Americans look like a nation of knuckle dragging Mohammad-haters, to a simple business deal? This is all it is, after all, a change of management. DP Worlds’ been around since…when…oh! 1999, practically a geriatric in business years. And it has plenty of experience worldwide too, operating container terminals from Australia to Venezuela. Any way, before petroleum was discovered under Dubai’s sand, Gulf Arabs were famous as seafarers and traders.

One could also make the argument that this is a shrewd move on Dubya’s part, as our image in the Muslim world—what with the occupation of Iraq and now the stupid Danish cartoon situation--- is decidedly at a low point. What better way to prove to the Arab street, at least, that not all Americans are flushing-the Qur’an- down-the-toilet bigots. Moreover, like at any chain-restaurant, the deal’s merely a change of management. No one, well hardly anyone, will lose her job over this.

Really, this is the kindest I ever been toward our ersatz-cowboy king, and I’m getting rather nauseous, but as yet no one has asked Bush, why?
Why now?

As I outlined above this could be a public relations coup for the United States, vis-à-vis the Arab street. Just our way of saying, “Let bygones be bygones,” to a nation, the United Arab Emirates, that had a part, albeit a small one, in the September 11, 2001 attacks.

Yet there is a nagging suspicion that not everything is on the up and up.

It was while watching this, or actually last, season’s Superbowl XL that a friend posited a thesis that the United States would experience another horrendous terrorist attack this spring. His theory is that somewhere a terrorist bomb will be set off on June 6, 2006. And knowing how tied to empty symbolism this administration is, he added, the acronym for this event will be 6/6/6, the mark of the beast. He reasoned that since the Republicans have nothing, looking at this time as if they will lose seats in both Houses of Congress, nothing better could happen for them than an al Qaeda-linked terrorist bombing sometime this year. Furthermore an event of this kind would fuel the superstitions of fundamentalist Christians into doing whatever it takes to return these corrupt Republican US Representatives and Senators back to Congress. If a bombing of a major US port where catastrophic enough, he thought, this would give Young King George the excuse needed to declare martial law.

This is enough to give anyone nightmares. But is my friend’s scenario plausible?

Unfortunately, yes.

Nearly all goods imported into the United States arrive in container ships. The containers are off-loaded onto semi-trailer trucks for shipment throughout the nation. A container from Singapore can be off-loaded in San Diego, then trucked to here, Des Moines, IA, without ever being opened until reaching its destination. Imagine the reaction if a container with a nuclear-devise of some sort exploded in, say, Pierre, SD? The Constitution and the Bill of Rights would be thrown in the trash can of history tout de suite; Marines in Homeland Security-drag would patrol city streets; the Republicans would be swept back into office during the general elections, if they are held at all, and immediately seek to repeal the Twenty-second Amendment. George W. Bush, President of the United States for Life!

Do I really think this could come to pass? I certainly hope not. I do hope that June 6 comes and goes this year with undo banality and ennui; that not even a run of the mill automobile accident mars the day’s events; that it’s a day of sunshine and warmth and peace. Yet, that nagging voice in the back of my mind heeds my friend’s warning. And as much as this administration utilizes marketing agency techniques and Hollywood-style scare tactics, some event-- such as a “dirty” nuclear devise smuggled out of a DP World-managed port in a overseas container into a middle American city --to make the date 6/6/6 stick in the collective memory is not out of the realms of possibility. After all, our “leaders” had no idea that nineteen hijackers would slam airliners into buildings on September 11, 2001. Did they.

Cow-Patty Drops Out

2006-02-16T09:17:00.000-08:00

Patty Judge, Iowa’s nurse/Secretary Of Agriculture, has dropped out of the 2006 Democratic gubernatorial primary race and is now embraced in the sweaty armpits of “conventional” favorite Chester Culver.

Patty, it seems, just couldn’t raise enough money to keep her a viable candidate. Obviously she didn’t crawl on her knees under the right tables in enough offices. Perhaps a hand job or two would have helped. But young Chester knows best how to raise money, as he’s placed his lips firmly on the Iowa Democratic Party’s sugar-daddy numero uno’s backside, real estate mogul Bill Knapp, where the dingleberries are freshest.

Farm-nurse Patty urges all other candidates to likewise drop out and pledge their un-dying allegiance to the inevitable coronation of young Count Chester. Even David Yepsen, political columnist for The Des Moines Register, is announcing the Democratic primary season at an end.

I hope not. I do not think Ed Fallon has any intention of folding his tent. I do foresee Tom Vilsack’s tax incentive pimp Michael Blouin dropping out shortly and jumping on the Culver bandwagon. And why shouldn’t he, there isn’t a dime’s worth of difference between Chester, Patty and him. Nor, for that matter, is there much difference between Chester and Republican front-runner Jim Nussle.

But Democrats mark my words, I will not vote for young Chester Culver should he be our party’s nominee in the fall.

I am back

2006-02-14T07:20:00.000-08:00

I've taken a hiatus from blogging because, (1) there are just so many blogs out here and (2) I was overwhelmed by the stupidity.

From now on I will endevor to blog only once a week, on any topic I currently find interesting, from sports to politics to "popular" culture, such as it is.

E.T. Spoon