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Posted by: Dragginbutt
Hmmm. As someone who a) has worked his entire adult life for the people of this nation, both serving 20 years in our military, and for the pst 10 as a consultant to a major cabinet agency, I think I have an insight here. First and formost I share a lot of the concerns that many have spoken here. I also have witnessed first hand much more than can be printed here.. I have been scared to death knowing the true details, then seeing the government spin on just about any subject you can name... so I think I can safely say that we may not have been lied to as some suggest, however we haven't always been given the wohole truth either. This current administration has me beside myself actually. Congressional leaders are even worse. When you think of it though, any one who would want the job should have their heads examined. Nobody in their right mind would want the jobs.
What keeps be plugging away is a basic belief in the Goodness of MAN. That somehow some where, down deep a person wants to do the right thing, and will if given the chance. Call that old fashioned... well maybe it is. I grew up in a time when a man's word was his bond. That nobody asked for handouts.. that you helped your neighbors when they needed it, and you never refused their help when you were in need. I guess you can say we were a lottle less self centered then.
I hope that with elections looming, that each of us does a little soul searching and choose candidates that share the same ideals that DO make this nation great. I don't for one minute believe there is another place on this Earth that can hold a candle to our way of life. Like it or not, there are some real s-holes out there. If you have ever been outside our great country and seen the local ways of life beneath the tourist surface... you will agree. The grass isn't greener over there... I have been there and seen that.. and it doesn't come close. A lot of countries want to see us fail. If it does come to that, it won't come from outside our borders... it will be from within. Mistrust, apathy, ignorance. they all add fuel to the fire. The solution is on the other side of that keyboard.
Posted by: Dragginbutt
I say no to incumbants no matter which party they are in.... Of course Kerry's comments about dumb people ending up in Iraq sure soured me as a former military person... I think he owes me an apology, but I am too stupid to know better according to him. He was a traitor during Viet Nam, he still is today. I imagine a certain Senator from AZ might have a thing or two to say to this "Gentleman" on the floor tomorrow.
It sure would be nice to see an old fashioned duel right about now...
Posted by: Dragginbutt
Georged, I have to wonder where your facts are coming from regarding military and motives. I think you will find that man for man (And women too) you will not find a more educated workforce anywhere on the face of the earth percentage wise. They have not accepted anyone without at least a high school education for decades. As for holding degrees, I think major corporations would be hard pressed to match the numbers of people holding degress in the military. As for training, much of the specialized training received is directly carry over in many technical fields, and is accredited and accepted by major colleges and universities all over the world. This is not the military we had right after Viet Nam. They are well educated, and well trained and well respected. Kerry's comments were just a continuation of his documented outbursts against anything that resembles a service person. It stinks....
Posted by: Dragginbutt
I take issue with your comments my friend. I do not think they are "well compensated" The majority of enlisted lower ranks still qualify for food stamps. They are not able to begin to accumulate wealth, purchas homes etc. Their spouses and families are regularly expected to survive without them for long periods of time. Ask a military spouse, they will tell you horror stories about cars breaking down etc while hubby is out playing army in the field for months, even years. All for nothing but a kiss on the cheek when they come home.
Even with all that to deal with, you will find enlisted members looking to the future. Whether that is in attending collage while they are still serving, putting away funds to attend when they get out etc. The deal is they are the hardest working, most motivated people on the planet... and not only do we owe them a debt that can never be paid in full, they desrve our respect as well.
I speak from 20 years of experience friend.... I am retired enlisted. And although you indicate that training is specialized, I have to say that depends. I for one began my career in the AF as a Nuclear Missle tech. I transferred into Computer programming, and picked up a lot of networking, security experience along the way. I am still using that knowledge today as a consultant to the State Dept. More important than technical skills, is the experience they learn in handling pressure, doing reasearch, problem solving, team building, and your basic work ethic not found in your typical high school dropout flipping burgers. These are real world skills, and the reason why most military enlisted are successful in life. Not whiners, not with their hands out for welfare, not doing the woulda, coulda shoulda shuffle you see on every street corner... No, these are hard working patriots.
I am sorry if I have mis-classified your knowledge base... somehow it strikes me as knowledge gained second hand, or read about from books, and not based on hard facts and experience lived. Those of us that have will definately have a different view on the subject.
This is not the military of the 70's. Why just looking at the technology they are using would make one believe that it takes an over abundant amount of skill and knowledge (read that education) to even operate it, let alone efficiently.. while you are multi tasking and trying to stay alive.
I'll give you that I may not be able to carry over my knowledge of nuclear warheads, but the 96 credit hours of hands on electronics, the 65 credit hours and years experience programming systems, the 7 years of working with the AF Office of Special Investigations creating the first government agency unit to perform Criminal investigations on computer crimes and computer forensics, and helping form what we now know as computer network security technology has served me well after retirement.
And for the record, the approximately $1000 before taxes I get every month after 20 years of service doesn't even cover my truck payment after I pay taxes, and my life insurance. Not free mind you.. nor is my Dental insurance, or my Medical insurance either.. although I was promised free care for life when I enlisted in 1976. A lot of broken promises.. a broken back that I feel every day of my life. 2 Blown knees, deaf in one ear, barely can hear out of the other, Diabetic and have serious heart problems all attributed to my service years. Oh yeah.. we are sitting high on the hog alright...
My story is not unique... it actually is the norm for today's volunteer military serviceman. And still we stand up to be counted... not because we are stupid, or uneducated... or because we see the military as the last resort Some of us actually have a clear calling tht has to be answered by Actions, NOT WORDS.
Sorry the blood presure is getting to me so I have to stop...
Most people wouldn't understand.....
All I can say is stop believing what you hear in the media... and give the military service man a fair shake...
Posted by: Dragginbutt
Again I am confused about your information sources. The military has NOT accepted anyone without a HS diploma for years now. As a former Drill instructor, I can also say that there are tight reins on what recruiters can say and promise to recruits. I remember quite a few that found themselves without a job when they crossed the line. Sure it may happen, but there are checks and balances. Your material sounds like it came from the Viet Nam era... things have changed drastically.
Again also, like I said, these kids are definately NOT overpaid. An E-1 makes chump change. Unless of course you figure in the food stamps they qualify for.
I agree with you on one point though... A lot of promises of benefits made when I enlisted have been eroded by congress over the years. I also agree that there is a lot of graft and waste in government. It all comes from the top. One of the reasons I have remained a consultant, and not become a federal worker. But my argument here is I do not think your views on the military enlisted serviceman is valid. Nor do I believe your opinions were gained from personal experience. You almost have to walk in their shoes to gain an appreciation for what they do, and why they do it.
Posted by: Dragginbutt
I also believe that we are in this mess for a couple of reasons. First, the US has totally dropped the ball when it comes to diplomacy. Instead of working with nations, we tend to try and create the world in our own image. With little or no regard to history, or culture etc. We appear arrogant to most nations. For the past two decades, we have tried to make believe that the world needs us... they don't.
Secondly, we conveniently resort to big sticks rather than engaging in dialog.
This administration borders on insanity. And for this reason, for the first time in my adult life, I actually fear for our country. Two years to go... I hope whoever takes the reins has the common sense to wake up and smell the roses and figure out how to solve issues without resorting to the big stick mentality.
Posted by: Dragginbutt
One last thing for Georged. In my time served, I found the majority of persons enlisting in our military to be highly motivated. You would be surprised to discover that most enlisted persons either have at least one degree, or are actively pursuing one, as it is almost a prerequisite these days if you wish to gain promotion. Many possess their masters, and a few doctorates are out there too. They are not lazy by any means, and they are not the dregs of society that you suggest they are. On the contrary, they are exactly the opposite. Where the mercenary force comment came from totally baffles me. They serve where they are told to serve. They stand up to be counted when asked. They bleed, they die so those of us sleeping in our beds tonight can do so in relative safety. They know the risks... AND STILL THEY COME. Not to become killers... not to get a thrill... but to make sure that their children and grandchildren do not have to...
Posted by: Dragginbutt
OK I got your meaning this time. My experience was with the USAF.. and I will agree that when compared to ground pounders, our stats differ greatly. There are not very many of us on the ground inbedded with ground troups.
I also agree that many upper crust DO have other options available to them, and their choice rarely includes military service. A lot of people have suggested the conscription argument for years. Not sure how that would improve the situation. I served right after Viet Nam, and I believe the shift to a volunteer military was a big improvement. Those that could find a deferment did so. Those that did not have the same choices in life did find a higher number of their peers in the military via the draft. I for one though do NOT buy into the idea that because of geographical differences or race that we currently have the same environment today that we had back then. Now days, if a person really wants to get a decent education, they will find ways. Heck, you are better off if your parents are penniless these days. There are so many programs out there that I do not see this as a deterrent. The issue is more of a motivational thing in my book.
I will say this however, our congressional leaders do NOT have the same ethics and care for the average citizen that they did when I was a kid. Now days they use their time in government to set themselves up when they leave office. The other problem is they are so focused on gaining power over people, fellow members etc, that they forget who they serve. If they could only serve one term.. I'd imagine they might have a different outlook on things. At least there would not be the power brokering we have today.
the whole system of commitie heads going to ruling party is a crock. The decide which bills come before congress for debate, and they will stall bills that have merit, but unfortunately do not come from their side of the fence.
I think the Dems have a hard task before them. In two years they will have to put their money where their mouth is and make a wholesale change in how things are run, or they will find themselves out on their ears like the Republicans did this past Tuesday. They don't have time for politics.. and unfortunately they are so tied up in patting themselves on the back, they may miss their opportunity to make a difference.
The really sad thing is that the older I get, the less I expect from them... Maybe it is fatigue.. maybe it is a lack of seeming relative... Can't say. I don't listen to them any more because no matter which party they belong to.. they all sound alike..
Sorry to have mis understood your direction....
Posted by: Dragginbutt
All this talk about conscription etc. What if.... just for a moment.. we thought in other ways.... Maybe like giving our kids the ablility to reason... give them the open minds to listen to others, and learn from them. Provide them with the tools and technology to solve real problems with negotiations rather than guns. The big sticks haven't worked. They only dug us deeper into a hole.
I am not a peace-nic... but as I get older, I see the lunacy of our actions. There has to be a better way. North Korea is an example. Their people are starving, they have no industry outside of their military. To keep their people in line, they pick on the only nation that has the ability to show restraint, gambling that we will not react. I don't think they thought that our administration would react the way it did. Their people are held in check fighting an enemy that they know little about outside what their leaders tell them. The same goes on in many Near East countries too. Only there, instead of the Communist parties, you have religious biggots that keep their people in check via lies and propaganda, and outright abuse if they even think of having a opinion. Women are actually be beaten in the streets for not wearing the garment of choice over their heads. If they travel, they must have a man go with them, or they can be stoned.
No, guns and rhetoric are not the answer. Communication and frank discussion are the only way we will see real change taking place. Both sides have to learn this to expect success, and I hope that mankind can learn this before they destroy themselves...
Posted by: Dragginbutt
Hades, you have to understand that the military does not set policy. The President, with consultation with congress does that. The military is only there to carry it out. Normally they salute and carry on. What worries the heck out of me is that for the first time I can remember in my lifetime, you now have retired and active military leaders, along with active troops publicly criticizing the decisions of the Commander in Chief. That used to be a court marshal offense. Not sure waht the ramification will be on this, but I suspect there is a lot of talk around the Pentagon and on the hill right now. I have lived through a coup before, (Kennedy) this one is even scarier that that one because even though Johnson was a tough SOB, he wasn't crazy evil. like our VP. That thought should really scare people. To think HE might take over if something happened to the President. Nancy Pelosi is another one that makes you shake your head. I have spent 30+ years dealing in this environment. Every day gets worse. I can hope that the outcome of the elections will see some concrete change, but to be honest with you, from what I have observed to date, I am not going to hold my breath. It seems that with the DEMs it will be business as usual. Which is what got them the boot 8 years ago.
Posted by: Dragginbutt
As a retired service member that also saw combat time in the first go in the gulf, and currently am a consutant to the Department is State, I have mixed emotions on the previous comments. First off, as a service man, we are taught to salute and follow orders. The time to question comes after the hostilities have ended. That being said, I also believe there is a lot to answer for when the dust clears. Your examples are relevant, and personally I doubt we will ever get a true and acurate accounting. Our leaders will have to live with it. Funny thing about history. Eventually all the dirt is made known...
I also have a great compassion for the current crop of young men and women that are serving our nation. Although many may say the life is easy, and our benefits are great.. the reality comes to sharp focus when the spouse sees that military vehicle pull in the driveway with a letter from the government sending ther condolences for losing their loved ones in a far away place. And oh by the way, you have 30 days to vacate your government housing unit so someone else can fill the spot of worry.
I do not know what the answer is. I doubt anyone who has not lived it does. Certainly, I put even less faith in the media and the spin doctored reporting that you see nightly on the news. I think if we had term limits for congress leaders like we have on presidents, we might find their actions to be more prudent instead of the power mongering we see daily. One only has to look at the incoming Democratic speaker of the house to see a textbook case of personal politics over national interests...
Posted by: Dragginbutt
I didn't read the article, and I don't know what all this means, but as a person who used to be subject to teh UCMJ and military law, I can say that I would fear that. In the military justice system, you are guilty until proven innocent. A big difference between that and the freedom we enjoy today.
Posted by: Dragginbutt
Unless you have lived and worked in this madness for your entire adult life, you would have no idea what is going on. All I can say is don't believe what you see on the news, and read in the papers. If you REALLY knew, you wouldn't sleep at night folks. Be careful of what you wish for.... We have come closer than you think to the edge.....
Some may think me full of hot air on most subjects.... but those that know me will tell you that if I tell you to be afraid... then you had better sit up and listen.... and I'd be listening right now...if I were you...
Posted by: Dragginbutt
One of the more interesting concepts. Let's tie expenditures on war, to money spent on peaceful pursuits and diplomacy. One of the sad things to happen over the last several administrations is a total lack of understanding of what diplomacy is all about. I do not thing any administration since Nixon has had a firm grip on that. We too often reach for the big stick when a stiff scolding would do. We will never be able to leave a safe world to our children if all we know how to do is fuel conflict. If we had spent even a tenth on diplomacy over the past 50 years that we have on destruction, just think of where we could be today.
Posted by: Just4Kicks
Oh cool, I wasn't sure what to do tonight but then I found this thread...yippie!BR>
I'll pass on the beer though thanks...don't want to cloud my judgement any.
Posted by: hondabuster
I know its a long read. Grab a beer, read and weep at what our country has become.
Time to Go! Inside the Worst Congress Ever
By Matt Taibbi
Rolling Stone
Tuesday 17 October 2006
The worst Congress ever: How our national legislature has become a stable of thieves and perverts - in five easy steps.
There is very little that sums up the record of the US Congress in the Bush years better than a half-mad boy-addict put in charge of a federal commission on child exploitation. After all, if a hairy-necked, raincoat-clad freak like Rep. Mark Foley can get himself named co-chairman of the House Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children, one can only wonder: What the hell else is going on in the corridors of Capitol Hill these days?
These past six years were more than just the most shameful, corrupt and incompetent period in the history of the American legislative branch. These were the years when the US parliament became a historical punch line, a political obscenity on par with the court of Nero or Caligula - a stable of thieves and perverts who committed crimes rolling out of bed in the morning and did their very best to turn the mighty American empire into a debt-laden, despotic backwater, a Burkina Faso with cable.
To be sure, Congress has always been a kind of muddy ideological cemetery, a place where good ideas go to die in a maelstrom of bureaucratic hedging and rank favor-trading. Its whole history is one long love letter to sleaze, idiocy and pigheaded, glacial conservatism. That Congress exists mainly to misspend our money and snore its way through even the direst political crises is something we Americans understand instinctively. "There is no native criminal class except Congress," Mark Twain said - a joke that still provokes a laugh of recognition a hundred years later.
But the 109th Congress is no mild departure from the norm, no slight deviation in an already-underwhelming history. No, this is nothing less than a historic shift in how our democracy is run. The Republicans who control this Congress are revolutionaries, and they have brought their revolutionary vision for the House and Senate quite unpleasantly to fruition. In the past six years they have castrated the political minority, abdicated their oversight responsibilities mandated by the Constitution, enacted a conscious policy of massive borrowing and unrestrained spending, and installed a host of semipermanent mechanisms for transferring legislative power to commercial interests. They aimed far lower than any other Congress has ever aimed, and they nailed their target.
"The 109th Congress is so bad that it makes you wonder if democracy is a failed experiment," says Jonathan Turley, a noted constitutional scholar and the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington Law School. "I think that if the Framers went to Capitol Hill today, it would shake their confidence in the system they created. Congress has become an exercise of raw power with no principles - and in that environment corruption has flourished. The Republicans in Congress decided from the outset that their future would be inextricably tied to George Bush and his policies. It has become this sad session of members sitting down and drinking Kool-Aid delivered by Karl Rove. Congress became a mere extension of the White House."
The end result is a Congress that has hijacked the national treasury, frantically ceded power to the executive, and sold off the federal government in a private auction. It all happened before our very eyes. In case you missed it, here's how they did it - in five easy steps:
Step One: Rule by Cabal
If you want to get a sense of how Congress has changed under GOP control, just cruise the basement hallways of storied congressional office buildings like Rayburn, Longworth and Cannon. Here, in the minority offices for the various congressional committees, you will inevitably find exactly the same character - a Democratic staffer in rumpled khakis staring blankly off into space, nothing but a single lonely "Landscapes of Monticello" calendar on his wall, his eyes wide and full of astonished, impotent rage, like a rape victim. His skin is as white as the belly of a fish; he hasn't seen the sun in seven years.
It is no big scoop that the majority party in Congress has always found ways of giving the shaft to the minority. But there is a marked difference in the size and the length of the shaft the Republicans have given the Democrats in the past six years. There has been a systematic effort not only to deny the Democrats any kind of power-sharing role in creating or refining legislation but to humiliate them publicly, show them up, pee in their faces. Washington was once a chummy fraternity in which members of both parties golfed together, played in the same pickup basketball games, probably even shared the same mistresses. Now it is a one-party town - and congressional business is conducted accordingly, as though the half of the country that the Democrats represent simply does not exist.
American government was not designed for one-party rule but for rule by consensus - so this current batch of Republicans has found a way to work around that product design. They have scuttled both the spirit and the letter of congressional procedure, turning the lawmaking process into a backroom deal, with power concentrated in the hands of a few chiefs behind the scenes. This reduces the legislature to a Belarus-style rubber stamp, where the opposition is just there for show, human pieces of stagecraft - a fact the Republicans don't even bother to conceal.
"I remember one incident very clearly - I think it was 2001," says Winslow Wheeler, who served for twenty-two years as a Republican staffer in the Senate. "I was working for [New Mexico Republican] Pete Domenici at the time. We were in a Budget Committee hearing and the Democrats were debating what the final result would be. And my boss gets up and he says, 'Why are you saying this? You're not even going to be in the room when the decisions are made.' Just said it right out in the open."
Wheeler's very career is a symbol of a bipartisan age long passed into the history books; he is the last staffer to have served in the offices of a Republican and a Democrat at the same time, having once worked for both Kansas Republican Nancy Kassebaum and Arkansas Democrat David Pryor simultaneously. Today, those Democratic staffers trapped in the basement laugh at the idea that such a thing could ever happen again. These days, they consider themselves lucky if they manage to hold a single hearing on a bill before Rove's well-oiled legislative machine delivers it up for Bush's signature.
The GOP's "take that, bitch" approach to governing has been taken to the greatest heights by the House Judiciary Committee. The committee is chaired by the legendary Republican monster James Sensenbrenner Jr., an ever-sweating, fat-fingered beast who wields his gavel in a way that makes you think he might have used one before in some other arena, perhaps to beat prostitutes to death. Last year, Sensenbrenner became apoplectic when Democrats who wanted to hold a hearing on the Patriot Act invoked a little-known rule that required him to let them have one.
"Naturally, he scheduled it for something like 9 a.m. on a Friday when Congress wasn't in session, hoping that no one would show," recalls a Democratic staffer who attended the hearing. "But we got a pretty good turnout anyway."
Sensenbrenner kept trying to gavel the hearing to a close, but Democrats again pointed to the rules, which said they had a certain amount of time to examine their witnesses. When they refused to stop the proceedings, the chairman did something unprecedented: He simply picked up his gavel and walked out.
"He was like a kid at the playground," the staffer says. And just in case anyone missed the point, Sensenbrenner shut off the lights and cut the microphones on his way out of the room.
For similarly petulant moves by a committee chair, one need look no further than the Ways and Means Committee, where Rep. Bill Thomas - a pugnacious Californian with an enviable ego who was caught having an affair with a pharmaceutical lobbyist - enjoys a reputation rivaling that of the rotund Sensenbrenner. The lowlight of his reign took place just before midnight on July 17th, 2003, when Thomas dumped a "substitute" pension bill on Democrats - one that they had never read - and informed them they would be voting on it the next morning. Infuriated, Democrats stalled by demanding that the bill be read out line by line while they recessed to a side room to confer. But Thomas wanted to move forward - so he called the Capitol police to evict the Democrats.
Thomas is also notorious for excluding Democrats from the conference hearings needed to iron out the differences between House and Senate versions of a bill. According to the rules, conferences have to include at least one public, open meeting. But in the Bush years, Republicans have managed the conference issue with some of the most mind-blowingly juvenile behavior seen in any parliament west of the Russian Duma after happy hour. GOP chairmen routinely call a meeting, bring the press in for a photo op and then promptly shut the proceedings down. "Take a picture, wait five minutes, gavel it out - all for show" is how one Democratic staffer described the process. Then, amazingly, the Republicans sneak off to hold the real conference, forcing the Democrats to turn amateur detective and go searching the Capitol grounds for the meeting. "More often than not, we're trying to figure out where the conference is," says one House aide.
In one legendary incident, Rep. Charles Rangel went searching for a secret conference being held by Thomas. When he found the room where Republicans closeted themselves, he knocked and knocked on the door, but no one answered. A House aide compares the scene to the famous "Land Shark" skit from Saturday Night Live, with everyone hiding behind the door afraid to make a sound. "Rangel was the land shark, I guess," the aide jokes. But the real punch line came when Thomas finally opened the door. "This meeting," he informed Rangel, "is only open to the coalition of the willing."
Republican rudeness and bluster make for funny stories, but the phenomenon has serious consequences. The collegial atmosphere that once prevailed helped Congress form a sense of collective identity that it needed to fulfill its constitutional role as a check on the power of the other two branches of government. It also enabled Congress to pass legislation with a wide mandate, legislation that had been negotiated between the leaders of both parties. For this reason Republican and Democratic leaders traditionally maintained cordial relationships with each other - the model being the collegiality between House Speaker Nicholas Longworth and Minority Leader John Nance Garner in the 1920s. The two used to hold daily meetings over drinks and even rode to work together.
Although cooperation between the two parties has ebbed and flowed over the years, historians note that Congress has taken strong bipartisan action in virtually every administration. It was Sen. Harry Truman who instigated investigations of wartime profiteering under FDR, and Republicans Howard Baker and Lowell Weicker Jr. played pivotal roles on the Senate Watergate Committee that nearly led to Nixon's impeachment.
But those days are gone. "We haven't seen any congressional investigations like this during the last six years," says David Mayhew, a professor of political science at Yale who has studied Congress for four decades. "These days, Congress doesn't seem to be capable of doing this sort of thing. Too much nasty partisanship."
One of the most depressing examples of one-party rule is the Patriot Act. The measure was originally crafted in classic bipartisan fashion in the Judiciary Committee, where it passed by a vote of thirty-six to zero, with famed liberals like Barney Frank and Jerrold Nadler saying aye. But when the bill was sent to the Rules Committee, the Republicans simply chucked the approved bill and replaced it with a new, far more repressive version, apparently written at the direction of then-Attorney General John Ashcroft.
"They just rewrote the whole bill," says Rep. James McGovern, a minority member of the Rules Committee. "All that committee work was just for show."
To ensure that Democrats can't alter any of the last-minute changes, Republicans have overseen a monstrous increase in the number of "closed" rules - bills that go to the floor for a vote without any possibility of amendment. This tactic undercuts the very essence of democracy: In a bicameral system, allowing bills to be debated openly is the only way that the minority can have a real impact, by offering amendments to legislation drafted by the majority.
In 1977, when Democrats held a majority in the House, eighty-five percent of all bills were open to amendment. But by 1994, the last year Democrats ran the House, that number had dropped to thirty percent - and Republicans were seriously pissed. "You know what the closed rule means," Rep. Lincoln Diaz-Balart of Florida thundered on the House floor. "It means no discussion, no amendments. That is profoundly undemocratic." When Republicans took control of the House, they vowed to throw off the gag rules imposed by Democrats. On opening day of the 104th Congress, then-Rules Committee chairman Gerald Solomon announced his intention to institute free debate on the floor. "Instead of having seventy percent closed rules," he declared, "we are going to have seventy percent open and unrestricted rules."
How has Solomon fared? Of the 111 rules introduced in the first session of this Congress, only twelve were open. Of those, eleven were appropriations bills, which are traditionally open. That left just one open vote - H. Res. 255, the Federal Deposit Insurance Reform Act of 2005.
In the second session of this Congress? Not a single open rule, outside of appropriation votes. Under the Republicans, amendable bills have been a genuine Washington rarity, the upside-down eight-leafed clover of legislative politics.
When bills do make it to the floor for a vote, the debate generally resembles what one House aide calls "preordained Kabuki." Republican leaders in the Bush era have mastered a new congressional innovation: the one-vote victory. Rather than seeking broad consensus, the leadership cooks up some hideously expensive, favor-laden boondoggle and then scales it back bit by bit. Once they're in striking range, they send the f@cker to the floor and beat in the brains of the fence-sitters with threats and favors until enough members cave in and pass the damn thing. It is, in essence, a legislative microcosm of the electoral strategy that Karl Rove has employed to such devastating effect.
A classic example was the vote for the Central American Free Trade Agreement, the union-smashing, free-trade monstrosity passed in 2005. As has often been the case in the past six years, the vote was held late at night, away from the prying eyes of the public, who might be horrified by what they see. Thanks to such tactics, the 109th is known as the "Dracula" Congress: Twenty bills have been brought to a vote between midnight and 7 a.m.
CAFTA actually went to vote early - at 11:02 p.m. When the usual fifteen-minute voting period expired, the nays were up, 180 to 175. Republicans then held the vote open for another forty-seven minutes while GOP leaders cruised the aisles like the family elders from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, frantically chopping at the legs and arms of Republicans who opposed the measure. They even roused the president out of bed to help kick @ss for the vote, passing a cell phone with Bush on the line around the House cloakroom like a bong. Rep. Robin Hayes of North Carolina was approached by House Speaker Dennis Hastert, who told him, "Negotiations are open. Put on the table the things that your district and people need and we'll get them." After receiving assurances that the administration would help textile manufacturers in his home state by restricting the flow of cheap Chinese imports, Hayes switched his vote to yea. CAFTA ultimately passed by two votes at 12:03 a.m.
Closed rules, shipwrecked bills, secret negotiations, one-vote victories. The result of all this is a Congress where there is little or no open debate and virtually no votes are left to chance; all the important decisions are made in backroom deals, and what you see on C-Span is just empty theater, the world's most expensive trained-dolphin act. The constant here is a political strategy of conducting congressional business with as little outside input as possible, rejecting the essentially conservative tradition of rule-by-consensus in favor of a more revolutionary strategy of rule by cabal.
"This Congress has thrown caution to the wind," says Turley, the constitutional scholar. "They have developed rules that are an abuse of majority power. Keeping votes open by freezing the clock, barring minority senators from negotiations on important conference issues - it is a record that the Republicans should now dread. One of the concerns that Republicans have about losing Congress is that they will have to live under the practices and rules they have created. The abuses that served them in the majority could come back to haunt them in the minority."
Step Two: Work as Little as Possible - And Screw Up Whatever You Do
It's Thursday evening, September 28th, and the Senate is putting the finishing touches on the Military Commissions Act of 2006, colloquially known as the "torture bill." It's a law even Stalin would admire, one that throws habeas corpus in the trash, legalizes a vast array of savage interrogation techniques and generally turns the president of the United States into a kind of turbocharged Yoruba witch doctor, with nearly unlimited snatching powers. The bill is a fall-from-Eden moment in American history, a potentially disastrous step toward authoritarianism - but what is most disturbing about it, beyond the fact that it's happening, is that the senators are hurrying to get it done.
In addition to ending generations of bipartisanship and instituting one-party rule, our national legislators in the Bush years are guilty of something even more fundamental: They suck at their jobs.
They don't work many days, don't pass many laws, and the few laws they're forced to pass, they pass late. In fact, in every year that Bush has been president, Congress has failed to pass more than three of the eleven annual appropriations bills on time.
That figures into tonight's problems. At this very moment, as the torture bill goes to a vote, there are only a few days left until the beginning of the fiscal year - and not one appropriations bill has been passed so far. That's why these @ssholes are hurrying to bag this torture bill: They want to finish in time to squeeze in a measly two hours of debate tonight on the half-trillion-dollar defense-appropriations bill they've blown off until now. The plan is to then wrap things up tomorrow before splitting Washington for a month of real work, i.e., campaigning.
Sen. Pat Leahy of Vermont comments on this rush to torture during the final, frenzied debate. "Over 200 years of jurisprudence in this country," Leahy pleads, "and following an hour of debate, we get rid of it?"
Yawns, chatter, a few sets of rolling eyes - yeah, whatever, Pat. An hour later, the torture bill is law. Two hours after that, the diminutive chair of the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, Sen. Ted Stevens, reads off the summary of the military-spending bill to a mostly empty hall; since the members all need their sleep and most have left early, the "debate" on the biggest spending bill of the year is conducted before a largely phantom audience.
"Mr. President," Stevens begins, eyeing the few members present. "There are only four days left in the fiscal year. The 2007 defense appropriations conference report must be signed into law by the president before Saturday at midnight...."
Watching Ted Stevens spend half a trillion dollars is like watching a junkie pull a belt around his biceps with his teeth. You get the sense he could do it just as fast in the dark. When he finishes his summary - $436 billion in defense spending, including $70 billion for the Iraq "emergency" - he f@cks off and leaves the hall. A few minutes later, Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma - one of the so-called honest Republicans who has clashed with his own party's leadership on spending issues - appears in the hall and whines to the empty room about all the lavish pork projects and sheer unadulterated waste jammed into the bill. But aside from a bored-looking John Cornyn of Texas, who is acting as president pro tempore, and a couple of giggling, suit-clad pages, there is no one in the hall to listen to him.
In the Sixties and Seventies, Congress met an average of 162 days a year. In the Eighties and Nineties, the average went down to 139 days. This year, the second session of the 109th Congress will set the all-time record for fewest days worked by a US Congress: ninety-three. That means that House members will collect their $165,000 paychecks for only three months of actual work.
What this means is that the current Congress will not only beat but shatter the record for laziness set by the notorious "Do-Nothing" Congress of 1948, which met for a combined 252 days between the House and the Senate. This Congress - the Do-Even-Less Congress - met for 218 days, just over half a year, between the House and the Senate combined.
And even those numbers don't come close to telling the full story. Those who actually work on the Hill will tell you that a great many of those "workdays" were shameless mail-ins, half-days at best. Congress has arranged things now so that the typical workweek on the Hill begins late on Tuesday and ends just after noon on Thursday, to give members time to go home for the four-day weekend. This is borne out in the numbers: On nine of its "workdays" this year, the House held not a single vote - meeting for less than eleven minutes. The Senate managed to top the House's feat, pulling off three workdays this year that lasted less than one minute. All told, a full fifteen percent of the Senate's workdays lasted less than four hours. Figuring for half-days, in fact, the 109th Congress probably worked almost two months less than that "Do-Nothing" Congress.
Congressional laziness comes at a high price. By leaving so many appropriations bills unpassed by the beginning of the new fiscal year, Congress forces big chunks of the government to rely on "continuing resolutions" for their funding. Why is this a problem? Because under congressional rules, CRs are funded at the lowest of three levels: the level approved by the House, the level approved by the Senate or the level approved from the previous year. Thanks to wide discrepancies between House and Senate appropriations for social programming, CRs effectively operate as a backdoor way to slash social programs. It's also a nice way for congressmen to get around having to pay for expensive-ass programs they voted for, like No Child Left Behind and some of the other terminally underfunded boondoggles of the Bush years.
"The whole point of passing appropriations bills is that Congress is supposed to make small increases in programs to account for things like the increase in population," says Adam Hughes, director of federal fiscal policy for OMB Watch, a nonpartisan watchdog group. "It's their main job." Instead, he says, the reliance on CRs "leaves programs underfunded."
Instead of dealing with its chief constitutional duty - approving all government spending - Congress devotes its time to dumb bullsh@t. "This Congress spent a week and a half debating Terri Schiavo - it never made appropriations a priority," says Hughes. In fact, Congress leaves itself so little time to pass the real appropriations bills that it winds up rolling them all into one giant monstrosity known as an Omnibus bill and passing it with little or no debate. Rolling eight-elevenths of all federal spending into a single bill that hits the floor a day or two before the fiscal year ends does not leave much room to check the fine print. "It allows a lot more leeway for fiscal irresponsibility," says Hughes.
A few years ago, when Democratic staffers in the Senate were frantically poring over a massive Omnibus bill they had been handed the night before the scheduled vote, they discovered a tiny provision that had not been in any of the previous versions. The item would have given senators on the Appropriations Committee access to the private records of any taxpayer - essentially endowing a few selected hacks in the Senate with the license to snoop into the private financial information of all Americans.
"We were like, 'What the hell is this?'" says one Democratic aide familiar with the incident. "It was the most egregious thing imaginable. It was just lucky we caught them."
Step Three: Let the President Do Whatever He Wants
The constitution is very clear on the responsibility of Congress to serve as a check on the excesses of the executive branch. The House and Senate, after all, are supposed to pass all laws - the president is simply supposed to execute them. Over the years, despite some ups and downs, Congress has been fairly consistent in upholding this fundamental responsibility, regardless of which party controlled the legislative branch. Elected representatives saw themselves as beholden not to their own party or the president but to the institution of Congress itself. The model of congressional independence was Sen. William Fulbright, who took on McCarthy, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon with equal vigor during the course of his long career.
"Fulbright behaved the same way with Nixon as he did with Johnson," says Wheeler, the former Senate aide who worked on both sides of the aisle. "You wouldn't see that today."
In fact, the Republican-controlled Congress has created a new standard for the use of oversight powers. That standard seems to be that when a Democratic president is in power, there are no matters too stupid or meaningless to be investigated fully - but when George Bush is president, no evidence of corruption or incompetence is shocking enough to warrant congressional attention. One gets the sense that Bush would have to drink the blood of Christian babies to inspire hearings in Congress - and only then if he did it during a nationally televised State of the Union address and the babies were from Pennsylvania, where Senate Judiciary chairman Arlen Specter was running ten points behind in an election year.
The numbers bear this out. From the McCarthy era in the 1950s through the Republican takeover of Congress in 1995, no Democratic committee chairman issued a subpoena without either minority consent or a committee vote. In the Clinton years, Republicans chucked that long-standing arrangement and issued more than 1,000 subpoenas to investigate alleged administration and Democratic misconduct, reviewing more than 2 million pages of government documents.
Guess how many subpoenas have been issued to the White House since George Bush took office? Zero - that's right, zero, the same as the number of open rules debated this year; two fewer than the number of appropriations bills passed on time.
And the cost? Republicans in the Clinton years spent more than $35 million investigating the administration. The total amount of taxpayer funds spent, when independent counsels are taken into account, was more than $150 million. Included in that number was $2.2 million to investigate former HUD secretary Henry Cisneros for lying about improper payments he made to a mistress. In contrast, today's Congress spent barely half a million dollars investigating the outright fraud and government bungling that followed Hurricane Katrina, the largest natural disaster in American history.
"Oversight is one of the most important functions of Congress - perhaps more important than legislating," says Rep. Henry Waxman. "And the Republicans have completely failed at it. I think they decided that they were going to be good Republicans first and good legislators second."
As the ranking minority member of the Government Reform Committee, Waxman has earned a reputation as the chief Democratic muckraker, obsessively cranking out reports on official misconduct and incompetence. Among them is a lengthy document detailing all of the wrongdoing by the Bush administration that should have been investigated - and would have been, in any other era. The litany of fishy behavior left uninvestigated in the Bush years includes the manipulation of intelligence on Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, the mistreatment of Iraqi detainees, the leak of Valerie Plame's CIA status, the award of Halliburton contracts, the White House response to Katrina, secret NSA wiretaps, Dick Cheney's energy task force, the withholding of Medicare cost estimates, the administration's politicization of science, contract abuses at Homeland Security and lobbyist influence at the EPA.
Waxman notes that the failure to investigate these issues has actually hurt the president, leaving potentially fatal flaws in his policies unexamined even by those in his own party. Without proper congressional oversight, small disasters like the misuse of Iraq intelligence have turned into huge, festering, unsolvable fiascoes like the Iraq occupation. Republicans in Congress who stonewalled investigations of the administration "thought they were doing Bush a favor," says Waxman. "But they did him the biggest disservice of all."
Congress has repeatedly refused to look at any aspect of the war. In 2003, Republicans refused to allow a vote on a bill introduced by Waxman that would have established an independent commission to review the false claims Bush made in asking Congress to declare war on Iraq. That same year, the chair of the House Intelligence Committee, Porter Goss, refused to hold hearings on whether the administration had forged evidence of the nuclear threat allegedly posed by Iraq. A year later the chair of the Government Reform Committee, Tom Davis, refused to hold hearings on new evidence casting doubt on the "nuclear tubes" cited by the Bush administration before the war. Sen. Pat Roberts, who pledged to issue a Senate Intelligence Committee report after the 2004 election on whether the Bush administration had misled the public before the invasion, changed his mind after the president won re-election. "I think it would be a monumental waste of time to re-plow this ground any further," Roberts said.
Sensenbrenner has done his bit to squelch any debate over Iraq. He refused a request by John Conyers and more than fifty other Democrats for hearings on the famed "Downing Street Memo," the internal British document that stated that Bush had "fixed" the intelligence about the war, and he was one of three committee chairs who rejected requests for hearings on the abuse of Iraqi detainees. Despite an international uproar over Abu Ghraib, C
Posted by: hondabuster
For one, just spreading the word, and shining the light of day on the corruption is a start.
Two, we need to act like we the people are the boss. We hire and fire, but we need to use facts and intelligence and not just slogans and bigotry, and emotion.
We need to hold the congress accountable to the people and we need to have them hold the executive accountable...something which hasnt been done in years.
Our politicians are working together (it is both dems and reps against the people), to sustain a society, which is unsustainable. We need to get people engaged, and willing to make things better for all, not just the wealthy.
I think there is so much mental illness, and self interest in the US right now...itll almost take a miricle for the world to be a better place for our children. Bottom line...as long as the choice is only for dems or reps...we lose.
You can read the real news,( which seems to contridict the so called liberal media, which is really controlled by the wealthy, and by definition conservative) at buzzflash.com, and stay informed about what our government is up to.
There was a guy on cnn the other day, and he gave these points for the people to take back america. I copied from http://www.opednews.com/maxwrite/print_friendly.php?p=opedne_rob_kall_061022_time_to__replace_som.htm
Time to Replace Some Antiquated Parts of Our Democracy
By Rob Kall
With less than 20% happy with congress, now is the time to change some basic, antiquated aspects of our democracy.
LEt's face it, a lot of people would dump BOTH the Democrats or Republicans if they had other viable choices. But it is very rare that third party candidates are seen as having any chance at winning. So people don't pay serious attention to them, let alone vote for them.
Now is the best time in a long time when there is an opportunity to change the rules so third party candidates have a better chance. This would be a huge boon to democracy-- to re-energizing, modernizing and improving the health of our democracy.
1- treat all candidates equally, not favored treatment for democrats and republicans
2-now that we have computerized voting, all elections should be instant run-off-- you pick your first, second and third choice and gradually elliminate the ones with the least votes until someone wins with a majority. Never allow someone to win with less than 50%.
3-take big money out of election campaigns-- polls show a big majority of Americans want this.
4-Take the biggest cost out of elections. Require local media AND national media to GIVE free ad time-- TV and radio-- to every qualified candidate.
5-institute term limits for congress- no more than 8 years for any senator or congressperson, and change senate terms to four years.
6-Make a law that legislators cannot become lobbyists-- ever.
This op-ed started out as a letter to CNN, in response to their broken government series. So I left out number four, about forcing the media to give free ad time. I knew they wouldn't run my comment if I included it. But it's one of the biggies. We need to take the cost out of elections and since We The People OWN the airwaves, we have every right to require something from the media we freely loan them to.
* * *
How do we make these things happen? In states where possible, get the people directly involved-- use proposition or similar direct ballot initiatives.
Otherwise, we need to start a national movement that pushes for these changes. You can still be a Democrat and support ALL of them. These will make for a healthier democracy and will force candidates to more clearly define their positions on issues.
We can do this. We need to do it. Don't expect the biggest liberal blogs to help much. They're too committed to the Democratic party. The Dems are currently the best thing we have to chose from in terms of viable candidates. But we can do better. I expect, if all the changes I call for came about, there would be plenty of Democrats I'd support, maybe even some Republicans-- because there would be Christicans and Corporacrats who would represent other constituencies who would push the Dems and Repubs to other positions.
Let's make it happen. It's a bipartisan project that even the far right might get behind. If it works, we'll see a much more diverse congress that works by coalition building, like we see in parlaiments in nations with more contemporary democracies. Who knows, we might even add a seventh change
7-The president must hold a majority of the support of the congress to stay in the presidency.
Creating a government with instant run-off elections, really viable third parties and term limits might actually enable us to dump the electoral system of government.
Posted by: hondabuster
Quote
Originally posted by: georged
Quote
I have heard that the multi-national corporations pulled together have enough wealth to pay off our national debt 7 times over.....so what was this about everybody being broke again?
Right now the New York Stock Exchange, the world's largest, is composed of companies having global capitalization of $21-trillion. Of that $14-trillion is US companies, the remainder non-US. US National debt is now $8.6-trillion.
To pay off the national debt, theoretically over one-half of the major US public companies would have to be liquidated. To do that, they'd have to be nationalized by the government. To nationalize them would essentially take them from public ownership and make them the property of the US government for purposes of liquidation. Which would destroy equity markets, making all public companies worth maybe 10% of capitalization, or $1.4-trillion in a fire sale. That won't solve US problems, the solution being more disastrous than the problem, to say nothing of the public riots and USD crash that would accompany nationalization.
The problem is the apathetic and ignorant US Public allowing its scum leadership the freedom to loot public funds for special interests while enriching themselves. I don't find that real surprising as most of the general public lives in an ocean of personal debt barely keeping their heads above water, a paycheck or two away from financial disaster.
Very well said.And another good link for the real news and honest commentary
opednews
Posted by: hondabuster
Heres an interesting story on a bill signd into law, which shows the democrats cant be trusted to be an opposition party.
Looks like this is the october surprise we new to expect. Now when the elections are stolen by the electronic voting machines, and the citizens take to the street..bush will just declare martial law, and become dictator for life. It also mentions the detention camps being built ( to hold the protesters), and being built by haliburton.
Sad to say, but the end of democracy is coming.
We need to ask if these are powers we want the next president to have...such as Hillery?
Bush Moves Toward Martial Law
Saturday, Oct. 28, 2006 at 2:39 AM
In a stealth maneuver, President Bush has signed into law a provision which, according to Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont), will actually encourage the President to declare federal martial law (1). It does so by revising the Insurrection Act, a set of laws that limits the President's ability to deploy troops within the United States. The Insurrection Act (10 U.S.C.331 -335) has historically, along with the Posse Comitatus Act (18 U.S.C.1385), helped to enforce strict prohibitions on military involvement in domestic law enforcement. With one cloaked swipe of his pen, Bush is seeking to undo those prohibitions.
Public Law 109-364, or the "John Warner Defense Authorization Act of 2007" (H.R.5122) (2), which was signed by the commander in chief on October 17th, 2006, in a private Oval Office ceremony, allows the President to declare a "public emergency" and station troops anywhere in America and take control of state-based National Guard units without the consent of the governor or local authorities, in order to "suppress public disorder."
President Bush seized this unprecedented power on the very same day that he signed the equally odious Military Commissions Act of 2006. In a sense, the two laws complement one another. One allows for torture and detention abroad, while the other seeks to enforce acquiescence at home, preparing to order the military onto the streets of America. Remember, the term for putting an area under military law enforcement control is precise; the term is "martial law."
Section 1076 of the massive Authorization Act, which grants the Pentagon another $500-plus-billion for its ill-advised adventures, is entitled, "Use of the Armed Forces in Major Public Emergencies." Section 333, "Major public emergencies; interference with State and Federal law" states that "the President may employ the armed forces, including the National Guard in Federal service, to restore public order and enforce the laws of the United States when, as a result of a natural disaster, epidemic, or other serious public health emergency, terrorist attack or incident, or other condition in any State or possession of the United States, the President determines that domestic violence has occurred to such an extent that the constituted authorities of the State or possession are incapable of ("refuse" or "fail" in) maintaining public order, "in order to suppress, in any State, any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy."
For the current President, "enforcement of the laws to restore public order" means to commandeer guardsmen from any state, over the objections of local governmental, military and local police entities; ship them off to another state; conscript them in a law enforcement mode; and set them loose against "disorderly" citizenry - protesters, possibly, or those who object to forced vaccinations and quarantines in the event of a bio-terror event.
The law also facilitates militarized police round-ups and detention of protesters, so called "illegal aliens," "potential terrorists" and other "undesirables" for detention in facilities already contracted for and under construction by Halliburton. That's right. Under the cover of a trumped-up "immigration emergency" and the frenzied militarization of the southern border, detention camps are being constructed right under our noses, camps designed for anyone who resists the foreign and domestic agenda of the Bush administration.
An article on "recent contract awards" in a recent issue of the slick, insider "Journal of Counterterrorism & Homeland Security International" reported that "global engineering and technical services powerhouse KBR [Kellog, Brown & Root] announced in January 2006 that its Government and Infrastructure division was awarded an Indefinite Delivery/Indefinite Quantity (IDIQ) contract to support U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facilities in the event of an emergency." "With a maximum total value of $385 million over a five year term," the report notes, "the contract is to be executed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers," "for establishing temporary detention and processing capabilities to augment existing ICE Detention and Removal Operations (DRO) - in the event of an emergency influx of immigrants into the U.S., or to support the rapid development of new programs." The report points out that "KBR is the engineering and construction subsidiary of Halliburton." (3) So, in addition to authorizing another $532.8 billion for the Pentagon, including a $70-billion "supplemental provision" which covers the cost of the ongoing, mad military maneuvers in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other places, the new law, signed by the president in a private White House ceremony, further collapses the historic divide between the police and the military: a tell-tale sign of a rapidly consolidating police state in America, all accomplished amidst ongoing U.S. imperial pretensions of global domination, sold to an "emergency managed" and seemingly willfully gullible public as a "global war on terrorism."
Make no mistake about it: the de-facto repeal of the Posse Comitatus Act (PCA) is an ominous assault on American democratic tradition and jurisprudence. The 1878 Act, which reads, "Whoever, except in cases and under circumstances expressly authorized by the Constitution or Act of Congress, willfully uses any part of the Army or Air Force as a posse comitatus or otherwise to execute the laws shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than two years, or both," is the only U.S. criminal statute that outlaws military operations directed against the American people under the cover of 'law enforcement.' As such, it has been the best protection we've had against the power-hungry intentions of an unscrupulous and reckless executive, an executive intent on using force to enforce its will.
Unfortunately, this past week, the president dealt posse comitatus, along with American democracy, a near fatal blow. Consequently, it will take an aroused citizenry to undo the damage wrought by this horrendous act, part and parcel, as we have seen, of a long train of abuses and outrages perpetrated by this authoritarian administration.
Despite the unprecedented and shocking nature of this act, there has been no outcry in the American media, and little reaction from our elected officials in Congress. On September 19th, a lone Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont) noted that 2007's Defense Authorization Act contained a "widely opposed provision to allow the President more control over the National Guard [adopting] changes to the Insurrection Act, which will make it easier for this or any future President to use the military to restore domestic order WITHOUT the consent of the nation's governors."
Senator Leahy went on to stress that, "we certainly do not need to make it easier for Presidents to declare martial law. Invoking the Insurrection Act and using the military for law enforcement activities goes against some of the central tenets of our democracy. One can easily envision governors and mayors in charge of an emergency having to constantly look over their shoulders while someone who has never visited their communities gives the orders."
A few weeks later, on the 29th of September, Leahy entered into the Congressional Record that he had "grave reservations about certain provisions of the fiscal Year 2007 Defense Authorization Bill Conference Report," the language of which, he said, "subverts solid, longstanding posse comitatus statutes that limit the military's involvement in law enforcement, thereby making it easier for the President to declare martial law." This had been "slipped in," Leahy said, "as a rider with little study," while "other congressional committees with jurisdiction over these matters had no chance to comment, let alone hold hearings on, these proposals."
In a telling bit of understatement, the Senator from Vermont noted that "the implications of changing the (Posse Comitatus) Act are enormous". "There is good reason," he said, "for the constructive friction in existing law when it comes to martial law declarations. Using the military for law enforcement goes against one of the founding tenets of our democracy. We fail our Constitution, neglecting the rights of the States, when we make it easier for the President to declare martial law and trample on local and state sovereignty."
Senator Leahy's final ruminations: "Since hearing word a couple of weeks ago that this outcome was likely, I have wondered how Congress could have gotten to this point. It seems the changes to the Insurrection Act have survived the Conference because the Pentagon and the White House want it."
The historic and ominous re-writing of the Insurrection Act, accomplished in the dead of night, which gives Bush the legal authority to declare martial law, is now an accomplished fact.
The Pentagon, as one might expect, plays an even more direct role in martial law operations. Title XIV of the new law, entitled, "Homeland Defense Technology Transfer Legislative Provisions," authorizes "the Secretary of Defense to create a Homeland Defense Technology Transfer Consortium to improve the effectiveness of the Department of Defense (DOD) processes for identifying and deploying relevant DOD technology to federal, State, and local first responders."
In other words, the law facilitates the "transfer" of the newest in so-called "crowd control" technology and other weaponry designed to suppress dissent from the Pentagon to local militarized police units. The new law builds on and further codifies earlier "technology transfer" agreements, specifically the 1995 DOD-Justice Department memorandum of agreement achieved back during the Clinton-Reno regime.(4)
It has become clear in recent months that a critical mass of the American people have seen through the lies of the Bush administration; with the president's polls at an historic low, growing resistance to the war Iraq, and the Democrats likely to take back the Congress in mid-term elections, the Bush administration is on the ropes. And so it is particularly worrying that President Bush has seen fit, at this juncture to, in effect, declare himself dictator.
Posted by: hondabuster
I just have to laugh, everytime i hear someone say we have a liberal media. If there truely were a liberal media in this country, this story would have not only been in it...but been front page.
Heres alink to the story
here
Or just do a google search, and youll find more outlets for it. You can also go to Sen Leathys website or search out the number on the bill. The facts are there...the conservative, corporate owned media dont want you knowing the facts. heres the posting on the sens website
Posted by: hondabuster
Quote
Originally posted by: DeeDawg
Originally posted by hondabuster: I just have to laugh, everytime i hear someone say we have a liberal media. If there truely were a liberal media in this country, this story would have not only been in it...but been front page.
Heres alink to the story http://www.informationliberation.com/?id=17432[/L]
Or just do a google search, and youll find more outlets for it. You can also go to Sen Leathys website or search out the number on the bill. The facts are there...the conservative, corporate owned media dont want you knowing the facts. heres the posting on the sens website
Let's see now; to prove there is no such thing a biased media, I am supposed to go to the web page of a very liberal left wing career politician from very left wing state? Yeah, now I'm convinced, not.
How about this one from the Daily Reveiw: Joe Angotti, a former NBC News senior vice president and executive producer of the NBC Nightly News with Tom Brokaw told an audience in Monmouth, IL that "Yes, there is a liberal bias on the part of some reporters on news networks. The paper also reported that Angotti commented that while the Fox News Channel doesn't practice "good journalism" it does serve as an alternative for those that believe that other sources are liberally biased. He also admitted that he watches Fox because he hears stories there that he won't hear on other networks. Angotti is partially correct. There is a liberal media bias. While his reasoning seems flawed to me, I will give him credit for being honest. After all how many liberals would admit to watching Fox News because it provides him with stories the networks won't cover? I guess that has nothing to do with a liberal bias.
You just proved my point. If those are talking points for the left (Sen Leathys remarks)...why wasnt it repeated again and again on the left leaning media? Could it be because there is no such thing as a left leaning media which has major backing by the wealthy? All the media in america is owned by 5 men. Any chance those 5 ultra wealthy men could be a lefty? Absolutly not.
Not one major news network carried that storey...arent you curious as to why? Why isnt it being discussed? Its your rights being flushed down the drain, and no one wants to discuss why?
Could it be that both the dems and the reps are in bed together...and the target is ordinary american citizens? Who are the detention camps being built for...dissenting americans? Why is there no opposition party in america? The current dems dont speak for me, nor do the repubs. I believe in the rule of law, and not the rule of man. Our constitution is under daily assult from out government, and no one seems to notice or care.
Some one once said...people end up with the government they deserve.
Posted by: hondabuster
Heres an interesting editorial written yesterday, remember to exercise your mind...you dont need to believe everything which is writen, but you do need to be aware of whats out there.
The Spoils of Corruption
by Charles Sullivan
http://www.opednews.com
Like many Americans, since early childhood I was taught that good always triumphs over evil. But as I grew older and acquainted myself with the history of my country, my perspective became less na?ve and better informed. My perceptions of reality were altered forever, and I am forced to live, like so many of my readers, with the burden of knowledge that often makes reality painful to bear.
America could have been very different, but it has become a land of unfathomable corruption. It is a place where money rules and lords power over everyone and every process. Corruption has lodged itself in every tissue and every organ of our societal institutions, and riddled them with crippling disease. Perhaps more than any organ it has blinded our ability to see what is before us.
The root of corruption stems from America's love affair with private wealth and conquest. We are a culturally shallow and spiritually deprived people who seem incapable of discerning truth from fairy tales. This may be a matter of convenience for some and a survival mechanism to others.
There are three primary cultural pillars that are the underpinning of our society: government, media, and religion. It is widely assumed that these institutions exist to serve the people. Whatever their intent when they were birthed in the minds and hearts of their creators, these institutions were subverted and used to subdue and control the masses; to make them subservient to power. Virtually everything we believe about America is contradicted by the evidence, but too many of us are unwilling to come to grips with reality, which thus assures the continuation of a brutal and tortuous history of murder and conquest.
In a wonderful essay titled The Problem is Civil Obedience, historian Howard Zinn wrote, "I start from the supposition that the world is topsy-turvey, that the wrong people are in jail and the wrong people are out of jail, that the wrong people are in power and the wrong people are out of power..." Zinn, as usual, sums up the situation perfectly. But the great majority refuses to see things as they really are. They prefer fairy tales to truth that is too painful for them to acknowledge and to bear; and so the charade continues.
Those on the far right of the political spectrum are fond of saying that America is a Christian nation, when, in fact, nothing could be farther from the truth. The framers of the Constitution, especially Thomas Jefferson, took great pains to keep America from evolving into a Theocracy. Even so, religion should provide a moral compass that steers its participants away from corruption and moral morass. Yet with only a comparatively few exceptions, religion is used against its followers. It serves wealth and power, and keeps the masses ignorant, and subservient to the hierarchy of the church, which is in collusion with the money changers in government.
Organized religion, like the mainstream media and the government, is controlled by the wealthy and powerful. It serves the high priests of capitalism and is little more than an enabler of corruption and conquest. Let us not forget that Manifest Destiny was driven by a puritanical zealotry that resulted in the ethnic cleansing of a continent. The collusion of religion with material wealth lends a false aura of moral authority to disingenuous and misguided human behaviors that follow immoral government into war after war. Thus the rich continue to exploit the working people for the benefit of the ruling class.
At some point in our history Jesus of Nazareth was supplanted by Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell. The Jesus who despised the wealthy and believed in service to the poor, who in anger overturned the tables of the money changers, no longer exists within the American psyche. Unlike Jesus, Robertson and Falwell believe in accruing wealth to themselves and in assassinating their enemies. They work hand in hand with the morally bankrupt leadership that has invaded and occupies 135 of the world's 192 nations. The genuine article has somehow given way to the counterfeit, and too many of us are unable to tell the difference.
In a purer form organized religion-in this case Christianity, would be revolutionary and radical; and it would serve as a bulwark against the accumulation of private affluence in favor of public service, and a massive redistribution of wealth and power. It would find itself, like any conscientious individual, in formal opposition to the conventions of government and society, rather than an enabler of them. But that clearly is not the case these days.
The church, like all things American, more closely resembles a for profit corporation than a place where human souls are instructed in righteous behavior and healed.
Similarly, the na?ve among us broadly assume that the mainstream media exists to inform the people, and thus serves as a countervailing force against corruption and malfeasance. In truth the corporate media serves those in power rather than holding them accountable to the people. While it was not always so, the mainstream media, like organized religion, is used to program public perceptions-to steer us away from truth and to perpetuate fairy tales that extol the virtues of bribery, violence, and greed. It makes useful idiots of those who cannot think for themselves and persuades them to act like fools in the eyes of the world.
From the days of Tom Paine we have regressed to an era in which news anchors are rewarded for their loyalty to political regimes by being awarded positions in government. Tom Paine and the spirit of public service have given way to Tony Snow and Katie Couric, and the creation of media celebrities. The boundary between government and media, between church and state and corporate power, no longer exists. They are all interchangeable parts in a machine that makes a mockery of social justice and human freedoms.
Gone are the days of radical, revolutionary religion in America. Gone are the days of Thomas Jefferson and Samuel Adams, when a just and Democratic Republic seemed possible. Gone are the days of Tom Paine and the militant press that challenged corrupt power. The hands of time are no longer moving forward; we have reversed them. Once again the dark ages loom large on the horizon before us like an unseen iceberg in the chill dark of an Atlantic night.
Posted by: hondabuster
Think about the NY Times, anyway you want, but they are the nations voice in the daily news. This was in todays editorials
The Difference Two Years Made
Published: November 5, 2006
On Tuesday, when this page runs the list of people it has endorsed for election, we will include no Republican Congressional candidates for the first time in our memory. Although Times editorials tend to agree with Democrats on national policy, we have proudly and consistently endorsed a long line of moderate Republicans, particularly for the House. Our only political loyalty is to making the two-party system as vital and responsible as possible.
That is why things are different this year.
To begin with, the Republican majority that has run the House ? and for the most part, the Senate ? during President Bush?s tenure has done a terrible job on the basics. Its tax-cutting-above-all-else has wrecked the budget, hobbled the middle class and endangered the long-term economy. It has refused to face up to global warming and done pathetically little about the country?s dependence on foreign oil.
Republican leaders, particularly in the House, have developed toxic symptoms of an overconfident majority that has been too long in power. They methodically shut the opposition ? and even the more moderate members of their own party ? out of any role in the legislative process. Their only mission seems to be self-perpetuation.
The current Republican majority managed to achieve that burned-out, brain-dead status in record time, and with a shocking disregard for the most minimal ethical standards. It was bad enough that a party that used to believe in fiscal austerity blew billions on pork-barrel projects. It is worse that many of the most expensive boondoggles were not even directed at their constituents, but at lobbyists who financed their campaigns and high-end lifestyles.
That was already the situation in 2004, and even then this page endorsed Republicans who had shown a high commitment to ethics reform and a willingness to buck their party on important issues like the environment, civil liberties and women?s rights.
For us, the breaking point came over the Republicans? attempt to undermine the fundamental checks and balances that have safeguarded American democracy since its inception. The fact that the White House, House and Senate are all controlled by one party is not a threat to the balance of powers, as long as everyone understands the roles assigned to each by the Constitution. But over the past two years, the White House has made it clear that it claims sweeping powers that go well beyond any acceptable limits. Rather than doing their duty to curb these excesses, the Congressional Republicans have dedicated themselves to removing restraints on the president?s ability to do whatever he wants. To paraphrase Tom DeLay, the Republicans feel you don?t need to have oversight hearings if your party is in control of everything.
An administration convinced of its own perpetual rightness and a partisan Congress determined to deflect all criticism of the chief executive has been the recipe for what we live with today.
Congress, in particular the House, has failed to ask probing questions about the war in Iraq or hold the president accountable for his catastrophic bungling of the occupation. It also has allowed Mr. Bush to avoid answering any questions about whether his administration cooked the intelligence on weapons of mass destruction. Then, it quietly agreed to close down the one agency that has been riding herd on crooked and inept American contractors who have botched everything from construction work to the security of weapons.
After the revelations about the abuse, torture and illegal detentions in Abu Ghraib, Afghanistan and Guant?namo Bay, Congress shielded the Pentagon from any responsibility for the atrocities its policies allowed to happen. On the eve of the election, and without even a pretense at debate in the House, Congress granted the White House permission to hold hundreds of noncitizens in jail forever, without due process, even though many of them were clearly sent there in error.
In the Senate, the path for this bill was cleared by a handful of Republicans who used their personal prestige and reputation for moderation to paper over the fact that the bill violates the Constitution in fundamental ways. Having acquiesced in the president?s campaign to dilute their own authority, lawmakers used this bill to further Mr. Bush?s goal of stripping the powers of the only remaining independent branch, the judiciary.
This election is indeed about George W. Bush ? and the Congressional majority?s insistence on protecting him from the consequences of his mistakes and misdeeds. Mr. Bush lost the popular vote in 2000 and proceeded to govern as if he had an enormous mandate. After he actually beat his opponent in 2004, he announced he now had real political capital and intended to spend it. We have seen the results. It is frightening to contemplate the new excesses he could concoct if he woke up next Wednesday and found that his party had maintained its hold on the House and Senate.
Posted by: hondabuster
Quote
Originally posted by: Dragginbutt
I also believe that we are in this mess for a couple of reasons. First, the US has totally dropped the ball when it comes to diplomacy. Instead of working with nations, we tend to try and create the world in our own image. With little or no regard to history, or culture etc. We appear arrogant to most nations. For the past two decades, we have tried to make believe that the world needs us... they don't.
Secondly, we conveniently resort to big sticks rather than engaging in dialog.
This administration borders on insanity. And for this reason, for the first time in my adult life, I actually fear for our country. Two years to go... I hope whoever takes the reins has the common sense to wake up and smell the roses and figure out how to solve issues without resorting to the big stick mentality.
Well said , and i agree.
Posted by: hondabuster
I read this article this weekend, and its lays out the conflicts of the current administration...and the interesting choices the new congress will need to come to grips with.
Do they defend american corporations...or american people.
Its another long one, but worth the time to read it.
The Surreal Politics of Premeditated War
by R.W. Behan
George W. Bush, who proudly claimed the mantle of ?war president,? was keenly rebuked in the recent mid-term election. The event was notable, but it merely continued the surreal politics of premeditated war?a politics that has dominated the last six bizarre, hideous years of our nation?s history.
Two elements of the repudiation seem unreal, indeed. Not the fact of it, but the amazing length of its gestation period?those six years?and how tepid it was. Given the documented record of the Bush Administration?lying us into war, torturing prisoners, rewarding cronies with no-bid contracts, spying secretly on the nation?s citizens, selling public policy to Jack Abramoff?s clients, stating even their intent to ignore laws with dozens of ?signing statements??one would expect the political about-face to have occurred far sooner, and the protest to have been a firestorm. Bush loyalists in Congress (and George Bush) should have been turned out angrily and en masse two years ago.
The victorious Democrats? response was even more surprising, and also unreal. ?Impeachment is off the table? quickly became the mantra: let us instead proceed with raising the minimum wage. Apparently the Bush Administration?s record is flawless, showing nothing remotely approaching a high crime or a misdemeanor. Impeachment would be a ?waste of time.?
There is a good reason for these strange results: we practice a politics of surrealism, and have done so since George Bush was first put in office.
Ron Suskind of the New York Times learned how the Bush Administration works, from a ?senior advisor to Bush? (Karl Rove is a suspect): ?We?re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.? They have done that, incessantly, and it is the source of the surrealism. Spins, evasions, omissions, jingoisms, distortions, ?perception management? (i.e., propaganda), and deliberate lying all contribute to a political discourse adrift from what is honest, true, and reliable.
The Clear Skies Act allowed more pollution, the Healthy Forests Act caused more trees to be cut down, the Patriot Act scarred the Bill of Rights, No Child Left Behind was a step toward privatizing public education, the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act was a bonanza for the pharmaceutical industry and began the process of dismantling Medicare, the Military Commissions Act fostered torture and suspended habeas corpus.
But no such manufactured reality is more misleading, fraudulent, and damaging than the ?global war on terror.?
It took six years for a tardy and mild electoral protest of the Iraq war to surface, because the trusting American people believed the ?war on terror? was the just and moral response of an innocent nation to a brutal terrorist attack. They handily reelected the President who was prosecuting it, proudly supported the troops, and accepted as necessary evils the Bush Administration excesses. But gradually that acceptance weakened, and on November 7, 2006 it was withdrawn.
The recent electoral turnaround was generated largely by the horrific conditions in Iraq today, the savage bloodletting of insurgency and civil war suffered by Americans and Iraqis alike. These conditions finally exceeded public tolerance. But the rationale for the war, its purpose, went unquestioned, because the Bush Administration obscurantism has been so successful.
We need to strip away the created reality of the ?war on terror? to see the true nature of it instead, or our weird, unreal politics will continue.
The wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq were not simply justified and honorable retaliations to the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington. They couldn?t possibly have been that, because both of them were premeditated?conceived, planned, and prepared long before September 11, 2001.
(Yes, there have been premeditated military incursions in the past?Panama, Grenada, and Kosovo come to mind?but none was of the magnitude and duration of the Afghan and Iraqi wars. Never before have we unleashed full scale combat, unprovoked, on sovereign foreign nations and then installed permanent military bases to occupy them.)
Though it has not been addressed in the mass media, the factual story of the President?s premeditated wars is clearly visible, and when the story is read at one sitting, the dreamlike quality of our politics is apparent.
The story to follow will not be a great revelation to anyone who has read, perhaps a bit more than casually, about our recent political, military, and diplomatic past, and has spent some time searching the Internet for corroboration and details. On the other hand, it is far from common knowledge, because in the manufactured reality crafted by the Bush Administration, it does not exist.
Two strands of history converged in the Bush years. One led to the invasion of Afghanistan, the other to the invasion of Iraq, and the strands came together on September 11, 2001.
The opening chapter of the story reveals a photograph dating to the Reagan years of Donald Rumsfeld cordially shaking hands with Saddam Hussein. We supported Saddam in his war with Iran. But history convulses: on January 26, 1998, Mr. Rumsfeld and 17 others, members of the Project for a New American Century, wrote a letter to President Clinton, urging the military overthrow of Saddam Hussein?s regime. If we fail to do so, they were candid in asserting, ?a significant portion of the world?s supply of oil will be put at hazard.?
This could be considered the fountainhead of our surreal politics. The PNAC proposed premeditated war explicitly, in a bizarre retrogression to the centuries of unapologetic European imperialism. Since World War II and the birth of the United Nations, however, the world has been seeking to surpass imperialism, struggling to settle international difficulties peaceably?and here was an open, sad, and radical rebuff.
(In addition to Mr. Rumsfeld, 10 others of the signatories would serve in the Bush Administration: Elliott Abrams, Richard Armitage, John Bolton, Paula Dobriansky, Robert Kagan, Zalmay Khalilzad, Richard Perle, William Schneider, Jr., Robert Zoellick, and Paul Wolfowitz.)
When George W. Bush took office, a concern for the ?significant portion of the world?s oil supply? was never far from view, because the Administration?s personal linkages to the oil industry were intimate, historic, and numerous. The president and vice president were just the first examples: eight cabinet secretaries and the national security advisor were recruited directly from the oil industry, and so were 32 others in the secretariats of Defense, State, Energy, Agriculture, Interior, and the Office of Management and Budget.
The Bush Administration came to power anxious, we know from published sources, to fulfill the PNAC?s vision of regime change in Iraq.
In his second week in office, President Bush appointed Vice President Cheney to chair a National Energy Policy Development Group. The supersecret ?Energy Task Force,? as it came to known, was composed of officials from the relevant federal agencies and beyond question heavily attended by energy industry executives and lobbyists. (The full membership has yet to be revealed, but Enron?s Kenneth Lay was conspicuously present.)
One brute fact had to be apparent to the Task Force: in the Caspian Basin, and beneath the Iraqi deserts there are 125 billion barrels of proven oil reserves, and the potential for 433 billion barrels more. Anyone controlling that much oil could break OPEC?s stranglehold overnight.
By early March, 2001, the Task Force was poring over maps of the Iraqi oilfields, pipelines, tanker terminals, and oil exploration blocks. It studied an inventory of ?Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts??dozens of oil companies from 30 different countries, in various stages of exploring and developing Iraqi crude. (These documents were forced into view several years later by a citizen group, Judicial Watch, with a Freedom of Information Act proceeding. It wasn?t easy?the Bush Administration appealed the lawsuit all the way to the Supreme Court?but the maps and documents can now be seen and downloaded at : http://www.judicialwatch.org/iraqi-oil-maps.shtml.)
Not a single U.S. oil company, however, was among the ?suitors,? and that was intolerable. Mr. Cheney?s task force concluded, ?By any estimation, Middle East oil producers will remain central to world security. The Gulf will be a primary focus of U.S. international energy policy.?
Condoleezza Rice?s National Security Council, meanwhile, was directed by a top secret memo to ?cooperate fully with the Energy Task Force as it considered melding two seemingly unrelated areas of policy.? The NSC was ordered to support ?the review of operational policies towards rogue states such as Iraq and actions regarding the capture of new and existing oil and gas fields.?
The Bush Administration seemed clearly to be drawing a bead on Iraqi oil?long before the ?global war on terror? was envisioned and marketed. But how could the ?capture of new and existing oil fields? be made to seem less aggressive, less baldly in violation of international law?
At the State Department, a policy-development initiative called ?The Future of Iraq? was undertaken which would accomplish this. The date was April, 2002, almost a full year before the invasion. The ?Oil and Energy Working Group? provided the cover. Iraq, it said in its final report:, ?should be opened to international oil companies as quickly as possible after the war?the country should establish a conducive business environment to attract investment in oil and gas resources.?
?Capture? would take the form of ?investment,? and the vehicle for doing so would be the ?production sharing agreement.? In exchange for investing in development costs, oil companies would ?share? in the subsequent production. What would happen, though, if the companies? investments were only minimal, but their shares of the production were disproportionately, obscenely large?
That?s the way it will work out. Production sharing agreements (PSA?s) are in place covering 75% of the undeveloped Iraqi fields, and the oil companies, soon to sign the contracts, will earn as much 162% on their ?investments.? The ?foreign suitors? are not quite so foreign now: the players on the inside tracks are Exxon-Mobil, Chevron, Conoco-Phillips, BP-Amoco and Royal Dutch-Shell.
The use of PSA?s, instead of alternative methods of financing infrastructure, however, will cost the Iraqi people hundreds of billions of dollars in just the first few years of the ?investment? program.
PSA?s are favored by the oil companies because the term ?production sharing agreement? is a euphemism for legalized theft. PSA?s were not adopted voluntarily by the Iraqis, however: their use was specified by the U.S. State Department and institutionalized by Paul Bremer?s Coalition Provisional Authority.
So a line of dots begins to point at Iraq, though nothing illegal or unconstitutional has yet taken place. We are still in the policy-formulation stage, but two ?seemingly unrelated areas of policy??national security policy and international energy policy?have become indistinguishable.
Another line of dots begins with the Carter Administration encouraging and arming the Taliban and Osama Bin Laden, in Afghanistan, to fend off the Russian invasion there.
And so the next chapter in the story of George Bush?s wars is underway.
The strategic location of Afghanistan can scarcely be overstated. The Caspian Basin contains some $16 trillion worth of oil and gas resources, and the most direct pipeline route to the richest markets is through Afghanistan.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, the first western oil company to express interest and take action in the Basin was the Bridas Corporation of Argentina. It acquired production leases and exploration contracts in the region, and by November of 1997 had signed an agreement with General Dostum of the Northern Alliance and with the Taliban to build a pipeline across Afghanistan.
Not to be outdone, the American company Unocal fought Bridas at every turn, even spurning an invitation from Bridas to join an international consortium in the Basin. Unocal wanted exclusive control of the trans-Afghan pipeline, and hired a number of consultants in its conflict with Bridas: Henry Kissinger, Richard Armitage (now Deputy Secretary of State in the Bush Administration), Zalmay Khalilzad (a signer of the PNAC letter to President Clinton) and Hamid Karzai. (Eventually Bridas sued Unocal in the U.S. courts, and won.)
Unocal stayed on the attack until 1999, frequently wooing Taliban leaders at its headquarters in Texas, and hosting them in meetings with federal officials in Washington, D.C.
Unocal and the Clinton Administration hoped to have the Taliban cancel the Bridas contract, but were getting nowhere. Mr. John J. Maresca, a Unocal Vice President, testified to a House Committee of International Relations on February 12, 1998, asking politely to have the Taliban removed and a stable government inserted. His discomfort was well placed.
Six months later terrorists linked to Osama bin Laden bombed the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and two weeks after that President Clinton launched a cruise missile attack into Afghanistan. Clinton issued an executive order on July 4, 1999, freezing the US held assets and prohibiting further trade transactions with the Taliban.
Mr. Maresca could count that as progress. More would follow.
Immediately on taking office, the new Bush Administration actively took up negotiating with the Taliban once more, seeking still to have the Bridas contract vacated in favor of Unocal. The parties met three times, in Washington, Berlin, and Islamablad, but the Taliban wouldn?t budge.
Behind the negotiations, however, planning was underway to take military action against the Taliban. The State Department sought and gained concurrence from both India and Pakistan to do so, and in July of 2001 three American officials met with Pakistani and Russian intelligence people to inform them of planned military strikes against Afghanistan the following October.
State Department official Christina Rocca told the Taliban, at their last pipeline negotiation in August of 2001, just five weeks before 9/11, ?Accept our offer of a carpet of gold, or we bury you under a carpet of bombs.?
Common to both the Afghan and Iraqi lines of dots are energy resources, both oil and gas. It is true our country depends on oil and gas, but it is not the American people who need to corner Mid East oil and gas by force. Dozens of oil companies around the world?the ?foreign suitors,? for example?can supply us with Iraqi oil or Caspian Basin gas, and would be pleased to do so. There is no reason not to rely on them: we are buying more and more Toyotas and Volvos, and fewer Chevrolets and Fords, with no apparent damage to our national security. Why not do the same with gasoline, diesel, and LNG, and avoid armed conflict?
Why not? Because the bottom lines of Exxon-Mobil, Unocal and other domestic oil companies, in the eyes of the Bush Administration, are sacrosanct. It is not the American consumers, then, but only the American oil companies who benefit from George Bush?s premeditated wars.
Also common to both lines of dots, and integral to the overall story, is the historic, intimate, and profitable relationship across several generations between the Bush family and the royal family of Saudi Arabia. It can be seen today in the Carlyle Group, a Washington-based investment company focused primarily in the arms, security, and energy industries. Both George H.W. and George W. Bush have been deeply involved in Carlyle, and so have a number of the Saudi royalty. (And so, incidentally, has the family of Osama Bin Laden.)
Carlyle has profited immensely from the Afghanistan and Iraqi wars. Its legal matters are handled by Baker, Botts?James Baker?s law firm in Texas. Mr. Baker also has a personal interest in Carlyle, amounting to some $180 million. (Baker, Botts defended Prince Sultan bin Abdul Aziz, the Defense Minister of Saudi Arabia, who was sued by the families of Trade Tower victims for alleged complicity in the attacks.) Another client of Baker, Botts is Exxon-Mobil.
In September of 2000, with the Presidential election approaching, the Project for a New American Century published a report, ?Rebuilding America?s Defenses.? The PNAC once more advocated pre-emptive war, i.e., premeditated war, something unprecedented in the U.S. history, but it realized what a radical departure that would represent. Moving to such a mindset would be long and difficult, in the absence of ?some catastrophic and catalyzing event, like a new Pearl Harbor.?
When President Bush assumed office three other members of the Project for a New American Century joined his administration: Richard Cheney, Douglas Feith, and Lewis Libby. Pre-emptive, premeditated war was formally adopted when the President signed the National Security Strategy early in his tenure.
So the twists and turns, convulsions, and complexity of people and ideas continued, and so did the jockeying for the world?s oil wealth, but still nothing illegal or unconstitutional had been done.
The rationale, the urge, and the planning, however, for attacking both Afghanistan and Iraq were in place. But to attack a sovereign nation unprovoked would enrage the American people?and much of the world, as well. The Bush Administration bided its time.
The preparations had all been done secretly, wholly within the executive branch. The Congress was not informed until the endgame of the premeditation, when President Bush, making his dishonest case for the ?war on terror? asked for and was granted the discretion to use military force. The American people were equally denied information of critical public importance. Probably never before in our history was such a drastic and momentous action undertaken with so little knowledge or oversight: the dispatch of America?s armed forces into five years of violence.
The story of George Bush?s premeditated wars now enters its final chapter.
The catastrophic event takes place. A hijacked airliner probably en route to the White House crashes in Pennsylvania, the Pentagon is afire, and the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center are rubble.
In the first hours of frenetic response, fully aware of al Qaeda?s culpability, both President Bush and Secretary Rumsfeld seek frantically to link Saddam Hussein to the attacks, we know from on site-witnesses. They are anxious to proceed with their planned invasion. And less than a week later, at a meeting of the National Security Council, President Bush ordered the Defense Department to be ready to handle Iraq, ?possibly occupying Iraqi oil fields.?
The controversies rage on yet today about the events of September 11, 2001. No steel building has ever collapsed from fire alone. Buildings falling precisely into their footprints are the marks of deliberate (and expert) demolition. The faulty construction/foreshortened lifespan/insurance angle. The collapse of a third building that was not hit at all. The short-selling of airline stock in previous days. The Pentagon hit by a missile, not a civilian airliner. Michael Rupert?s book ?Crossing the Rubicon? lays the blame for 9/11 directly at Dick Cheney?s feet. Senator Robert Dole?s former chief of staff, Mr. Stanley Hilton, claims he can prove George Bush signed an order authorizing the attacks. Half the people polled in New York city believed the Bush Administration had prior knowledge of the attack, and ?consciously failed? to act. Et cetera.
(Conspiracy is forever easier to see than to find, but that does not obviate the need to seek thoroughly the whole truth about 9/11, and that has yet to be done.)
Involving the Bush Administration in the execution of 9/11, or even accommodating their informed inaction, is almost too appalling to contemplate. But if they needed a reason to proceed with their planned invasions, they could not have been handed a more fortuitous and spectacular excuse.
9/11 was a criminal act of terrorism, not a violation of our entire nation?s security. Comparing it, as the Bush Administration immediately did, to Pearl Harbor was ludicrous: the hijacked airliners were not the vanguard of a formidable naval armada, an air force, and a standing army ready to engage in all out war, as the Japanese were prepared to do and did in 1941. 9/11 was a shocking event of unprecedented scale, but to characterize it as an invasion of national security was criminal. It was creating reality. It was also, and in the extreme, surreal, because the Bush Administration chose consciously to frighten the American people beyond any conceivable necessity. It adopted fear mongering as a mode of governance.
As not a few disinterested observers noted at the time, international criminal terrorism is best countered by international police action, which Israel and other nations have proven many times over to be effective.
Then why was a ?war? declared on ?terrorists and states that harbor terrorists??
The pre-planned attack on Afghanistan, as we have seen, was meant to nullify the contract between the Taliban and the Bridas Corporation, to assure access to the Caspian Basin riches for American oil companies. It was a pure play of international energy policy. It had nothing to do, as designed, with apprehending Osama bin Laden?a pure play of security policy.
But the two ?seemingly unrelated areas of policy? had been ?melded,? so here was an epic opportunity to bait-and-switch--and the opportunity was not missed for a moment. Conjoining the terrorist and the state that harbored him made a ?war? plausible: it would be necessary to overthrow the Taliban as well as to bring Osama bin Laden to justice. (As it turned out, of course, the Taliban was overthrown instead of bringing Osama bin Laden to justice, but the energy policy goal was achieved, at least. And years later President Bush was astonishing in his candor, when he admitted ?Osama bin Laden isn?t important.?)
The first monstrous and intentional deception?the declaration of a ?war on terror??took place. There was no talk of contracts, pipelines, or Argentinian oil companies. Osama bin Laden and the Taliban were cleverly, ingeniously conflated, and there was only talk of war.
On October 7, 2001 the carpet of bombs is unleashed over Afghanistan. Hamid Karzai, the former Unocal consultant, is installed as head of an interim government. Subsequently he is elected President of Afghanistan, and welcomes the first U.S. envoy?Mr. John J. Maresca, Vice President for International Relations of the Unocal Corporation, who had implored Congress three years previously to have the Taliban overthrown. Mr. Maresca was succeeded by Mr. Zalmay Khalilzad?also a former Unocal consultant. (Mr. Khalilzad has since become Ambassador to Iraq.)
With the Taliban banished and the Bridas contract moot, Presidents Karzai of Afghanistan and Musharraf of Pakistan meet on February 8, 2002, sign an agreement for a new pipeline, and the way forward is open for Unocal once more.
The Bridas contract was breached by US military force, but behind the combat was Unocal. Bridas sued Unocal in the US courts for contract interference, and in 2004 it won, overcoming Richard Ben Veniste?s law firm. That firm had multibillion dollar interests in the Caspian Basin, and shared an office in Uzbekistan with the Enron Corporation. In 2004, Mr. Ben Veniste was serving as a 9/11 Commissioner.
About a year after the Karzai/Musharraf agreement was signed, an article appeared in ?Alexander?s Gas and Oil Connections,? an obscure trade publication. It described the readiness of three US federal agencies to finance the prospective pipeline, and how ??the United States was willing to police the pipeline infrastructure through permanent stationing of it troops in the region.? The article appeared on February 23, 2003.
The objective of the first premeditated war was now achieved. The Bush Administration stood ready with financing to build the pipeline across Afghanistan, and with a permanent military presence to protect it.
Within two months President Bush sent the military might of America sweeping into Iraq.
The second round of deliberate deception was more egregious by far.
Alleging a relationship between bin Laden?s al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan had at least some basis in fact. Alleging a link between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein simply did not. And the weapons-of-mass-destruction argument was equally fraudulent, we know now. But the bait-and-switch ?war on terrorism? would continue. ?Cakewalk.? The staging of the Jessica Lynch rescue. The toppling of the statue in Baghdad. Mission accomplished. The orchestrated capture of Saddam Hussein. And the barrage of managed perception continues to this day.
The smokescreen includes the coverup of the 9/11 attacks on the Trade Towers and the Pentagon. Initially and fiercely resisting any inquiry at all, President Bush finally appoints a 10-person ?9/11 Commission.? Its report places the blame on ?faulty intelligence.? President Bush and Vice President Cheney are accorded breathtaking courtesies in the inquiry: they are not required to testify under oath, and they need not even testify separately. At the insistence of the White House, they are ?interviewed? together in the Oval Office, with no transcription permitted.
The apparent manipulation of pre-war intelligence is not addressed by the 9/11 Commission, the veracity President Bush?s many statements is assumed without question, and the troubling incongruities of 9/11 are ignored.
Many of the 10 commissioners, however, were burdened with stunning conflicts of interest?Mr. Ben Veniste, for example? mostly by their connections to the oil and defense industries, both of which were benefited beyond measure (and doubt) by the Mid East conflicts.
Then the Abu Ghraib horrors came to the surface. Then the spectacular cronyism of the no-bid contracts, with Mr. Cheney and his former company, Halliburton, becoming the icons of corruption. Then the domestic spying issue. Torrents of expos?s were published, while Iraq descended into the hellish quagmire of insurgency and civil war?with Afghanistan belatedly following suit.
On November 7, 2006 the American people said, ?Enough!? By any measure?by public acclaim?the last six years have been a national tragedy and a national disgrace.
In spite of the Democrats? united message rejecting it, many citizens are calling actively for the impeachment of President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and perhaps others. (Secretary Rumsfeld has left the Administration, but faces prosecution under German law.)
The story told here has to be considered ?circumstantial.? None of it results from testimony under oath, none of it has been admitted as legal evidence in a jurisprudential undertaking, and the presumption of innocence until guilt is proven remains axiomatic. And we might well reiterate the humane and civil plea, heard frequently after 9/11: what we need is justice, not vengeance.
We should not proceed directly to impeachment. At the very least, however, the story of George Bush?s premeditated wars raises questions of presidential dereliction as grave as any in our history.
We need to know the truth and all the truth. The time has come, as well as the opportunity, for formal, Congressional investigations, based on subpoenas, sworn testimony, and direct evidence about 9/11 and about the created reality of the ?war on terror.?
The new Congress has no greater Constitutional duty than to find this truth and display it, if our nightmarish politics is to end. If such inquiries clearly exonerate the Bush Administration, the nation can breathe deeply and go on. If they do not, then but only then should impeachment be undertaken.
To fail in this responsibility is to condone the surreal political discourse the Bush Administration has imposed. That could render it the permanent condition of American governance.
Posted by: hondabuster
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Originally posted by: Dragginbutt
Unless you have lived and worked in this madness for your entire adult life, you would have no idea what is going on. All I can say is don't believe what you see on the news, and read in the papers. If you REALLY knew, you wouldn't sleep at night folks. Be careful of what you wish for.... We have come closer than you think to the edge.....
Some may think me full of hot air on most subjects.... but those that know me will tell you that if I tell you to be afraid... then you had better sit up and listen.... and I'd be listening right now...if I were you...
Its almost too late to change things back to the america i fought for 35 years ago, the government is firmly in the grip of the corporations, ..there is no difference in dems or repubs...they are both loyal to corporations over the interests of americans, and they play the people like violins over petty issues which dont matter, while the big issues go unnoticed.
Posted by: hondabuster
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Originally posted by: Dragginbutt
One of the more interesting concepts. Let's tie expenditures on war, to money spent on peaceful pursuits and diplomacy. One of the sad things to happen over the last several administrations is a total lack of understanding of what diplomacy is all about. I do not thing any administration since Nixon has had a firm grip on that. We too often reach for the big stick when a stiff scolding would do. We will never be able to leave a safe world to our children if all we know how to do is fuel conflict. If we had spent even a tenth on diplomacy over the past 50 years that we have on destruction, just think of where we could be today.
Boy, aint that the truth!
Posted by: Deeplaker60
Worst Congress ever...hmmm. Could be, but major problems in this country today are the causes of actions by past Congresses. I agree with Dragginbutt that we are not getting good candidates. A political science professor from UW--Madison made a similar point on public radio a few weeks ago. When asked to speculate on presidential candidates that are now emerging, he responded that none so far are "true leaders" like an FDR, JFK or Ronald Reagan. It's been a long time since a presidential candidate fit that mold.
It seems to me that we are increasingly governed by political hacks who put party politics ahead of what's best for the country. Voters are the same way. I know highly educated people who would vote for Osama bin Laden if he ran on their party's ticket.
Posted by: DeeDawg
Originally posted by tshull......... al gore is lookin pretty good now!!
Hypocrisy is a curse on both sides. Algore has more than a few inconvenient truths of his own. He espouses a "carbon-neutral lifestyle" for the little folk, but fails to live up to it himself. Forget about the posse of suburbans that escort him everywhere, how about all the international and domestic flights in a private jet while promoting his ideas and movie? Not to mention he and his wife Tipper live in two properties: a 10,000-square-foot, 20-room, eight-bathroom home in Nashville, and a 4,000-square-foot home in Arlington, Va. He also has a third home in Carthage, Tenn, where there is an active zinc mine. Gore claims to be environmentally friendly, but he hasn't dumped his stock holdings in Occidental (Oxy) Petroleum.
The problem with politics today is there are only two options, and you get to choose between the lesser of two evils as dictated to you by a highly biased fourth estate. Until we have more options it will never change. Both parties are far too influenced by the extremists.
Posted by: DeeDawg
Originally posted by hondabuster: I just have to laugh, everytime i hear someone say we have a liberal media. If there truely were a liberal media in this country, this story would have not only been in it...but been front page.
Heres alink to the story http://www.informationliberation.com/?id=17432[/L]
Or just do a google search, and youll find more outlets for it. You can also go to Sen Leathys website or search out the number on the bill. The facts are there...the conservative, corporate owned media dont want you knowing the facts. heres the posting on the sens website
Let's see now; to prove there is no such thing a biased media, I am supposed to go to the web page of a very liberal left wing career politician from very left wing state? Yeah, now I'm convinced, not.
How about this one from the Daily Reveiw: Joe Angotti, a former NBC News senior vice president and executive producer of the NBC Nightly News with Tom Brokaw told an audience in Monmouth, IL that "Yes, there is a liberal bias on the part of some reporters on news networks. The paper also reported that Angotti commented that while the Fox News Channel doesn't practice "good journalism" it does serve as an alternative for those that believe that other sources are liberally biased. He also admitted that he watches Fox because he hears stories there that he won't hear on other networks. Angotti is partially correct. There is a liberal media bias. While his reasoning seems flawed to me, I will give him credit for being honest. After all how many liberals would admit to watching Fox News because it provides him with stories the networks won't cover? I guess that has nothing to do with a liberal bias.
Posted by: georged
That was more than a beer. No disagreements, I always wonder how much longer the general public will put up with being swindled out of their money to fund special interest profits and steady erosion of their civil rights. Probably as long as they believe lies about protecting them and have a boob tube or something just as mindless for escape?
Posted by: georged
It'll take a severe economic depression to pull the general publics head out of their butts, but by then it'll be far too late. Current administration and congress have to go down as the absolute worst in US history. The US is no different than any other declining empire; prepare yourselves for two distinct social structures, the haves and the have-nots.
Posted by: georged
The US is already selling petrodollar debt at the point of a gun. The current issue is how long China, India, Japan and others can continue absorbing US debt to keep their US export markets viable until China/India can raise domestic standards of living to consume (+-) 65% of their industrial production. A cashless society is inevitable, but since fiat currency is now the standard method of exchange the only future question is who's printing presses will be used. The US, with debt now about 70% of an internal transaction GDP with an abnormal payment imbalance, is for all practical purposes insolvent. Any business person would be imprisoned for the degree of fiscal irresponsibility blatantly exhibited by US leadership, but the US Public swallows it whole as they erroneously feel they're being protected.
Hondabuster's article merely shows how corrupt and self-serving the government of a declining empire can become, especially when that government rules by fear instead of prosperity. As a general public responds to fear, they provide that government with even more latitude and opportunities to expand control over that public and subsequent corruption.
I almost puke when I hear my leadership stating we won't cut and run from Iraq, heaping even more debt on the pile, killing more Americans and Iraqis, and watching congress support what is literally insanity.
Posted by: georged
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Originally posted by: ATVHades
georged
Any idea what we must do as Americans to remove our corrupted government and set it back on a proper path? I just don't see how we can vote out all these corrupted politicans since the local people keep voting these politicans back in power. I shudder to see what the future holds for the American people.
:-(
I don't share your aforementioned confidence in the US Public. When the world's wealthiest nation is selling public land to fund rural schools while wasting trillions on 'defense' and many posters on this forum support ATV trespassing while demanding public funding for ATV riding, it's obvious the rot goes far too deep for simple solutions. I see only eventual financial collapse into the two-tiered system. Futurists have long predicted hemispherical consolidations and, IMO, a US financial collapse would lower the US standard of living to where the Americas would offer lower cost labor to support competitive manufacturing in global markets and again attract investment capital currently exploding in nations with low cost labor.
Posted by: georged
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I have heard that the multi-national corporations pulled together have enough wealth to pay off our national debt 7 times over.....so what was this about everybody being broke again?
Right now the New York Stock Exchange, the world's largest, is composed of companies having global capitalization of $21-trillion. Of that $14-trillion is US companies, the remainder non-US. US National debt is now $8.6-trillion.
To pay off the national debt, theoretically over one-half of the major US public companies would have to be liquidated. To do that, they'd have to be nationalized by the government. To nationalize them would essentially take them from public ownership and make them the property of the US government for purposes of liquidation. Which would destroy equity markets, making all public companies worth maybe 10% of capitalization, or $1.4-trillion in a fire sale. That won't solve US problems, the solution being more disastrous than the problem, to say nothing of the public riots and USD crash that would accompany nationalization.
The problem is the apathetic and ignorant US Public allowing its scum leadership the freedom to loot public funds for special interests while enriching themselves. I don't find that real surprising as most of the general public lives in an ocean of personal debt barely keeping their heads above water, a paycheck or two away from financial disaster.
Posted by: georged
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Originally posted by: squeege
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Originally posted by: ATVHades
georged
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The US is no different than any other declining empire; prepare yourselves for two distinct social structures, the haves and the have-nots.
You are saying the rich and poor? I would have to disagree.
I have also heard that the U.S. now ranks third in the world for income disparity among nations. Only Former russia and mexico beat us out now.....???
Your post contradicts itself. Income disparity is a very few holding the wealth; haves and have-nots. Majority of the personal wealth in the US is held by 2% of the population. 10% of the US population pays the majority of personal income taxes. The rest live on debt supplementing income (the housing bubble and credit cards being a prime example) or below the poverty line.
Posted by: georged
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Originally posted by: squeege
You are saying the rich and poor? I would have to disagree
That first line was a quote from you!
I was trying to figure out why you would say that?
No, it was from ATVHades post.
Posted by: georged
I posted while you were editing.
Posted by: georged
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Originally posted by: squeege
My cousins father/mother inlaws are half owners with a billionaire on a yacht...it just aint right hr>
Yacht owners would undoubtedly disagree with you.
Posted by: georged
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Very well said.
My saying it further antagonizes those in that position from their own stupidity and directs them, guess where, to the nearest politician promising them safety for the opportunity of directing their tax money to the special interest who will enrich the politician. Like abuse, the general public becomes so accustomed to being screwed by politicians it takes something really drastic to change the pattern. Put any politician in front of them spouting false promises of safety and cooked government numbers for an example of public stupidity and acceptance. How anything but a national disaster of epic proportion can change that pattern is beyond my comprehension.
Posted by: georged
As an indicator of whether or not the general public is aware of the self-serving scum leading our nation, the upcoming national election and the next presidential election will be an interesting gauge. For the first time in my life as a registered Republican I'm going to vote against every Republican on the tickets. There are some independents I favor, but due to the electoral process in most cases all my vote for them would do is drain a vote against a Republican supporting current administration policies.
I'm not saying there's any difference between the two parties, that disappeared long ago when Republicans shunned fiscal responsibility and openly used special interests to buy office. I'm just ready for a change, any change that empathizes US domestic needs. I'm tired of shipping our wealth offshore to bolster margins for defense contractors and commodity traders while expanding an already bloated military and government. Especially as I watch our infrastructure crumble as state revenue sharing is extinguished by federal requirements to wage a war possibly even more stupid
