This piece by the former UN Weapons Inspector and truth-telling critic of the Bush administration appeared on our good friend site, www.truthdig.com, which we recommend highly for superb national and international news and analysis.

I recently heard from an anti-war student I met while I was speaking at a college in northern Vermont. The e-mail included the following query:

“I told you about how I wanted to build a career around social activism and making a difference. You told me that one of the most important things was to make myself reputable and give people a reason to listen to you. I think this is some of the best advice I’ve received. My issue however is that you mentioned joining the military as a way to do this and mentioned how that is how you fell into it. ... We talked extensively about all of our criticisms of the military currently and our foreign policy. ... What I don’t understand is, how can you [advise] someone who wants to make a difference with the flawed system, to join that flawed system?”

The question is a valid one. Throughout my travels in the United States, where I interact with people from progressive anti-war groups, I am often confronted with the seeming contradiction of my position. I rail against the war in Iraq (and the potential of war with Iran) and yet embrace, at times enthusiastically, the notion of military service. It gets even more difficult to absorb, at least on the surface, when I simultaneously advocate counter-recruitment as well as support for those who seek to join the armed services.

The notion that the military and citizens of conscience should be at odds is a critical problem for our nation. That confrontation only exacerbates the problems of the soldier and the citizen, and must be properly understood if it is to be defeated. Let us start by constructing a framework in which my positions can be better assessed.

First and foremost, I do not view military service as an obligation of citizenship. I do view military service as an act of good citizenship, but it can under no circumstance be used as a litmus test for patriotism. There are many ways in which one can serve his or her nation; the military is but one. I am a big believer in the all-volunteer military. For one thing, the professional fighting force is far more effective and efficient than any conscript force could ever be.

There are those who argue that a draft would level the playing field, spreading the burdens and responsibilities associated with a standing military force more evenly among the population. Those citizens whose lives would be impacted through war (namely those of draft age and their immediate relatives) would presumably be less inclined to support war.

Conversely, the argument goes, with an all-volunteer professional force, the burden of sacrifice is limited to that segment of society which is engaged in the fighting, real or potential. Two points emerge: First, the majority of society not immediately impacted by the sacrifices of conflict will remain distant from the reality of war. Second, even when the costs of conflict become discernable to the withdrawn population, the fact that the sacrifice is being absorbed by those who willingly volunteered somehow lessens any moral outcry.

I will submit that these are valid observations, and indeed have been borne out in America’s response to the Iraq war tragedy. However, simply because something exists doesn’t make it right. The collective response to the Iraq war on the part of the American people is not a result of there not being a draft, but rather poor citizenship. An engaged citizenry would not only find sufficient qualified volunteers to fill the ranks of our military, but would also personally identify with all those who served so that the loss of one was felt by all. The fact that many Americans today view the all-volunteer force not so much as an extension of themselves, but more along the lines of a “legion” of professionals removed from society, illustrates the yawning gap that exists between we the people and those we ask to defend us.

Narrowing this gap is not something that can be accomplished simply through legislation. Reinstating the draft is illusory in this regard. There is a more fundamental obstacle to the reunion of our society and those who take an oath in the military to uphold and defend the Constitution. Void of this bond, the inherent differences of civilian and military life will serve to drive a wedge between the two, regardless of whether the military force is drafted or volunteer.

Lacking a common understanding of the foundational principles upon which the nation was built, a citizenry will grow to view military service as an imposition, as opposed to an obligation. Simply put, one cannot willingly defend that which one does not know and understand. The fundamental ignorance that exists in America today about the Constitution creates the conditions which foster the divide between citizen and soldier that permeates society today. America must take ownership of its military, not simply by footing the bill, but by assuming a moral responsibility for every aspect of military service. The vehicle for doing this has been well established through the Constitution: the legislative branch of government, the Congress, which serves to represent the will of the people.

Congress, especially the House of Representatives, was never conceived of as separate and distinct from the people, but rather as one with the people, directly derived from their collective will via the electoral process. Unfortunately today, few Americans identify with Congress. An “us versus them” mentality pervades. This mentality creates the crack in the moral and social contract which exists regarding a citizenry and its military. Congress is responsible for maintaining the military. Congress is the branch of government mandated with the responsibility for declaring war. When the bond is strained between the people and Congress, the bond between citizen and soldier is broken. Congress, left to its own devices, will begin to view the military not as an extension of its constituents, but rather as a commodity to be traded and used in a highly politicized fashion.

This is the reality we find ourselves in today (and indeed which has existed for some time). The 2006 midterm elections highlight this reality, where a strong anti-war sentiment upon the part of the voters resulted in a Democratic majority in both the House of Representatives and the Senate. Having assumed the mantle of legislative power, however, those who were elected on the coattails of anti-war sentiment were able to shun their anti-war constituents. They did so by taking full advantage of the reality that the anti-war movement was in fact not a movement at all, but rather a concept pushed forward by a disparate mass without much political viability.

anti-war sentiment did in fact cross over from the ranks of the progressive left and into the mainstream of American society, it was quickly quashed through the dishonest logic that if one truly supported the troops (as most red-blooded Americans swear they do), then one must by extension support the mission. This flawed connectivity empowered Congress to sidestep the issue of withdrawing American forces from Iraq, and enabled it to continue rubber-stamping funding for a war which long ago lost any connection, perceived or otherwise, to the general security of the American people.

And so U.S. service members continue to fight and die in Iraq, a conflict which grows more unpopular with the American people each passing day. The question thus emerges: What is the appropriate response on the part of the American citizenry? While we insulate ourselves from political duplicity, the soldiers ultimately pay the price for the cowardice of those whom we elect to represent us in higher office. This seems to be the path taken by most Americans, who have grown numbly indifferent to the incessant stream of disappointment over the continued failure of Congress to truly represent the will of the people. We have therefore built a wall which separates we the people from the one aspect of republican governance which is, by design, supposed to give us voice.

In doing so, we likewise create a buffer between citizen and soldier, as those who are constitutionally mandated to fund the care, equipping and utilization of the military now operate in ambiguity created by the vacuum of citizen apathy. Thus liberated from the moral compass provided by the people, Congress has lost its ability to defend its own role in governance, and over time has demeaned its constitutional mandate by transferring powers inherent to the legislative branch to an executive branch which has assumed the role of caretaker of the military. By vesting absolute power in the hands of the executive, Congress has all but assured that America has become a nation no longer governed by the rule of law, but rather the rule of man. This sort of tyranny is what Americans fought a revolution to free themselves from 233 years ago.

An executive that operates in accordance with a unitary theory of governance is one that views the capacity to defend the state as being in fact the capacity to defend the realm. As such, one sees a gravitation of emphasis: Rather than focusing on external threats to the collective, the realm becomes obsessed with internal threats to its ability to retain power. The Patriot Act is a clear-cut example of how a unitary executive has undermined and corrupted the legitimate law enforcement mechanisms of the land by vesting the executive with powers normally associated solely with the legislative branch. In this regard, we see the armed forces similarly abused, with the creation of military command structures (namely U.S. Northern Command) which exist not to protect the people, but rather protect the realm from the people. This is not a stated objective, but rather one inferred from the fact that, for the first time since the imposition of posse comitatus in 1876, the United States has positioned its armed forces so that they can participate in normal state law enforcement. In short, instead of serving as a force of protection for the American people from external threats, the military views the American people as the threat, “targets” which need to be investigated as potential threats to the military.

An example of just how far off track the executive branch, facilitated by an all too complicit legislative branch, has strayed when it comes to the common defense is the Pentagon’s controversial Counterintelligence Field Activity, ostensibly created in a post-9/11 world to “… protect the [Defense] department by supporting the detection and neutralization of foreign espionage.” The CFA operates under the umbrella of U.S. Northern Command, created in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks to ostensibly safeguard the American homeland. A major aspect of the CFA’s work is something known as the Joint Protection Enterprise Network, or JPEN.

The JPEN network enables the Defense Department to share unverified information with civilian police departments, the FBI and other government agencies such as the National Security Agency (NSA). Originally dubbed Project Protect America, the JPEN system came into being in July 2003 with the full support of then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. The heart and soul of the JPEN system is the “Threat and Local Observation Notice,” or TALON report, the brainchild of then-Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz. In the conduct of its work, the CFA created and distributed thousands of TALON reports via the JPEN system on the activities of private U.S. citizens, with a particular focus of those engaged in anti-war protests.

The CFA is slated in the near future to be morphed into a larger Defense Intelligence Agency-run Counterintelligence and Human Intelligence activity. Far from limiting the scope and scale of the activities currently undertaken by the CFA, this new organization will simply increase the level of illegal and unconstitutional activities currently undertaken by the CFA against the American “target.” The fact that the U.S. military now views the American citizenry as its target, as opposed to the object of its defense, shows just how broken the circle of trust is between citizen and soldier. Additional TALON reports are being assembled on anyone deemed to be a potential threat to the U.S. military, including all who are involved in “counter-recruitment” activities designed to provide alternatives to military service for today’s youths. This myopic approach toward installation and facility security undertaken by the Pentagon is not only intellectually weak but constitutionally prohibited. The legislative branch, operating amid constituent apathy, continues to fail in its mission of upholding the rule of law.

In similarly deplorable fashion, the Pentagon has allowed itself to be hijacked by the radical right wing of the Republican Party. The fact that Fox News has become the channel of choice for the U.S. military speaks volumes about the mind-set which has gripped those who lead it. The military has always been a conservative institution. Yet when wearing the uniform of the United States serves more as a front for defending a political ideology (a rabid one at that) rather than upholding and defending the Constitution, the military does itself a disservice. The disconnect between those who serve in the military and those whom they are sworn to protect can be fatal when one realizes the recruiting pool no longer identifies with the military as a legitimate expression of patriotism and citizenship.

The scope of this ideological hijacking is broad, yet barely recognized. One can glimpse just how deep and nefarious this ideological shift is when one considers the extent to which evangelical Christians have infiltrated the U.S. Air Force Academy, proselytizing their heavily politicized religion to the future officers and leaders of that service. The past comments of Lt. Gen. William Boykin, a decorated Army Special Operations veteran who described America’s post-9/11 “war on terror” as a conflict between “Christian” America and “radical Islam,” are widely embraced within the U.S. military. President Bush has echoed Boykin in his speeches and statements, and the military’s favorite presidential candidate, Republican Sen. John McCain, has become the embodiment of Boykin’s philosophy. The Constitution prohibits the notion that America be defined as a Christian nation. To allow the military, sworn as it is to uphold and defend that document, to posture itself as Christian, becoming in effect the “sword of God,” is unthinkable and unforgivable.

The implications of such posturing are far-reaching, especially from the military recruitment standpoint. The all-volunteer military succeeds when it attracts to its ranks those who have a sincere desire to serve their nation. It succeeds greatly when those it attracts come from the broadest possible cross section of the American demographic. There has always been an economic aspect to the all-volunteer force; service is not slavery, and the military has always promised the security of a middle-class lifestyle to those who choose to enlist. But military service, properly motivated, has never been solely about the money. It is about defending a greater good, the people of the United States of America and their values and ideals as defined by the Constitution.

It has become increasingly difficult to motivate enough of today’s youths to serve in the armed services based upon the call of duty alone. One of the primary reasons for this shortfall is the unfortunate perception, not improperly derived, that military service is not in keeping with the concept of “doing the right thing.” This perception, born of an unpopular war and the dishonest foreign policies of successive administrations, is further exaggerated by the reality that the military not only operates as a separate and distinct part of American society (this has always been the case) but, due in large part to post-9/11 hysteria, has been positioned to view the American people as a threat. The inherent problems of the military trying to recruit from a population base which is under attack from the military are self-evident. Genuine patriotism was once a viable recruitment pitch. Now, economic incentives, false promises and pseudo-patriotism are used as the bait to lure the youths of today into America’s legions. Like the legions of the past, these new warriors march not on behalf of the citizens they are sworn to protect, but rather the emperor who commands them. This may be viewed as an overly harsh statement, but there is no other way to describe the abuses of a unitary executive who positions himself above the Constitution and Congress in a time of war.

Having described the current state of the military and military service in this manner, why would I ever encourage a citizen of military age to consider service in the armed forces? First and foremost, one needs to understand that the entire military system has not been corrupted. There are still men and women of honor who serve with dedication and pride. They are, in fact, in the majority. It takes only a few bad apples to spoil the lot, however, and our military today, thanks to a nebulous mission and lower recruiting standards, is full of bad apples. Likewise, to quote a Russian general, “a fish stinks from its head,” and nothing smells worse today than the “head” of the United States. Our commander in chief has disgraced the office he was entrusted with, and in doing so has severely damaged the foundation of American civil society as well as the institutions sworn to uphold and defend it.

The solution, however, cannot be “cut and run.” Simply identifying the problem and pointing a finger at the perpetrators will do nothing to resolve these critical issues. Our military cannot change unless we the people re-establish the link between ourselves and the legislative branch of government and rebuild the bond of trust between citizen and soldier. This cannot happen in stages, but rather must occur simultaneously. While the vast majority of America struggles to regain its moral and ethical compass through the re-establishment of the rule of law as set forth by the Constitution, we need to continue to maintain a military which is capable of defending us.

This requires good people to serve, even if the conditions of their service are not ideal. Do I want to have an intelligent, morally grounded soldier on the front line in Iraq, making the decisions about the use of force in the framework of an illegal and unjust occupation, or do I want to relinquish that job to a former felon lacking even a high school diploma? Do I want the troops of today led by Bible-wielding zealots or Constitution-wielding patriots? While we struggle to re-establish the bond between citizen and soldier, we have an absolute requirement to ensure we continue to field a military composed of citizen soldiers. The only way to prevent our military from becoming the new Roman Legion is to staff it with citizens of principle who reject such an abominable label. We are a nation at war, not just abroad, but with ourselves. Now, more than ever, we need citizens of standing to answer the call to service, not in the name of a criminal president or an illegal war, but rather in defense of the Constitution and all that it stands for, against all enemies, foreign and domestic.

Eric Mann is the president of LA's Labor Community Strategy Center which, among many other initiatives, spawned the Bus Riders Union and its own school of organizing. Mann is regarded as one of the premiere grassroots organizers and theoreticians in the country, rivaling the late and far more famous Saul Alinksy. He has written several books on political strategy,with global and local focus.

The racist attacks on Obama by the Clinton and McCain camps are escalating and having more resonance with white voters. While Senator Obama is strategizing how to effectively stand up against Clinton’s and McCain’s attacks, we in the antiracist movement can be a force as well. Please send this article to voters in North Carolina and Indiana, as well as the subsequent primaries, and to friends and comrades.

Hillary Clinton won Pennsylvania by a margin of 10% as her ally Governor Rendell told white voters they were not ready to vote for a Black man. What might be missed in this news is that Barack Obama still has a commanding delegate lead and many superdelegates are moving to his side.

The Right wing and racists are pressing the attack. Republicans are running ads in North Carolina against Obama (and for Hillary) trying to demonize the brilliant Reverend Wright. Hillary, when asked about Iraq, says “speaking of Farrakhan…,” and the Red Squad is now investigating everyone who ever threw a house party for Obama.

The Sean Bell case [in New York] and the painful, once again, exoneration of the police who murdered a Black man push the fight against racism and police brutality into the forefront. In the contested Democratic primaries, it is senators Obama and Clinton who must call for intervention by the Department of Justice and to promise that if elected, they will use federal civil rights laws to discipline the police and to defend the civil rights of the Bell family.

Hillary Clinton is running an increasingly desperate, unprincipled, and racist campaign against Barack Obama. She must be stopped. At this moment in history the defeat of Hillary Clinton and the victory of Barack Obama in the forthcoming Democratic Party primaries in Guam, Indiana, North Carolina, West Virginia, Kentucky, Oregon, Montana, South Dakota, and Puerto Rico is a critical question facing the anti-racist, civil rights, and Black Liberation Movement.

Despite all Hillary Clinton’s machinations, the power of the Clinton machine, and a year in which she was the unchallenged front-runner, it is Barack Obama who has a commanding lead—a margin of at least 130 votes in the delegate count. Hillary’s last resort is to organize a White Backlash campaign against a Black candidate.

Hillary Clinton has escalated her attacks on Obama’s capacity to be president and sanctioned the most racist interventions against Obama that McCain would never dare to initiate—but gratefully receives as a campaign contribution. In return, conservative talk show forces led by Rush Limbaugh with the tacit support of McCain are sending Republican voters (“Dummycrats”) into open Democratic primaries to vote for Clinton. Their goal is to get her the Democratic nomination because they see her as a weaker candidate against McCain than Obama. If they can’t assure Clinton the nomination, the goal is to support her plan to weaken the campaign of Senator Obama, to raise so many questions of his character and competency that again John McCain will have a far better chance of winning the general election.

Hillary Clinton is well aware of this stealth campaign by the most reactionary racist Republican voters to assure her the margin of victory in Ohio and Texas over Obama. She gladly accepts this deal with the devil. By her actions, it is clear that Hillary Clinton does not see herself in an alliance with Barack Obama to defeat John McCain. She does not see John McCain as their common enemy or even adversary. In fact, she sees Barack Obama as her worst enemy. Hillary Clinton is leading a White Bloc in which she is allying with John McCain against Barack Obama. She must be stopped.

Barack Obama is well aware of white racism in the electorate. He is trying to appeal to the best instincts among white people, to neutralize “moderate” white voters, and to isolate the most racist ones. He is carrying out a complex tactical plan to talk about racial discrimination in a way he thinks can reach out to Black and Latino voters and appeal to or not threaten white voters through a populist “class” appeal for all working people. While there is much to challenge in Obama’s approach to the endemic problem of racism in U.S. society, it is not accurate to reduce his campaign to a “beyond race” perspective. Obama is an anti-racist. By her practice, Hillary Clinton is running a racist campaign. The choice is that clear.

The victory of Barack Obama in the Democratic primaries and the defeat of Hillary Clinton could provide a seismic shift in U.S. politics 28 years after Ronald Reagan’s first election and 16 years after the Center-Right Far Right continuum of Bill Clinton and George Bush. It is in the interest of the anti-racist movement to challenge the White Bloc, to work for the victory of Barack Obama, and to work for the defeat of Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primaries.

It is also in the strategic interests of a broad united front against racism, the police state, and the U.S. Empire to strongly encourage the Third Party candidacy of Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney. The McKinney campaign will be the sharpest contrast to that of John McCain and George Bush. Her Reconstruction Platform focuses on a full U.S. withdrawal from Iraq, the Right of Return of the New Orleans 250,000, and a challenge to the growing police state and the racist mass incarceration of Black and Latino people. This will offer a principled challenge to the Obama campaign and an alternative and attractive choice in the general election. We should welcome an Obama, McKinney debate with two good choices for the progressive left anti-racist movement.

Robert L. Borosage is the president of the Institute for America’s Future and co-director of its sister organization, the Campaign for America’s Future. This piece was extracted from a longer talk and I offer it for its smarts and clarity - Edge Pusher.

Summary: The heart of the Roosevelt coalition in the 1930s became the heart of the conservative coalition that dominated our politics over the last 30 years. Progressives now have to make the case to these voters that government can work.

Let me offer a simple set of propositions.

1. Conservatism has failed-and conservatives, while they
cannot admit it, understand that. You've heard this
before, but it is important to repeat it. The failure is
not simply that of clueless George. Conservatism failed
not because the Bush administration was incompetent,
although incompetence has been its hallmark. It failed
not because Bush and the DeLay Congress were corrupt,
although corruption has been pervasive. Conservatism
failed because it is wrong. Wrong about the world. Wrong
about the economy. Wrong about the society.

Its imperial and military fantasies led directly to
Iraq, surely the worst foreign policy debacle since
Vietnam. Its market fundamentalism generated Gilded Age
inequality, a Depression-era financial crisis, stagnant
wages and rising insecurity, and left America the
world's largest debtor, dependent on the kindness of
strangers. Their celebration of deregulation and scorn
for government ended up poisoning our kids, with
uninspected toxic toys and diseased lunch-room foods.

2. We are headed into not simply a change election, but
an election that has the potential to mark a sea change,
the end of the conservative era that Reagan launched in
1980 and the beginning of a new era of progressive
reform. The election will take place in the midst of an
unpopular war and a recession, with over three-fourths
of the country looking for a dramatic change in course.
Democrats will surely pick up seats in both the House
and the Senate.

Democrats know how to snatch defeat from the jaws of
victory. But the potential is there for an election that
changes our course.

3. A new progressive majority is forming. You can see it
in the Democratic victories in 2006; you can see it in
the astounding turnout in Democratic primaries in 2008:
young people turning out in unprecedented numbers;
Latinos doubling their share of the primary vote;
African Americans and single women raising their
participation.

4. A key test of the viability of a new coalition will
depend on the votes of the white working class, defined
as white workers with less than a college education,
still about half of the voting population. This was the
heart of the Roosevelt coalition. And they are now the
heart of the conservative coalition that dominated our
politics over the last 30 years.

America has changed dramatically since the New Deal. As
a recent paper by Ruy Teixeira and Alan Abramowitz [1]
points out, in 1940 three-quarters of the population 25
and older were high school dropouts or never went to
high school; 5 percent had college degrees. In 2007,
only 14 percent were high school dropouts; 29 percent
had college degrees and another 25 percent had some
college. The white working class now is composed largely
of white-collar, not blue-collar workers-people in
sales, clerical and service jobs, rather than in
industrial jobs. This white working class is smaller
than the New Deal working class, better off than the New
Deal working class, more educated, more white-collar and
far less unionized. In the 1940s, unions represented 60
percent of the Northern blue-collar workforce. Today,
unions are less than 10 percent of the private
workforce.

Since Nixon, Republican majorities have depended on
winning a supermajority of white working class votes.
Ronald Reagan won these voters by 61 percent to 35
percent in 1980. Al Gore lost them by 17 percent; Kerry
by 23 percent. As minority voters become a greater
percentage of our population and of the vote, the
Republicans will seek to expand these margins among the
white working class.

There are ongoing arguments about why Democrats do so
badly in this population. Part of the explanation traces
back to the Civil Rights movement, and the Southern
strategy of the Republican Party begun under Nixon. By
making itself the party of white sanctuary, Republicans
anchored their party in the South and attracted voters
alienated by the civilizing movements of the 1960s.

Some of the switch, as we've seen, came from cultural
appeals and from the Republican claim after Vietnam to
be the muscular party of national security.

But a large part of the decline, I would argue, came
because Democrats stopped making sense on economics. As
Kevin Phillips put it, [2] Democrats went from "taxing
the few for the benefit of the many" to "taxing the many
on behalf of the few." Republicans made Reagan's mythic
"welfare mother" a racial cue to hard-pressed white
workers. Democrats went from a policy of exporting goods
to exporting jobs, and from a party anchored by labor to
a party funded by Wall Street. Conservatives won the
argument that government couldn't really help, and they,
at least, offered to cut your taxes-perhaps the only
raise you might hope to see.

And then the corruption and incompetence of conservative
presidents from Reagan to Bush helped prove their
ideological point that government was the problem and
not the solution. Now voters are convinced that
government is controlled by entrenched corporate
interests, wastes billions of taxpayers money and can't
organize a two-car funeral-and the past six years of the
Bush administration has made that case.

Progressives have to prove that government can work.
That it can make health care and college affordable.
That it can help generate good jobs here at home. That
it can curb the Wall Street casino and insure that
increased profits and productivity are widely shared. We
have to take reinventing government seriously, not as a
slogan or a gimmick, but as a fundamental project of
reform.

Two political conclusions arise from this analysis.
First, progressives have a monumental stake in
rebuilding the strength of the union movement. White
working-class voters vote two to one Republican if they
are not in unions. They vote two to one Democratic if
they are union members.

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to understand that is
why Karl Rove and the Bush Administration have joined
the business drive to crush the right to organize, and
have done what they could to weaken unions and to
convince Americans that unions are part of the past.

We have a great stake in turning that around, not simply
by passing the Employee Free Choice Act, which is the
centerpiece of reviving the right to organize, but by
turning government at all levels into an ally of unions.
"FDR wants you to join a union," they used to argue in
the 1930s. We have to make that slogan true for
governors, mayors, legislators and the next president.

We should be focusing more and more resources and energy
on our secret asset among white workers-women,
particularly single women. As Page Gardner of Women's
Voices, Women's Votes [3] has shown, single women vote
overwhelmingly on economic issues and overwhelmingly for
Democrats and progressives. Bu they tend not to vote.
They are low-information voters, too hard pressed to pay
much attention. This year they are turning out in large
numbers, and we should make certain-as we should with
Latinos and young people-that we develop the vehicles to
communicate with them, the ability to educate and
mobilize them and the agenda that attracts them. If they
turn out in large numbers, if we empower unions once
more, if we consolidate our majorities among the new
millennium generation and the new Latino voters, we can
go a long way towards a new era of progressive reform.
Campaign For America's Future

1825 K Street, NW, Suite 400, Washington, DC 20006
202-955-5665 (tel) | 202-955-5606 (fax) |
www.ourfuture.org

Before you read the main piece here, do yourself a favor of being well informed and make a note to visit the following URL to read "How the U.S. Just Got Schooled by a 'Rag-Tag' Neighborhood Army in Iraq" by Gary Brecher. It is the perfect companion piece to the below, both of which break through the delusions in which Americans, their media and their government keep themselves. Go to: http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/81147/?page=entire

Then as to the Rev. Wright Article: Founded by one of the greatest journalists of our time, Alexander Cockburn, Counter Punch is one of the best political and news analysis sites on the web. For a sorely needed perspective on Rev. Wright, they reproduced this piece written by Tim Wise. Check it out at www.counterpunch.org/wise03182008.html.

For most white folks, indignation just doesn't wear well. Once affected or conjured up, it reminds one of a pudgy man, wearing a tie that may well have fit him when he was fifty pounds lighter, but which now cuts off somewhere above his navel and makes him look like an idiot.

Indignation doesn't work for most whites, because having remained sanguine about, silent during, indeed often supportive of so much injustice over the years in this country--the theft of native land and genocide of indigenous persons, and the enslavement of Africans being only two of the best examples--we are just a bit late to get into the game of moral rectitude. And once we enter it, our efforts at righteousness tend to fail the test of sincerity.

But here we are, in 2008, fuming at the words of Pastor Jeremiah Wright, of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago--occasionally Barack Obama's pastor, and the man whom Obama credits with having brought him to Christianity--for merely reminding us of those evils about which we have remained so quiet, so dismissive, so unconcerned. It is not the crime that bothers us, but the remembrance of it, the unwillingness to let it go--these last words being the first ones uttered by most whites it seems whenever anyone, least of all an "angry black man" like Jeremiah Wright, foists upon us the bill of particulars for several centuries of white supremacy.

But our collective indignation, no matter how loudly we announce it, cannot drown out the truth. And as much as white America may not be able to hear it (and as much as politics may require Obama to condemn it) let us be clear, Jeremiah Wright fundamentally told the truth.

Oh I know that for some such a comment will seem shocking. After all, didn't he say that America "got what it deserved" on 9/11? And didn't he say that black people should be singing "God Damn America" because of its treatment of the African American community throughout the years?

Well actually, no he didn't.

Wright said not that the attacks of September 11th were justified, but that they were, in effect, predictable. Deploying the imagery of chickens coming home to roost is not to give thanks for the return of the poultry or to endorse such feathered homecoming as a positive good; rather, it is merely to note two things: first, that what goes around, indeed, comes around--a notion with longstanding theological grounding--and secondly, that the U.S. has indeed engaged in more than enough violence against innocent people to make it just a tad bit hypocritical for us to then evince shock and outrage about an attack on ourselves, as if the latter were unprecedented.

He noted that we killed far more people, far more innocent civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki than were killed on 9/11 and "never batted an eye." That this statement is true is inarguable, at least amongst sane people. He is correct on the math, he is correct on the innocence of the dead (neither city was a military target), and he is most definitely correct on the lack of remorse or even self-doubt about the act: sixty-plus years later most Americans still believe those attacks were justified, that they were needed to end the war and "save American lives."

But not only does such a calculus suggest that American lives are inherently worth more than the lives of Japanese civilians (or, one supposes, Vietnamese, Iraqi or Afghan civilians too), but it also ignores the long-declassified documents, and President Truman's own war diaries, all of which indicate clearly that Japan had already signaled its desire to end the war, and that we knew they were going to surrender, even without the dropping of atomic weapons. The conclusion to which these truths then attest is simple, both in its basic veracity and it monstrousness: namely, that in those places we committed premeditated and deliberate mass murder, with no justification whatsoever; and yet for saying that I will receive more hate mail, more hostility, more dismissive and contemptuous responses than will those who suggest that no body count is too high when we're the ones doing the killing. Jeremiah Wright becomes a pariah, because, you see, we much prefer the logic of George Bush the First, who once said that as President he would "never apologize for the United States of America. I don't care what the facts are."

And Wright didn't say blacks should be singing "God Damn America." He was suggesting that blacks owe little moral allegiance to a nation that has treated so many of them for so long as animals, as persons undeserving of dignity and respect, and which even now locks up hundreds of thousands of non-violent offenders (especially for drug possession), even while whites who do the same crimes (and according to the data, when it comes to drugs, more often in fact), are walking around free. His reference to God in that sermon was more about what God will do to such a nation, than it was about what should or shouldn't happen. It was a comment derived from, and fully in keeping with, the black prophetic tradition, and although one can surely disagree with the theology (I do, actually, and don't believe that any God either blesses or condemns nation states for their actions), the statement itself was no call for blacks to turn on America. If anything, it was a demand that America earn the respect of black people, something the evidence and history suggests it has yet to do.

Finally, although one can certainly disagree with Wright about his suggestion that the government created AIDS to get rid of black folks--and I do, for instance--it is worth pointing out that Wright isn't the only one who has said this. In fact, none other than Bill Cosby (oh yes, that Bill Cosby, the one white folks love because of his recent moral crusade against the black poor) proffered his belief in the very same thing back in the early '90s in an interview on CNN, when he said that AIDS may well have been created to get rid of people whom the government deemed "undesirable" including gays and racial minorities.

So that's the truth of the matter: Wright made one comment that is highly arguable, but which has also been voiced by white America's favorite black man, another that was horribly misinterpreted and stripped of all context, and then another that was demonstrably accurate. And for this, he is pilloried and made into a virtual enemy of the state; for this, Barack Obama may lose the support of just enough white folks to cost him the Democratic nomination, and/or the Presidency; all of it, because Jeremiah Wright, unlike most preachers opted for truth. If he had been one of those "prosperity ministers" who says Jesus wants nothing so much as for you to be rich, like Joel Osteen, that would have been fine. Had he been a retread bigot like Falwell was, or Pat Robertson is, he might have been criticized, but he would have remained in good standing and surely not have damaged a Presidential candidate in this way. But unlike Osteen, and Falwell, and Robertson, Jeremiah Wright refused to feed his parishioners lies.

What Jeremiah Wright knows, and told his flock--though make no mistake, they already knew it--is that 9/11 was neither the first, nor worst act of terrorism on American soil. The history of this nation for folks of color, was for generations, nothing less than an intergenerational hate crime, one in which 9/11s were woven into the fabric of everyday life: hundreds of thousands of the enslaved who died from the conditions of their bondage; thousands more who were lynched (as many as 10,000 in the first few years after the Civil War, according to testimony in the Congressional Record at the time); millions of indigenous persons wiped off the face of the Earth. No, to some, the horror of 9/11 was not new. To some it was not on that day that "everything changed." To some, everything changed four hundred years ago, when that first ship landed at what would become Jamestown. To some, everything changed when their ancestors were forced into the hulls of slave ships at Goree Island and brought to a strange land as chattel. To some, everything changed when they were run out of Northern Mexico, only to watch it become the Southwest United States, thanks to a war of annihilation initiated by the U.S. government. To some, being on the receiving end of terrorism has been a way of life. Until recently it was absolutely normal in fact.

But white folks have a hard time hearing these simple truths. We find it almost impossible to listen to an alternative version of reality. Indeed, what seems to bother white people more than anything, whether in the recent episode, or at any other time, is being confronted with the recognition that black people do not, by and large, see the world like we do; that black people, by and large, do not view America as white people view it. We are, in fact, shocked that this should be so, having come to believe, apparently, that the falsehoods to which we cling like a kidney patient clings to a dialysis machine, are equally shared by our darker-skinned compatriots.

This is what James Baldwin was talking about in his classic 1972 work, No Name in the Street, wherein he noted:

"White children, in the main, and whether they are rich or poor, grow up with a grasp of reality so feeble that they can very accurately be described as deluded--about themselves and the world they live in. White people have managed to get through their entire lifetimes in this euphoric state, but black people have not been so lucky: a black man who sees the world the way John Wayne, for example, sees it would not be an eccentric patriot, but a raving maniac."

And so we were shocked in 1987, when Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall declined to celebrate the bicentennial of the Constitution, because, as he noted, most of that history had been one of overt racism and injustice, and to his way of thinking, the only history worth celebrating had been that of the past three or four decades.

We were shocked to learn that black people actually believed that a white cop who was a documented racist might frame a black man; and we're shocked to learn that lots of black folks still perceive the U.S. as a racist nation--we're literally stunned that people who say they experience discrimination regularly (and who have the social science research to back them up) actually think that those experiences and that data might actually say something about the nation in which they reside. Imagine.

Whites are easily shocked by what we see and hear from Pastor Wright and Trinity Church, because what we see and hear so thoroughly challenges our understanding of who we are as a nation. But black people have never, for the most part, believed in the imagery of the "shining city on a hill," for they have never had the option of looking at their nation and ignoring the mountain-sized warts still dotting its face when it comes to race. Black people do not, in the main, get misty eyed at the sight of the flag the way white people do--and this is true even for millions of black veterans--for they understand that the nation for whom that flag waves is still not fully committed to their own equality. They have a harder time singing those tunes that white people seem so eager to belt out, like "God Bless America," for they know that whites sang those words loudly and proudly even as they were enforcing Jim Crow segregation, rioting against blacks who dared move into previously white neighborhoods, throwing rocks at Dr. King and then cheering, as so many did, when they heard the news that he had been assassinated.

Whites refuse to remember (or perhaps have never learned) that which black folks cannot afford to forget. I've seen white people stunned to the point of paralysis when they learn the truth about lynchings in this country--when they discover that such events were not just a couple of good old boys with a truck and a rope hauling some black guy out to the tree, hanging him, and letting him swing there. They were never told the truth: that lynchings were often community events, advertised in papers as "Negro Barbecues," involving hundreds or even thousands of whites, who would join in the fun, eat chicken salad and drink sweet tea, all while the black victims of their depravity were being hung, then shot, then burned, and then having their body parts cut off, to be handed out to onlookers. They are stunned to learn that postcards of the events were traded as souvenirs, and that very few whites, including members of their own families did or said anything to stop it.

Rather than knowing about and confronting the ugliness of our past, whites take steps to excise the less flattering aspects of our history so that we need not be bothered with them. So, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, for example, site of an orgy of violence against the black community in 1921, city officials literally went into the town library and removed all reference to the mass killings in the Greenwood district from the papers with a razor blade--an excising of truth and an assault on memory that would remain unchanged for over seventy years.

Most white people desire, or perhaps even require the propagation of lies when it comes to our history. Surely we prefer the lies to anything resembling, even remotely, the truth. Our version of history, of our national past, simply cannot allow for the intrusion of fact into a worldview so thoroughly identified with fiction. But that white version of America is not only extraordinarily incomplete, in that it so favors the white experience to the exclusion of others; it is more than that; it is actually a slap in the face to people of color, a re-injury, a reminder that they are essentially irrelevant, their concerns trivial, their lives unworthy of being taken seriously. In that sense, and what few if any white Americans appear capable of grasping at present, is that "Leave it Beaver" and "Father Knows Best," portray an America so divorced from the reality of the times in which they were produced, as to raise serious questions about the sanity of those who found them so moving, so accurate, so real. These iconographic representations of life in the U.S. are worse than selective, worse than false, they are assaults to the humanity and memory of black people, who were being savagely oppressed even as June Cleaver did housework in heels and laughed about the hilarious hijinks of Beaver and Larry Mondello.

These portraits of America are certifiable evidence of how disconnected white folks were--and to the extent we still love them and view them as representations of the "good old days" to which we wish we could return, still are--from those men and women of color with whom we have long shared a nation. Just two months before "Leave it to Beaver" debuted, proposed civil rights legislation was killed thanks to Strom Thurmond's 24-hour filibuster speech on the floor of the U.S. Senate. One month prior, Arkansas Governor Orville Faubus called out the National Guard to block black students from entering Little Rock Central High; and nine days before America was introduced to the Cleavers, and the comforting image of national life they represented, those black students were finally allowed to enter, amid the screams of enraged, unhinged, viciously bigoted white people, who saw nothing wrong with calling children niggers in front of cameras. That was America of the 1950s: not the sanitized version into which so many escape thanks to the miracle of syndication, which merely allows white people to relive a lie, year after year after year.

No, it is not the pastor who distorts history; Nick at Nite and your teenager's textbooks do that. It is not he who casts aspersions upon "this great country" as Barack Obama put it in his public denunciations of him; it is the historic leadership of the nation that has cast aspersions upon it; it is they who have cheapened it, who have made gaudy and vile the promise of American democracy by defiling it with lies. They engage in a patriotism that is pathological in its implications, that asks of those who adhere to it not merely a love of country but the turning of one's nation into an idol to be worshipped, it not literally, then at least in terms of consequence.

It is they--the flag-lapel-pin wearing leaders of this land--who bring shame to the country with their nonsensical suggestions that we are always noble in warfare, always well-intended, and although we occasionally make mistakes, we are never the ones to blame for anything. Nothing that happens to us has anything to do with us at all. It is always about them. They are evil, crazy, fanatical, hate our freedoms, and are jealous of our prosperity. When individuals prattle on in this manner we diagnose them as narcissistic, as deluded. When nations do it--when our nation does--we celebrate it as though it were the very model of rational and informed citizenship.

So what can we say about a nation that values lies more than it loves truth? A place where adherence to sincerely believed and internalized fictions allowsone to rise to the highest offices in the land, and to earn the respect of millions, while a willingness to challenge those fictions and offer a more accurate counter-narrative earns one nothing but contempt, derision, indeed outright hatred? What we can say is that such a place is signing its own death warrant. What we can say is that such a place is missing the only and last opportunity it may ever have to make things right, to live up to its professed ideals. What we can say is that such a place can never move forward, because we have yet to fully address and come to terms with that which lay behind.

What can we say about a nation where white preachers can lie every week from their pulpits without so much as having to worry that their lies might be noticed by the shiny white faces in their pews, while black preachers who tell one after another essential truth are demonized, not only for the stridency of their tone--which needless to say scares white folks, who have long preferred a style of praise and worship resembling nothing so much as a coma--but for merely calling bullshit on those whose lies are swallowed whole?

And oh yes, I said it: white preachers lie. In fact, they lie with a skill, fluidity, and precision unparalleled in the history of either preaching or lying, both of which histories stretch back a ways and have often overlapped. They lie every Sunday, as they talk about a Savior they have chosen to represent dishonestly as a white man, in every picture to be found of him in their tabernacles, every children's story book in their Sunday Schools, every Christmas card they'll send to relatives and friends this December. But to lie about Jesus, about the one they consider God--to bear false witness as to who this man was and what he looked like--is no cause for concern.

Nor is it a problem for these preachers to teach and preach that those who don't believe as they believe are going to hell. Despite the fact that such a belief casts aspersions upon God that are so profound as to defy belief--after all, they imply that God is so fundamentally evil that he would burn non-believers in a lake of eternal fire--many of the white folks who now condemn Jeremiah Wright welcome that theology of hate. Indeed, back when President Bush was the Governor of Texas, he endorsed this kind of thinking, responding to a question about whether Jews were going to go to hell, by saying that unless one accepted Jesus as one's personal savior, the Bible made it pretty clear that indeed, hell was where you'd be heading.

So you can curse God in this way--and to imply such hate on God's part is surely to curse him--and in effect, curse those who aren't Christians, and no one says anything. That isn't considered bigoted. That isn't considered beyond the pale of polite society. One is not disqualified from becoming President in the minds of millions because they go to a church that says that shit every single week, or because they believe it themselves. And millions do believe it, and see nothing wrong with it whatsoever.

So white folks are mad at Jeremiah Wright because he challenges their views about their country. Meanwhile, those same white folks, and their ministers and priests, every week put forth a false image of the God Jeremiah Wright serves, and yet it is whites who feel we have the right to be offended.

Pardon me, but something is wrong here, and whatever it is, is not to be found at Trinity United Church of Christ.

Tim Wise is the author of White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son (Soft Skull Press, 2005), and Affirmative Action: Racial Preference in Black and White (Routledge: 2005). He can be reached at: timjwise@msn.com. This essay originally appeared in www.lipmagazine.org.

This week's guest blog is about that touchy, out of the news subject of the potential U.S. bombing of Iran. I wrote about this in this space some months ago (which you can read below), laying out the case that the Bush administration would bomb - this before the administration was set back by the CIA report that Iran had some years ago ceased it nuclear weapons efforts. But if anything, Bush and Cheney have shown they are relentless. We are grateful therefore for this update on the situation to the fine blogger Dave Lindorff whose work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net. A journalist and columnist, his latest book is The Case for Impeachment. Below his blog you will find the latest lying Bush statement about Iran as he leaves the world wondering whether he will order a bombing.

Every horror movie has that "Oh Shit!" moment, when the hero or heroes are huddled in some creepy hideout, and suddenly something happens that tells you that the monster is just around the corner, or just about to attack. In "Jurassic Park" it was the pulsing ripples in a cup of water, heralding the arrival of a T-Rex. In "Jaws" it was the deep bass music, letting you know that a monstrous shark was about to attack.

Well, we just got our "Oh Shit!" moment with the just-announced resignation of Admiral William J. Fallon, the military commander of US Middle East operations.

Adm. Fallon, 63, famously said that an attack on Iran would not happen "on my watch," and is widely believed to have already threatened, along with a number of other top generals and admirals, to quit the service if the Bush administration were to launch an air attack on Iran.

Put the pieces together. We know that the vice president is obsessed with a desire to attack Iran, and has been since before he even took office. Bush has repeatedly stressed that Iran cannot be permitted to continue with its nuclear processing (he calls it their "nukular" bomb program, though there is no evidence that the country has a nuclear bomb development program, and in fact the last National Intelligence Estimate on Iran said there was not and hadn't been since 2003). And Fallon has n ow quit.

The Eisenhower nuclear aircraft carrier strike force has departed for stationing off Iran, joining forces already in place there, and loaded to the brim with strike aircraft, Tomahawk missiles, and even nuclear weapons. It was long ago reported that stealth bombers had been put in place in some of the countries of the old Soviet Union north of Iran, as well as on the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean.

All the elements, that is to say, are in place for a massive air assault on Iranian targets, designed to destroy its nuclear program, cripple its military command and control, and-at least this is a stated Cheney goal- to lead to the overthrow of the Iranian government by its own people.

It is, of course, the strategy of madmen.

The US has no forces to send into Iran. All they can do is bomb it. And bombing a country doesn't lead its people to rise up. It leads them to rally 'round the flag. Especially when the civilian casualties of our not-so-"smart" bombs start to soar.

If such an attack were to happen, we can kiss goodbye to six years of domestic peace, such as we've had. The Iranians have considerable capability to inflict damage on US targets of interest, both overseas and here in the domestic US using assymetrical warfare techniques. The worse part is, they'd be completely justified in doing so, since any attack on them would be a crime against peace-the gravest of all international crimes.

American troops already mired and pinned down in a war in Iraq, would find themselves suddenly under attack by Shia forces there, who for several years now have been largely leaving them alone.

And oil, which just bumped up against $110 a barrel, an all-time record, will double in price overnight, as the whole Persian Gulf becomes a war zone.

We can expect massive launches of small boats armed with missiles and torpedoes, as well as sophisticated anti-ship missiles from shore batteries, all fired at US ships in the Gulf, and it would be astounding if some or even many vessels of the US fleet weren't sunk.

Meanwhile, tanker traffic in the Gulf, which accounts for 20% or more of the world's oil, will cease as insurance rates for those vessels go through the roof.

The monster of war will be unleashed, and will not easily be defeated. That's why Adm. Fallon was so opposed to the whole idea. He knows that it will be a disaster for the US militarily, economically and politically.

The worst part is that Cheney knows this, too. He just doesn't care. This is the man's parting shot as he leaves office- to put the country into the throes of a war so vicious that no one will think of pursuing him for his long list of crimes against the nation and the Constitution.

He is guessing-and he may be right-that the American public will, sheep-like as always, rally to the cause, with a new round of yellow magnet "ribbons" on their cars. He is hoping-and he may be right-that war will be a boon for the candidacy of Republican John McCain and for embattled Republicans running for Congress.

It's a kind of political Hail Mary.

Oh Shit! Here it comes!

—Dave Lindorff

From the Washington Post

President Bush said Thursday (March 20) that Iran has declared that it wants to be a nuclear power with a weapon to "destroy people," including others in the Middle East, contradicting the judgments of a recent U.S. intelligence estimate.

The president spoke in an interview intended to reach out to the Iranian public on the Persian new year and to express "moral support" for struggling freedom movements, particularly among youth and women. It was designed to stress U.S. support for Iran's quest for nuclear energy and the prospects that Washington and Tehran can "reconcile their differences" if Iran cooperates with the international community to ensure that the effort is not converted into a weapons program.

But most striking was Bush's accusation that Iran has openly declared its nuclear weapons intentions, even though a National Intelligence Estimate concluded in December that Iran had stopped its weapons program in 2003, a major reversal in the long-standing U.S. assessment.

"They've declared they want to have a nuclear weapon to destroy people - some in the Middle East. And that's unacceptable to the United States, and it's unacceptable to the world," Bush told U.S.-funded Radio Farda, which broadcasts into Iran in Farsi.

Experts on Iran and nuclear proliferation said the president's statement was wrong. "That's as uninformed as [Sen. John] McCain's statement that Iran is training al-Qaeda. Iran has never said it wanted a nuclear weapon for any reason. It's just not true. It's a little troubling that the president and the leading Republican candidate are both so wrong about Iran," said Joseph Cirincione, president of Ploughshares Fund, a global security foundation.

Others said it is unclear whether the president believes what he said or was deliberately distorting Iran's position.

"The Iranian government is on the record across the board as saying it does not want a nuclear weapon. There's plenty of room for skepticism about these assertions. But it's troubling for the administration to indicate that Iran is explicitly embracing the program as a means of destroying another country," said Suzanne Maloney, an Iran specialist at the State Department until last year and now at the Brookings Institution's Saban Center.

This week I again offer another relevant guest voice on the election: the progressive case for Obama over Hillary. Thus far we've argued that we need to be very careful about Barack Obama (see earlier blogs) and be aware of the degree to which he is unlikely to bring fundamental change because of his alliances with power interests. This has become an even more vivid concern in light of his alarming letter to the United Nations three weeks ago in which he urged the US Ambassador to resist an effort to censure Israel for its appalling closure of resources to the Gaza Strip, an act so egregious that every other nation in the world was prepared to condemn it and an act that alone among countries, Israel could get away with (and one redolent of you know what historic fascist regime).

This is the same Obama who for many years seemed to understand that Israel's illegal West Bank settlement policy is the true obstacle to peace in the Mideast and with the Arab world, for both the U.S. and Israel. The same Obama, who before the letter, pundits and Arabs were saying represented America's great brown hope for correcting relationships with the vast Muslim civilization following the Bush crimes. In one swoop not of course covered by the U.S. but extensively spread by the Mideast media, Obama undid much of that hope and good will and showed a serious character flaw of ambition and opportunism trumping human decency (get the Jewish vote at all costs by trumping Hillary for it, no matter the impact on the U.S).

That said, I offer the best argument made yet for progressive people supporting Obama below from the almost always relevant and interesting Nation magazine's February 18 issue. For more go to www.thenation.com/doc/20080218/hayes.

The Choice

by Christopher Hayes

It's gotten to that time in the primary contest where lines are drawn, camps are solidified and conversations around dinner tables grow heated. My friend Dan recently put it this way: "You start talking about the candidates, and next thing you know someone's crying!" The excellent (and uncommitted) blogger Digby recently decided to shut down her comments section because the posts had grown so toxic. The recent uptick in acrimony is largely due to the narrowing of the field. While once the energy was spread over many camps, it is now, with the exits of Dennis Kucinich and John Edwards, concentrated on just two, leaving progressives in a fierce debate over whether Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama would make the better nominee, and President.

According to polling data as well as my conversations with friends and colleagues, progressives are evenly split or undecided between the two. This is, to me, somewhat astonishing (about which more in a moment), but it also means that at a time when other subgroups within the Democratic coalition are leaning heavily toward one candidate or the other, progressives are at a moment of maximum leverage.

Insofar as the issues discussed during a presidential campaign are circumscribed by the taboos and pieties of the political and media establishments, they tend to be dispiriting for those of us on the left. Neither front-runner is calling for the nation to renounce its decades-old imperial posture or to end the prison-industrial complex; neither is saying that America's suburbs and car culture are not sustainable modes of living in an era of expensive oil and global warming or pointing out that the "war on drugs" has been a moral disaster and strategic failure, with casualties borne most violently and destructively by society's most marginalized and--a word you won't be hearing from either candidate--oppressed. And yet, this election is far more encouraging (dare I say hopeful?) than any in recent memory. The policy agenda for the Democratic front-runners is significantly further to the left on the war, climate change and healthcare than that of John Kerry in 2004. The ideological implosion of conservatism, the failures of the Bush Administration and, perhaps most important, the shifts in public opinion in a leftward direction on war, the economy, civil liberties and civil rights are all coming together at the same time, providing progressives with the rare and historic opportunity to elect a President with a progressive majority and an actual mandate for progressive change.

The question then becomes this: which of the two Democratic candidates is more likely to bring to fruition a new progressive majority? I believe, passionately and deeply, if occasionally waveringly, that it's Barack Obama.

Had you told me a few years ago that the left of the Democratic Party would be split between Obama and Clinton, I'd have dismissed you as crazy: Barack Obama has been a community organizer, a civil rights attorney, a loyal and reliable ally in the State Senate of progressive groups. For the Chicago left, his primary campaign and his subsequent election to the US Senate was a collective rallying cry. If you've read his first book, the truly beautiful, honest and intellectually sophisticated Dreams From My Father, you have an inkling of what youngChicago progressives felt about Obama. He is one of us, and now he's in the Senate. We thought we'd elected our own Paul Wellstone. (Full disclosure: my brother is an organizer on the Obama campaign.)

That's not, alas, how things turned out. Almost immediately Obama--likely with an eye on national office--shaded himself toward the center. His rhetoric was cool, often timid, not the zealous advocacy on behalf of peace, justice and the dispossessed that had characterized Wellstone's tenure. His record places him squarely in the middle of Democratic senators, just slightly to Clinton's left on domestic issues (he voted against the bankruptcy bill, for example). As a presidential candidate, his domestic policy (with some notable exceptions on voting rights and technology policy) has been very close to that of his chief rivals, though sometimes, notably on healthcare, marginally less progressive.

But while domestic policy will ultimately be determined through a complicated and fraught interplay with legislators, foreign policy is where the President's agenda is implemented more or less unfettered. It's here where distinctions in worldview matter most--and where Obama compares most favorably to Clinton. The war is the most obvious and powerful distinction between the two: Hillary Clinton voted for and supported the most disastrous American foreign policy decision since Vietnam, and Barack Obama (at a time when it was deeply courageous to do so) spoke out against it. In this campaign, their proposals are relatively similar, but in rhetoric and posture Clinton has played hawk to Obama's dove, attacking from the right on everything from the use of first-strike nuclear weapons to negotiating with Iran's president. Her hawkishness relative to Obama's is mirrored in her circle of advisers. As my colleague Ari Berman has reported in these pages, it's a circle dominated by people who believed and believe that waging pre-emptive war on Iraq was the right thing to do. Obama's circle is made up overwhelmingly of people who thought the Iraq War was a mistake.

Clinton's fundamentally defensive conception of how to defuse the Republicans on national security (neutralizing their hawkishness with one's own) is an example of a larger problem, rooted in the fact that so many of her circle served in her husband's Administration. Their political identities were formed in the crucible of crisis, from the Gingrich insurgency to the Ken Starr inquisition. The overriding imperative was survival against massive odds, often with a hostile public, press or both. Like an animal caught in a trap that chews off its leg to wriggle away, the Clinton crew by the end of its tenure had hardly any limbs left to propel an agenda. The benefit of this experience, much touted by the Clintons, is that they know how to fight and how to survive. But the cost has been high: those who lived through those years are habituated to playing defense and fighting rear-guard actions. We know how progressives fared under Clintonism: they were the bloodied limbs left in the trap. Clintonism, in other words, is the devil we know.

Which brings us to the one we don't. A President cannot build a movement, but he can be its messenger, as was Reagan. Part of what tantalizes and frustrates about Obama is that he seems to have the potential to be such a messenger and yet shies away from speaking in ideological terms. When he invokes union organizers facing Pinkerton thugs to give us our forty-hour week, or says we are bound to one another as "our brother's keeper...our sister's keeper," he is articulating the deepest progressive values: solidarity and community and collective action. But he places more rhetorical emphasis on a politics of "unity" that, read uncharitably, seems to fetishize bipartisanship as an end in itself and reinforce lame and deceptive myths that the parties are equally responsible for the "bickering" and "divisiveness" in Washington. It appears sometimes that his diagnosis of what's wrong with politics is the way it is conducted rather than for whom.

In its totality, though, Obama's rhetoric tells a story of politics that is distinct from both the one told by Beltway devotees of bipartisanship and comity and from the progressive activists' story of a ceaseless battle between the forces of progress and those of reaction. If it differs from what I like to hear, it is also unfailingly targeted at building the coalition that is the raison d'être of Obama's candidacy. Consider this passage from Obama's stump speech:

I've learned in my life that you can stand firm in your principles while still reaching out to those who might not always agree with you. And although the Republican operatives inWashington might not be interested in hearing what we have to say, I think Republican and independent voters outside of Washington are. That's the once-in-a-generation opportunity we have in this election.

Obama makes a distinction between bad-faith, implacable enemies (lobbyists, entrenched interests, "operatives") and good-faith ideological opponents (Republicans, independents and conservatives of good conscience). He wants to court the latter and use their support to vanquish the former. This may be improbable, but it crucially allows former Republicans (Obama Republicans?) to cross over without guilt or self-loathing. They are not asked to renounce, only to join.

Obama's diagnosis of the obstacles to progress is twofold. First, that the division of the electorate into the categories created by the right's culture warriors is the primary means by which the forces of reaction resist change. Progress will be made only by rejecting or transcending those categories. In 1971 a young Pat Buchanan urged Richard Nixon to wield race as what would come to be known as a wedge issue. "This is a potential throw of the dice," he wrote, "that could...cut the Democratic Party and country in half; my view is that we would have far the larger half." Obama seeks to stitch those halves back together.

Second, that the reason progressives have failed to achieve our goals over the past several decades is not that we didn't fight hard enough but that we didn't have a popular mandate. In other words, the fundamental obstacle is a basic political one: never having the public squarely on our side and never having the votes on the Hill. In this respect the Obama campaign is uniquely circular: his political appeal is rooted in the fact that he's so politically appealing. This means that when he loses, the loss affects him worse than it would other candidates, since it also cuts against his message. But when he wins, particularly when he wins big, as he did in Iowa and South Carolina, the win means more because it reinforces the basic argument of his campaign.

The question of who can best build popular support for a progressive governing agenda is related to, but distinct from, the question of electability. Given a certain ceiling on Clinton's appeal (due largely to years of unhinged attacks from the "vast right-wing conspiracy"), her campaign seems well prepared to run a 50 percent + 1 campaign, a rerun of 2004 but with a state or two switching columns: Florida, maybe, or Ohio. Obama is aiming for something bigger: a landmark sea-change election, with the kind of high favorability and approval ratings that can drive an agenda forward. Why should we think he can do it?

The short answer is that Obama is simply one of the most talented and appealing politicians in recent memory. Perhaps the most. Pollster.com shows a series of polls taken in the Democratic campaign. The graphs plotting national polling numbers as well as those in the first four states show a remarkably consistent pattern. Hillary Clinton starts out with either a modest or, more commonly, a massive lead, owing to her superior name recognition and the popularity of the Clinton brand. As the campaign goes forward Clinton's support either climbs slowly, plateaus or dips. But as the actual contest approaches, and voters start paying attention, Obama's support suddenly begins to grow exponentially.

In addition to persuading those who already vote, Obama has also delivered on one of the hoariest promises in politics: to bring in new voters (especially the young). It's a phenomenon that, if it were to continue with him as nominee, could completely alter the electoral math. Young people are by far the most progressive voters of any age cohort, and they overwhelmingly favor Barack Obama by stunning margins. Their enthusiasm has translated into massive increases in youth turnout in the early contests.

Finally, there's the question of coattails. In many senses there's less difference between the two presidential candidates than there is between a Senate with fifty-one Democrats and one with fifty-six. No Democratic presidential candidate is going to carry, say, Mississippi or Nebraska, but many Democrats in those states fear that the ingrained Clinton hatred would rally the GOP base and/or depress turnout, hurting down-ticket candidates. Over the past few weeks a series of prominent red-state Democrats, most notably Ben Nelson, Kent Conrad and Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius, have endorsed Obama. When I asked a Democratic Congressional candidate in the Deep South who he preferred at the top of the ticket, he didn't hesitate: "Obama is absolutely the better candidate. Hillary brings a lot of sting; he takes some sting out of them."

Whoever is elected in November, progressives will probably find themselves feeling frustrated. Ultimately though, the future judgments and actions of the candidates are unknowable, obscured behind time's cloak. Who knew that the Bill Clinton of 1992 who campaigned with Nelson Mandela would later threaten to sanction South Africa when it passed a law allowing the production of low-cost generic AIDS drugs for its suffering population--or that the George W. Bush of 2000, an amiable "centrist" whose thin foreign-policy views shaded toward isolationism, would go on to become a self-justifying, delusional and messianic instrument of global war? In this sense, Bill Clinton is right: voting for and electing Barack Obama is a "roll of a dice." All elections are. But the candidacy of Barack Obama represents by far the left's best chance to, in Buchanan's immortal phrasing, take back the bigger half of the country. It's a chance we can't pass up.

"One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time." --André Gide

While John Edwards is being criticized as too old-school in his attack on corporate greed (and there is no question his performance would benefit from painting a positive new America picture rather than merely citing the negative), the same media pundits have given Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama a pass on their corporate cash contributions and pro-corporate votes as well as on who surrounds them in staff and advisory positions. Hillary, a corporate and military industrial complex favorite, has packed around her many of the most questionable people in the right wing of the Democratic Party establishment, epitomized by former Secretary of State Madelyn Albright, who once said yes to the question was it worth it that the Clinton embargo of Iraq killed 500,000 Iraqi children; and key campaign strategist Mark Penn, who is up-to-his eyeballs in lobbying for corporate interests that damage the public. Obama gets even less scrutiny, which is why I offer the following guest blog from the Black Agenda Report. —Edge Pusher

By Glen Ford, Black Agenda Report
January 11, 2008

When politicians offer nothing, and the people demand nothing, then the powers-that-be are free to continue doing whatever they choose. The death knell of participatory politics can often be a very noisy, celebratory affair - such as we have witnessed in the call-and-response ritual of "Change!" "Hope!" and other exuberant but insubstantial campaign exercises. Finally, the most accomplished slickster in presidential history, Bill Clinton, was compelled to expose Barack Obama's "fairy tale" anti-war history-some truth for a "change." Black Agenda Report knows the story very well, after more than four years of observing Obama's descent from vaguely progressive rhetoric to shameless pandering (to whites) and vapid "Change!" mantra nonsense. Only the rich can win this game.

The scam of this still-new century enthralls and envelopes the nation, a narrowly-packaged farce in which political twins Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama pretend they are not joined at the hip on every public policy issue that has been allowed to enter the corporate media-vetted discourse: health care, Iraq, trade. Even these points of (non)contention disappear in the din of purely commercial marketing mantras with infinitely malleable meanings: "Change," "Hope," "Reform."

When no real change is offered - when both frontrunners are wedded to a lingering presence in Iraq and to reestablishing U.S. hegemony in the world; when insurance and drug companies are left virtually untouched by duos' tepid forays into broadening health care coverage; and when neither offers a whisper of an idea on halting the corporate-engineered global Race to the Bottom, then it is certain that, although "change" may come, it will be at the direction of the rich who have brought the nation and planet to the very brink of catastrophe.

Ironically, it was Bill Clinton who, on the eve of the New Hampshire primary, exposed the bogus nature of the stage-set battle between his wife and Barack Obama:

"It is wrong that Senator Obama got to go through 15 debates trumpeting his superior judgment and how he had been against the war in every year, enumerating the years, and never got asked one time - not once, 'Well, how could you say that when you said in 2004 you didn't know how you would have voted on the resolution? You said in 2004 there was no difference between you and George Bush on the war. And you took that speech you're now running on off your Web site in 2004. And there's no difference in your voting record and Hillary's ever since. Give me a break. This whole thing is the biggest fairy tale I've ever seen."

When the Great Triangulator and Supreme Snake Oil Salesman tells you a scam is going on, take it from an expert, and believe.

The Real Story on Obama

Actually, Clinton got one of the dates wrong. We at Black Agenda Report know - because we have been closely scrutinizing Obama since his Illinois state senate days, and engaged him in a month-long interchange in June of 2003. Obama's October 2002 anti-war speech first disappeared from his U.S. Senate campaign site, not in 2004, but in 2003, when public perception of the war and occupation - with the exception of Black opinion - had dramatically shifted towards war. At the time, Bruce Dixon and the core Black Agenda Report crew, including myself, were housed at www.BlackCommentator.com.

Dixon, a native Chicagoan who had worked with Obama in a massive Illinois voter registration drive in 1992, noted on June 5, 2003 that "...a few weeks ago, Barack Obama's heartfelt statement of principled opposition to lawless militarism and the rule of fear was stricken without explanation from his campaign web site, and replaced with mild expressions of 'anxiety.'" In place of the speech that Obama's handlers would five years later wave as proof of his resolute opposition to the war, Obama stammered and stuttered:

"But I think [people are] all astonished, I think, in many quarters, about, for example, the recent Bush budget and the prospect that, for example, veterans benefits might be cut. And so there's discussion about that, I think, among both supporters and those who are opposed to the war. What kind of world are we building?

"And I think that's - the anxiety is about the international prospects and how we potentially reconstruct Iraq. And the costs there, then, tie in very directly with concerns about how we're handling our problems at home."

What a difference a shift in public opinion on war makes. Bruce Dixon put it well: "His passion evaporated, a leading black candidate for the US Senate mouths bland generalities on war, peace and the US role in the world."

Obama put The Speech back on the site. But there was another shock in store. During the same week, Obama's name turned up in one of our periodic searches of the Democratic Leadership Council's membership list. Could a man widely perceived as a rising star in the progressive Black firmament have signed on to the DLC, the corporate bagman and center of all things Republican Lite in the Democratic Party? We challenged Obama again, directly, as reported on June 19, 2003 in an article titled, "Not Corrupted by DLC, Says Obama?":

"Illinois State Senator Barack Obama rejects any 'suggestion' that 'inclusion of my name' on a Democratic Leadership Council/New Democrats membership list amounts to 'an endorsement on my part of the DLC platform.'

"In a June 13 letter to The Black Commentator, the Black candidate for U.S. Senate defended his civil liberties, anti-war, and social welfare legislative record, and requested 'that folks take the time to find out what my views are before they start questioning my passion for justice or the integrity of my campaign effort.'

"Specifically, State Senator Obama maintains that an October 2002 anti-war speech was removed from his campaign web site because 'the speech was dated once the formal phase of the war was over, and my staff's desire to continually provide fresh news clips.'"

Testing Obama

Naturally, we didn't believe a word about either The Speech or Obama's supposed lack of knowledge about the DLC's claim to his person, despite his lengthy, written protestations of innocence and ignorance.

We decided it was pointless to go back and forth with Obama on whether he was technically a member of the DLC or just sympathetic to their pro-corporate policies. Instead, we challenged Obama to take a test. If he answered three questions in the affirmative, he should not be in the DLC. Otherwise, he is a bird-of-a-feather, and should continue in their corporate company. The "bright line" questions put to Obama on June 26 were:

1. Do you favor the withdrawal of the United States from NAFTA? Will you in the Senate introduce or sponsor legislation toward that end?

2. Do you favor the adoption of a single payer system of universal health care to extend the availability of quality health care to all persons in this country? Will you in the Senate introduce or sponsor legislation toward that end?

3. Would you have voted against the October 10 congressional resolution allowing the president to use unilateral force against Iraq?

In the summer of 2003, Obama was ranked third of fourth in the field of contenders for the Illinois Democratic senate nomination. He didn't want to alienate any constituency, and so agreed to take our test. He also agreed to ask the DLC to take his name off their list of New Democrats, albeit reluctantly.

Obama's response to our "bright line" questions was as follows:

"My views on universal health care, the unilateral use of force in Iraq, and NAFTA are in fact what you might expect given my previous history and voting record.

"I favor universal health care for all Americans, and intend to introduce or sponsor legislation toward that end in the U.S. Senate, just as I have at the state level....

"I would have voted against the October 10th congressional resolution authorizing the President to use unilateral force against Iraq....

"And although I believe that free trade - when also fair - can benefit workers in both rich and poor nations, I think that the current NAFTA regime lacks the worker and environmental protections that are necessary for the long-term prosperity of both America and its trading partners. I would therefore favor, at minimum, a significant renegotiation of NAFTA and the terms of the President's fast track authority."

Clearly, Obama failed the test on repeal of NAFTA and "slicked" his way through the universal health care question. But we fudged his grades, and passed him, anyway - and have regretted doing so, ever since. A year later, Obama's name was briefly back on the DLC list; their site manager said he assumed that Obama belonged there. Also in 2004, as Bill Clinton angrily recounted, Obama told the New York Times he doesn't know how he would have voted on the 2002 War Powers Act if he had been in the U.S. Senate at the time. Later, the winds of war opinion changed, and Obama's handlers celebrated the 5th anniversary of his 2002 anti-war speech as if it ranked with the Magna Carta in historical significance.

"Slick Willy" knows a scammer when he sees one, either in the mirror or opposing his wife. After more than four years of documenting Obama's machinations, so do we.

Back to the Present

And now we are left only with the politics of "Change"--which is anything the various audiences want it to be. Through relentless pandering to white desires for an end to Black agitation and reminders of enduring institutional racism, Obama has proven his ability to amass huge white support. As a result, much of Black America may become convinced the last hurdle to putting a Black Face in the Highest Place has been overcome, and shift overwhelmingly to Hillary's estranged Black political twin. Corporate America, never threatened by either candidate, has long been comfortable with the outcome of this race, whichever way it goes - that's why they put their money on both Barack and Hillary.

After Obama thanked his supporters for making him a close second in New Hampshire, the sound system blared a Stevie Wonder song with the hook, "Here I am, baby, signed sealed, delivered, I'm yours."

For whom were those lyrics meant?

BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.

For more news that's hard to find, check out www.blackagendareport.com.

12/21/07 "ICH" -- -- Every four years the country is swept up in the pomp and pageantry of presidential elections. And every four years loyal Americans flock to the voting booths to select the candidate of their choice. Elections--we are told---are supposed to be the true expression of democratic government. But they aren't. They're a sham and most people know it. The balloting creates the illusion of choice where there is none. It's become a meaningless ritual that has nothing to do with representative government.

The 2008 elections have already been marred by a number of controversies, the worst of which is the report that was published last Friday by Ohio’s top election official, Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner. The report proves that the voting systems that decided the 2004 election in Ohio were rife with “critical security failures”. The election was rigged; pure and simple--stolen by the Bush team and their friends in the establishment media who refuse to report the news. It's actually funny, in a cynical kind of way. The perpetrators were so cocksure they could pull it off that---according to Democracy Now--- “the servers for the computation of the Ohio vote count were in the same basement in Chattanooga, Tennessee that houses servers for the Republican National Committee. The programmers who (worked) for Ken Blackwell, the Republican Secretary of State, were Republicans who did websites for the Bush administration.” (Democracy Now)

What gall. Blackwell's thugs didn't even try conceal what they were up to. Why should they care? It's not like there's an independent media that's going to report the details of a stolen election. No way. Blackwell ripped off the election and then thumbed his nose at the public. No investigation. No accountability. No nothing. Just like a banana republic only bigger.

So why do we keep throwing billions of dollars down a black hole just to maintain this pathetic charade that fools no one? Why not just load up the boxcars with pallets of crisp-new hundred dollar bills and ship them off to Crawford where they end up anyway. Let Bush worry about how to distribute the loot. Besides, with Congress' public approval dithering at 11%; we'd be better off paying them to stay at home and turn the House of Representatives into condos.

This year every one of the leading candidates is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Every one of them is a “dual loyalist” with a globalist agenda. Every one of them accepts the new regime of curtailed civil liberties, endless war, and free trade. There's not a nationalist or a patriot among them. None. They're all part of the same corporate effluent that washed into Washington on a wave of special interest payola drowning all visible symbols of a once-vital Republic. Romney pontificates about expanding Guantanamo while Clinton boasts about an attack on Iran. Blah, blah, blah. How can anyone listen to this gibberish? There's not a dime's worth of difference between any of them. They're all lacquer-hair phonies who've never had an original thought in their lives. Everything they think or say comes off a cue-card or teleprompter that flashes poll-tested, focus-group mumbo-jumbo which they reiterate roboticly. It's all rubbish.

If a prospective candidate hasn't sworn his undying allegiance to the cabal of transnational corporations, or taken a blood-oath to defend the doctrine of unfettered self-aggrandizement, or pledged to carry out a bloodthirsty “economy-busting” global crusade; he is quickly banished to the wilderness.

Just look at Ron Paul, who collected $6 million in donations in a matter of hours but still can't even get his picture in the papers. Why is that?

It's because he hasn't sold his soul to the carpetbagging freebooters who run the system. Apart from Kucinich, he's the only red-blooded, Constitution-toting American in the race. The rest are just bunko-artists and Pharisees.

Everyone knows what's going on. The whole campaign extravaganza is a pointless farce. Why continue the deception?

We all watched in 2000 while the five loonies on the Supreme Court suspended the hand counting of ballots, overturned the ruling of the Florida Supreme Court, and awarded the election to their own Party's candidate. How is that any different than Blackwell's manipulations in Ohio? It's all the same. In fact, the 5 justices had so little regard for the intelligence of the American people they invoked the 14th amendment---the “equal protection” clause---which had never been used except in cases of racial discrimination. They didn't care. Who was going to stop them?

Can you imagine, dear reader, the peals of laughter that must have gone up at the right-wing think tanks after that ruling? Hooray for the oligarchy of racketeers! Pass the brandy.

That was a turning point in American history. It showed that the ruling class really doesn't care what the people think anymore. This is THEIR country and they'll run it whatever way they want. To hell with democracy.

The reason there's more coverage of the campaigns this year is simply because the boardroom Mandarins want to restore the illusion that we actually have a choice. We don't. They pick the candidates and we pull the lever and go home. End of story. The debates are nothing more than a public relations gambit designed to lend a bit of credibility to a system that is rotten to the core. What part of the body-politic has been spared the cancerous ravages of corporate corruption. The Congress? The Executive? The High Court? The media?

Don't make me laugh. The entire system is marinated in a culture of violence and dishonesty. Nothing is salvageable. It all stinks.

The real difference between the parties is minuscule but significant. The Democrats have become the party of traditional imperialism spearheaded by Brzezinski, Holbrooke, Albright and the other guardians of Empire. These are the master-puppeteers who operate behind the scenes for their well-heeled benefactors. Their focus is mainly on Central Asia; controlling resources from the Caspian Basin, “pacifying” Afghanistan, rallying the EU to a greater role in NATO, and continuing the apocryphal “war on terror” into infinity. It's the Great Game redux.

The Republican Party has become the party of neoconservatives. Their operational plan is “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm”. It aligns the US with the foreign policy objectives of Israel's Likud Party. The focus is balkanizing the Middle East, undermining Arab nationalism, installing US-Israeli client regimes, and controlling the regions prodigious natural resources. It is a straightforward strategy for regional hegemony.

This is the REAL split between the parties, not the meaningless Democrat-Republican labels. Presently, the traditional imperialists have regained the upper-hand as the Bush bandwagon lurches into the ditch. Of course, there is some cross-pollenizing between the two parties; the differences are not absolute. There's plenty of gray-area and incestuous intermingling, but this is a pretty accurate overview. What's important is that neither party has any intention of restoring the Bill of Rights, slowing the outsourcing of jobs, or abandoning the war on terror. No way. That is not in their collective interests at all.

When civil liberties are stripped away; elections become pointless. Freedom has nothing to do with pushing a colored-nob on a touch-screen computer every 4 years. Its about containing the power of the state. Doesn't anyone grasp that? Freedom has become hollow buzzword that's sprinkled through presidential speeches or used to defend the latest bloody intervention in some foreign country. It's lost whatever meaning it had. We've forgotten that the Bill of Rights doesn't give us special, superhuman powers. It was designed to be a straitjacket that would restrict the actions of power-hungry politicians and confine them within the law. That's all it is; a shackle on government. Now, all that's been lost. The basic rules of the game have changed; the social contract has been repealed. Even the flag, which once embodied the hopes and aspirations of the nation; has been raised over Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and countless other black sites spread across the planet like grains of sand. What does the world see when they look at that flag now? Do they see a symbol of liberty and justice or the butcher's apron flapping lazily above some far-flung torture chamber.

Everything has changed. America has lost its way. Casting a ballot for one silver-spoon CFR plutocrat over another accomplishes nothing. That's not democracy. It's a fraud.

For more news that's hard to find, check out www.informationclearinghouse.info/article18935.htm.

Bad enough that California has put Senator Diane Feinstein in a position of influence if not power over American civil liberties, intelligence excesses and the right to torture whom we want to with impunity (see my last blog). LA County has contributed Rep. Jane Harman (the South Bay and parts of West LA and Venice), who as a key member of the House Intelligence Committee helped cover up Bush's lying the U.S. into war with Iraq and who sees terrorists under every bed. Just this week the Washington Post reported that Harman, as former Minority Leader of the House Intelligence Committee, was one of the Congressional leaders who were briefed on the use of water-boarding torture by the CIA and raised no objection.

Harman, yet another prime example of what is devastatingly wrong with the Democratic Party, has now authored a bill that overwhelmingly passed the House and which promises to be a major step in advancing the police state and moving the country from its current pre-fascism into hardcore madness. At a time when there are already 750,000 Americans - can you believe it! - on the no-fly list, including many critics of the Bush administration, Harman and the Dems have produced a would-be law that, like the stealth laws laid down early in the Hitler years and in every other democracy that degenerated into a police state of the Right of Left, seems to satisfy a public need for "security" but in reality builds a firm platform for a despotic government and for the end of our Constitutional liberties, one significant, blind step at a time.

Indeed, the law promises to put more power in the hands of the same people who created the immense no-fly list, potentially opening the door to giving them the authority to declare activists of all kinds "terrorists." It is because people like the no-fly list perpetrators exist in every society that not yielding ANY liberty in the face of "national security" or inventing any law they can handily misinterpret, is so vitally important, because such law ALWAYS gets expanded in practice.

Can't happen here? Wake up and get informed. In her new book, “The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot," Naomi Wolf details how the U.S. is incrementally but rapidly repeating almost exactly the path to a despotic society followed by regimes like Hitler's (in his early years as Chancellor, when, after being legally elected under a constitutional government with its own civil rights laws, he had to build a "legal" base incrementally for what would become Nazi crimes). Wolf outlines ten classic steps used elsewhere to subvert real democracy and personal liberties. most of which the Bush administration has already implemented.
(See a must-watch video lecture by Naomi Wolf on YouTube at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjALf12PAWc )

John Dean, the former White House Counsel who told Congress about Richard Nixon's crimes, actually makes much the same case in his new book, "Broken Government," though he refuses to accept where this is leading. And you can read still more about these abuses in my earlier blogs.

Why aren't most Americans aware of what's happening?

Look no further than corporate media.

Just as in other societies that went down the police state path, the early, ground-laying days to despotism were most always incremental. They were driven by a far-right wing or left-wing party, just as the Republicans are driving it here. The majority of "opposition" politicians supported the changes, just as the "afraid to look weak" Democrats are doing here. Meanwhile, the dominant media found other matters more relevant than alerting the public to what is happening and holding the politicians accountable before the public - such important matters as what Obama and Hillary said about each other today, or whether Hillary prefers diamonds or pearls.

Read the below guest editorials to get a sense of what Harman has now wrought by way of potentially handing the police state movers in this country a powerful new tool by which to criminalize free speech and activism. The opening will be to use virtually the same methods the Southern States did to criminalize the Civil Rights Movement in the Fifties and Sixties. Then if you are sufficiently worried, get in touch with our California Senators, Barbara Boxer and (pray for the best) Diane Feinstein and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and encourage them to stop the Harman nonsense in the Senate. You need to move quickly, however.
United States Capitol switchboard at (202) 224-3121
http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm

And if you live in the South Bay, vote for anyone who runs against Harman in the next Democratic primary. Meanwhile, call Harman – (202) 225-8220 in DC and
(310) 643-3636 in L.A. - and share your thoughts about her disgraceful
attempt to undermine your civil rights.

Below are some guest editorials:
______________________________________________________________________
From the Baltimore Sun Op-Ed page:

Here Come The Thought Police

By Ralph E. Shaffer and R. William Robinson

November 19, 2007

With overwhelming bipartisan support, Rep. Jane
Harman's "Violent Radicalization and Homegrown
Terrorism Prevention Act" passed the House 404-6 late
last month and now rests in Sen. Joe Lieberman's
Homeland Security Committee. Swift Senate passage
appears certain.

Not since the "Patriot Act" of 2001 has any bill so
threatened our constitutionally guaranteed rights.

(Now go to the following to read the entire op-ed piece: www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/oped/bal-op.thoughtpolice19nov19,0,2384977.story
baltimoresun.com)
--------------------------------
From Progressive Democrats

Demand a NO vote on S. 1959 !!!

D - Dennis Kucinich and R - Dana Rohrabacher voted NO in the House
along with only four other members. This is not a partisan issue it is
a civil liberties issue.

For more on the bill, read its sections, followed by the National Lawyers Guild's analysis ...
SEC. 899A. DEFINITIONS. (from S. 1995)

`(1) COMMISSION- The term `Commission' means the National Commission
on the Prevention of Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism
established under section 899C.

`(2) VIOLENT RADICALIZATION- The term `violent radicalization' means
the process of adopting or promoting an extremist belief system for the
purpose of facilitating ideologically based violence to advance
political, religious, or social change.

`(3) HOMEGROWN TERRORISM- The term `homegrown terrorism' means the
use, planned use, or threatened use, of force or violence by a group or
individual born, raised, or based and operating primarily within the
United States or any possession of the United States to intimidate or
coerce the United States government, the civilian population of the
United States, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or
social objectives.

`(4) IDEOLOGICALLY BASED VIOLENCE- The term `ideologically based
violence' means the use, planned use, or threatened use of force or
violence by a group or individual to promote the group or individual's
political, religious, or social beliefs.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
NATIONAL LAWYERS GUILD AND SOCIETY OF AMERICAN LAW TEACHERS
STRONGLY OPPOSE HOMEGROWN TERRORISM PREVENTION ACT

Contacts: *Marjorie Cohn, NLG president, marjorie@tjsl.edu; 619-374-6923
*Eileen Kaufman & Tayyab Mahmud, SALT co-presidents, eileenk@tourolaw.edu , (631)761-7125; Mahmud@seattleu.edu , (206) 398-4148

On October 23, 2007, the House of Representatives passed the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007 by a vote of 404-6. The bill will be referred out of committee this week and will then go to the Senate floor. The National Lawyers Guild and the Society of American Law Teachers strongly oppose this legislation because it will likely lead to the criminalization of beliefs, dissent and protest, and invite more draconian surveillance of Internet communications.

This bill would establish a Commission to study and report on "facts and causes" of "violent radicalism" and "extremist belief systems." It defines "violent radicalism" as "adopting or promoting an extremist belief system for the purpose of facilitating ideologically based violence to advance political, religious, or social change." The term "extremist belief system" is not defined; it could refer to liberalism, nationalism, socialism, anarchism, communism, etc.

"Ideologically based violence" is defined in the bill as the "use, planned use, or threatened use of force or violence by a group or individual to promote the group or individual's political, religious, or social beliefs." Thus, "force" and "violence" are used interchangeably. If a group of people blocked the doorway of a corporation that manufactured weapons, or blocked a sidewalk during an anti-war demonstration, it might constitute the use of "force" to promote "political beliefs."

The bill charges that the Internet "has aided in facilitating violent radicalization, ideologically based violence, and the homegrown terrorism process in the United States by providing access to broad and constant streams of terrorist-related propaganda to United States citizens." This provision could be used to conduct more intrusive surveillance of our Internet communications without warrants.

This legislation does not criminalize conduct, but may well lead to criminalizing ideas or beliefs in violation of the First Amendment. By targeting the Internet, it may result in increased surveillance of Internet communications in violation of the Fourth Amendment.

The National Lawyers Guild and the Society of American Law Teachers strongly urge the Senate to refuse to pass the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007.
Founded in 1937 as an alternative to the American Bar Association, which did not admit people of color, the National Lawyers Guild is the oldest and largest public interest/human rights bar organization in the United States. Its headquarters are in New York and it has chapters in every state.
The Society of American Law Teachers (SALT) is a community of progressive law
teachers working for justice, diversity and academic excellence. SALT is the
largest membership organization of law faculty and legal education
professionals in the United States.

Senator Diane Feinstein is many things on many different days. Although nominally a Democrat, some days she pleases herself by voting benefits to very wealthy people and corporations at the expense of most other Californians and Americans, just as her nearly billionaire husband-businessman would appreciate.

Some days as a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee she blithely allows the Bush administration and its national security apparatus to deceive Congress about Iraq and lately about Iran even though she could easily read good journalists on the web and discover the nonsense being perpetrated and passed along through her, including about Iran's involvement in Iraq. Some days she is enabling not only the foreign affairs lies and agenda of the Bushies but also their domestic goal of turning the federal courts into bastions of corporate, police state and racist control of the society, as she helped do by anointing onto the Federal Appeals Court an overtly anti-black and anti-gay Southern right wing Republican, Mississippi Judge Leslie Southwick. And although voting against Samuel Alito to be on the Supreme Court, she stopped a possible filibuster of the man who has since given every sign he will help destroy the Constitution and end abortion rights for women (and has already demonstrated he lied to Congress with a promise to respect legal precedent). Of Alito Feinstein blithely stated, “I was impressed with his ability to maintain a very even demeanor,” she said on CBS’”Face the Nation.” “I think there is an additional weight you must give to his background, his qualifications and his ability,” she said.

So we are not dealing here with the brightest bulb, the most courageous warrior of principle, some great defender of truth and justice and the American way. Not even dealing with someone who does her homework. She is instead a fair representative of everything wrong with the Democratic Party and