|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
The End of America', by Naomi Wolf (October 31, 2008)
"I don't call Bush a fascist. If you look carefully at my language, I am very considered. What I do talk about is "fascist tactics". One definition of "fascist" is when the state informs against the individual in an effort to exclude democracy. And there's no question that that is what's happening now.
If you look at history, you can see that there are 10 steps for turning an open society into a dictatorship. This process took place in "fascist shifts" ranging from Italy and Germany in the 1920s and 1930s to the Latin American coups of the 1970s and beyond. And, difficult as this is to contemplate, it is clear that each of these 10 steps has already been initiated in the USA by the Bush administration.
With its jails in Iraq and Afghanistan, and, of course, Guantanamo in Cuba, America certainly has its gulag now. Plus, in our film you see footage of the 2008 Republican National Convention in St Paul, where 400 US citizens were arrested for protesting; footage that was buried in the ground by one of the protesters, but survived.
The fact that the President can call anyone an enemy combatant now and hold them in solitary confinement for three years; the fact that you've got torture camps; the fact that they can "render" people - if this isn't using force against the individual in a effort to undermine democratic process, I don't know what is.
On 1 October, Bush deployed the First Brigade in the United States of America - that's 3,000 to 5,000 warriors redeployed from Iraq, battle-hardened, with tanks, with weapons. The army say their mission is crowd control and dealing with unruly individuals. That violates the Constitution and years of making sure the military don't police civilian streets. It's one definition of a police state. Then there's the federalised National Guard, not to mention Blackwater (the private security company).
I'm heartened by how The End of America has resonated with people. At my events now, it's conservatives and liberals attending because everyone gets that something very sinister is going on. That's what the film does: it shows how these individual stories we are familiar with fit into a much larger pattern.
We're not out of the woods, even if there's a miracle of a transparent, accountable, uncontested, not-defrauded Barack Obama victory. We're still in trouble without a citizens' movement to restore these checks and balances, to roll back these laws, because Obama will be subjected to the same pressures our current situation would give any leader.
My book notes that there's a giant profit motive in shredding the Constitution - telecommunications companies, weapons manufacturers, all of them are shifting into surveillance and security technology. And they're writing laws to facilitate security officials. So Obama will be faced with those pressures - and that's why citizens have to be a counterpressure.
The Founders knew that, without checks and balances, the best-intentioned leaders are going to attempt to surveil the opposition, intimidate their commentators, and threaten their journalists with prosecution under the Espionage Act.
I want to sign people up, across party lines, to create a powerful citizens' movement. I just met Michael Kirk, the distinguished documentary director for Frontline, and he said - which is true - that (Dick) Cheney and (David) Addington have buried time-bombs so deep in secret legislation that we're never going to find them, as they wait to be activated during the next Republican regime.
We may have thought of the American Constitution as a very boring part of civics education in middle school, but it is actually this very, very precious radical document that protects us in a very personal way.
For me, there's this comic component: we've been OK with a foreign policy that perverts democracies around the world, so long as our liberties were secure at home. And now we're experiencing the same kind of intimidation here that we tolerated around the world for so long. The urgency of the timing is why there such a huge distribution plan going on in the USA for this film. It's even been made available online for free.
I knew nothing about the film-making process; it's all new to me. But there are these two remarkable Emmy-nominated film-makers, Annie Sundberg and Ricki Stern, who made The Trials of Darryl Hunt, about a man who spent 20 years in prison for a brutal rape/murder he did not commit, and The Devil Came on Horseback, about Darfur. I thought: "Oh wow, if only we can get these women to tell this story." And they got these amazing interviews. These ordinary Americans I'd written about, that I knew from newspaper clippings; they found them, and senior people in the military and journalism. I tried to be as useful as I could, in the sense that I tried to give the best lecture I could, which they intercut through the film. But it's their movie. I knew I'd be well served, so I just watched them work their magic. "
The War against Citizens and Our Freedom, by Naomi Wolf, powellsbooks.blog (October 30, 2008)
"I have been travelling around the country for five weeks now, flying home on breaks to be with my kids. The message — what do we do to fight and win this war against citizens and against our freedom.
While I have had to focus on assimilating new news and information, checking reports, blogging and taping and speaking, my mind is so full of the people I have met and the stories they have told. Each city has crystallized a scene or moment that will stay with me forever. I wish I could show you each of them. They are the real story.
North Carolina: I gave a speech at UNC. A lovely mother of a beautiful 19-year-old girl brings her to me. The young woman is a Ron Paul supporter and she is on fire to change the world. She is one of those shining lights — a star, just radiating a hunger for truth and a readiness to get on her path. The mother is stoic at first — telling me her daughter is determined to go further with her activism and she, the mom, is scared. I don't blame her: in my talk I had referred to the many escalating kinds of harassment and intimidation activists from all walks of life are facing. I blurt out — half-joking — the mom in me speaking, not the citizen — that if she was my child I would lock her up to keep her from getting into all this. The mother notes sadly — and half-joking — that she would like to but can't — the young woman is of age. Suddenly the mother is weeping and I am holding her. I cannot honestly tell her not to worry. I say I will keep her and her family in my prayers and she says she will do the same for me.
Later, at drinks, a student — who has come of age in the Bush years — notes that "people say you can say anything you want here but it's not really true. You can get blowback." Her professor remarks that a local right-wing talk show has been encouraging listeners to pressure the administration to discourage them from letting people like me on campus to speak. She adds that students are encouraged to tape their teachers to catch them saying anything that might be "political" and that her department head, rather than defying those tape recorders, tells faculty to be cautious in what they say.
In Chicago, a young man — Ian Bicking — comes up to me after my talk. Middle-class, middle-American, the suburban guy next door in every way. He is trembling with emotion. His sister, Monica Bicking, is one of the "RNC Eight." She was charged as "a terrorist" for protesting at the RNC under the Minnesota Patriot Act and is facing a quarter of a million dollars in legal fees and years of her life fighting the charges even if she is successful in defeating them. Years more if she is found guilty. He is in computers. His girlfriend or fiancee is a potter. A quarter of a million dollars is hard for most anyone to come by. I feel the fear and grief around him that I sense when I read about people whose families are targeted by the State in Chechnya or Turkey. I tell him I will ask people to raise money for her.
I was told before I left by members of the Ron Paul community that many are under continual surveillance and that their materials were confiscated by Secret Service at the RNC. Also in Chicago, the head of the state Libertarian Party says he thinks he is on the Watch List.
Seattle — I tell the audience about the deployment of the First Brigade to — somewhere in the United States. I explain why this is so terrifying a step — we have been protected from military on our streets for 200 years by the Insurrection Act of 1807 and by Posse Comitatus of 1879. This brigade — three to four thousand battle-hardened warriors — have been redeployed here from Iraq, with lethal and nonlethal weapons and an initial stated mission of "crowd control." (A month later, not a single mainstream media outlet has reported on their whereabouts or mission, let alone asked questions.) A young man in the audience tells me his brother is with the First Brigade and they are "engaged in exercises." He will tell me where after the talk. I have his number but have not yet called him. Honestly, I am reluctant to find out. Last time I was in Washington State — Spokane — an audience member had told me and others had confirmed that Blackwater had been engaged in exercises on government land and that Secret Service had taken offices on a floor of a tower in the local University.
I meet another young man — a firefighter — who has started an organization of firefighters for "9-11 Truth." He is with his lieutenant. They explain to me why, as professional firefighters, they are raising questions about the "official story." I am not a firefighter, of course, or a physicist or an engineer, but the emotional tenor of the explanations they give me about what they see seem very solidly grounded in their own professional experience. Both men strike me as individuals of balance and integrity, very practical and sincere men and very down-to-earth. Given the delicacy of the role of firefighters in 9-11, and how much blowback these men could receive, it seems more notable to me that they have come forward with their questions than it does to me that architects or engineers or academics have formed such organizations. They do not strike me as wild-eyed fanatics. They strike me as they guys you would want to have save you from a fire.
San Francisco — I am honored to share a stage with Daniel Ellsberg — who had risked 120 years in prison in order to release the classified Pentagon Papers to American citizens. He noted the last time I was with him that all the things that got Nixon impeached are now legal.
There are about a thousand people there from all walks of life.
I feel hopeful.
More of this journal tomorrow — thanks for joining me on the journey. "
The Front Lines of the War against Citizens, by Naomi Wolf, powellsbooks.blog (October 31, 2008)
"Picking up again from my journal from the front lines of the war against citizens —
Baltimore: we are here at the Baltimore Book Festival. Beautiful fall day, joyful crowds, stalls of booksellers, Baltimore's funky charm. In the Q and A afterwards, regarding the subject of surveillance, an audience member notes that the BALTIMORE BOOK FESTIVAL had been infiltrated and was under surveillance. This was reported and confirmed in the local press. I looked around at the elderly ladies dressed elegantly for the event, at the children running around in the sun, at the crowds at the stall next door who were celebrating the magical speaker and writer Cornel West and thought of how it worked for readers and writers behind the Iron Curtain
All these citizens interested in books: subversives.
San Francisco, the Century Club: a wonderful evening, many older people, many of them conservative, very concerned about what is happening to their nation. Afterwards a well-dressed, tall man comes to talk to me. He looks and speaks exactly like an affluent WASP businessman. 'I was a Democratic donor,' he said. 'Shortly after I gave a fundraiser, the FBI broke into my house. I was arrested and spent two years in Federal prison.' I did not get a chance to ask him what the charges were, but I asked him if I could interview him, if he would go on the record. He said he is afraid to because he is on parole and is just trying to forget those years as a prisoner. But he did add: 'There are labor camps now as part of the prison system.' This is something I had heard before: that certain prisons are being reorganized as formal work camps.
Berkeley: it has gotten to the point at which I just do not want to absorb some of what people are coming to tell me. And I don't have a newspaper behind me or a team of investigative reporters: I can't report these stories out as the New York Times can or the Wall Street Journal to assess if these are lone madmen telling me delusional tales or if they are whistleblowers trying to get the word out without jeopordizing themselves. This one I really did not want to hear: another perfectly ordinary-looking professional man in his forties — well-spoken, apparently well-educated — told me he was a computer engineer.
He said he had been called to set up the computer network system for a facility near Bakersfield that he asserted was massive and that he identified as a FEMA camp. He said: 'I saw it: I was there. I saw the train cars with the shackles on the floor. They are white.' I told him no reporter could do anything with what he was claiming without his being willing to say it on the record or on background at least, and without a second source to confirm it. These camps have been rumored for years but there is no solid reporting documenting any rumors or dispelling them. He said he was now a US citizen but he had immigrated from another country and would not go on the record because he was scared about maintaining his immigration status.
Madman or concerned citizen? I cannot know. I want, of course, to believe he is suffering from a delusional disorder.
Back home, I check my email. A lovely young woman I had met in Chicago had told me, trembling, that she had protested at the RNC — she knew her group had been under surveillance, and a reporter for a New York area newspaper had confirmed to me that at the RNC he and other reporters had seen police officers who then reappeared dressed as protesters and infiltrated their groups. (I had asked him to go on the record and he refused.) The young woman said that she had come home a day or so later to find that her apartment had been broken into and nothing touched. She said she was very scared to come forward but would consider it. I asked her by email if she would go on the record — and I never got an email back.
New York again: I am interviewed by Michelangelo Signorile, the well-known journalist and commentator. He mentions that he was at the RNC and that agents that had no identification whatsoever were stopping cars, including his. He said they were in blue jumpsuits. He noted that they could have been Blackwater or even other foreign nationals, there was no way to know, and they were armed. He remarked very honestly — a point I have been trying to make for some time — that when faced with an armed man with no identifying marker, one is disinclined to resist his demand to search one's car — or to demand anything. I aked if I could quote him by name and he said sure.
I talked last night to a radio host in Portland, Oregon, one of the coolest and most laid-back of cities.
She informs me that Vera Katz, the Democratic mayor, had sent Portland police to Israel to be trained in crowd control and that they had come back much more ready to engage in violent control of protesters. She described new police trucks that had officers or agents hanging off the back of them, like military trucks.
She said that the Oregonian had distributed the hate DVD inciting hostility against Muslims. In spite of many objections from readers and citizens, the paper was unmoved. They cited Free Speech, which is laudable. But I am certain the Oregonian would not distribute violently sexual (or even, perhaps, violently anti-Semitic) DVDs if asked to by an advertiser. I suggested she check with the publisher abut that and meanwhile urged her listeners to boycott their local newspapers' advertisers until there would be real investigative reporting of the First Brigade and other Constitutional issues.
Matthis Chareaux comes over to my house — the wonderful 24-year-old Afghanistan vet who refused to redeploy after five years' service to a war that he points out many members of Cngress say is illegal. He went to Congress and said he was not going because he could not obey an illegal order and he said, 'I will be in Brooklyn if you want to come arrest me.' For months he did not hear of any legal or other action against him. A few days ago he receivd a letter telling him he is facing a court-martial. Major David Antoon says that more deserters or soldiers who refuse to redeploy or resist 'stop-loss' orders are prosecuted than war criminals in this conflict. He tells me that his friend Nicholas Morgan is still in the hospital, having been trampled by police officers on horseback when the Iraq Vets against the War went to the last Presidential debate to ask why veterans' issues were not being addressed. You can send checks for Matthis' legal fees or Nicholas' medical bills to IVAW.org.
Matthis also tells me something I just do not want and am not psychologically prepared to hear. For a year now I have been warning people that Bush can deploy the national guard and declare martial law only by declaring a 'state of emergency.' He does not need Congress to do so and he can define it however he like. Matthis caims that we are ALREADY under a declared state of emergency. WHAT? I think. He shows me his redeployment letter which references the 'state of emergency' that Bush declared several years ago in response to North Korean access to 'fissile material.' I am not a lawyer, so cannot tell if these two terms have the same meaning and value under the law or if this is entirely irrelevant. One more crucial lead I am supposed to follow up on — fearing, again, to find out more in case Matthis is not, in fact, overreacting or overreading. But either way, this is the first I had heard of that Presidential action regarding North Korea. Why are citizens informing me of far more significant developments than the national newspapers and othr media outlets are? I know some of the answers, but they make me very sad. In East Germany citizens had to tell one another what was really happening because state news sources, of course, could not be relied upon. Matthis says that as an Army journalist he was hearing firsthand reports of the torture of prisoners six months before the Abu Ghraib scandal and was told repeatedly not to go anywhere with the story. He had sent an anonymous letter to Human Rights Watch about it.
He says that when soldiers ask their Army therapists about what they can do to avoid redeployment — if they have PTSD, for instance, and they know they cannnot do it after years at the front --
the counselors say: become a fugitive, redeploy, or kill yourself. I tell him I do not believe that. He says several friends of his is IVAW have reported that response firsthand from their shrinks. I still don't believe it.
Today in the Times I read a new report that the suicide rate among Iraq and Afghanistan veterans is at an all-time high, and no one really knows why."
The Evidence Establishes, Without Question, That Republican Rule Is Dangerous, by John Dean, findlaw.com (October 31, 2008)
"Occasionally, during the past eight years of writing this column, I have addressed the remarkably dangerous manner in which Republican Party officials rule the nation when they control one or more of the three branches of the federal government. Over the same period, I've also made this argument, even more directly and loudly, in three books on the subject.
In this column, I will be more pointed on this subject than I have ever been, while also repeating a few key facts that I have raised earlier -- because Election Day 2008 now provides the only clear remedy for the ills of Republican rule.
The Republican Approach to Government: Authoritarian Rule
Republicans rule, rather than govern, when they are in power by imposing their authoritarian conservative philosophy on everyone, as their answer for everything. This works for them because their interest is in power, and in what it can do for those who think as they do. Ruling, of course, must be distinguished from governing, which is a more nuanced process that entails give-and-take and the kind of compromises that are often necessary to find a consensus and solutions that will best serve the interests of all Americans.
Republicans' authoritarian rule can also be characterized by its striking incivility and intolerance toward those who do not view the world as Republicans do. Their insufferable attitude is not dangerous in itself, but it is employed to accomplish what they want, which it to take care of themselves and those who work to keep them in power.
Authoritarian conservatives are primarily anti-government, except where they believe the government can be useful to impose moral or social order (for example, with respect to matters like abortion, prayer in schools, or prohibiting sexually-explicit information from public view). Similarly, Republicans' limited-government attitude does not apply regarding national security, where they feel there can never be too much government activity - nor are the rights and liberties of individuals respected when national security is involved. Authoritarian Republicans do oppose the government interfering with markets and the economy, however -- and generally oppose the government's doing anything to help anyone they feel should be able to help themselves.
In my book Broken Government: How Republican Rule Destroyed the Legislative, Executive and Judicial Branches [1], I set forth the facts regarding the consequences of the Republicans' controlling government for too many years. No Republican -- nor anyone else, for that matter -- has refuted these facts, and for good reason: They are irrefutable.
The McCain/Palin Ticket Perfectly Fits the Authoritarian Conservative Mold
During the 2008 presidential campaign, Senator John McCain and Governor Sarah Palin, the Republican candidates, have shown themselves to be unapologetic and archetypical authoritarian conservatives. Indeed, their campaign has warmed the hearts of fellow authoritarians, who applaud them for their negativity, nastiness, and dishonest ploys and only criticize them for not offering more of the same.
The McCain/Palin campaign has assumed a typical authoritarian posture: The candidates provide no true, specific proposals to address America's needs. Rather, they simply ask voters to "trust us" and suggest that their opponents - Senators Barack Obama and Joe Biden - are not "real Americans" like McCain, Palin, and the voters they are seeking to court. Accordingly, McCain and Plain have called Obama "a socialist," "a redistributionist," "a Marxist," and "a communist" - without a shred of evidence to support their name-calling, for these terms are pejorative, rather than in any manner descriptive. This is the way authoritarian leaders operate.
In my book Conservatives Without Conscience [2], I set forth the traits of authoritarian leaders and followers, which have been distilled from a half-century of empirical research, during which thousands of people have voluntarily been interviewed by social scientists. The touch points in these somewhat-overlapping lists of character traits provide a clear picture of the characters of both John McCain and Sarah Palin.
McCain, especially, fits perfectly as an authoritarian leader. Such leaders possess most, if not all, of these traits:
 |
dominating |
|
|
opposes equality |
|
|
desirous of personal power |
|
|
amoral |
|
|
intimidating and bullying |
|
|
faintly hedonistic |
|
|
vengeful |
|
|
pitiless |
|
|
exploitive |
|
|
manipulative |
|
|
dishonest |
|
|
cheats to win |
|
|
highly prejudiced (racist, sexist, homophobic) |
|
|
mean-spirited |
|
|
militant |
|
|
nationalistic |
|
|
tells others what they want to hear |
|
|
takes advantage of "suckers" |
|
|
specializes in creating false images to sell self |
|
|
may or may not be religious |
|
|
usually politically and economically conservative/Republican |
Incidentally, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney also can be described by these well-defined and typical traits -- which is why a McCain presidency is so likely to be nearly identical to a Bush presidency.
Clearly, Sarah Palin also has some qualities typical of authoritarian leaders, not to mention almost all of the traits found among authoritarian followers. Specifically, such followers can be described as follows:
|
|
submissive to authority |
|
|
aggressive on behalf of authority |
|
|
highly conventional in their behavior |
|
|
highly religious |
|
|
possessing moderate to little education |
|
|
trusting of untrustworthy authorities |
|
|
prejudiced (particularly against homosexuals and followers of religions other than their own) |
|
|
mean-spirited |
|
|
narrow-minded |
|
|
intolerant |
|
|
bullying |
|
|
zealous |
|
|
dogmatic |
|
|
uncritical toward chosen authority |
|
|
hypocritical |
|
|
inconsistent and contradictory |
|
|
prone to panic easily |
|
|
highly self-righteous |
|
|
moralistic |
|
|
strict disciplinarians |
|
|
severely punitive |
|
|
demanding loyalty and returning it |
|
|
possessing little self-awareness |
|
|
usually politically and economically conservative/Republican |
The leading authority on right-wing authoritarianism, a man who devoted his career to developing hard empirical data about these people and their beliefs, is Robert Altemeyer. Altemeyer, a social scientist based in Canada, flushed out these typical character traits in decades of testing.
Altemeyer believes about 25 percent of the adult population in the United States is solidly authoritarian (with that group mostly composed of followers, and a small percentage of potential leaders). It is in these ranks of some 70 million that we find the core of the McCain/Palin supporters. They are people who are, in Altemeyer's words, are "so self-righteous, so ill-informed, and so dogmatic that nothing you can say or do will change their minds."
The Problem with Electing Authoritarian Conservatives
What is wrong with being an authoritarian conservative? Well, if you want to take the country where they do, nothing. "They would march America into a dictatorship and probably feel that things had improved as a result," Altemeyer told me. "The problem is that these authoritarian followers are much more active than the rest of the country. They have the mentality of 'old-time religion' on a crusade, and they generously give money, time and effort to the cause. They proselytize; they lick stamps; they put pressure on loved ones; and they revel in being loyal to a cohesive group of like thinkers. And they are so submissive to their leaders that they will believe and do virtually anything they are told. They are not going to let up and they are not going to go away."
I would nominate McCain's "Joe the Plumber" as a new poster-boy of the authoritarian followers. He is a believer, and he has signed on. On November 4, 2008, we will learn how many more Americans will join the ranks of the authoritarians.
Frankly, the fact that the pre-election polls are close - after eight years of authoritarian leadership from Bush and Cheney, and given its disastrous results -- shows that many Americans either do not realize where a McCain/Palin presidency might take us, or they are happy to go there. Frankly, it scares the hell out of me, for there is only one way to deal with these conservative zealots: Keep them out of power.
This election should be a slam dunk for Barack Obama, who has run a masterful campaign. It was no small undertaking winning the nomination from Hillary Clinton, and in doing so, he has shown without any doubt (in my mind anyway) that he is not only qualified to be president, but that he might be a once-in-a-lifetime leader who can forever change the nation and the world for the better.
If Obama is rejected on November 4th for another authoritarian conservative like McCain, I must ask if Americans are sufficiently intelligent to competently govern themselves. I can understand authoritarian conservatives voting for McCain, for they know no better. It is well-understood that most everyone votes with his or her heart, not his or her head. Polls show that 81 percent of Americans "feel" (in their hearts and their heads) that our country is going the wrong way. How could anyone with such thoughts and feelings vote for more authoritarian conservatism, which has done so much to take the nation in the wrong direction?
We will all find out on (or about) November 5th. "
Talking with Fascists, by Andy Newman, Socialist Unity (October 20, 2008)
"At lunch time I bumped into someone who used to have a national leadership role in the BNP until he was expelled from the party at the end of last year. I wanted to have a chat with him as I understood by reading his blog that he is on a journey away from the organised far right, so we went for a cup of tea in a local café.
At this point the whole thing became a little surreal because on the way to the café we met Steve Wakefield, the mayor of Swindon in his full mayoral regalia, who had a brief chat with me about Swindon’s new library being opened today; and then when we were in the café, in came Roderick Bluh, the Tory leader of the council, and Justin Tomlinson, the Conservative PPC for Swindon North. I was able to be quite sincere in congratulating them about Swindon’s first permanent municipal central library – something that Swindon Labour Party bizarrely didn’t manage in over 50 years! To his credit Justin’s face froze into a mask of horror as I introduced my companion, and Justin shook hands with him as if picking up a highly contagious piece of medical waste.
Up until a few years ago I wouldn’t have spoken to BNP members myself – though when a teenager I did know friends of friends who were in the NF. What changed my mind was the experience of getting several late night phone calls from the now convicted BNP terrorist Mark Bullman.
Bullman is a dangerous character, a rabid anti-Semite and self-confessed Hitler lover, who was eventually convicted of racially aggravated arson, after trying to burn down Swindon’s Broad Street Mosque. I knew it was him as soon as I saw the pictures, because the Swastika daubed on the outside wall was identical to the rather idiosyncratic style that Bullman had used in letters to me. But before I could go to the police I heard that Bullman had already been arrested. Bullman was registered fund holder for Wiltshire BNP.
Complaints had been made to the national BNP by the local BNP branch about Bullman’s open nazism, violence and drinking, but Nick Griffin had defended him; and Bullman was allegedly encouraged in his trajectory by a leading “respectable” member of the BNP in the West Country.
I decided when Bullman contacted me that it was simply safer to talk to him than snub him, and establish a human relationship, and impress upon him that I was a real person with young children, not just an objectified “enemy”.
So I was interested to read this discussion paper by Ribble Valley Against Racism. It is worth reading the whole paper, but here is an extract::
Anti-fascists often say that there is little point in trying to persuade fascists to change their minds. The assumption is that they are too far gone to listen to anything that challenges their world view. The recommendation is to focus on enlightening the ‘soft’ racists who might be easily led to more extreme views. The fact that fascists at all levels in the movement have indeed rejected everything they previously stood for indicates that it is worth thinking about what causes them to turn. The lessons below are presented as suggested points of departure for further exploration.
There is no single easy explanation of why people get into or out of extreme right politics. The roots of fascism are not necessarily to be found in some kind of standard fascist personality such as the ‘Authoritarian Personality’. There may be some people whose basic psychological make-up predisposes them towards the extreme right. However, Maureen Stowe illustrates how a person can become involved and even take the high public profile of becoming elected to the local council without even knowing that she was representing a nazi party.
A number of psychological mechanisms and social processes can be identified. If we can tease them out we can get a better understanding of the lives of those who get involved in this destructive approach to life.
… The question arises as to how best to elicit any empathy a fascist might have so that they can appreciate the human cost of their activities. How can we appeal to their essential humanity?
Of course, empathy may not be accessible for some fascists. They may not be capable of responding positively to any such appeal.
A major lesson lies in the importance of maintaining personal contact and dialogue between fascists and anti-fascists. The usual situation is that the two groups polarise, each demonising the other. The end result is that members of each group talk within their respective groups encouraging more and more extreme dislike between the opposing sides.
This is a vicious circle in which conflict escalates. Strong suspicion between the two groups means that dialogue across the divide and building trust is likely to be very difficult.
Group pressures within each group serve to maintain and strengthen their cohesion and boundaries, so perpetuating the conflict. For members of either side, to have any friendly contact with the opposition is likely to be seen as betrayal and suspect by members of one’s own group. Loyalty to one’s own group is highly valued. Anything which looks like disloyalty is seen as threatening the survival of one’s own group.
“For my friends, it would have been inconceivable that one might actually talk to a member of the National Front, let alone have a conversation.”
Anti-fascists need to learn to be more open to contact with fascists. For most people, quite apart from not wanting to appear disloyal, it will be difficult to overcome strong emotions aroused by the opinions and activities of nazis. However, keeping the door open to the possibility of contact and dialogue is necessary.
Anti-fascists have to condemn what is wrong and make it clear that racist actions are not acceptable in a decent society. How do you do this while at the same time maintaining the possibility of dialogue? This requires skills which most of us don’t have. Making the commitment to acquiring those skills will help. Name calling is much easier. The driving force of fascism is hate. If we oppose hate with hate we are in danger of becoming that which we are trying to overcome. Commitment to respect for all includes respect for those we disagree with and who hate us. The trick is to learn to communicate respect for the person while making it clear that you disapprove of their actions and words: love the sinner, hate the sin. If you can do this then you are more likely to be able to continue the dialogue.
Quakers have done much work on low key dialogue which provides useful suggestions.
John Woolman (1720-1772) was an American Quaker who visited Quaker slave owners. He respectfully discussed slavery, appealing to conscience and without blame. Over many years he quietly persuaded many to give up slave owning before the main growth of the abolition movement.
Creative Listening was devised by Rachel Pinney in 1962 to encourage greater understanding between political opponents. It was later applied to a variety of situations, especially in therapy with children. The idea is to listen respectfully and attentively to someone who holds a view you disagree with. You explain beforehand that you will not attempt to persuade them or attack them or even present your own views.
Pinney says of the speaker “Not only is he heard, he hears himself. This is a fantastic experience, and it sends the speaker away rethinking the subject, often for weeks to come.” The listener, by giving his total attention to the speaker, “will have a brand new experience: by not interrupting or arguing, he will hear things he has never heard before.”
Personally, I think that it is necessary to put forward your own views, but also to try to explore areas of common ground as much as possible. What we need to do is not only politically oppose organised far-right politics, but also allow individual members of far-right organisations an exit strategy.
The chap I spoke to today shared quite a few insights about the current state of the BNP, and right wing politics, and you will all be pleased to know that he is personally dropping out of politics altogether."
Welcome to the Final Stages of the Coup…, by Larisa Alexandrova, Huffington Post (September 21, 2008)
"In 2000, the long fought for and long admired democracy of the United States of America began a slow and steady decline toward fascism - a Bush family tradition - with the installment of a president - a man the citizens overwhelmingly rejected (although the funny math told a still believed myth) - by a few corrupt judges on the US Supreme Court. That coup is now nearly complete and checkmate is all but unavoidable.
Let me first point you to the Bush administration's so-called Wall Street bailout bill, here, so that you can see for yourself that this treachery is being conducted in the light of day. Fascism is finally and formally out of the right-wing closet even if the F word is not yet openly being used (although it should be, and often).
Now, if you do not yet understand that the Wall Street crisis is a man-made disaster done through intentional deregulation and corruption, I have a bridge in Alaska to sell to you (or Sara Palin does anyway). This manufactured crisis is now to be remedied, if the fiscal fascists get their way, with the total transfer of Congressional powers (the few that still remain) to the Executive Branch and the total transfer of public funds into corporate (via government as intermediary) hands.
Adam Davidson of NPR blogs about the so-called bailout bill as follows:
I would guess that this has to be one of the biggest peacetime transfers of power from Congress to the Administration in history. (Anyone know?). Certainly one of the most concise.
The Treasury Secretary can buy broadly defined assets, on any terms he wants, he can hire anyone he wants to do it and can appoint private sector companies as financial deputies of the US government. And he can write whatever regulation he thinks are needed.
Most importantly, Davidson points to this passage in the bill:
Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.
The Bush family, in the form of Prescott Bush, has tried a more aggressive coup before in order to install fascism in this country. This treasonous plot was called "the Business Plot," because the high-level plotters - including Prescott Bush - were Wall Street men who openly supported fascism.
It seems this time around, the Bush family is trying the more subtle approach to open bloodshed: first create a crisis, then under the guise of addressing that crisis, overthrow democracy. Yes, it does sound terribly conspiracy-theory-esque when explained just this way. But what else does one call a criminal conspiracy to destroy Congressional powers permanently, alter Judicial powers permanently, and steal public funds?
As I see it now, we have but two options and I have long alluded to hoping against hope that one of these options would not be the only one left to a peaceful people. The first and frankly most preferable option is for Congress to immediately begin impeachment proceedings against the members of this latest Business Plot.
No time needs to be wasted on hearings as we already now have in writing, formally as presented to Congress, the intentions of this administration to nullify Congressional powers permanently, to alter Judicial powers permanently, and to openly steal public funds using as blackmail the total collapse of the US economy if these powers are not handed over. You do see how this is blackmail, do you not? You do see how this is a manufactured crisis precisely designed to be used as blackmail, do you not?
The other option, the one I have long prayed we would never need to even consider, is a total revolution. But, If Congress won't act in its own self-defense, in the defense of democracy, in defense of us - the people who have elected them to protect us from this very danger - then what is left for us to do? I don't want to see it come down to this, but I fear that it will. Put your party politics aside right now. We are in a crisis so dangerous that should these people succeed in their coup, your party affiliation will no longer matter, your American flag will be a nice collectible item of something that once was, and your version of God will be worshiped in secrecy because your freedoms will be owned by the few.
You are no longer Republicans, Democrats, or any shade of voter. You do not live in a swing state or a solid colored state. You are simply this: an American. That is the only side that matters. So call your members of Congress and demand, no, declare that unless they do their duty to the Constitution and to us, we will move to the streets - not because we want to, but because our founding fathers demanded this duty of each and every citizen in the face of such a domestic enemy. Demand - as is your right - that this bill be voted against and demand - as is your right - that the people plotting this treachery be held to account. We are either a nation of laws or we are no longer a democracy. Pick a side, because there won't be another time, another moment, another chance to be a patriot.
UPDATE
You guys have to read this, the guy is near ready to call 911 and report me to the secret police for daring to suggest that I fear that there may be a revolution and want everyone to contact Congress and demand no passage of the Coup Wall Street bill (oh, and did I mention that he calls himself the Confederate Yankee?)
"I can only hope the lawful authorities are monitoring such enticements towards insurrection with all due seriousness, and find a nice, well-lit and cheery cell for those who require one."
Enticements? I did not realize I was standing on a street- corner pulling on my fishnet stockings in hopes of starting a revolt. Now let us examine what I actually wrote - I will bold the key points:
As I see it now, we have but two options and I have long alluded to hoping against hope that one of these options would not be the only one left to a peaceful people. The first and frankly most preferable option is for Congress to immediately begin impeachment proceedings against the members of this latest Business Plot.
No time needs to be wasted on hearings as we already now have in writing, formally as presented to Congress, the intentions of this administration to nullify Congressional powers permanently, to alter Judicial powers permanently, and to openly steal public funds using as blackmail the total collapse of the US economy if these powers are not handed over. You do see how this is blackmail, do you not? You do see how this is a manufactured crisis precisely designed to be used as blackmail, do you not?
The other option, the one I have long prayed we would never need to even consider, is a total revolution. But, If Congress won't act in its own self-defense, in the defense of democracy, in defense of us - the people who have elected them to protect us from this very danger - then what is left for us to do? I don't want to see it come down to this, but I fear that it will.
Hmmm, sounds like a massive terrorist plot, right? Oh, and don't forget to contact your members of Congress. Seriously, is this guy taking heroin with his coffee? Which part of "I hope against hope" and "I fear" is an enticement for anything that would require me to be arrested and put in jail? Freedom of speech, a no-no in Confederate Americana. Stop by and tell this guy what you think of his hopes that I end up in prison.
UPDATE 2
Another kook joins the distortion train and swift-boat party. This one is actually now claiming that I am calling for an insurrection (wow, in a few hours they will be claiming that I armed the rebels, and charging the Bastille). And if you read the comments section of this blog, you will find yet more examples of rabid xenophobia and bigotry.
And yet even more stunning? Not a one of them can seem to find the time to react to the unlimited power the Executive Branch is demanding. Perhaps they are too busy eating their racist Obama waffles?
On a side note, please use the phrase "insurrection in bed" in every comment since the right wing requires a distraction, even an imaginary one.
UPDATE 3
I have gotten some emails where people appear confused by my use of the Caesar quote. Just to clarify, this is in reference to Bush as Caesar, not my support of Caesar. This is in reference to the massive Bush power grab buried in the bailout "coup" bill. Sorry for any confusion.;)"
The Battle Plan II: Sarah "Evita" Palin, the Muse of the Coming Police State, by Naomi Wolf, Huffington Post (September 22, 2008)
"Please understand what you are looking at when you look at Sarah "Evita" Palin. You are looking at the designated muse of the coming American police state.
You have to understand how things work in a closing society in order to understand "Palin Power." A gang or cabal seizes power, usually with an affable, weak figurehead at the fore. Then they will hold elections -- but they will make sure that the election will be corrupted and that the next affable, weak figurehead is entirely in their control. Remember, Russia has Presidents; Russia holds elections. Dictators and gangs of thugs all over the world hold elections. It means nothing. When a cabal has seized power you can have elections and even presidents, but you don't have freedom.
I realized early on with horror what I was seeing in Governor Palin: the continuation of the Rove-Cheney cabal, but this time without restraints. I heard her echo Bush 2000 soundbites ("the heart of America is on display") and realized Bush's speechwriters were writing her -- not McCain's -- speeches. I heard her tell George Bush's lies -- not McCain's -- to the American people, linking 9/11 to Iraq. I heard her make fun of Barack Obama for wanting to prevent the torture of prisoners -- this is Rove-Cheney's enthusiastic S and M, not McCain's, who, though he shamefully colluded in the 2006 Military Tribunals Act, is also a former prisoner of war and wrote an eloquent Newsweek piece in 2005 opposing torture. I saw that she was even styled by the same skillful stylist (neutral lipstick, matte makeup, dark colors) who turned Katharine Harris from a mall rat into a stateswoman and who styles all the women in the Bush orbit --but who does not bother to style Cindy McCain.
Then I saw and heard more. Palin is embracing lawlessness in defying Alaskan Legislature subpoenas --this is what Rove-Cheney, and not McCain, believe in doing. She uses mafia tactics against critics, like the police commissioner who was railroaded for opposing handguns in Alaskan battered women's shelters -- Rove's style, not McCain's. I realized what I was seeing.
Reports confirmed my suspicions: Palin,
not McCain, is the FrankenBarbie of the Rove-Cheney cabal. The strategy became
clear. Time magazine reported that Rove is "dialed in" to the McCain campaign.
Rove's protégé Steve Schmidt is now campaign manager. And
Politico reported that Rove was heavily
involved in McCain's vice presidential selection. Finally a new report shows
that there are dozens of Bush and Rove
operatives surrounding Sarah Palin and orchestrating her every move.
What's the plan? It is this. McCain doesn't matter. Reputable dermatologists are
discussing the fact that in simply actuarial terms, John McCain has a virulent
and life-threatening form of skin cancer. It is the elephant in the room, but we
must discuss the health of the candidates: doctors put survival rates for
someone his age at two to four years. I believe the Rove-Cheney cabal is using
Sarah Palin as a stalking horse, an Evita figure, to put a popular, populist
face on the coming police state and be the talk show hostess for the end of
elections as we know them. If McCain-Palin get in, this will be the last true
American election. She will be working for Halliburton, KBR, Rove and Cheney
into the foreseeable future -- for a decade perhaps -- a puppet "president" for
the same people who have plundered our treasure, are now holding the US economy
hostage and who murdered four thousand brave young men and women in a way of
choice and lies.
How, you may ask, can I assert this? How can I argue, as I now do, that there is actually a war being ramped up against US citizens and our democracy and that Sarah Palin is the figurehead and muse for that war?
Look at the RNC. This is supposed to be
McCain's America. But you see the unmistakable theatre of Rove's S and M imagery
-- and you see stages eight, nine and ten of the steps to a dictatorship as I
outlined them in The End of America.
Preemptive arrest? Abusive arrest? "Newly released footage, which was buried to
avoid confiscation, shows riot cops arresting and abusing a giant group of
people for nothing."
Journalists were arrested -- for reporting. Amy Goodman and ABC producers
were arrested. Jane Hamsher of Firedoglake and others were forced to lie face
down as armed agents tied their hands behind their backs. The riot police wore
the black S&M gear of the Rovian fantasy life and carried the four foot batons
cops carry in North Korea. All this is not John McCain's imagery or strategy: it
is Karl Rove's.
In McCain-Palin's America, citizens who are protesting are being charged as terrorists. This means that a violent war had been declared on American citizens. A well known reporter leaked to me on background that St Paul police had dressed as protesters and, dressed in Black -- shades of the Blackshirts of 1920 -- infiltrated protest groups. There were also phalanxes of men in black wearing balaclavas, linking arms and behaving menacingly -- alleged "anarchists." Let me tell you, I have been on the left for thirty years and you can't get three lefties to wear the same t-shirt to a rally, let alone link arms and wear identical face masks: these are not our guys. Agent Provocateurs framing protesters and calling protest "terrorism" constitutes step ten of a police state:
"In what appears to be the first use of criminal charges under the 2002 Minnesota version of the Federal Patriot Act, Ramsey County Prosecutors have formally charged 8 alleged leaders of the RNC Welcoming Committee with Conspiracy to Riot in Furtherance of Terrorism... [they] 7 1/2 years in prison under the terrorism enhancement charge which allows for a 50% increase in the maximum penalty."
"Paid, confidential informants... infiltrated the RNCWC on behalf of law enforcement. They allege that members of the group sought to kidnap delegates to the RNC, assault police officers with firebombs and explosives, and sabotage airports in St. Paul. Evidence released to date does not corroborate these allegations with physical evidence or provide any other evidence for these allegations than the claims of the informants. Based on past abuses of such informants by law enforcement, the National Lawyers Guild is concerned that such police informants have incentives to lie and exaggerate threats of violence and to also act as provocateurs in raising and urging support for acts of violence."
Under the Palin-Rove police state, you will see escalating infringements on your access to a free internet:
Under the coming Palin-Rove police state, you will witness the plans now underway to bring Iraqi troops to patrol the streets of our nation. This is not McCain's fantasy: it is Rove's and Cheney's.
Under the Palin-Rove police state, there will be no further true elections. Mark Crispin Miller has done sensational and under-reported investigating t o establish that -- as I warned -- indeed the GOP staffers on the US Senate Judiciary Committee have been .
The evidence is also buried on the Website of the Majority House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.
WASHINGTON -- Republican staff members of the US Senate Judiciary Commitee infiltrated opposition computer files for a year, monitoring secret strategy memos and periodically passing on copies to the media, Senate officials told The Globe. >From the spring of 2002 until at least April 2003, members of the GOP committee staff exploited a computer glitch that allowed them to access restricted Democratic communications witho ut a password. Trolling through hundreds of memos, they were able to read talking points and accounts of private meetings discussing which judicial nominees Democrats would fight -- and with what tactics.
-- "Senate panel's GOP staff spied on Democrats" By Charlie Savage, Globe Staff | January 22, 2004
Do you think that spying like this will ever end under a Palin-Rove regime? Dream on. If she and McCain are elected, then every single strategy memo and speech and debate prep note from every opposition candidate from now and on into forever will be read by the regime in power while it is still in the computers of the challengers.
Under the Palin-Rove police state, citizens will be targeted with state cyberterrorism. Bruce Fein of the American Freedom Agenda, a former Reagan official, warned me three years ago that the Bush team went after a Republican who had crossed them through cyberstalking: they messed with his email, messed with his phones and I believe messed with his bank account -- he became a cyber-pariah, unemployable and haunted. With modern technology, there really is less place to hide from the state than there was in East Germany in the Cold War era. I remember feeling a chill: of course. That is the wave of the future once we breach the protections around citizens of FISA and the fourth amendment. That way lies the abyss for us all.
Am I trying to scare you? I am. I am trying to scare you to death and ask you to scare your Republican and independent friends most of all. How do you know when it is war on citizens? When there are mass arrests, journalists are jailed, the opposition is infiltrated, rights are stripped and leaders start to ignore the rule of law.
Almost everyone I work with on projects related to this campaign for liberty has been experiencing computer harassment: emails are stripped, messages disappear. That's not all: people's bank accounts are being tampered with: wire transfers to banks vanish in midair. I personally keep opening bank accounts that are quickly corrupted by fraud. Money vanishes. Coworkers of mine have to keep opening new email accounts as old ones become infected. And most disturbingly to me personally is the mail tampering I have both heard of and experienced firsthand. My tax returns vanished from my mailbox. All my larger envelopes arrive ripped straight open apparently by hand. When I show the postman, he says "That's impossible." Horrifyingly to me is the impact on my family. My childrens' report cards are returned again and again though perfectly addressed; their invitations are turned back; and my daughters many letters from camp? Vanished. All of them. Not one arrived. Try explaining that to a smart thirteen year old. Try explaining it in a way that still makes her feel secure and comfortable.
I am not telling you this because it's about my life. I am telling you this because it is about your life -- whoever you are, Conservative or Liberal, independent or evangelical. Your politics will not protect you in a police state. History shows that nothing portects you in a police state. This is not about my fear and anxiety: it is about what awaits you and everyone you love unless you see this for what it is:
Scharansky divided nations into "fear societies" and "free societies." Make no mistake: Sarah "Evita" Palin is Rove and Cheney's cosmetic rebranding of their fascist push: she will help to establish a true and irreversible "fear society" in this once free once proud nation. For God's sake, do not let her; do not let them."
What Would You Do If You Saw Your Nation Going Fascist?, by Gary G. Kohls, lewrockwell.com (September 24, 2008)
"Okay, so you call yourself a patriot. But what exactly do you mean by that?
Do you mean the patriotism that says "My country, right or wrong?" Or do you mean the patriotism that says "Might Makes Right?" Or the patriotism that Samuel Johnson defined as "the last refuge of the scoundrel?"
Do you mean the patriotism of the 16th-century Protestant reformers who believed that every leader of every nation, no matter how evil, was ordained by God to rule and therefore Christian citizens were to be unconditionally obedient to those leaders?
Or are you the patriot that loves your country so much that you won’t let tyrants or the corporate war machine take it over without a fight? Are you the type of patriot that is willing to have a lover’s quarrel with your nation, especially when your leaders meet what can be defined as "international war criminals?"
In order to find out which type of patriotism you or your country’s leaders adhere to, consider the following "hypothetical" situation:
Suppose you are a white, church-going, bible-believing citizen in a country that has prided itself in its inventiveness, its literacy, its art, its culture, its glory in past wars and its superpower status.
Say that you saw powerful corporations and their cronies who are in positions of political power grab control of your democratic nation’s legislature, judiciary and military by the use of deceptive propaganda and rigged elections. Suppose that you and your fellow citizens were being consistently lied to about your nation’s foreign policy.
Say that these business and political leaders somehow gained control of the highest executive office in the land and then started taking away, in rapid succession, the civil rights of many of your nation’s citizens. Suppose that the installed leader started accusing progressive, peace-loving citizens of being traitors; started silencing dissenters and imprisoning people of conscience; started purging anti-fascist resistance groups and co-opting the "liberal" press; and started censoring out opposing opinions from the public consciousness
Suppose the artists, song-writers, poets, film-makers and creative thinkers of your nation were all silenced, drugged or imprisoned.
You would be in 1930s Germany and the anti-democracy tyrants would have been Adolf Hitler and his henchmen. So now the question becomes: what would you have done if you were a 1930s-era German seeing your democratic nation going fascist?
If you were an average white, affluent, straight male citizen, with all the privilege and power granted to you by that majority status, you would have said virtually nothing in opposition, even as the rights of groups other than your own were being taken away and the members were disappearing in the middle of the night into the gulag of prisons and mental institutions.
As an average bible-believing Christian, you would probably have obeyed your war-supporting bishops or pastors in their support of Hitler (almost all of whom had pledged a solemn oath of loyalty to the Führer). You, as a conservative Christian, would have been expected to also be obedient to the rulers in Berlin in times of national crisis rather than faithfully adhering to the ethical teachings of Jesus, who forbade homicidal violence to his followers and who said that his followers were to love, rather than fear and kill, their enemies.
If you were an average German lawyer, physician or psychiatrist, you would have joined the Nazi Party, for doing otherwise would have jeopardized your practice and income. And you would have kept your mouth shut when witnessing the fear and anguish of your Jewish, Slavic, socialist, liberal, or gay clients as they were forced to march toward, and disappear into, the concentration camps and gas chambers.
So the question remains: if you saw your nation going fascist, would you have done what average German patriots did and been unconditionally obedient to your leader? Would you have been on the wrong side of justice by saluting the swastika rather than resisting the tyrants?
Knowing that any person who opposed Hitler’s wars of aggression was considered an enemy of the state, whom would you have supported? Would you have taken the side of the innocent victims? Would you have suffered in solidarity with them, or would you have stood with the oppressors?
Would you have joined the freedom-fighters (labeled "terrorists" or traitors by the State) who were courageously and patriotically trying to save their beloved nation from fascism, or would you have joined the militarists and corporatists and right-wing politicians who thought that they were choosing the "winning" side?
Now think over the similarities between the blatant fascist Germany of the 1930s and the politics and governance of the nation you live in. If you do so honestly, you may realize that fascism may be closer than you think. And in the process of pondering these issues, your personal politics and theology AND the politics and theology of those who want your vote, your business AND your silence will be revealed.
And then the course your political and spiritual life will take: active resistance against tyranny, collaboration with it or silence in the face of suffering, in response to the title question will also become clear."
Tyranny on Display at the Republican Convention, by Chris Hedges, truthdig.com (September 8, 2008)
"St. Paul is a window into our future. It is a future where, as one protester told me by phone, "people have been pepper-gassed, thrown on the ground by police who had drawn their weapons, had their documents seized and their tattoos photographed before being taken away to jail." It is a future where illegal house raids are carried out. It is a future where vans containing heavily armed paramilitary units circle and film protesters. It is a future where, as the protester said, "people have been pulled from cars because their license plates were on a database and handcuffed, thrown in the back of a squad car and then watched as their vehicles were ransacked and their personal possessions from computers to literature seized." It is a future where constitutional rights mean nothing and where lawful dissent is branded a form of terrorism.
The rise of the corporate state means the rise of the surveillance state. The Janus-like face of America swings from packaged and canned spectacles, from nationalist slogans, from seas of flags and Christian crosses, from professions of faith and patriotism, to widespread surveillance, illegal mass detentions, informants, provocateurs and crude acts of repression and violence. We barrel toward a world filled with stupendous lies and blood.
What difference is there between the crowds of flag-waving Republicans and the apparatchiks I covered as a reporter in the old East German Communist Party? These Republican delegates, like the fat and compromised party functionaries in East Berlin, all fawned on cue over an inept and corrupt party hierarchy. They all purported to champion workers' rights and freedom while they systematically fleeced, disempowered and impoverished the workers they lauded. They all celebrated the virtue of a state that was morally bankrupt. And while they played this con game, one that gave them special privileges, power and wealth, they unleashed their goons and thugs on all who dared to challenge them. We are not East Germany, but we are well on our way. An economic meltdown, another catastrophic terrorist attack on American soil, a war with Iran, and we could easily swing into an authoritarian model that would look very familiar to anyone who lived in the former communist East bloc.
A few of those arrested in St. Paul, including eight leaders of the RNC Welcoming Committee [1] -- one of the groups organizing protests at the GOP convention in St. Paul -- now face terrorism-related charges. Monica Bicking, Eryn Trimmer, Luce Guillen Givins, Erik Oseland, Nathanael Secor, Robert Czernik, Garrett Fitzgerald and Max Spector could get up to seven and a half years in prison under the terrorism enhancement charge, which allows for a 50 percent increase in the maximum penalty. This is the first time criminal charges have been filed under the 2002 Minnesota version of the federal Patriot Act.
The Patriot Act, which was put in place as much to silence domestic opposition as to ferret out real terrorists, has largely lain dormant. It has authorized the government to monitor our phone conversations, e-mails, meetings and political opinions. It has authorized the government to shut down anti-war groups and lock up innocents as terrorists. It has abolished habeas corpus. But until now we have not grasped its full implications for our open society. We catch glimpses, as in St. Paul or in our offshore penal colonies where we torture detainees, of its awful destructive power.
The commercial media told us that what was important in St. Paul was happening inside the convention hall. The vapid interviews, the ridiculous soap opera sagas about Sarah Palin's daughter and the debate about whether John McCain or Barack Obama has proprietary rights to "Change" divert us from the truth of who we have become. You had to search out "Democracy Now!," [2] TheUptake.org [3], Twin Cities Indymedia [4], I-Witness [5], along with a few other independent outlets, to see, hear or read real journalism from St. Paul.
It does not matter that the RNC Welcoming Committee describes itself as an "anarchist/anti-authoritarian" organization. We don't have to embrace a political agenda to protect the right to be heard. Shut down free speech and radicals only burrow deeper underground, splitting ossified political systems into fractured extremes. We may well end up with the Christian right on one side, with politicians like Sarah Palin providing an ideological veneer to a Christian fascism, and embittered leftist radicals who turn to violence on the other.
St. Paul was not ultimately about selecting a presidential candidate. It was about the power of the corporate state to carry out pre-emptive searches, seizures and arrests. It was about squads of police in high-tech riot gear, many with drawn semiautomatic weapons, bursting into houses. It was about seized computers, journals and political literature. It was about shutting down independent journalism, even at gunpoint. It was about charging protesters with "conspiracy to commit riot," a rarely used statute that criminalizes legal dissent. It was about 500 people held in open-air detention centers. It was about the rising Orwellian state that has hollowed out the insides of America, cast away all that was good and vital, and donned its skin to shackle us all."
The Anti-Obama Hate-Fest, by Robert Parry, Consortium News (September 4, 2008)
" The Republican Party, which has defined modern-day negative politics, was back at it again, bashing Barack Obama and the news media in an ugly display that rivaled the old days of Nixon-Agnew - or George W. Bush's last convention where GOP operatives passed out "Purple Heart Band-Aids" to mock John Kerry's war wounds.
After a slow start because of Hurricane Gustav, the convention in St. Paul, Minnesota, has turned into an anti-Obama hate-fest with a nearly all-white gathering laughing at and mocking the nation's first African-American presidential nominee of a major party.
However, beyond the pulsating contempt visible on the faces of the GOP delegates, many of the nasty attacks on Obama - as well as the effusive praise for the Republican ticket - were blatantly false, as if testing the depths of American gullibility and bigotry.
In speech after speech, Republicans didn't so much as tell the Big Lie as they deployed Wholesale Lies.
The Associated Press, which mostly had been recycling the Republican spin about the supposedly "maverick" ticket of John McCain and Sarah Palin, was so struck by the litany of distortions that the AP produced a special fact-checking article describing how Republicans had "stretched the truth."
For instance, Palin said about Obama, "it's easy to forget that this is a man who has authored two memoirs but not a single major law or reform - not even in the state senate."
However, as the AP noted, Obama "worked with Republicans to pass legislation that expanded efforts to intercept illegal shipments of weapons of mass destruction and to help destroy conventional weapons stockpiles. The legislation became law last year."
Plus, the AP reported, "In Illinois, he was the leader on two big, contentious measures in Illinois: studying racial profiling by police and requiring recordings of interrogations in potential death penalty cases. He also successfully co-sponsored major ethics reform legislation."
The AP's fact-checking article noted, too, that former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee's slap at Democratic vice presidential nominee Joe Biden - that Palin "got more votes running for mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, than Joe Biden got running for president of the United States" - was a "whopper."
The AP wrote that "Palin got 616 votes in the 1996 mayor's election, and got 909 in her 1999 re-election race, for a total of 1,525. Biden dropped out of the race after the Iowa caucuses, but he still got 76,165 votes in 23 states and the District of Columbia where he was on the ballot during the 2008 presidential primaries."
Parallel Reality
The Republican National Convention also acted as if the Republicans had not controlled the White House for the past eight years and the Congress for most of that time.
"We need change, all right," declared former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, "change from a liberal Washington to a conservative Washington! We have a prescription for every American who wants change in Washington - throw out the big-government liberals, and elect John McCain and Sarah Palin."
Beyond this parallel universe of who runs Washington, there was fanciful puffery about the GOP "reformer" ticket - dubbed "maverick squared" - that doesn't square with reality at all.
For instance, the AP cited Palin's claim that "I have protected the taxpayers by vetoing wasteful spending ... and championed reform to end the abuses of earmark spending by Congress. I told the Congress 'thanks but no thanks' for that Bridge to Nowhere."
The reality, of course, was much different.
As the AP noted. Palin, as mayor of the tiny town of Wasilla, hired a lobbyist and made annual treks to Washington seeking earmarked spending that totaled $27 million, and then as Alaska's governor for less than two years, she sought nearly $750 million in special federal spending, "by far the largest per-capita request in the nation."
And as for that $398 million bridge from Ketchikan to an island with 50 residents, the truth is that Palin enthusiastically supported the project before she reluctantly opposed it, rejecting the "Bridge to Nowhere" only after it had become politically indefensible.
The Los Angeles Times discovered that Sen. McCain had specifically cited several of Palin's earmarks on his annual list of wasteful pork-barrel spending.
In 2001, for instance, McCain's list included a $500,000 earmark for a public transportation project in Wasilla, and in 2002, he criticized $1 million targeted for an emergency communications center that Palin sought but local law enforcement said was redundant and a source of confusion.
Remaking Palin
Now, however, Palin has been transformed into a maverick reformer. McCain's campaign even cites her experience as an abuser of the earmark process as part of the reason she supposedly understands why it must be scrapped.
McCain spokesman Taylor Griffin said Palin's successes in getting earmarked funds "was one of the formative experiences that led her toward the reform-oriented stance that she has taken as her career has progressed."
Nevertheless, Palin wrote in a newspaper column just this year that "the federal budget, in its various manifestations, is incredibly important to us, and congressional earmarks are one aspect of this relationship." [For more details, see Los Angeles Times, Sept. 3, 2008]
Beyond the GOP's reality-challenged speeches, there was the startling image of a nearly all-white convention - where only 36 of the 2,380 delegates were black, the smallest number in at least 40 years - rollicking in ridicule and bristling with animosity toward Obama, an African-American.
With their loud chants of "drill, baby, drill" regarding energy policy and boisterous shouts of "USA, USA" about "victory" in Iraq, there was a sense that St. Paul was hosting a convention of American Falangists, rather than that of a modern national party.
The whiff of authoritarianism extended to outside where demonstrators and journalists were swept off the streets in indiscriminate arrests.
What's less clear about the GOP convention is whether the Republicans are on to something, that perhaps the United States has crossed over into a post-rational society that cares little about facts and reality or serious policy ideas and respectful debate, but rather is a nation moved by anger and ridicule, fear and nationalism."
Is America Fascist, by Sherwood Ross, opednews.com (July 31, 2008)
"If it hasn’t gone the way of Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany, it’s sure teetering on the brink. America is a nation in deepening crisis, a nation whose leaders repeatedly plunge their citizens into, and make them pay for, serial wars abroad, while stealing their liberties at home. USA has become a country that treats its citizens like trash (New Orleans), tortures its enemies(Abu Ghraib), threatens other nations with nuclear fire(Iran), flouts international treaties(UN Charter re Iraq), and spies on(FISA), and intimidates, its critics(No Fly). Americans that can clearly see the totalitarian machinations of Vladimir Putin in Russia and Hu Jintao in China are blind to the fascism threatening to envelop them as well.
Webster’s defines fascism as “a totalitarian governmental system led by a dictator and emphasizing an aggressive nationalism, militarism, and often racism.” A comparison of 20th century fascist and communist regimes with President Bush’s USA indicates the machinery for a full-blown totalitarian takeover is now in place, even if no coup has occurred. As Naomi Wolf writes in “The End of America”(Chelsea Green)the 2007 Defense Authorization Bill’s Section 333 allows the president “to declare martial law and take charge of the National Guard troops without the permission of a governor when ‘public order’ has been lost…” and to “send the guard into our streets during a public health emergency, terrorist attack or ‘other condition.’”
The enabling crowbar was the Military Commissions Act of 2006. It gives the president authority to set up his own system for bringing alien combatants to trial while denying them protection of the Geneva Conventions. “The president and his lawyers now claim the authority to designate any American citizen he chooses as being an ‘enemy combatant,’” Wolf writes of power usurpation that characterized the post-World War One epoch in Europe and Asia.
Thus, Congress has empowered Bush just as Germany’s Reichstag empowered Hitler, Wolf writes, recalling Hitler’s boast, “Democracy will be overthrown with the tools of democracy.” Hitler’s Interior Minister issued Clause 2 that gave police the power to hold people in custody indefinitely and without a court order, powers the U.S. Congress today has conferred upon “The Decider” in the White House. Mussolini’s used the less grandiose “Il Duce” or “The Leader.”
According to Michael Ratner, director of the Center For Constitutional Rights, New York, “the president can…designate people enemy combatants and detain them for whatever reason he wants…there are no charges and prisoners have no lawyers, no family visits, no court reviews, no rights to anything, and no right to release until the mythical end to the ‘war on terror.’”
Wolf writes that dictators justify their usurpation of domestic liberties by raising the alarm of “terrorist” threats. Stalin, for example, used this very term in 1934 when he warned his public of a world-wide conspiracy by capitalists to overthrow the Soviet state. If there have been no mass arrests of native-born Americans it is only because the president has not chosen to exercise this authority. If you think it can’t happen to you, recall that in September of 2003 the Army arrested 36-year-old American-born Muslim chaplain James Yee, a West Point graduate, allegedly for “espionage and possibly treason”---but more likely for calling for better conditions for Gitmo inmates. Wolf wrote:
“He was blindfolded; his ears were blocked; he was manacled and then put into solitary confinement for 76 days; forbidden mail, television, or anything to read except the Koran. His family was not allowed to visit him. …His lawyers were told he would face execution. (But)Within six months, the U.S. government had dropped all criminal charges against Yee.” Yes, just as it has dropped charges against hundreds of Guantanamo prisoners earlier, men labeled by former Defense Secretary Rumsfeld as “the worst of the worst” but against the overwhelming majority of whom the Bush regime apparently had no case whatever!
The treatment Yee got is typical of those who run afoul of the Bush regime: torture first, trial after…if there is a trial. And since his release, Yee has been denied his free speech right to discuss his ordeal---gagged by the Pentagon. Perhaps most incredible, even if a Guantanamo prisoner should be found innocent, the Pentagon says he might not be released anyway. This echoes Stalin’s practice of re-arresting Gulag prisoners after they had done their time. At one point, Stalin had eight million souls behind bars, even exceeding President Bush, currently the world’s Incarcerator-In-Chief.
Author Wolf says another danger flag is the creation of paramilitary groups, “aggressive men who have no clear, accountable relationship to the government or the party seeking power…” Mussolini had the blackshirts; Hitler the brownshirts; but whatever their dress, they were thugs. Wolf says that Moycock, N.C.-based Blackwater Worldwide stands ready “to deploy its unaccountable private army (35,000 men) in the U.S.---in the aftermath of natural disasters, and also in cases of ‘national emergency.’” With at least a half billion dollars in government contracts, “Blackwater is the world’s largest private security force, works closely with Halliburton, and is available for action outside the scrutiny of Congress,” Wolf writes. The outfit raked in $73 million for patrolling the streets of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. And Blackwater subcontractor Red Tactica, recruits former Chilean commandos,” men described by one Chilean sociologist that are “valued for their expertise in kidnapping, torturing and killing defenseless civilians,” Wolf wrote.
Besides creating such “security” forces, dictators create secret prisons, as Bush has done, ranging from prison ships in the Indian Ocean to dungeons in Poland, where they can hide them from Red Cross scrutiny, as the CIA has done. “We should worry about the men held at Guantanamo because history shows that stripping prisoners of their rights is intoxicating not only to leaders but to functionaries at every level of society,” Wolf writes. “Gitmo” is also an interrogation camp, an operation “that is completely and flatly illegal” and outlawed by the Geneva Conventions in 1949, she points out. Stalin also employed torture and in 1937 actually legalized its use in Soviet prisons. When he received his infamous “albums” with the names of those to be executed and imprisoned, next to some names he often wrote: “Beat! Beat! Beat!” And only months after taking power, Hitler “established a network of illegitimate prisons where torture took place” and where guards could murder inmates with “no chance of being punished,” Wolf said. And like Stalin, The Decider has signaled his henchmen beatings are now the American Way.
Dictators hold power by instilling fear in their citizens. Since 2000, Wolf writes there has been “a sharp increase in U.S. citizen groups that are being harassed and infiltrated by police and federal agents, often in illegal ways.” She pointed to a 2006 ACLU report that California police had infiltrated antiwar protests, political rallies, and other constitutionally protected gatherings and were secretly investigating them, even though the California state constitution forbids this. And prior to the 2004 Republican convention in New York, police department detectives infiltrated groups planning peaceful demonstrations. At the Federal level, Bush’s apparatchiks are compiling dossiers on law-abiding citizens. The Defense Department’s Talon program has created a database about peaceful antiwar and other groups and activists. As Jen Nessel of the Center for Constitutional Rights says, “We have absolutely moved over into a preventive detention model---you look like you could do something bad, you might do something bad, so we’re going to hold you.”
Bush regime actions’ today recall how the Gestapo, NKVD, Stasi(East German secret police) and Red China’s Politburo “all requisitioned private data such as medical, banking, and library records,” Wolf writes, because access to such private data “breaks down citizens’ sense of being able to act freely against those in power.” And although the Department of Homeland Security’s TIPS scheme to get letter carriers and meter readers, etc., to report suspicious activities was met with derision and never funded, the ACLU noted it was merely absorbed in the Pentagon’s “black budget.”
Privacy in America today as guaranteed by the Constitution is fast becoming a memory. The New York Times reported the government in 2005 was monitoring your e-mail and telephone talk without legal warrants and the following year the newspaper disclosed U.S. treasury officials, with CIA help, “were reviewing millions of private bank transactions without individual court-ordered warrants or subpoenas,” Wolf pointed out.
One method of intimidation is to limit a citizen’s right to travel freely. The Bush regime has created “watch”(75,000 names) and “no fly”(45,000 names) lists that restrict individuals’ air travel--and those searched and/or stopped from flying can complain all they like because it won’t do them any good. Robert Johnson, an American citizen, Wolf reports, described the humiliation factor of being strip searched when he attempted to board an airplane: “I had to take off my pants. I had to take off my sneakers, then I had to take off my socks. I was treated like a criminal.” This has now become a commonplace ordeal for thousands of Americans. Even at the height of World War Two, such invasions of personal rights would have been unthinkable.
Going back to Webster’s definition of fascism, USA today is the world’s runaway leader in “militarism.” Forty-three percent of all U.S. tax dollars in 2007 went to feed the war machine, as the Pentagon believes security depends on operating more than 700 military bases in 130 countries overseas in addition to 1,000 at home. Bush has escalated its budget so that USA now spends nearly as much on arms as all the rest of the world combined. Uncle Sam is also the No. 1 private arms peddler to the world. By contrast, Iran, portrayed by the White House as a menace to the Middle East, has an annual military budget that is 1/100th of the Pentagon’s outlay.
Perhaps it would be a good exercise for Americans to read how Hitler emphasized nationalism and militarism. As he wrote in “Mein Kampf”: “Instead of everlasting struggle the world preaches cowardly pacifism, and everlasting peace…There is only one right in this world and this right is one’s own strength.” As for “reconciliation, understanding, world peace, the League of Nations, and international solidarity---we destroy these ideas.” Hitler called for delivering Germans “from the hopeless confusion of international convictions” and educating them “consciously and systematically to fanatical nationalism.” Armed with such views the fascist state thinks nothing of starting an aggressive war based on lies. In 1939, Hitler claimed he was attacked by Poland, igniting World War Two. Bush claimed that Iraq had nuclear and biological weapons to destroy America when, in fact, it was the United States that possessed those very weapons and it was Iraq that had none.
Bush nonetheless started a seemingly endless war that has by some estimates to date killed more than 1 million Iraqis, wounded perhaps 2 million more, forced a like number from their homes, ravished their country and its economy, touched off a civil war, forced 1 million Iraqis into foreign exile, and killed and wounded 35,000 American troops. Former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan called the Iraq war “illegal” but Bush, like Hitler, cares nothing for international treaties, even if those the U.S. has signed under our Constitution are the supreme law of the land. He has made a mockery to the anti-nuclear treaty, causing former President Carter to charge his own country has become the leader in nuclear proliferation. What’s more, Bush has spent about $50 billion on germ warfare “defense” with no known significant foreign threat to USA."
We’re Losing the Ability to Think, by Leonard Pitts, Jr. (July 28, 2008)
"I love comic books.
For 41 years, I’ve studied them, collected them, written and read exhaustively about them. So I hope you’ll agree I’m qualified to judge the merits of a comic book created by one Brent Rinehart as a tool in his campaign for reelection as a commissioner of Oklahoma County, Okla.
It is really, really bad. You may see for yourself by clicking the link to be found at www.anorak.co.uk/anorak-in-new-york/185867.html.
Now, you may think my less than glowing appraisal stems from its rank anti-gay bigotry, including a depiction of a gay man with horns. Or from the artwork, which looks like something scrawled by a gifted 6-year-old.
Well, yes. But here’s the main reason Rinehart’s work offends: It is astonishingly stupid.
Voters should support him because an angel does? His opponents are in league with Satan? Old Scratch is working to ”get kids to believe homosexuality is normal” and Rinehart is their only defense? And I haven’t even mentioned the creative punctuations and multiple misspellings.
I am not an Oklahoma County voter, so maybe you wonder why I care about Rinehart’s campaign. I don’t. What I do care about is what I will call the ongoing stupidification of America, of which this is but one glaring example among many. Think of the congressman who advocated bombing Mecca to teach Muslims a lesson. Think of the ”zero tolerance” policy that required a 10-year-old to be suspended for bringing to school the tiny toy gun from his GI Joe. Think of the ”Jay Walking” segment on The Tonight Show where average Americans cannot answer basic questions of civics and history. Think of those cable shows where we are theoretically entertained by coarse women vying for the affection of washed-up rock stars. Heck, read your junk e-mail.
And then tell me you don’t feel the nation’s collective IQ dropping like stocks.
I am not talking about ignorance. Ignorance is a lack of information; we’re all ignorant in one way or another. Nor am I talking about people prone to punctuation or spelling errors; we all make mistakes.
No, I’m talking about stupidity, which I define as an inability to analyze, draw conclusions from, or otherwise use information even when one has it. And stupidity is often characterized by smug indifference. When a CNN anchor drew Rinehart’s attention to his spelling errors, his reply was, ”I don’t necessarily care.” This is, I feel constrained to remind you, the elected representative of 220,000 people.
For as much as we obsess over black vs. white and red vs. blue, I suspect the defining division of this technology-driven era will be between those who have and can exploit information and those who do not and cannot. Between intelligence and its opposite. One wonders how long we can continue to equate stupidity with ”keeping it real,” being a regular Joe or Jane, and hope to continue leading the world.
There’s a movie, Idiocracy, which posits a post-intelligent future in which the stupid have inherited the Earth. It’s not a great film, but there is a truth to it. You watch the characters watching a reality show that consists entirely of some guy being kicked in the testicles and you realize you wouldn’t be surprised to see that show on VH-1 tomorrow.
Why not? In recent years, we have seen intelligence demonized as the sole province of the ”elite,” a term that once described accomplishment, but is now used to condemn anyone who looks like he might have accidentally cracked a book or had a thought.
Not long ago, I gave a commencement address in which I told young people I am less concerned with what they think than that they think. Because we are losing that skill. Me, I find that alarming.
Maybe you disagree. I bet you’ll feel differently when Brent Rinehart is president."
The Corporate State and the Subversion of Democracy, by Chris Hedges, TruthDig.com (May 31, 2008)
"I used to live in a country called America. It was not a perfect country, God knows, especially if you were African-American or Native American or of Japanese descent in World War II or poor or gay or a woman or an immigrant, but it was a country I loved and honored. This country gave me hope that it could be better. It paid its workers wages that were envied around the world. It made sure these workers, thanks to labor unions and champions of the working class in the Democratic Party and the press, had health benefits and pensions. It offered good public education. It honored basic democratic values and held in regard the rule of law, including international law, and respect for human rights. It had social programs from Head Start to welfare to Social Security to take care of the weakest among us, the mentally ill, the elderly and the destitute. It had a system of government that, however flawed, was dedicated to protecting the interests of its citizens. It offered the possibility of democratic change. It had a media that was diverse and endowed with the integrity to give a voice to all segments of society, including those beyond our borders, to impart to us unpleasant truths, to challenge the powerful, to explain ourselves to ourselves. I am not blind to the imperfections of this America, or the failures to always meet these ideals at home and abroad. I spent 20 years of my life in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and the Balkans as a foreign correspondent reporting in countries where crimes and injustices were committed in our name, whether during the Contra war in Nicaragua or the brutalization of the Palestinians by Israeli occupation forces. But there was much that was good and decent and honorable in our country. And there was hope.The country I live in today uses the same words to describe itself, the same patriotic symbols and iconography, the same national myths, but only the shell remains. America, the country of my birth, the country that formed and shaped me, the country of my father, my father’s father, and his father’s father, stretching back to the generations of my family that were here for the country’s founding, is so diminished as to be nearly unrecognizable. I do not know if this America will return, even as I pray and work and strive for its return. The “consent of the governed” has become an empty phrase. Our textbooks on political science are obsolete. Our state, our nation, has been hijacked by oligarchs, corporations and a narrow, selfish political elite, a small and privileged group which governs on behalf of moneyed interests. We are undergoing, as John Ralston Saul wrote, “a coup d’etat in slow motion.” We are being impoverished-legally, economically, spiritually and politically. And unless we soon reverse this tide, unless we wrest the state away from corporate hands, we will be sucked into the dark and turbulent world of globalization where there are only masters and serfs, where the American dream will be no more than that-a dream, where those who work hard for a living can no longer earn a decent wage to sustain themselves or their families, whether in sweat shops in China or the decaying rust belt of Ohio, where democratic dissent is condemned as treason and ruthlessly silenced.
I single out no party. The Democratic Party has been as guilty as the Republicans. It was Bill Clinton who led the Democratic Party to the corporate watering trough. Clinton argued that the party had to ditch labor unions, no longer a source of votes or power, as a political ally. Workers, he insisted, would vote Democratic anyway. They had no choice. It was better, he argued, to take corporate money. By the 1990s, the Democratic Party, under Clinton’s leadership, had virtual fundraising parity with the Republicans. Today the Democrats get more. In political terms, it was a success. In moral terms, it was a betrayal.
The North American Free Trade Agreement was sold to the country by the Clinton White House as an opportunity to raise the incomes and prosperity of the citizens of the United States, Canada and Mexico. NAFTA would also, we were told, staunch Mexican immigration into the United States.
“There will be less illegal immigration because more Mexicans will be able to support their children by staying home,” President Clinton said in the spring of 1993 as he was lobbying for the bill.
But NAFTA, which took effect in 1994, had the curious effect of reversing every one of Clinton’s rosy predictions. Once the Mexican government lifted price supports on corn and beans for Mexican farmers, they had to compete against the huge agribusinesses in the United States. The Mexican farmers were swiftly bankrupted. At least 2 million Mexican farmers have been driven off their land since 1994. And guess where many of them went? This desperate flight of poor Mexicans into the United States is now being exacerbated by large-scale factory closures along the border as manufacturers pack up and leave Mexico for the cut-rate embrace of China’s totalitarian capitalism. But we were assured that goods would be cheaper. Workers would be wealthier. Everyone would be happier. I am not sure how these contradictory things were supposed to happen, but in a sound-bite society, reality no longer matters. NAFTA was great if you were a corporation. It was a disaster if you were a worker.
Clinton’s welfare reform bill, which was signed on Aug. 22, 1996, obliterated the nation’s social safety net. It threw 6 million people, many of them single mothers, off the welfare rolls within three years. It dumped them onto the streets without child care, rent subsidies and continued Medicaid coverage. Families were plunged into crisis, struggling to survive on multiple jobs that paid $6 or $7 an hour, or less than $15,000 a year. But these were the lucky ones. In some states, half of those dropped from the welfare rolls could not find work. Clinton slashed Medicare by $115 billion over a five-year period and cut $25 billion in Medicaid funding. The booming and overcrowded prison system handled the influx of the poor, as well as our abandoned mentally ill. And today we stand in shame with 2.3 million of our citizens behind bars, most for nonviolent drug offenses. More than one in 100 adults in the United States is incarcerated and one in nine black men ages 20 to 34 is behind bars. The United States, with less than 5 per cent of the global population, has almost 25 percent of the world’s prisoners.
The growing desperation across the United States is unleashing not simply a recession-we have been in a recession for some time now-but the possibility of a depression unlike anything we have seen since the 1930s. This desperation has provided a pool of broken people willing to work for low wages and without unions or benefits. This is good news if you are a corporation. It is very bad news if you work for a living. For the bottom 90 percent of Americans, annual income has been on a slow, steady decline for three decades. The majority’s income peaked at $ 33,000 in 1973. By 2005, according to New York Times reporter David Cay Johnston in his book “Free Lunch,” it had fallen to a bit more than $29,000, this despite three decades of economic expansion. And where did that money go? Ask ExxonMobil, the biggest U.S. oil and gas company, which made a $10.9-billion profit in the first quarter of this year, leaving us to pay close to $4 a gallon to fill up our cars. Or better yet, ask Exxon Mobil Corp Chief Executive Rex Tillerson, whose compensation rose nearly 18 percent to $21.7 million in 2007, when the oil company pulled in the largest profit ever for a U.S. company. His take-home pay package included $1.75 million in salary, a $3.36-million bonus, and $16.1 million of stock and option awards, according to a company filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. He also received nearly $430,000 of other compensation, including $229,331 for personal security and $41,122 for use of the company aircraft. In addition to his pay package, Tillerson, 56, received more than $7.6 million from exercising options and stock awards during the year. Exxon Mobil earned $40.61 billion in 2007, up 3 percent from the previous year. But Tillerson’s 2007 pay was not even the highest mark for the U.S. oil and gas industry. Occidental Petroleum Corp. CEO Ray Irani made $33.6 million and Anadarko Petroleum Corp. chief James Hackett took in $26.7 million over the same period.
For each dollar earned in 2005, the top 10 percent got 48.5 cents. That was the top 10th’s greatest share of the income pie, Johnston writes, since 1929, just before the Roaring ’20s collapsed in the Great Depression. And within the top 10 percent, those who made more than $100,000, nearly all the gains went to the top 10th of 1 percent, people like Tillerson, or Irani or Hackett, who made at least $1.7 million that year. And until we have real election reform, until we make it possible to run for national office without candidates kissing the rings of Tillersons, Iranis and Hacketts to get hundreds of millions of dollars, this rape of America will continue.
While the Democrats have been very bad, George W. Bush has been even worse. Let’s set aside Iraq-the worst foreign policy blunder in American history. George Bush has also done more to dismantle our Constitution, ignore or revoke our statutes and reverse regulations that protected American citizens from corporate abuse than any other president in recent American history. The president, as the Boston Globe reported, has claimed the authority, through “signing statements,” to disobey more than 750 laws enacted since he took office, asserting that he has the power to set aside any statute passed by Congress when it conflicts with his interpretation of the Constitution. Among the laws Bush said he can ignore are military rules and regulations, affirmative-action provisions, requirements that Congress be told about immigration services problems, ‘’whistle-blower” protections for nuclear regulatory officials, and safeguards against political interference in federally funded research. The Constitution is clear in assigning to Congress the power to write the laws and to the president a duty ‘’to take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” George Bush, however, has repeatedly declared that he does not need to ‘’execute” a law he believes is unconstitutional. The Bush administration has gutted environmental, food and product safety, and workplace safety standards along with their enforcement. And this is why coal mines collapse, the housing bubble has blown up in our face and we are sold lead-contaminated toys imported from China. Bush has done more than any president to hand our government directly over to corporations, which now get 40 percent of federal discretionary spending. Over 800,000 jobs once handled by government employees have been outsourced to corporations, a move that has not only further empowered our shadow corporate government but helped destroy federal workforce unions. Everything from federal prisons, the management of regulatory and scientific reviews, the processing or denial of Freedom of Information requests, interrogating prisoners and running the world’s largest mercenary army in Iraq has become corporate. And these corporations, in a perverse arrangement, make their money off of the American citizen. Halliburton in 2003 was given a no-bid and non-compete $7-billion contract to repair Iraq’s oil fields, as well as the power to oversee and control Iraq’s entire oil production. This has now become $130 billion in contract awards to Halliburton. And flush with taxpayer dollars, what has Haliburton done? It has made sure only 36 of its 143 subsidiaries are incorporated in the United States and 107 subsidiaries (or 75 percent) are incorporated in 30 different countries. Halliburton is able through this arrangement to lower its tax liability on foreign income by establishing a “controlled foreign corporation” and subsidiaries inside low-tax, or no-tax, countries known as a “tax havens.” They take our money. They squander it. And our corporate government not only funds them but protects them. Halliburton-and Halliburton is just one example-is the engine of our new, rogue corporate state, serviced by people like George Bush and Dick Cheney, once the company’s CEO.
The disparity between our oligarchy and the working class has created a new global serfdom. Credit Suisse analysts estimates that the number of subprime foreclosures in the United States over the next two years will total 1,390,000 and that by the end of 2012, 12.7 percent of all residential borrowers in the United States will be forced out of their homes. The corporate state, which as an idea is an abstraction to many Americans, is very real when the pieces are carefully put together and linked to a system of corporate power that has made this poverty, the denial of our constitutional rights and a state of permanent war inevitable. The assault on the American working class-an assault that has devastated members of my own family- is nearly complete. The U.S. economy has 3.2 million fewer jobs today than it did when George Bush took office, including 2.5 million fewer manufacturing jobs. In the past three years, nearly one in five U.S. workers was laid off. Among workers laid off from full-time work, roughly one-fourth were earning less than $40,000 annually. A total of 15 million U.S. workers are unemployed, underemployed or too discouraged to job hunt, according to the Labor Department. There are whole sections of the United States which now resemble the developing world. There has been a Weimarization of the American working class. And the assault on the middle class is now under way. Anything that can be put on software-from finance to architecture to engineering-can and is being outsourced to workers in countries such as India or China who accept a fraction of the pay and work without benefits. And both the Republican and Democratic parties, beholden to corporations for money and power, allow this to happen.
Take a look at our government departments. Who runs the Defense Department? The Department of Interior? The Department of Agriculture? The Food and Drug Administration? Who runs the Department of Labor? Corporations. And in an election year where we are numbed by absurdities we hear nothing about this subordinating of the American people to corporate power. The political debates, which have become popularity contests, are ridiculous and empty. They do not confront the real and advanced destruction of our democracy. They do not confront the takeover of our electoral processes.
We have watched over the past few decades the rise of a powerful web of interlocking corporate entities, a network of arrangements within subsectors, industries or other partial jurisdictions to diminish and often abolish outside control and oversight. These corporations have neutralized national, state and judicial authority. They dominate, for example, a bloated and wasteful defense industry which has become sacrosanct and beyond the reach of politicians, most of whom are left defending military projects in their districts, no matter how redundant, because they provide jobs. This has permitted a military-industrial complex, which contributes lavishly to political campaigns, to spread across the country with virtual impunity. Defense-related spending for fiscal 2008 will exceed $1 trillion for the first time in history. The U.S. has become the largest single seller of arms and munitions on the planet. The defense budget for fiscal 2008 is the largest since the Second World War even as we have more than $400 billion in annual deficits. More than half of federal discretionary spending goes to defense. This will not end when Bush leaves office. And so we build Cold War relics like $ 3.4-billion submarines and stealth fighters to evade radar systems the Soviets never built and spend $ 8.9 billion on ICBM missile defense that will be useless in stopping a shipping container concealing a dirty bomb. The defense industry is able to monopolize the best scientific and research talent and squander the nation’s resources and investment capital. These defense industries produce nothing that is useful for society or the national trade account. Melman, like President Eisenhower, saw the defense industry as viral, something that, as it grew, destroyed a healthy economy. And so we produce sophisticated fighter jets while Boeing is unable to finish its new commercial plane on schedule, and our automotive industry tanks. We sink money into research and development of weapons systems and starve technologies to fight against global warming and renewable energy. Universities are awash in defense-related cash and grants, and struggle to find money for environmental studies. This massive military spending, aided by this $3-trillion war, is hollowing us out from the inside. Our bridges and levees collapse, our schools decay and our safety net is taken away.
The corporate state, begun under Ronald Reagan and pushed forward by every president since, has destroyed the public and private institutions that protected workers and safeguarded citizens. Only 7.8 per cent of workers in the private sector are unionized. This is about the same percentage as in the early 1900s. There are 50 million Americans in real poverty and tens of millions of Americans in a category called “near poverty.” Our health care system is broken. Eighteen thousand people die in this country, according to the Institute of Medicine, every year because they can’t afford health care. That is six times the number of people who died in the 9/11 attacks, and these unnecessary deaths continue year after year. But we do not hear these stories of pain and dislocation. We are diverted by bread and circus. News reports do little more than report on trivia and celebrity gossip. The FCC, in an example of how far our standards have fallen, defines shows like Fox’s celebrity gossip program “TMZ” and the Christian Broadcast Network’s “700 Club” as “bona fide newscasts.” The economist Charlotte Twight calls this vast corporate system of spectacle and democratic collapse “participatory fascism.”
How did we get here? How did this happen? In a word, deregulation-the systematic dismantling of the managed capitalism that was the hallmark of the American democratic state. Our political decline came about because of deregulation, the repeal of antitrust laws, and the radical transformation from a manufacturing economy to a capital economy. This understanding led Franklin Delano Roosevelt on April 29, 1938, to send a message to Congress titled “Recommendations to the Congress to Curb Monopolies and the Concentration of Economic Power.” In it, he wrote:
“The first truth is that the liberty of democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of power to a point where it becomes stronger than the democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is Fascism-ownership of Government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. The second truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if its business system does not provide employment and produce and distribute goods in such a way to sustain an acceptable standard of living.”
The rise of the corporate state has grave political consequences, as we saw in Italy and Germany in the early part of the 20th century. Antitrust laws not only regulate and control the marketplace, they serve as bulwarks to protect democracy. And now that they are gone, now that we have a state that is run by and on behalf of corporations, we must expect inevitable and perhaps terrifying political consequences.
I spent two years traveling the country to write a book on the Christian right called “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.” In depressed former manufacturing towns from Ohio to Kentucky it was the same. There are tens of millions of Americans for whom the end of the world is no longer an abstraction. They have lost hope. Fear and instability has plunged the working class into personal and economic despair, and not surprisingly into the arms of the demagogues and charlatans of the radical Christian right who offer a belief in magic, miracles and the fiction of a utopian Christian nation. And unless we re-enfranchise these Americans back into the economy, unless we give them hope, our democracy is doomed.
As the pressure mounts, as this despair and desperation reaches into larger and larger segments of the American populace, the mechanisms of corporate and government control are being bolstered to prevent civil unrest and instability. It is not accidental that with the rise of the corporate state comes the rise of the security state. This is why the Bush White House has pushed through the Patriot Act (and its renewal), the suspension of habeas corpus, the practice of “extraordinary rendition,” the warrantless wiretapping on American citizens and the refusal to ensure free and fair elections with verifiable ballot-counting. It is part of a package. It comes together. It is not about terrorism or national security. It is about control. It is about their control of us.
Sen. Frank Church, as chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence in 1975, investigated the government’s massive and highly secretive National Security Agency. He wrote:
“That capability at any time could be turned around on the American people and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide. If this government ever became a tyranny, if a dictator ever took charge in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back, because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done, is within the reach of the government to know. Such is the capability of this technology. … I don’t want to see this country ever go across the bridge. I know the capability that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return. …”
When Sen. Church made this statement the NSA was not authorized to spy on American citizens. Today it is.
In a military brig in Charleston an American citizen, Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri, is being held in a black hole set up on American soil. He was stripped on June 23, 2003, by George Bush of his constitutional rights and declared an “enemy combatant.” He is being detained without charge, interrogated without a lawyer and held indefinitely. Lawyers for the Bush administration claim that the president can send the military into any neighborhood, any town or suburb, capture a citizen and hold him or her in prison without charge. They base this claim on the Authorization for Use of Military Force, passed by Congress after 9/11, that gives President Bush the power to “use all necessary and appropriate force” against anyone involved in planning, aiding or carrying out the attacks. But Al-Mari was not captured in Afghanistan or Iraq. He was arrested in Peoria, Ill., in December 2001. And if the president can declare American citizens living inside the United States to be enemy combatants and order them stripped of constitutional rights, what does this mean for us? How long can we be held without charge? Without lawyers? Without access to the outside world? Maybe Al-Mari is, as the government claims, a terrorist. I don’t know. But I do know that if this becomes a precedent, if it is not overturned by the courts, habeas corpus, the most important bulwark of our democratic state, will be dead.
We are fed lie after lie to mask the destruction the corporate state has wrought in our lives. The consumer price index, for example, used by the government to measure inflation, has become meaningless. To keep the official inflation figures low the government has been substituting basic products they once measured to check for inflation with ones that do not rise very much in price. This trick has kept the cost-of-living increases tied to the CPI artificially low. The disconnect between what we are told and what is actually true is worthy of the old East German state. The New York Times’ consumer reporter, W.P. Dunleavy, wrote that her groceries now cost $587 a month, up from $400 a year earlier. This is a 40 percent increase. California economist John Williams, who runs an organization called Shadow Statistics, contends that if Washington still used the CPI measurements applied back in the 1970s, inflation would be in the 10 percent range. The advantage to the corporations is huge. A false inflation rate, one far lower than the real rate, keeps equitable interest payments on bank accounts and certificates of deposit down. It masks the deterioration of the American economy. The Potemkin statistics allow corporations and the corporate state to walk away from obligations tied to real adjustments for inflation. These statistics mean that less is paid out in Social Security and pensions. It has reduced the interest on the multitrillion-dollar debt. Corporations never have to pay real cost-of-living increases to their employees. The term “unemployment” has also been steadily redefined. This has rendered official data on employment worthless. In real terms about 10 percent of the working population is unemployed, a figure that is, over the long run, unsustainable. The economy, despite the official statistics, is not growing. It is shrinking. And as the nation crumbles we are awash with the terrible simplicity of false statistics. We confuse our emotional responses, carefully manipulated by advertisers, pundits, spin doctors, television hosts, political consultants and focus groups, with knowledge. It is how we elect presidents and those we send to Congress, how we make decisions, even decisions to go to war. It is how we view the world. Four media giants-AOL-Time Warner, Viacom, Disney, and Rupert Murdoch’s NewsGroup-control nearly everything we read, see and hear. This growing disconnect with reality is the hallmark of a totalitarian state.
“Before they seize power and establish a world according to their doctrines,” Hannah Arendt wrote, “totalitarian movements conjure up a lying world of consistency which is more adequate to the needs of the human mind than reality itself; in which, through sheer imagination, uprooted masses can feel at home and are spared the never-ending shocks which real life and real experiences deal to human beings and their expectations. The force possessed by totalitarian propaganda-before the movements have the power to drop iron curtains to prevent anyone’s disturbing, by the slightest reality, the gruesome quiet of an entirely imaginary world-lies in its ability to shut the masses off from the real world.”
So what do we do? Voting is not enough. If voting was that effective, to quote the activist Philip Berrigan, it would be illegal. And voting in an age when elections are stolen by rigged ballot machines and a stacked Supreme Court willing to overturn all legal precedent to make George Bush president, will not work. I am not saying do not vote. We should all vote. But that has to be the starting point if we want to reclaim America. We must lobby, organize and advocate for the dissolution of the World Trade Organization and NAFTA. The WTO and NAFTA have handcuffed workers, consumers and stymied our efforts to create clean environments. These agreements are beyond the control of our courts and have crippled our weakened regulatory agencies. The WTO forces our working class to compete with brutalized child and prison labor overseas, to be reduced to this level of slave labor or to go without meaningful work. We need to repeal the anti-worker Taft-Hartley law of 1947. The act obstructs the organization of unions. We need to transfer control of pension funds from management to workers. If these pension funds, worth trillions of dollars, were in the hands of workers the working class would own a third of the New York Stock Exchange.
The working class has every right to be, to steal a line from Obama, bitter with liberal elites. I am bitter. I have seen what the loss of manufacturing jobs and the death of the labor movement did to my relatives in the former mill towns in Maine. Their story is the story of tens of millions of Americans who can no longer find a job that supports a family and provides basic benefits. Human beings are not commodities. They are not goods. They grieve, and suffer and feel despair. They raise children and struggle to maintain communities. The growing class divide is not understood, despite the glibness of many in the media, by complicated sets of statistics or the absurd, utopian faith in unregulated globalization and complicated trade deals. It is understood in the eyes of a man or woman who is no longer making enough money to live with dignity and hope.
George Bush, who will be here on Saturday, has done more to shred, violate or
absent the government from its obligations under domestic and international law.
He has refused to sign the Kyoto Protocol, backed out of the Anti-Ballistic
Missile Treaty, tried to kill the International Criminal Court, walked out on
negotiations on chemical and biological weapons, and defied the Geneva
Convention and human rights law. He has set up offshore penal colonies where we
deny detainees basic rights and openly engage in torture. He launched an illegal
war in Iraq based on fabricated evidence we now know had been discredited even
before it was made public. And if we as citizens do not hold him accountable for
these crimes, if we allow the Democratic majority in Congress to get away with
its refusal to begin the process of impeachment, which appears likely, we will
be complicit in the codification of a new world order, one that will have
terrifying consequences. For a world without treaties, statutes and laws is a
world where any nation, from a rogue nuclear state to a great imperial power,
will be able to invoke its domestic laws to annul its obligations to others.
This new order will undo five decades of international cooperation-largely put
in place by the United States-destroy our own constitutional rights and thrust
us into a Hobbesian nightmare. We are one, maybe two, terrorist attacks away
from a police state. Time is running out.
We must not allow international laws and treaties-ones that set minimum
standards of behavior and provide a framework for competing social, political,
economic and religious groups and interests to resolve differences-to be
discarded. The exercise of power without law is tyranny. And the consequences of
George Bush’s violation of the law, his creation of legal black holes that can
swallow American citizens along with those outside our borders, run in a direct
line from the White House to Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and military brigs in cities
such as Charleston.
George Bush-we now know from the leaked Downing Street memo-fabricated a legal
pretext for war. He decided to charge Saddam Hussein with the material breach of
the resolution passed in the wake of the 1991 Gulf War. He had no evidence that
Saddam Hussein was in breach of this resolution. And so he and his advisers
manufactured reports of weapons of mass destruction and disseminated them to a
frightened and manipulated press and public. In short, he lied. He lied to us
and to the rest of the world. There are tens of thousands, perhaps a few hundred
thousand people, who have been killed and maimed in a war that has no legal
justification, a war waged in violation of international law, a war that under
the post-Nuremberg laws is defined as “a criminal war of aggression.”
We have blundered into nations we know little about. We are caught between bitter rivalries and competing ethnic groups and leaders we do not understand. We are trying to transplant a modern system of politics invented in Europe characterized, among other things, by the division of earth into independent secular states based on national citizenship in a land where the belief in a secular civil government is an alien creed. Iraq was a cesspool for the British when they occupied it in 1917. It will be a cesspool for us as well. We can either begin an orderly withdrawal or watch the mission collapse.
A rule-based world matters. The creation of international bodies and laws, the sanctity of our constitutional rights, have allowed us to stand pre-eminent as a nation-one that seeks at its best to respect and defend the rule of law. If we demolish the fragile and delicate domestic and international order, if we permit George Bush to create a world where diplomacy, broad cooperation, democracy and law are worthless, if we allow these international and domestic legal safeguards to unravel, our moral and political authority will plummet. We will erode the possibility of cooperation between nation-states, including our closest allies. We will lose our country. And we will, in the end, see visited upon us the evils we visit on others. Read Antigone, when the king imposes his will without listening to those he rules or Thucydides’ history. Read how Athens’ expanding empire saw it become a tyrant abroad and then a tyrant at home. How the tyranny the Athenian leadership imposed on others it finally imposed on itself. This, Thucydides wrote, is what doomed Athenian democracy; Athens destroyed itself. For the primary instrument of tyranny and empire is war and war is a poison, a poison which at times we must ingest just as a cancer patient must ingest a poison to survive. But if we do not understand the poison of war-if we do not understand how deadly that poison is-it can kill us just as surely as the disease.
Hope, St. Augustine wrote, has two beautiful daughters. They are anger and courage. Anger at the way things are and the courage to see they do not remain the way they are. We stand at the verge of a massive economic dislocation, one forcing millions of families from their homes and into severe financial distress, one that threatens to rend the fabric of our society. We are waging a war that devours lives and capital, and that cannot ultimately be won. We are told we need to give up our rights to be safe, to be protected. In short, we are made afraid. We are told to hand over all that is best about our nation to those like George Bush and Dick Cheney who seek to destroy our nation. A state of fear only engenders cruelty; cruelty, fear, insanity, and then paralysis. In the center of Dante’s circle the damned remained motionless. If we do not become angry, if we do not muster within us the courage, indeed the militancy, to challenge those in the Democratic and Republican parties who herd us towards the corporate state, we will have squandered our courage and our integrity when we need it most."
The Handy Reference Guide to Bush Disasters, Incompetencies, and Lies, by Guy Reel, commondreams.org (May 13, 2008)
"The other day, as I was musing aloud about notion that George Bush is the worst president in U.S. history, an acquaintance interrupted, “What’s been so bad?” I stammered for a moment, unable to get my mind around such a large question. It was sort of like trying to summarize the mysteries of the universe: The topic is so big one doesn’t know where to start. So I decided to compile a handy reference guide to the failed policies, worst decisions, irrational practices and outrageous lies of the Bush administration.In compiling this list, I made the rule that it cannot be an inventory of policy differences between liberals and conservatives; it must differentiate between rational and irrational policies, between truth and lies, between successes and failures. In other words, this should not be a partisan list but an attempt to chronicle the failures, catastrophes and ruinous policies that are apparent to impartial observers. Contributions are welcomed.
1. Lies about an optional war. Some may argue that Bush wasn’t lying about the weapons of mass destruction — that he, and many others, believed they were there. The problem is, he, and most everyone in his administration, misrepresented (lied) about the nature of the intelligence that (they claimed) led us into war. Within the intelligence community — yes, Bush’s own intelligence community — there was much, much more disagreement about the nature and threat of these weapons (and even whether they existed) than what Bush-Cheney-Rice-Rumsfeld claimed. Also in the category of outrageous lies, it is now clear that Bush, during the run-up to the war, was routinely lying when he said he had made no decision about going to war, that he was trying to exhaust all diplomatic options. Memos and staffers have since made it clear that Iraq was a target for war even before 9/11.
2. The optional war itself. It was clear that an invasion of Iraq was not tied to 9/11 and that it would not do anything to deter terrorism and that, in fact, it would make terrorism worse. Bush and his followers might believe otherwise, but I would argue that this is empirically true. The vote for the war authorization was pushed right before a midterm election, and Bush was demanding its passage, clearly making war a political issues. That alone is outrageous conduct for a president. But I would be happy to eliminate this one from the list, if enough readers think I should.
3. The fiasco in handling the optional war that was started from lies. Even John McCain, military strategists and such right-wingers as Pat Buchanan acknowledge this one. Because of arrogance, ignorance and just plain stupidity, the war was mismanaged from the start. It led to countless unnecessary deaths, a disastrous loss of prestige and diplomatic clout for America, and, predictably, it became an al-Qaeda training and recruitment tool.
4. Tax cuts that overwhelmingly favor the rich in a time of war. It is possible, as far as policy goes, to argue for tax cuts, even in the face of crushing deficits. It may be possible to argue, in a supply-sider’s dream, that it is appropriate for the rich to garner most of the benefits for the tax cuts. But it is nearly impossible, unless one lacks sufficient powers of reasoning, to argue that we should enact tax cuts that disproportionately favor the wealthy, when war demands sacrifices and sufficient revenue to be waged successfully.
5. Trillions in new debt, and annual deficits in the half-trillion-dollar range. This may be paired with the item above. Bush and the Republicans have not only failed to pay for the tax cuts they so eagerly handed out to rich supporters who then gave them campaign contributions, they also put forth billions in new spending, making Democrats look like chumps when it comes to pork-barreling. Oh, and by the way, they also enacted the biggest entitlement program in history since Social Security, the pharmaceutical drug bill, that provided billions to drug companies while restricting drug price competition. Also, the Bush administration lied to members of his own party about the cost of the 2003 Medicare bill, just so they could be tricked into voting for it.
6. The weakening of the dollar. Again, this may be paired with the items above. Many experts have speculated that the dollar’s reign as the world currency may end fairly soon, and its displacement can be directly tied to Reagan-Bush-Bush policies favoring vast debt, massive gaps in wealth between the rich and middle class, a weakening of the manufacturing economy, and changing the U.S. from the largest creditor nation in history to the largest debtor nation in history. I won’t give Bill Clinton a pass on this one, since the manufacturing sector decline continued under his watch and, some might argue, accelerated as a result of NAFTA. But it is clear that idea that taxes are heresy under Republicans — even at the expense of the nation and at the collapse of the dollar — has taken on its Biblical status under George W. Bush.
7. The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Here was a president so disengaged that American citizens were left stranded, and people died, during his inaction. Yet, in his words, “Brownie, you’re doing a heckuva job.”
8. The suspension of habeas corpus. This has taken several forms under George Bush — by executive decision, through legal opinion by the likes of hack John Yoo and by the establishment of prisons to hold prisoners without charge or trial. But one moment Americans should never forget is the passage of the Military Commissions Act of 2006. Congress must share the blame on this, but without Bush’s “leadership,” it never would have passed. The law cast aside the Constitution and the principle of habeas corpus, which protects against unlawful and indefinite imprisonment. The Congress also gave the president absolute power to designate enemy combatants, and to set his own definitions for torture.
9. “Enhanced interrogation”/torture/extraordinary rendition. Bush said he knew and approved of the harsh tactics that led to such outrages as Abu Ghraib. Bush says the U.S. doesn’t torture because it doesn’t torture. Whatever you call it, it amounts to an illegal usurping of executive authority. John McCain was against it before he was for it. Some Americans may believe terrorists deserve torture in some cases, and I won’t disagree; however, it is clear that, under George W. Bush, America tortured some innocent people, and in some cases it transported prisoners to other countries so they could be tortured there.
10. Halliburton/Blackwater. These companies are by symbols for the privatization of war. Military contractors, often having no accountability to anyone, have stolen billions, wasted more billions, and kidnapped, raped and murdered in the name of the United States.
11. Guantanamo. While military prisons are routine in wartime, the problem with Gitmo is that it has been set up to hold terrorists as well as the innocent. And because of the end of habeas corpus, there is no way for the innocent to be set loose. In addition, it has undoubtedly created terrorists out of innocent people; even setting loose the innocent has become a grave risk, thanks to George W. Bush. But Guantanamo is not the only place where the innocent are held. Just last month, the U.S. released AP photographer Bilal Hussein after holding him in Iraq for two years without trial.
12. Presidential signing statements. Bush has made unprecedented use of these extra-legal statements in which he declares all or part of a law unconstitutional because (he says) it encroaches on executive authority. Therefore, he’ll sign the bill but ignore the parts he disagrees with. These statements have been used on a limited basis by other presidents in particular situations. But George Bush has claimed the authority to disobey more than 750 laws. Among them, reported the Boston Globe, are “military rules and regulations, affirmative-action provisions, requirements that Congress be told about immigration services problems, ‘whistle-blower’ protections for nuclear regulatory officials, and safeguards against political interference in federally funded research. Legal scholars say the scope and aggression of Bush’s assertions that he can bypass laws represent a concerted effort to expand his power at the expense of Congress, upsetting the balance between the branches of government.”
13. The Healthy Forests Initiative — would allow more logging and development in our national parks.
14. The Clear Skies Initiative — would weaken many parts of the Clean Air Act to allow more pollutants in many areas. Aside from what these laws do is the Orwellian Newspeak — giving names to policies or laws that are, at best, misleading. (Read: Patriot Act.)
15. Mining safety. Bush cut funding for mining safety and stacked the Mine Safety and Health Administration with industry executives, who fought against better regulations to protect lives and limbs. In 2006, forty-seven coal miners died on the job, the most in any full year since 1995, when forty-seven also were killed. Thirty-three were killed last year. Not all the deaths can be blamed on Bush and his industry-friendly appointees, but most assuredly, some can.
16. The U.S. attorney scandals. In this case, seven U.S. attorneys — Republicans — were fired in 2006. The reasons for the dismissals remain unclear, but allegations were that they were made for partisan political purposes. Anyone who doubts that partisanship (see Monica Goodling) was a factor — which, by the way, undermines the justice system of the United States — has not been paying attention to the way George Bush operates. Investigations into the matter have been impeded, but it is without question that the scandal has eroded morale in the Justice Department.
17. Stop loss. This U.S. military policy amounts to a back-door draft. While legal, it erodes morale, weakens the military and subjects soldiers to repeated danger and the possibility of physical and mental problems. Apparently, a weaker military is a policy of this administration, since it has overextended personnel and refused to provide adequate body armor to troops. In addition, Bush favored cutting funding for Veterans’ Administration, denying crucial medical care to the troops that he sent to war.
18. Alienation of U.S. allies.
19. Cutting of food stamps. This could be an ideological difference, so many might argue it’s not fair game in a list of Bush disasters. However, one aspect of the Bush prescription drug plan related to this issue can’t be viewed as ideological: as reported by Salon, “More bad news about that prescription drug plan: Seniors who use it may lose their food stamps.”
20. “So?” Dick Cheneys’ response to a question noting that the vast majority of Americans believe Iraq was a mistake and want the troops to come home.
21. FISA/illegal wiretapping. Bush still claims that violating the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is okay because he’s fighting the terrorists. But there’s nothing in the law that prevented wiretapping; it allowed temporary wiretapping until warrants could be issued. That didn’t matter to Bush; he’d rather violate the law when possible.
22. 9/11. Bush and his administration ignored repeated warnings that a major terrorist act was pending on U.S. soil. Richard Clarke said he tried for months to have Bush and Condaleeza Rice make terrorism a priority, but they ignored him. Whether you believe Clarke or not, the fact is that there was a memo about bin Laden being determined to strike in the U.S., and Bush went on vacation to Crawford, Texas, shortly before the Twin Towers fell.
23. Global warming. Bush now admits it’s a problem, although Bush officials trashed science by redacting independent governmentally commissioned studies on the issue. But even though he says it’s a problem he has no proposals to do anything about it in the near term.
24. Health care. More children (9 million) are without health insurance today than when Bush took office. The nation is facing catastrophic health care costs for the next century; Bush has ignored the problem.
25. Energy policy. The records of Dick Cheney’s task force on energy are secret, so we don’t know how much of the nation’s energy policy was dictated by energy companies. But it is certain that it was a great deal; Bush’s pattern in this area is the same as in others; i.e., put oil and gas officials in charge of energy policy; put pharmaceutical companies in charge of drug policy; let health industry lobbyists write health policy legislation. Gas prices have soared and record profits are now routine business for the oil companies; people think their taxes are lower under Bush, but they are paying more for gas, food and other basic necessities - and they are also paying more state and local taxes because of federal budget cuts.
26. Immigration. For Bush or against him on this issue, it can hardly be argued that he has put forth a successful policy.
27. The Pentagon information apparatus designed to praise George Bush’s war by touting military officers — paid by private contractors — as objective observers. This was a deliberate attempt to lie to the American people through a compliant and incompetent mass media.
28. Plants in press conferences. Jeff Gannon, a right-wing gay escort, was given press credentials and allowed to lob softball questions at Bush during White House news conferences.
29. A weaker America — we are weaker militarily, economically and on the world stage than the day George Bush took office. Some Republicans seem to fear Democrats because they say the Democrats want to destroy America. But it is hard to imagine a series of policies that have done more to hurt America than those forced upon us over the last seven years. Three-fourths of Americans know the country is on the wrong track, yet half of them support “more wrong track,” as Bill Maher put it. This is because the Republicans are very good at distracting large numbers of people from the disasters that this administration has fostered. One method they use is that they claim that criticisms of policy, particularly war policy, amount to criticisms of America. I want to make it clear that this tactic won’t work here. The above criticisms are not criticisms of America; they are criticisms of George W. Bush. It is because I love this country that this list was compiled. It was George Bush, not America, who brought us to this place.
30. A divided America. After 9/11 Bush had that rare opportunity to unite the nation, and the world, to defeat terrorism. Instead of using this goodwill - instead of bringing us all together to fight a common enemy — he squandered it. A generation has been lost to Bush’s petty petulance and his unilateral, misguided use of executive power. One would think that most conservatives, and most Republicans, would worry about expanded executive power. But many of them haven’t. One wonders how they will feel about it when a Democrat takes office."
Obama Chose Right Word: Who Wouldn’t Be ‘Bitter’ About Being Bushed?, by Robyn Blumner, Salt Lake Tribune (April 22, 2008)
"Barack Obama may have been a little too blunt in his now infamous quip about how the economic insecurities gripping small-town America manifest themselves, but the word ”bitter” perfectly sums up my feelings these days.
You bet I’m bitter.
I’ve watched my country get hijacked by a group of self-serving incompetents who have little conscience about sending young men and women to die in an unnecessary war, while putting the bill on a credit card for the next generation.
You bet I’m bitter.
I’ve seen some of the greatest moral handiwork of modern civilization - the Geneva Conventions - get treated as if it were the naive ramblings of out-of-touch do-gooders. I’ve watched the founding principles of our nation - the inalienable right of due process of law and the checks and balances of three equal branches of government - treated as a copse to be mowed down on route to the unitary executive.
You bet I’m bitter.
I’ve stood by as the wealth of our nation has been concentrated in the hands of a tiny elite while the middle class struggles to tread water financially. I’ve seen our tax policies shift to benefit this small group, starving our national treasury of needed resources and making it far less possible to prepare for the future by investing in infrastructure, education and shoring up Social Security and Medicare.
You bet I’m bitter.
I’ve watched a macabre health care system become even more dysfunctional, so that a single accident or illness can destroy the economic security of a family. I’ve seen Big Pharma use its lobbying muscle to keep Medicare from negotiating better drug prices. I’ve observed as health insurance companies with their inflated middle-man profits add immeasurably to the cost of care while trying to deny coverage and services to their customers. I’ve heard our leaders whine about ‘’socialized medicine” anytime a comprehensive fix is suggested.
You bet I’m bitter.
I’ve seen industry insiders put in charge of regulatory agencies so that worker safety and environmental protection are eroded in the name of increased profits. I’ve watched as science is subverted to ideology. Where facts on global climate change are ignored or manipulated to fit a politically driven script. I’ve seen the Department of Justice transform into the legal arm of the Republican Party.
You bet I’m bitter.
I’ve watched the dismantling of the wall of separation between church and state, allowing billions of tax dollars to flow to religiously affiliated groups that peddle their own brand of faith as part of the government-funded service. I’ve seen Christian fundamentalism defeat funding for international family planning and constrain the distribution of condoms in places where HIV/AIDS has decimated the population.
You bet I’m bitter.
I’ve stood by as the national debt nearly doubled in the last seven years due to irresponsible tax cuts and spending on such folly as an endless preemptive war that may end up costing $3 trillion. I’ve observed the privatization of core government functions, such as the handling of security assignments in Iraq by the unaccountable Blackwater. I’ve seen billions of dollars in Iraq reconstruction money wasted and lost to a system of endemic corruption.
You bet I’m bitter.
I’ve watched our nation get less secure thanks to the counterproductive policies of the neocons in charge. I’ve seen the populations of otherwise friendly nations turn against the United States, seeing us as the world’s biggest bully and hypocrite rather than its greatest beacon of liberty, justice and opportunity. I’ve observed that our willingness to abuse prisoners has become a recruiting tool for our enemies, making us masters of our own demise.
You bet I’m bitter. And when more than 80 percent of Americans think we’re on the wrong track, I’m not the only one. Obama chose the right word. The only question is, how long will this bad taste last and how do we get rid of it?"
Fascism Is Creepy, by Stacey Warde, commondreams.org (April 15, 2008)
"For nearly eight years, I’ve tried without success to describe the radical shift that has taken place in our government.
Each time I’ve approached the task, I’ve had to throw up my hands in frustration because the only model that makes sense to me is the one called fascism.
But that word doesn’t go over too well in polite conversation. It evokes horrors too horrible to imagine. The reality, however, is that fascism isn’t just about jackbooted thugs and state-sponsored industry built on slavery and death to one’s enemies.
The danger of fascism is its seemingly benign mechanisms of control - fear, conformity, the state’s intermingling with religion and corporate enterprise - for keeping a populace in check, for making its people feel content with the way things are and never quick to protest occasional violations of human rights and infringements on their or another’s liberties.
The danger of fascism is its seemingly magical ability - through brilliant propaganda outlets like Fox News - to keep a people resigned to whatever the government does in their name, making them feel secure through its adventures in endless wars and policing the globe and the homeland.
The other great thing about fascism is its capacity for supporting, even indulging, denial on the most massive scale: “We don’t torture. …You can trust us. …If you’re not doing anything wrong, you’ve got nothing to worry about….”
Our phones are tapped, elections rigged, bogus wars planned and executed, real and imagined enemies created, and police acquire more powers to intimidate and harass while more rights are taken away from citizens.
Churches pray for the end of the world and offer their children as sacrifices for the war machine, and collude with the government colluding with the corporations and financial institutions - promising blood, anything, for National Security.
Soon, we who protest have been silenced, or marginalized. The Supreme Leader has the right to put anyone he considers a threat - U.S. citizens included - into prison indefinitely, without access to an attorney, or the right to confront his accusers, merely by declaring that person an “enemy combatant.”
The whole drama and theater of the fascist play draws its action from the government wedding itself to corporate interests - in the U.S., a nationalist religious fervor is thrown into the mix to make it all palatable.
Eventually, we all do what we are told - or suffer the consequences. The real danger of fascism is its creep factor. It creeps up on us, and before we know it, we’ve become model citizens in the state that runs secret prisons and gulags around the world. We accept, approve and justify state-sponsored kidnapping, torture and preemptive war. Fascism is creepy.
Historically, by the time citizens realize what’s happened to the country they love, it’s too late.
Like many others, I’ve known for a long time that America has changed. Its legacy of freedom has morphed into something grossly distorted, something the founders of this nation would not have recognized.
I believe they would have wanted us - those who came after them - to fight just as hard for this legacy, which they bestowed upon us, trusting that what they obtained through their own blood and sacrifice was worth the cost, the promise of freedom, to live free from the tyranny and fear of not just our enemies but our own government.
I used to nod with a smile at the pithy “I love my country but fear my government,” but now it’s not so funny. Under the Bush administration, the government has cynically debased rather than protected my rights as a citizen, and I’ve got good reason to fear.
My eyes are wide open.
Still, it’s hard for some citizens to acknowledge the plain and simple fact that our liberties have diminished and not advanced under Bush’s leadership. It’s been hard for many of us to draw a clear picture of our predicament, to know just how much has actually been lost, and where that leaves us as citizens.
How does anyone make sense of something as horrible as the loss of liberty and the emergence of something darker and more sinister? What word or words can possibly describe it?
The United States hasn’t always lived up to its promise as a haven of freedom, but it’s come close, and has built an even greater legacy of expanding and protecting those freedoms handed down to us from the Revolution, giving people around the globe reason to hope.
Our government has at times acted criminally in the name of freedom, justifying acts of terror and war. But I’d like to believe that the swing has always been in the other direction, toward more human rights and freedom.
Yet, in the nearly eight years since Bush took office, U.S. foreign and domestic policy has tilted away from not closer to its responsibility of guaranteeing individual freedoms. Our government has done more during Bush’s tenure to jeopardize and infringe upon those rights than to protect them.
The world distrusts American interests precisely because we’ve failed to honor and respect the codes of our own charters of freedom, let alone those of the international community, neglecting human rights at home and abroad.
Consequently, repressive nations like China have no reason to fear repercussions from the United States for abuse of citizens seeking democratic reforms. They can continue to oppress their own people without fear of reprisals because the United States is no longer the beacon or protector of freedom that it once was.
How does the United States, given its own recent history of sanctioning repressive tactics like waterboarding, hooding, and indefinite imprisonment, claim higher ground and demand an end to repression and terror?
As noted by historians of the fascist movements of the 20th century, repression and human rights abuses like those practiced by China, and recently the United States, can appear in waves, sweeping up state governments around the globe in a frenzy of abuse against their own people.
Once again, fascism appears to be on the rise, in the West as well as in fundamentalist Islamic nations that oppress women and nonbelievers.
I don’t have any illusions regarding the threat of militant Islam, or its own fascist turns against liberty, subjecting its enemies and its own people to terror and inhumane treatment.
Sharia law, in which local Imams dictate morality, is no more appealing to me than the White House dictating my responsibilities as a citizen.
I like the old biblical injunction of “set your own house in order” before attempting to influence another’s.
The time is ripe to turn the United States back to its original radical design of guaranteeing the individual liberties of all its citizens, including the right to speak out against the government and to turn tyranny on its head.
It’s time to reaffirm the right of the accused to confront their accusers, to put teeth back into the force of law that protects our freedoms as spelled out in the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights. It’s time for a refreshingly honest discussion of our rights as U.S. citizens in a nation stifled by fear and ignorance.
If we can pool the talents and passions and resources of people whose vision embraces the human spirit’s quest for freedom, we might just stop the frightening tilt toward fascism that has made the United States - a nation founded on democratic ideals - a stranger to the world and to itself. We might reawaken ourselves to the legacy of freedom that once served as a bulwark against fascism."
A Veto of the FISA Bill Endangers Americans, by Keith Olbermann, MSNBC (February 14, 2008)
" A part of what I will say, was said here on Jan. 31. Unfortunately it is both sadder and truer now than it was then.
"Who's to blame?" Mr. Bush also said this afternoon, "Look, these folks in Congress passed a good bill late last summer.... The problem is, they let the bill expire. My attitude is: If the bill was good enough then, why not pass the bill again?"
Like the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. Or Executive Order 90-66. Or The Alien and Sedition Acts. Or slavery.
Mr. Bush, you say that our ability to track terrorist threats will be weakened and our citizens will be in greater danger. Yet you have weakened that ability!
You have subjected us, your citizens, to that greater danger! This, Mr. Bush, is simple enough for even you to understand.
For the moment, at least, thanks to some true patriots in the House, and your own stubbornness, you have tabled telecom immunity, and the FISA act.
You. By your own terms and your definitions, you have just sided with the terrorists. You've got to have this law, or we're all going to die. But, practically speaking, you vetoed this law.
It is bad enough, sir, that you were demanding an ex post facto law that could still clear the AT&Ts and the Verizons from responsibility for their systematic, aggressive and blatant collaboration with your illegal and unjustified spying on Americans under this flimsy guise of looking for any terrorists who are stupid enough to make a collect call or send a mass e-mail.
But when you demanded it again during the State of the Union address, you wouldn't even confirm that they actually did anything for which they deserved to be cleared.
"The Congress must pass liability protection for companies believed to have assisted in the efforts to defend America."
Believed? Don't you know? Don't you even have the guts Dick Cheney showed in admitting they did collaborate with you? Does this endless presidency of loopholes and fine print extend even here? If you believe in the seamless mutuality of government and big business, come out and say it! There is a dictionary definition, one word that describes that toxic blend.
You're a fascist - get them to print you a T-shirt with fascist on it! What else is this but fascism? Did you see Mark Klein on this newscast last November?
....."
How to Erode and Destroy Democracy: a Dozen Tested Strategies, by Rob Kall, truthout.org (January 2, 2008)
"Tips to fascists, dictators, corporatists, militarists, imperialists, neocons, right-wingers, theocrats, theofascists and terrorists.
1. Kill the strongest opposition candidate and then pretend that elections should go on as normal, without allowing the opposition party to reorganize. Examples:
Benazir Bhutto: strategy - hamstring security abilities to the extent that the candidate actually writes a letter accusing the government leadership of intentional sabotage of security.
Paul Wellstone: rush through a replacement candidate and politicize the funeral. Get the mainstream media "partners" to portray the funeral as despicably political to eliminate sympathy for the new candidate. (Expect something like this with the candidate who replaces Bhutto.
2. Steal elections using e-voting with nonpublic software code, no paper ballot records, purges from lists of eligible voters, phone-bank jamming and fraudulent registration drives, where you throw away the registrations of opposition party registrants. Multiple examples in US - Florida and Ohio, particularly. Essential: this only works with weak, cowardly candidates who fail to aggressively work to prevent these actions and then fail to challenge questionable outcomes. This has been relatively easy, since even when candidates do get tough in response to rigged elections, there are plenty of weak, compromised legislators who will enable the election theft. Clint Curtis's campaign is a good example. The Dems in Congress allowed the theft.
3. Erode constitutional rights. Violate laws and treaties. Make excuses that there are imminent threats to national security, or that the treaties will hurt the nation's economy. Take the most horrific of these and get the media to boost hysteria and fear, then get the most fascist members of the legislature to push through laws retroactively making violations of the law legal. The majority of sold-out legislators will work with your lobbyists, avoid your media mockery and pass the legislation or approve appointees who allow or refuse to not condemn the assaults upon the Constitution and international law. Example - Mukasey approval, FISA approval, continuation of Iraq war (started on lies).
4. Gradually destroy the economy. Engage in "Shock Doctrine" disaster capitalism, so the nation's citizens are more worried about survival than maintaining democracy. Naomi Klein has documented how fascist neocon Milton Friedman economists have used this tried and true approach to destruction of democracy in dozen of nations - usually with the help of the USA's CIA. See Naomi Klein's book, "Shock Doctrine," for detailed examples.
5. Corporatize the nation. Maximize laws that give corporations human rights as persons. Allow corporations to pollute the election process, so their money is the primary factor in deterring the ability of candidates to reach voters, as is the law and policy in the US. Have legislators you own create bogus, chimera laws that look like and call themselves election reform, that are really so full of loopholes that they actually improve the power of corporations while taking away the power of citizens. See US policy for excellent examples.
6. Deregulate the media so a handful of corporate owners control most of the message. Then filter the news so viewers/readers/listeners are turned off to paying attention. Do this by using the same footage over and over again, and numb the viewers' minds with focus on coverage of morally impaired and stupid celebrities, tabloid news such as weird surgeries, kidnappings, horrific mass murders, strange diseases, detachment of Siamese twins.... And when you do cover real news, mock the most serious defenders of democracy. Attempt to embarrass them, to get viewers and readers to think of them as fools and kooks. Especially, use this mockery approach to sabotage and attack any candidates not "with the program" who are surging in polls.
7. Infiltrate alternative media. Hijack comment threads with negative, cynical remarks, or distract commenters from staying on focus. Provoke incivility among regular readers of pro-democracy media.
8. Widen class differences. Keep as many people as possible hungry, without health care, worried about where they will get the money to pay for housing, clothing, education, food and medicine.
9. Take advantage of natural disasters to weaken democratic factors. Allow floods, hurricanes and fires to "cleanse" unwanted voters in selected regions. Replace them with high-end real estate and corporate assets. Use the disasters as opportunities to spend taxpayer money to reward political allies.
10. Pretend that everything you do is the patriotic support of Democracy, even if it is directly opposed to democracy. Attack the pro-democracy party and organizations as being communist, socialist, fringe, kook, even dangerous to democracy. Depend upon anti-democracy mainstream media allies to help pound this message so the fools produced by the dumbed-down, "most children left behind" educational system buy these messages. Use talk radio to nail this down. See US education laws and policies for examples. This is already working quite effectively in the US as low international scores indicate.
11. Allow candidates to run repeatedly, without term limits. Eventually, candidates who do not toe the anti-democracy line in all parties will burn out or run out of funding. That will leave, even in the supposed liberal parties, reliable legislators who will keep the anti-democracy program going. Eventually, they will get themselves into key leadership positions, either at the top of the party or just below the top. Consider Chuck Schumer, Stenny Hoyer and Rahm Emanuel as excellent examples.
12. Build fear into the culture. Say you are fighting terrorism, but engage in international policies that foment and encourage terrorism, helping terrorists to massively expand recruitment and even training of operatives. See Iraq for Islamic terrorists. See the US for anti-abortion Christian terrorists.
My regular readers will know that I write this as a way to speak truth to current events, not as actual advocacy or support for these "strategies." I fear that some will read this as a genuine "how to." Some will be pleased with the advanced progress the world has seen along these strategies. If you are one of these - probably an adviser to power - please consider that your children and grandchildren will inherit the legacy you create for them. If wealth or power are your goals, what good will they do in a world darkened by tyranny or corporate domination? "
Creeping Fascism: Lessons From the Past, by Ray McGovern, commondreams.org (December 27, 2007)
"“There are few things as odd as the calm, superior indifference with which I and those like me watched the beginnings of the Nazi revolution in Germany, as if from a box at the theater…Perhaps the only comparably odd thing is the way that now, years later….”
These are the words of Sebastian Haffner (pen name for Raimund Pretzel), who as a young lawyer in Berlin during the 1930s experienced the Nazi takeover and wrote a first-hand account. His children found the manuscript when he died in 1999 and published it the following year as “Geschichte eines Deutschen” (The Story of a German). The book became an immediate bestseller and has been translated into 20 languages-in English as “Defying Hitler.”
I recently learned from his daughter Sarah, an artist in Berlin, that today is the 100th anniversary of Haffner’s birth. She had seen an earlier article in which I quoted her father and emailed to ask me to “write some more about the book and the comparison to Bush’s America…this is almost unbelievable.”
More about Haffner below. Let’s set the stage first by recapping some of what has been going on that may have resonance for readers familiar with the Nazi ascendancy, noting how “odd” it is that the frontal attack on our Constitutional rights is met with such “calm, superior indifference.”
Goebbels Would be Proud
It has been two years since top New York Times officials decided to let the rest of us in on the fact that the George W. Bush administration had been eavesdropping on American citizens without the court warrants required by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978. The Times had learned of this well before the election in 2004 and acquiesced to White House entreaties to suppress the damaging information.
In late fall 2005 when Times correspondent James Risen’s book, “State of War: the Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration,” revealing the warrantless eavesdropping was being printed, Times publisher, Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., recognized that he could procrastinate no longer. It would simply be too embarrassing to have Risen’s book on the street, with Sulzberger and his associates pretending that this explosive eavesdropping story did not fit Adolph Ochs’ trademark criterion: All The News That’s Fit To Print. (The Times ‘ own ombudsman, Public Editor Byron Calame, branded the newspaper’s explanation for the long delay in publishing this story “woefully inadequate.”)
When Sulzberger told his friends in the White House that he could no longer hold off on publishing in the newspaper, he was summoned to the Oval Office for a counseling session with the president on Dec. 5, 2005. Bush tried in vain to talk him out of putting the story in the Times. The truth would out; part of it, at least.
Glitches
There were some embarrassing glitches. For example, unfortunately for National Security Agency Director Lt. Gen. Keith Alexander, the White House neglected to tell him that the cat would soon be out of the bag. So on Dec. 6, Alexander spoke from the old talking points in assuring visiting House intelligence committee member Rush Holt ( D-N.J.) that the NSA did not eavesdrop on Americans without a court order.
Still possessed of the quaint notion that generals and other senior officials are not supposed to lie to congressional oversight committees, Holt wrote a blistering letter to Gen. Alexander after the Times, on Dec. 16, front-paged a feature by Risen and Eric Lichtblau, “Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers Without Courts.” But House Intelligence Committee chair Pete Hoekstra (R-Michigan) apparently found Holt’s scruples benighted; Hoekstra did nothing to hold Alexander accountable for misleading Holt, his most experienced committee member, who had served as an intelligence analyst at the State Department.
What followed struck me as bizarre. The day after the Dec. 16 Times feature article, the president of the United States publicly admitted to a demonstrably impeachable offense. Authorizing illegal electronic surveillance was a key provision of the second article of impeachment against President Richard Nixon. On July 27, 1974, this and two other articles of impeachment were approved by bipartisan votes in the House Committee on the Judiciary.
Bush Takes Frontal Approach
Far from expressing regret, the president bragged about having authorized the surveillance “more than 30 times since the September the 11th attacks,” and said he would continue to do so. The president also said:
“Leaders in Congress have been briefed more than a dozen times on this authorization and the activities conducted under it.”
On Dec. 19, 2005 then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and then-NSA Director Michael Hayden held a press conference to answer questions about the as yet unnamed surveillance program. Gonzales was asked why the White House decided to flout FISA rather than attempt to amend it, choosing instead a “backdoor approach.” He answered:
“We have had discussions with Congress…as to whether or not FISA could be amended to allow us to adequately deal with this kind of threat, and we were advised that that would be difficult, if not impossible.”
Hmm. Impossible? It strains credulity that a program of the limited scope described would be unable to win ready approval from a Congress that had just passed the “Patriot Act” in record time. James Risen has made the following quip about the prevailing mood: “In October 2001 you could have set up guillotines on the public streets of America.” It was not difficult to infer [[ http://www.truthout.org/cgi-bin/artman/exec/view.cgi/60/19945 ]] that the surveillance program must have been of such scope and intrusiveness that, even amid highly stoked fear, it didn’t have a prayer for passage.
It turns out we didn’t know the half of it.
What To Call These Activities
“Illegal Surveillance Program” didn’t seem quite right for White House purposes, and the PR machine was unusually slow off the blocks. It took six weeks to settle on “Terrorist Surveillance Program,” with FOX News leading the way followed by the president himself. This labeling would dovetail nicely with the president’s rhetoric on Dec. 17:
“In the weeks following the terrorist attacks on our nation, I authorized the National Security Agency, consistent with U.S. law and the Constitution, to intercept the international communications of people with known links to al-Qaeda and related terrorist organizations…. The authorization I gave the National Security Agency after September 11 helped address that problem…”[emphasis added]
And Gen. Michael Hayden, who headed NSA from 1999 to 2005, was of course on the same page, dissembling as convincingly as the president. At his May 2006 confirmation hearings to become CIA director, he told of his soul-searching when, as director of NSA, he was asked to eavesdrop on Americans without a court warrant. “I had to make this personal decision in early Oct. 2001,” said Hayden, “it was a personal decision…I could not not do this.”
Like so much else, it was all because of 9/11. But we now know…
It Started Seven Months Before 9/11
How many times have you heard it? The mantra “after 9/11 everything changed” has given absolution to all manner of sin.
We are understandably reluctant to believe the worst of our leaders, and this tends to make us negligent. After all, we learned from former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill that drastic changes were made in U.S. foreign policy toward the Israeli-Palestinian issue and toward Iraq at the first National Security Council meeting on Jan. 30, 2001. Should we not have anticipated far-reaching changes at home, as well?
Reporting by the Rocky Mountain News and court documents and testimony in a case involving Qwest Communications strongly suggest that in February 2001 Hayden saluted smartly when the Bush administration instructed NSA to suborn AT&T, Verizon, and Qwest to spy illegally on you, me, and other Americans. Bear in mind that this would have had nothing to do with terrorism, which did not really appear on the new administration’s radar screen until a week before 9/11, despite the pleading of Clinton aides that the issue deserved extremely high priority.
So this until-recently-unknown pre-9/11 facet of the “Terrorist Surveillance Program” was not related to Osama bin Laden or to whomever he and his associates might be speaking. It had to do with us. We know that the Democrats who were briefed on the “Terrorist Surveillance Program” include House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) (the one with the longest tenure on the House Intelligence Committee), Congresswoman Jane Harman (D-CA) and former and current chairmen of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Bob Graham (D-FL) and Jay Rockefeller (D-WVA). May one interpret their lack of public comment on the news that the snooping began well before 9/11 as a sign they were co-opted and then sworn to secrecy?
It is an important question. Were the appropriate leaders in Congress informed that within days of George W. Bush’s first inauguration the NSA electronic vacuum cleaner began to suck up information on you and me, despite the FISA law and the Fourth Amendment?
Are They All Complicit?
And are Democratic leaders about to cave in and grant retroactive immunity to those telecommunications corporations-AT&T and Verizon-who made millions by winking at the law and the Constitution? (Qwest, to it’s credit, heeded the advice of its general counsel who said that what NSA wanted done was clearly illegal.)
What’s going on here? Have congressional leaders no sense for what is at stake? Lately the adjective “spineless” has come into vogue in describing congressional Democrats-no offense to invertebrates.
Nazis and Those Who Enable Them
You don’t have to be a Nazi. You can just be, well, a sheep.
In his journal Sebastian Haffner decries what he calls the “sheepish submissiveness” with which the German people reacted to a 9/11-like event, the burning of the German Parliament (Reichstag) on Feb. 27, 1933. Haffner finds it quite telling that none of his acquaintances “saw anything out of the ordinary in the fact that, from then on, one’s telephone would be tapped, one’s letters opened, and one’s desk might be broken into.”
But it is for the cowardly politicians that Haffner reserves his most vehement condemnation. Do you see any contemporary parallels here?
In the elections of March 4, 1933, shortly after the Reichstag fire, the Nazi party garnered only 44 percent of the vote. Only the “cowardly treachery” of the Social Democrats and other parties to whom 56 percent of the German people had entrusted their votes made it possible for the Nazis to seize full power. Haffner adds:
“It is in the final analysis only that betrayal that explains the almost inexplicable fact that a great nation, which cannot have consisted entirely of cowards, fell into ignominy without a fight.”
The Social Democratic leaders betrayed their followers-”for the most part decent, unimportant individuals.” In May they sang the Nazi anthem; in June the Social Democratic party was dissolved.
The middle-class Catholic party Zentrum folded in less than a month, and in the end supplied the votes necessary for the two-thirds majority that “legalized” Hitler’s dictatorship.
As for the right-wing conservatives and German nationalists: “Oh God,” writes Haffner, “what an infinitely dishonorable and cowardly spectacle their leaders made in 1933 and continued to make afterward…. They went along with everything: the terror, the persecution of Jews…. They were not even bothered when their own party was banned and their own members arrested.” In sum:
“There was not a single example of energetic defense, of courage or principle. There was only panic, flight, and desertion. In March 1933 millions were ready to fight the Nazis. Overnight they found themselves without leaders…At the moment of truth, when other nations rise spontaneously to the occasion, the Germans collectively and limply collapsed. They yielded and capitulated, and suffered a nervous breakdown…. The result is today the nightmare of the rest of the world.”
This is what can happen when virtually all are intimidated.
Our Founding Fathers were not oblivious to this; thus, James Madison:
“I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments by those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations…. The means of defense against foreign danger historically have become the instruments of tyranny at home.”
We cannot say we weren’t warned."
Police State America - A Look Back and Ahead, by Stephen Lendman, Information Clearing House (December 18, 2007)
"Year end is a good time to look back and reflect on what's ahead. If past is prologue, however, the outlook isn't good, and nothing on the horizon suggests otherwise. Voters last November wanted change but got betrayal from the bipartisan criminal class in Washington. Their attitude shows in an October Reuters/Zogby (RZ) opinion poll with George Bush at 24% that tops Richard Nixon's worst showing of 25% at his lowest 1974 Watergate point. And if that looks bad, consider Congress with "The Hill" reporting from the same RZ Index that our legislators scored a "staggering 11%, the lowest (congressional) rating in history," but there's room yet to hit bottom and a year left to do it. Why not with lawmakers' consistent voter sellout and failure record that keeps getting worse.
It's been that way ever since 9/11 with both sides of the aisle complicit with the administration. This article looks back at the record, and year end is a good time to review it. It's hard imagining another as bad with a President defiling the law and once telling Republican colleagues the Constitution is "just a goddamned piece of paper."
He didn't just say it. He governs by it, gets away with it, and former Defense Department analyst Daniel Ellsberg, of Pentagon Papers fame, says "a coup has occurred (with another to come from) the next 9/11....that completes the first (that's) seen a steady assault on every fundamental (aspect) of our Constitution (to create) an executive government (to) rule by decree" no different from a police state.
Author Naomi Wolf spells it out in her April, 2007 Guardian article - "Fascist America, In 10 Easy Steps." In it, she argues the Bush administration is following the same script any "would-be dictator must take to destroy constitutional freedoms," and she lists them. They range from "invoking a terrifying internal and external enemy" to "creat(ing) a gulag" to spying on everyone to harassing opposition to controlling the media to calling dissent treason to "suspend(ing) the rule of law." She also notes how much "simpler" it is to shut down democracy than "to create and sustain" it, and that's today's threat.
It's not with jackboots in the streets but by a steady "process of erosion" with the public largely unaware and distracted by media mind manipulators. It's happening today, and Wolf sounds the alarm with the words of James Madison saying "The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands....is the definition of tyranny," and that's the condition now in America. This article reviews the record for the past seven years. It's not pretty.
Even the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, (unlike every Pope in memory) condemned it in a wide-ranging UK Muslim magazine interview. It was quoted in a November 25 Sunday Times column headlined "US is 'worst' imperialist" and wields its power more reprehensibly than Britain ever did in its heyday. He explained that American overseas adventurism led to "the worst of all worlds" and expressed pessimism about the current state of western civilization and Washington's own misguided sense of mission.
He critiqued the "war on terror" and stated America lost the moral high ground post-9/11 and needs to launch a "generous and intelligent programme of aid to the (nations it) ravaged;....check (its) economic exploitation of defeated territories" and demilitarize them. He called the West fundamentally adrift and our "definition of humanity (isn't) working." He denounced America's violence and belief it can solve problems left for "other people (to clean up and) put....back together - Iraq, for example." Another is the condition at home.
Since taking office in January, 2001, George Bush signed a blizzard of Executive Orders and attached dozens of "signing statements" to hundreds of law provisions even though nothing in the Constitution allows this practice, and the Supreme Court banned line-item vetos. He continues to do it while Congress and the courts condone his claiming unconstitutional "unitary executive" authority to ignore the law and do as he pleases in the name of "national security" on his say alone.
It began on 9/11 when George Bush addressed the nation and declared a "war on terrorism," asked for world support to win it, and began what became "our government's emergency (preventive war strategy) response plans." The scheme was to ignore the law, go to war, and destroy our civil liberties to keep us safe from "rogue states, 'bad guys,' and evil-doers" throughout an "arc of instability" from the South American Andean region (mainly Colombia) to North Africa through the Middle East to the Philippines, Indonesia and elsewhere in Asia. Congress as well acted right out of the box with two audacious resolutions that surrendered its authority to the executive, allowed him to proceed, and signaled what would come.
The first one came September 18, 2001 in a joint "House-Senate Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF)" that authorized "the use of United States Armed Forces against those responsible for the recent attacks launched against the United States." A second followed in the October, 2002 "Joint Resolution to Authorize the Use of the United States Armed Forces Against Iraq," and the rest is history. This article reviews other key congressional legislation to the present along with George Bush's blatant abuse of presidential power.
His first action came November 13, 2001 when he issued Military Order Number 1 that one analyst called a "coup d'etat," and "watershed moment in (the) country," that was a hint of what would follow. This order violated the spirit and letter of a civil society under constitutional law with a firewall separating it from the military. No longer, and it got worse later on when its provisions resurfaced by act of Congress. That's discussed below. First, Military Order Number 1 and what's in it:
-- it let the President usurp authority to capture, kidnap or otherwise arrest any non-citizens (and later citizens as well) anywhere in the world if he claims they're involved in international terrorism and to hold them indefinitely without charge, evidence or allowing them due process in a court of law.
-- however, IF trials are allowed, they would be by special ad hoc "military commissions," not civil courts and in secret, with evidence obtained by torture allowed, those found guilty given no right of appeal, and they can be secretly executed.
-- no civil court has authority in these cases even if victims are identified and legal counsel wishes to represent them.
Few knew then that on November 13, 2001 US citizens lost their civil liberties, but that would come out later on. It's still ongoing with Congress and the courts complicit in the willful destruction of our democracy that was already on life support. Today, it's gone.
Use of National Security ((NSPDs) and Homeland Security Presidential Directives (HSPDs)
In the Bush administration, NSPDs replaced the Presidential Decision and Review Directives under Bill Clinton and others under different names since the Kennedy administration began the practice. Earlier ones remain in force unless superseded. They're much like Executive Orders (EOs) with the "full force and effect of law," relate to national security, and for that reason remain classified unless or until made public. In seven years, George Bush issued dozens of NSPD's that are too many to review as well as over 20 Homeland Security Presidential Directives (HSPDs). A few key ones are discussed below.
The October 25, 2001 NSPD-9 deserves special note and was titled "Defeating the Terrorist Threat to the United States." On March 23, 2004, Donald Rumsfeld gave this explanation of its classified contents to the 9/11 Commission:
-- "To eliminate the Al Queda network;
-- To use all elements of national power to do so -- diplomatic, military, economic, intelligence, information and law enforcement;
-- To eliminate sanctuaries for Al Queda and related terrorist networks -- and if diplomatic efforts to do so failed, to consider additional measures."
On April 1, 2004, the White House released this statement on the directive:
The NSPD called on the Secretary of Defense to plan for military options "against Taliban targets in Afghanistan, including leadership, command-control, air and air defense, ground forces, and logistics (along with similar efforts) against Al Queda and associated terrorist facilities in Afghanistan."
Here's the problem. The administration adopted these measures on September 4, 2001, seven days before 9/11. George Bush then signed them into binding law in NSPD-9 on October 25, 2001 to conceal when they originated.
....."
Huckabee spot reminds Paul of fascism prediction, by David Edwards and Jason Rhyne, rawstory.com (December 18, 2007)
"A new campaign ad from Republican presidential contender Mike Huckabee sounds a lot like a literary prediction about the coming of fascism, according to fellow GOP Oval Office seeker Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX).
Huckabee's ad, a Christmas message referencing the "celebration of the birth of Christ," depicts the former Arkansas governor in front of a window frame or bookshelf that appears to resemble a cross.
Asked by Fox and Friends host Steve Doocy what he thought of the TV spot, Paul minced no words.
"Well, I haven't thought about it completely, but you know, it reminds me of what Sinclair Lewis once said," Paul responded. "He says, 'When fascism comes to this country, it will be wrapped in the flag carrying a cross."
Continued Paul, "Now, I don't know whether that's a fair assessment or not, but you wonder about using a cross like he is the only Christian or implying that subtly. So I don't think I would use anything like that."
....."
America Is Going Fascist, by Michael Nenonen, The Republic of East Vancouver (December 4, 2007)
Reading Naomi Wolf’s The End of America:
Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2007), I
realized the hour is later than I thought.
Many of us have watched the Bush regime’s actions with a growing feeling of
horror intertwined with a sense that somehow we’ve seen all of this before, but
we aren’t sure where. We’re confused because what we’re seeing conflicts with
unexamined and deeply held assumptions we have about American freedom. Wolf’s
short but meticulously documented book shows that what is happening in America
has indeed happened many times before, not in the United States, but rather in
places like Chile, Italy, Russia, and Germany. In each case, people couldn’t
understand why they didn’t recognize where they were heading before they passed
the point of no return.
It's shifting fast
Wolf argues that the United States is undergoing a “fascist shift” from an
authoritarian but still relatively open society to a totalitarian society. The
techniques for forcing this shift have evolved over the last century and are now
studied by aspiring tyrants the world over. These methods are even part of the
formal curriculum in places like the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security
Cooperation, previously known as the School of the Americas, in Fort Benning,
Georgia, where thousands of Latin Americans have been trained by the United
States government in the most savage techniques of insurgency and
counterinsurgency. Fascists use ten basic strategies to shut down open
societies. They invoke an external and internal threat in order to convince the
population to grant their rulers extraordinary powers. They establish secret
prisons that practice torture, prisons that are initially few in number and only
incarcerate social pariahs, but that quickly multiply and soon imprison
“opposition leaders, outspoken clergy, union leaders, well-known performers,
publishers, and journalists.” They develop a paramilitary force that operates
without legal restraint. They set up a system of intense domestic surveillance
that gathers information for the purposes of intimidating and blackmailing
citizens. They infiltrate, monitor, and disorganize citizens’ groups. They
arbitrarily detain and release citizens, especially at borders. They target key
individuals like civil servants, academics, and artists in order to ensure their
complicity or silence. They take control of the press. They publicly equate
dissent with treason. Finally, they suspend the rule of law. All of these
strategies are being employed in America today.
Consider the evidence
The Bush administration and its supporters have consistently portrayed the
security threat posed by international terrorists as a threat to the very
survival of Western civilization in order to justify permanent war and to keep
the American public in a state of panic and paranoia.
The prisons at Guantanamo and God-knows how many CIA “Black Sites” torture their
inmates, even though human rights organizations have demonstrated that the
majority of at least Guantanamo’s inmates are innocent victims of mass arrests.
The inmates are designated as “enemy combatants” who have no rights under
international or American law. And there is nothing stopping American presidents
from filling these prisons with American citizens. In an April 24 2007 article
for the Huffington Post, Wolf writes that thanks to the Military Commissions Act
of 2006, “the president has the power to call any US citizen an ‘enemy
combatant’. He has the power to define what ‘enemy combatant’ means. The
president can also delegate to anyone he chooses in the executive branch the
right to define ‘enemy combatant’ any way he or she wants and then seize
Americans accordingly. Even if you or I are American citizens, even if we turn
out to be completely innocent of what he has accused us of doing, he has the
power to have us seized as we are changing planes at Newark tomorrow, or have us
taken with a knock on the door; ship you or me to a navy brig; and keep you or
me in isolation, possibly for months, while awaiting trial.” She points out that
while currently Americans in such situations will be spared any torture except
psychosis-inducing isolation and can look forward to eventual trials, these
rights typically evaporate in the final stages of a fascist shift.
They're called "mercenaries"
Military contractors are the regime’s paramilitary force. Blackwater’s
mercenaries, many of whom were trained by Latin America’s most horrific police
states, have operated in Iraq outside of Iraqi, American, and military law, and
have murdered uncounted innocent Iraqis with impunity. Domestically, Blackwater
was contracted to provide hundreds of armed security guards in the wake of
Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, and there’s evidence that they fired on
civilians. Blackwater’s business plan calls for their use in future disasters
and emergencies throughout the United States, and it’s supported by some of the
biggest powerbrokers in America.
American intelligence agencies are now bypassing court orders to wiretap
citizens’ telephones, spy on their e-mails, and monitor their financial
transactions, and the USA Patriot Act forces corporations, booksellers,
librarians, and doctors to turn over previously confidential information about
Americans to the state.
Thousands of human rights, environmental, anti-war, and other citizens’ groups
have been infiltrated by government agents, many of whom have clearly acted as
agent provocateurs in order to undermine the groups’ solidarity and to
legitimize police actions against them.
Political opponents listed
America’s Transportation Security Administration maintains a terrorist watch
list of tens of thousands of Americans who are now subjected to security
searches and arbitrary detention at airports. The list includes people like
Democratic Senator Edward Kennedy and respected constitutional scholar Walter F
Murphy.
US Attorneys, CIA agents, military lawyers, and other civil servants who’ve
disagreed with the Bush administration have been threatened and fired. David
Horowitz and his colleagues have mounted a well-funded nation-wide intimidation
campaign that has university students spying on their professors and that has
successfully coerced regents at State Universities to discipline or fire
left-leaning professors like Ward Churchill. The regime’s supporters have
organized campaigns to damage the careers of artists like the Dixie Chicks for
criticism of the president and his policies.
The administration has Fox News in its pocket, it has paid journalists for
positive coverage, it has disseminated misinformation through the media, and
it’s ferociously attacking critical journalists. Arrests of US journalists are
at an all-time high. The Bush administration’s outing of CIA operative Valerie
Plame was done in retaliation against her husband, Joseph Wilson, whose New York
Times op-ed piece exposed lies that the Bush administration used to lead the
nation to war. Worse than this, independent journalists appear to be marked for
death by American forces in Iraq. In her Huffington Post article, Wolf writes,
“The Committee to Protect Journalists has documented multiple accounts of the US
military in Iraq firing upon or threatening to fire upon unembedded (meaning
independent) reporters and camera operators from organisations ranging from al-Jazeera
to the BBC. . . . In some cases reporters have been wounded or killed, including
ITN's Terry Lloyd in 2003. Both CBS and the Associated Press in Iraq had staff
members seized by the US military and taken to violent prisons; the news
organisations were unable to see the evidence against their staffers.” The goal
of these tactics, as she writes in The End of America, is to create “a new
reality in which the truth can no longer be ascertained and no longer counts.”
Dissent = treason
In recent years, prominent Republicans like Ann Coulter, Melanie Morgan, and
William Kristol have accused liberal journalists of treason and espionage for
publishing leaked material damaging to the administration, and in February 2007,
Republican Congressman Don Young said “Congressmen who wilfully take actions
during wartime that damage morale and undermine the military are sabateurs, and
should be hanged.” This would be amusing, were it not for the Bush
administration’s revival of the draconian 1917 Espionage Act after half a
century’s slumber.
And finally, the Bush administration shows contempt for the law. In The End of
America, Wolf writes that Bush has used more signing statements than any
previous president, and by doing so has relegated “Congress to an advisory role.
This abuse lets the President choose what laws he wishes to enforce or not,
overruling Congress and the people. So Americans are living under laws their
representatives never passed. Signing statements put the president above the
law.” He has also gutted the Posse Comitatus Act, which was created to prevent
the president from maintaining a standing army for use against American
citizens. Wolf writes that the 2007 Defence Authorization Bill lets the
president “expand his power to declare martial law and take charge of the
National Guard troops without the permission of the governor when ‘public order’
has been lost; he can send these troops out into our streets at his
direction—overriding local law enforcement authorities—during a national
disaster, epidemic, serious public health emergency, terrorist attack, or ‘other
condition.’” On its own, this is an incredible expansion of presidential power,
but when combined with the use of military contractors like Blackwater it gives
the president almost dictatorial authority.
Wolf shows that fascist shifts don’t happen overnight, but rather over a course
of years during which the fascists’ plans unfold at an accelerating pace.
Germany in 1933 was further along this path than it was in 1931, and Germany in
1935 was farther along than it was in 1933. Similarly, America in 2007 is
farther along the path than it was in 2005, or will be in 2009, provided that a
massive pro-democracy movement, complete with impeachment proceedings, doesn’t
reverse the shift while there’s still time. A simple Democratic victory in the
2008 presidential election won’t do the job unless the institutional and legal
environment created by the Bush administration is thoroughly dismantled.
Regardless of whether the next president is a Republican or a Democrat, he or
she will inherit a legacy of centralized power that a democracy simply can’t
tolerate.
Left behind
Unfortunately, during the shift opposition politicians and activists still tend
to perceive the world through a democratic frame of reference, and this prevents
them from seeing that their opponents are no longer operating within this frame.
As the opposition is tying its boxing gloves, the fascists are breaking out the
machetes.
......"
The End of America? Naomi Wolf Thinks It Could Happen, by Don Hazen, alternet.org (November 21, 2007)
"An interview with author Naomi Wolf, whose new book, "The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot," may confirm your worries about democracy in America.
If you think we are living in scary times, your worst fears may be confirmed by reading Naomi Wolf's newest book, The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot. In it, Wolf proves the old axiom that history does repeat itself. Or more accurately, history occurs in patterns, and in order to understand where our country is today and where it is headed, we need to read the history books.
Wolf began by diving into the early years leading up to fascist regimes, like the ones led by Hitler and Mussolini. And the patterns that she found in those, and others all over the world, made her hair stand on end. In "The End of America," she lays out the 10 steps that dictators (or aspiring dictators) take in order to shut down an open society. "Each of those ten steps is now under way in the United States today," she writes.
If we want an open society, she warns, we must pay attention and we must fight to protect democracy.
I met with Wolf to discuss what she learned while researching this book, how the American public has received her warnings, and what we can do to squelch the fascist narratives we are fed in this country each day.
Don Hazen: Let's take up a big question first - your fears about the upcoming U.S. presidential election and what the historical blue print about fascist takeovers shows in terms of elections.
Naomi Wolf: We would be naive given the historical patterns to have hope that there's going to be a transparent, accountable election in 2008. There are various ways the blueprint indicates how events are much more likely to play out. Historically, the months leading up to the national election are likely to be unstable.
What classically happens is either there will be a period of provocation, and we have a history of this in the United States - agitators who are dressed as or act like activist voter registration workers, anti-war marchers ... but who engage in actual violence, torch property, assault police officers. And that scares people. People are much less likely to vote for change when they're scared, and it gives them the excuse to crack down.
In addition, I'm concerned about the 2007 Defense Authorization Act, which makes it much easier for the president to declare martial law.
DH: Are you saying that they keep on adding coercive laws for no apparent reason?
NW: Yes. Why amend the law so systematically? Why do you need to make martial law easier? Another thing historical blueprints underscore is the hyped threat; intelligence will be spun or exaggerated, and sometimes there are faked documents like Plan Z with Pinochet in Chile.
DH: Plan Z?
NW:Yes, Plan Z. Pinochet, when he was overthrowing the Democratic government of Chile, told Chilean citizens that there was going to be a terrible terrorist attack, with armed insurgents. Now there were real insurgents, there was a real threat, but then he produces what he called Plan Z, which were fake papers claiming that these terrorists were going to assassinate all these military leaders at once.
And this petrified Chileans so much that they didn't stand up to fight for their democracy. So it's common to take a real threat and hype it. And close to an election it's very common to invoke a hype threat and scare people so much that they will not want to have a transparent election.
Americans have this very wrong idea about what a closed society looks like. Many despots make it a point to try to hold the elections, but they're corrupted elections. Corrupted elections take place all over the world in closed societies. Ninety-nine percent of Austrians voted yes for the annexation by Germany, because the SA were standing outside the voting booths, intimidating the voters and people counting the vote. So you can mess with the process.
One current warning sign is the e-mails that the White House is not yielding about the attorney general scandal. The emails are likely to show that there were plans afoot to purge all of the attorneys at once, like overnight. And then to let the country deal with the shock.
Now that's something that Goebbels did in 1933 in April, overnight. He fired everyone, focusing on lawyers and judges who were not a supporter of the regime. So you can still have elections ... in an outcome like that. If that had happened, if the bloggers and others actually hadn't helped to identify the U.S. attorney scandal, and they had been successful and fired them all, our election situation would be different.
Basically we'd still have an election, but it is possible the outcome would be predetermined because it's the U.S. attorneys that monitor what voting rights groups do, what is legal and who can decide the outcome of elections.
DH: Well there's a lot of activity currently in terms of the Justice Department aimed at purging voters ... reducing voter rolls ... that's an ongoing battle to try to keep voters eligible. Conservatives are always trying to reduce the electorate. By the way, are you familiar with Naomi Klein's book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism?
NW: Yes, and it all makes a lot of sense. And its certainly historically true. We're in this post-9/11 period when there is a lot of potential for these kind of "shock therapy" things to happen, but virtually everything ... has happened previously in history in patterns. It's just the blueprint. It's not rocket science.
I could tell last fall when a law was passed expanding the definition of terrorists to include animal rights activists, that people who look more like you and me would start to be called terrorists, which is a classic tactic in what I call a fascist expansion.
DH: Don't look at me - I'm not a vegetarian. Just kidding.
NW: (Laughs) Right. It's also predictive ... according to the blueprint, that the state starts to torture people that most of us don't identity with, because they're brown, Muslim, people on an island. They're called an enemy.
That there will be a progressive blurring of the line, and six months, two years later, you're going to see it spread to others. ... According to the blueprint, we're right on schedule that this kid recently got tasered in Florida, I gather, for asking questions.
There was a study by people who pioneered tasers, and the state legislature supported it; a Republican legislator put pressure on the provost, who put pressure on the university, and then the police at this university implemented the taser use. So unfortunately, it's likely that we're going to see more demonstrators, typical society leaders, in a call to restore "public order," leading up to the election. You put all those cases together ...
DH: I want to shift gears a bit and ask you to talk about what the response to the book, what kind of people have heard you speak, and what kind of reactions have they had?
NW: I'm really gratified by the response to the book. I have found, with the book's publication, though I'm not following everything that's been written about it, that most of America gets it - people across the political spectrum.
All kinds of people, including very mainstream people. Republican people. Progressive. Libertarian. Very moderate people. Very conservative people. They are basically saying to me, "Thank you for confirming our fears and showing us how these things fit together, and what we can do about them."
DH: I'm also interested in your process of deciding that you were comfortable in using words like "fascism," "Nazism," "Hitler," "Mussolini." Michael Ratner talks about it in the jacket of your book, when he writes: "Most Americans reject outright any comparisons of post-9/11 America with the fascism and totalitarianism of Nazi Germany or Pinochet's Chile. Sadly, what Wolf calls the echoes between those societies and America today are too compelling." At some point you must have come to this turning point in terms of the language - how far am I going to go, how am I going to talk about this? Was it a difficult decision?
NW: It was hard emotionally but it was unavoidable intellectually. The book actually got started with the influence of a holocaust survivor - a dear friend, who's the daughter of two holocaust survivors from Germany. She basically forced me to start reading history.
Not the end or outcome. She was talking about the early years and the effects on rights groups, gay rights groups, and sexuality forums and architecture, At first I didn't even want to draw conclusions, but my hair was just standing on edge.
When I saw that, then I went and read other history books, and looked at Stalin and Hitler, a real "innovator." I thought, if people want an open society, they need to pay attention.
You see the same things happening again and again and again. And historically people were really mislead and just reading kind of teaches us the blueprint. People use the same approach all over the world because it works. This is what they do.
Now we've just seen it in Burma. It is like clock work: monks in the street ... and because I know the blueprint, how long before they start curtailing free assembly, shooting monks, and cutting off that communication? And two days later ... you know what happened.
So intellectually I couldn't avoid using the language. Now in terms of the word "fascist," it's a very conservative usage in the book. I used the dictionary definition. There are many definitions of fascism. And even fascists disagree with other fascists. It's kind of like the Germans thought the Italian fascists weren't butch enough.
DH: So the Italians were wussier fascists than the Germans?
NW: Exactly. It gets better. The definition is pretty straightforward: "When the state uses violence against the individual to oppose democratic society." And that's what we're seeing.
And then looking back at Italy and Germany, which were the two great examples of modern constitutional democracies that were illegally closed by people that were elected ... duly elected ... most Americans don't remember. Mussolini, a National Socialist, came to power entirely legally. And they used the law to shut down the law. So that's what I call a fascist shift.
DH: So let's talk about what could happen here. Is America in denial? Or is avoidance an attitude that seemed to be present in all historical examples? That people assume it's not going to happen to them. Does the Americans' denial at this point run parallel with the denial of Germans and Italians? Or do we have our own version of denial here?
NW: That's a really great question; both are true. It's really instructive to read memoirs and journals from Germany. People writing, "This can't last ... we surely will come to our senses"; "they can't gain any ground in the next election ... you know, we're a civilized country"; "this is ridiculous, they're a bunch of thugs; no one takes them seriously."
History is particularly instructive in the early days of the fascist shifts in Germany and Italy, when things were really pretty normal. People go about their business, just like we're doing now. It's not like goose stepping columns of soldiers are everywhere. It looks like ordinary life. Celebrities, gossip columns, fashion, before getting caught up in a snare. People kept going to movies, worrying about feeding the cat. (laughs) Even while you watch the sort of inevitable unfold.
DH: And now in America?
NW: Right. So in some ways it is human nature to be in denial ... but Americans have our own special version, which is profoundly dangerous. Europeans know democracies are fragile, and they could close. They had closed. Bismarckian Germany was not a democracy.
But here we're walking around ... we usually have that sense that somehow our air will sustain us, even when no one else's air does. And we don't have to do anything about it. We have this like bubble, that somehow democracy will just take care of us, and we don't have to fight to protect democracy.
They can mow down democracies all over the world, but somehow we'll be just fine. But what's so ironic about that is that the Founding Fathers drafted the Bill of Rights in fear. They knew that you had to have checks and balances, because it's human nature to abuse power, no matter who you are. They knew the damage that the army could do breaking into your home. ... they knew that democracy is fragile, and the default is tyranny. They knew that. And that's why they created the system of checks and balances.
DH: In your book, on page 36, you write in terms of the political environment we are in: "But we are not wracked by rioting in the streets or a major depression here in America. That is why the success that the Bush administration has had in invoking Islamofascism is so insidious. We have been willing to trade our key freedoms for a promised state of security in spite of our living conditions of overwhelming stability, security, affluence and social order."
How and why has it been so easy here in the U.S. in terms of taking away liberties?
NW: I assume you mean how did it succeed even though we don't have Bolsheviks rioting in the street? Yes. I mean it is incredible looking back, but in a way it's not. I mean 9/11 was a complete left brain shock. If we had had wars at home, experienced the kind of violence at home that other countries have, we would not have gone into shock ... not have been willing to trade in our heritage in exchange for a manipulated false sense of security.
DH: Most people were not affected directly by 9/11 except traumatically by seeing it on the screen.
NW: Yes, but you can't undercredit the incredible sophistication of the way the Bush administration manipulates fear. For example, the sleeper cells narrative, which is Stalin's narrative, was totally made up.
And I give lots of examples in the book of alleged sleeper cells that never turned out to be the creepy, scary, nightmare scenario that the White House claimed they would be.
DH: In the book you say that fascists have great skills at changing public opinion.
NW: That's correct. That's exactly right. They've been very skillful at creating extremely terrifying narratives. And this is why looking at Goebbels is so instructive. Our leaders have been busy creating footage and sound bites that can be petrifying, and as a result, some of us live in a state of existential fear.
In contrast, in England and Spain, where they were hit by the same bad guys we're fighting, they're going after terrorists, but the population isn't walking around in a state of existential anxiety.
Gordon Brown said it, "Fighting terror ... well, terror's a crime." You can't underplay how sophisticated the Bush team has been about manipulating our fears. And one reason we really can't ignore is our home-grown ignorance. We now have two generations of young people who don't know about civics. A study came out that showed that even Harvard freshmen really don't understand how our government works.
And so we really don't know what democracy is anymore. I had to do a lot of learning to write this book - I'm not a constitutional scholar. I'm just a citizen. And we've been kind of divorced from our democracy. We've let a pundit class take it over. Where the Founders wanted us to know what the First Amendment was and what the Second Amendment does for us.
So as a consequence we don't feel the kind of warning bell of "Oh, my God, arbitrary search and seizure! That's when they come into your house and take your stuff and scare your children! We can't have that!"
Because there's this class of politicians, scholars and pundits who do the Constitution for us, so we don't bother educating ourselves. It's hard to educate yourself now these days.
All of that plays into how easily we can be manipulated. We really don't read history in America, so we don't notice warning signals. We tend not to pay attention to the rest of the world or the past, so we don't know what the classic scenarios are.
DH: In terms of your personal narrative, the kinds of books you've written about feminism and gender like the Beauty Myth, Fire With Fire and Promiscuities ... this book seems pretty far a field. It seems like it would have to be a wrenching realization to lead you to read everything and produce the book. Was it traumatic?
NW: Well, I would say that it's been traumatic.
DH: Is it because you are out there on the front lines now?
NW: That's not the trauma. I feel like I'm living inside a consciousness of urgency and potential horrific consequences. And that is much more uncomfortable than living inside my prior being where I generally thought, "We're living in a democracy where there are some annoying people doing the wrong things" kind of mindset.
But I know that there's a "true consciousness" that we need to overcome the false consciousness. I know it's the right consciousness to get the facts. And I guess what's heartening is that a bunch of other people seem to be collectively entering this consciousness. They are saying: "My gosh, there is a real emergency here with very devastating stakes." That is traumatic but necessary.
It is a loss of innocence to see how easy it is to degrade democracy. I certainly walk around with kind of hyperawareness tuned into, for example, the toll in Guantanamo and those children in Iraq. It doesn't get covered well.
There's basically a concentration camp being established in Iraq with children in it. And no one appears to be digging in to it ...
DH: As we are coming to an end here, there are a couple of concepts I found particularly interesting in the book. One is when you talked about the "10 steps," or the "blueprint" that fascists have used time and time again to close down democracies. You say that that these factors, ingredients, are more than the sum of their parts, which suggests a kind of synergy, "each magnifies the power of the others and the whole," as you write.
You also write about the pendulum cliché, that we have this illusion through our history that the pendulum always swings back. But because of the permanent war on terrorism, that may not be true anymore. Can you say a little bit more about those two things, and how that might fit together?
NW: Well part of the illusion is created because it seems we are in two different countries, operating at home and abroad. For example, they can come at you, anyone and claim you're an enemy combatant. They rendered people in Italy ... they can render people all over the world. And they can put people like Jose Padilla in solitary confinement for three years, literally drive sane healthy people insane.
If the president can say, Well, "Don is an enemy combatant," there is nothing you can do. It's like "Tag, you're it!" To that extent we can not be innocent. And then someone is in jail for three years without being able to see their families or have easy access to a phone.
If they can do that, the pendulum can't swing, because after the first arrest, it generally goes in one direction, and according to the blueprint, the time has come for those first arrests. We're having this conversation now, before these arrests. But if tomorrow you read in the New York Times or the Washington Post that New York Times editor Bill Keller has been arrested, the staff will all be scared, others will get scared. And people don't understand that that's how democracy closes down. And when that happens first, it's the tipping point at which we think it's still a democracy.
DH: That is when the rules have changed?
NW: Yes, and people need to believe and realize that that kind of negotiation is pretty much over. And there's just the lag time, which is so dangerous, when people still think it's a democracy, even while the martial law steps have begun. And that's where we are at, unless we get it.
Because you know, Congress keeps saying, "Hello, we're Congress." You have to answer us when we ask for information. The president's like, "Sorry, I'm ignoring you!" It starts becoming thinking like an abused woman, like: "Surely he's going to do it right this time, surely he's not going to do it again." And he does. "
The Coup at Home, by Frank Rich, NY Times (November 11, 2007)
".....
But there’s another moral to draw from the Musharraf story, and it has to do with domestic policy, not foreign. The Pakistan mess, as The New York Times editorial page aptly named it, is not just another blot on our image abroad and another instance of our mismanagement of the war on Al Qaeda and the Taliban. It also casts a harsh light on the mess we have at home in America, a stain that will not be so easily eradicated.
In the six years of compromising our principles since 9/11, our democracy has so steadily been defined down that it now can resemble the supposedly aspiring democracies we’ve propped up in places like Islamabad. Time has taken its toll. We’ve become inured to democracy-lite. That’s why a Mukasey can be elevated to power with bipartisan support and we barely shrug.
This is a signal difference from the Vietnam era, and not necessarily for the better. During that unpopular war, disaffected Americans took to the streets and sometimes broke laws in an angry assault on American governmental institutions. The Bush years have brought an even more effective assault on those institutions from within. While the public has not erupted in riots, the executive branch has subverted the rule of law in often secretive increments. The results amount to a quiet coup, ultimately more insidious than a blatant putsch like General Musharraf’s.
More Machiavellian still, Mr. Bush has constantly told the world he’s championing democracy even as he strangles it. Mr. Bush repeated the word “freedom” 27 times in roughly 20 minutes at his 2005 inauguration, and even presided over a “Celebration of Freedom” concert on the Ellipse hosted by Ryan Seacrest. It was an Orwellian exercise in branding, nothing more. The sole point was to give cover to our habitual practice of cozying up to despots (especially those who control the oil spigots) and to our own government’s embrace of warrantless wiretapping and torture, among other policies that invert our values.
Even if Mr. Bush had the guts to condemn General Musharraf, there is no longer any moral high ground left for him to stand on. Quite the contrary. Rather than set a democratic example, our president has instead served as a model of unconstitutional behavior, eagerly emulated by his Pakistani acolyte.
Take the Musharraf assault on human-rights lawyers. Our president would not be so unsubtle as to jail them en masse. But earlier this year a senior Pentagon official, since departed, threatened America’s major white-shoe law firms by implying that corporate clients should fire any firm whose partners volunteer to defend detainees in Guantánamo and elsewhere. For its part, Alberto Gonzales’s Justice Department did not round up independent-minded United States attorneys and toss them in prison. It merely purged them without cause to serve Karl Rove’s political agenda.
Tipping his hat in appreciation of Mr. Bush’s example, General Musharraf justified his dismantling of Pakistan’s Supreme Court with language mimicking the president’s diatribes against activist judges. The Pakistani leader further echoed Mr. Bush by expressing a kinship with Abraham Lincoln, citing Lincoln’s Civil War suspension of a prisoner’s fundamental legal right to a hearing in court, habeas corpus, as a precedent for his own excesses. (That’s like praising F.D.R. for setting up internment camps.) Actually, the Bush administration has outdone both Lincoln and Musharraf on this score: Last January, Mr. Gonzales testified before Congress that “there is no express grant of habeas in the Constitution.”
To believe that this corruption will simply evaporate when the Bush presidency is done is to underestimate the permanent erosion inflicted over the past six years. What was once shocking and unacceptable in America has now been internalized as the new normal.
This is most apparent in the Republican presidential race, where most of the candidates seem to be running for dictator and make no apologies for it. They’re falling over each other to expand Gitmo, see who can promise the most torture and abridge the largest number of constitutional rights. The front-runner, Rudy Giuliani, boasts a proven record in extralegal executive power grabs, Musharraf-style: After 9/11 he tried to mount a coup, floating the idea that he stay on as mayor in defiance of New York’s term-limits law.
What makes the Democrats’ Mukasey cave-in so depressing is that it shows how far even exemplary sticklers for the law like Senators Feinstein and Schumer have lowered democracy’s bar. When they argued that Mr. Mukasey should be confirmed because he’s not as horrifying as Mr. Gonzales or as the acting attorney general who might get the job otherwise, they sounded whipped. After all these years of Bush-Cheney torture, they’ll say things they know are false just to move on.
In a Times OpEd article justifying his reluctant vote to confirm a man Dick Cheney promised would make “an outstanding attorney general,” Mr. Schumer observed that waterboarding is already “illegal under current laws and conventions.” But then he vowed to support a new bill “explicitly” making waterboarding illegal because Mr. Mukasey pledged to enforce it. Whatever. Even if Congress were to pass such legislation, Mr. Bush would veto it, and even if the veto were by some miracle overturned, Mr. Bush would void the law with a “signing statement.” That’s what he effectively did in 2005 when he signed a bill that its authors thought outlawed the torture of detainees.
That Mr. Schumer is willing to employ blatant Catch-22 illogic to pretend that Mr. Mukasey’s pledge on waterboarding has any force shows what pathetic crumbs the Democrats will settle for after all these years of being beaten down. The judges and lawyers challenging General Musharraf have more fight left in them than this.
Last weekend a new Washington Post-ABC News poll found that the Democratic-controlled Congress and Mr. Bush are both roundly despised throughout the land, and that only 24 percent of Americans believe their country is on the right track. That’s almost as low as the United States’ rock-bottom approval ratings in the latest Pew surveys of Pakistan (15 percent) and Turkey (9 percent).
Wrong track is a euphemism. We are a people in clinical depression. Americans know that the ideals that once set our nation apart from the world have been vandalized, and no matter which party they belong to, they do not see a restoration anytime soon."
Amazing Grace, by Charles Sullivan, Information Clearing House (November 6, 2007)
"It seems inexplicable that so many of the
American people can be so dazed and confused, while moral degenerates ransack
our nation, piss and defecate upon the Constitution and the Declaration of
Independence, and brazenly loot the public domain, making a mockery of the rule
of law and societal norms; whatever they may be.
Incredible lies are routinely passed as truth and the world as we know it is
unraveling, as we prepare to invade and occupy yet another country, perhaps
igniting World War Three. We go on with the insipid routine of our dull lives:
we go shopping, and bombard our senses with mind numbing entertainment, telling
ourselves that it—fascism—can’t happen here, even as its poisoned blossoms
unfold before our astonished eyes and fill our lungs with their noxious fumes.
We refuse to believe what we are seeing and we dismiss it as too preposterous to
be real. We no longer wholly trust our own senses or follow our most innate
instincts, failing to recognize that they are all that is true; all that allow
us to survive the wretched madness that pursues us like rabid dogs, and
relentlessly nips at our fleeing heels.
Increasing numbers of us move through this world with a sense of impending doom
but we do not fully comprehend its origins or the breadth of the disaster it
portends. We sense not only that something is wrong—something is terribly,
irreconcilably, sickeningly, wrong. We do our utmost to repress those feelings,
telling ourselves that our worst fears, our darkest nightmares, are irrational,
unfounded phantoms of the imagination; so many ghosts lurking under our beds.
We have been programmed to believe that we are the greatest nation to ever
emerge from the mists of history, that everything about us as a people is
exceptional and exemplary. Despite a history of endless provocation and war and
countless other forms of self mutilation, we claim that we are a peace loving
people—god’s own children, animated by divine stirrings.
But perhaps our state of confusion, our disorientation, and our shock at what
the government is doing in our name—all of which seems to be occurring at the
blinding speed of light—and our refusal to believe that which is so blatantly
obvious to all but those who wear mental blindfolds, or the criminally insane,
is a form of psychological shock and awe that has been deliberately imposed upon
us not only by depraved politicians vying for wealth and power, but by our every
societal institution.
We have arrived at our place as a result of an educational system that does not
teach us how to think, but to follow rules and obey authority; to bow to self
policing peer pressure and group think: a system that prepares us to pass math
tests but not those of citizen and neighbor. We dutifully recite the pledge of
allegiance to the flag but we hold no allegiance to the world’s people, or its
stunning biological and cultural diversity, or to truth. We were led to the
precipice by religious institutions that operate by the same principles as “for
profit” corporations, encouraged by Zionist and Christian fundamentalists with
visions of Armageddon dancing in their crazed, bigoted heads. We are here
because we pay attention to a media monoculture that does not inform, but lies
and deceives for money.
We are here because we are morally lazy, uninterested, distracted, overworked,
over burdened with debt, and apathetic to a fault. We confused the symbols of
democracy with democracy itself; and we foolishly thought that democracy could
somehow magically move of its own accord, without our participation as citizens.
Too many of us believed that all that was required of us was to vote in
elections in which the outcomes were preordained by the candidate’s access to
wealth. We told ourselves this is democracy, but we were tragically mistaken.
And now it is too late.
The rush to Armageddon will occur quickly; it must happen, like the passage of
the Patriot Act, before the people have time to digest what is being done to
them, before they can concoct an intelligent and rational response to shock and
awe; before the people can organize against the premeditated murder and mayhem
that awaits them.
We Americans are the product of free market ideologues, religious zealots, and
vulgar experiments in social engineering. We are being led to slaughter, and to
be slaughtered, by dark and foreboding forces bent on the destruction of all
that is decent, just, and beautiful.
Yet many will continue to believe that the president and his henchmen are sane
and just people. Some will even ordain them devout Christians and extol their
dark virtues as enlightenment and courage. Others will continue to believe that
the sycophants in Congress will awaken at the eleventh hour to save us from our
own delusions and excesses, not recognizing that we are alone and have only one
another. It has always been so; but rather than uniting against our
tormentors—we fight amongst ourselves.
Events may already be in motion that have acquired an unstoppable momentum, like
a hulking meteor streaking in deadly silence toward the earth in precise
accordance with the laws of motion. But like all tempests, they too will
eventually blow themselves out and, better people than us will someday attempt
to rebuild the world anew. I wish them luck and amazing grace, the kind of grace
that is so conspicuously absent in us. In the words of labor organizer, Joe
Hill, murdered by the state before a Utah firing squad: “Good luck to all of
you.”
No more can we enjoy the sight of soft summer sunsets in tranquil settings,
accompanied by the singing of the wood thrush, and choirs of chanting insects
embracing the darkling twilight; but forever more the rocket’s perpetual red
glare and silent, distant death. We are nearing road’s end. The time is fast
approaching to mount the nearest hillside, to hold our loved ones close; to sip
some vintage wine, and watch the fireworks that are even now hurtling their way
toward Armageddon. The time is nigh to watch the world as we knew it wink out of
existence, and to say goodbye. It’s been good to know you. "
Olbermann: On Waterboarding and Torture, by Keith Olbermann, MSNBC Countdown (November 5, 2007)
"Olbermann: Bush may not observe the rules, but the country abides by them.
It is a fact startling in its cynical simplicity and it requires cynical and simple words to be properly expressed: The presidency of George W. Bush has now devolved into a criminal conspiracy to cover the ass of George W. Bush.
All the petulancy, all the childish threats, all the blank-stare stupidity; all the invocations of World War III, all the sophistic questions about which terrorist attacks we wanted him not to stop, all the phony secrets; all the claims of executive privilege, all the stumbling tap-dancing of his nominees, all the verbal flatulence of his apologists...
All of it is now, after one revelation last week, transparently clear for what it is: the pathetic and desperate manipulation of the government, the refocusing of our entire nation, toward keeping this mock president and this unstable vice president and this departed wildly self-overrating attorney general, and the others, from potential prosecution for having approved or ordered the illegal torture of prisoners being held in the name of this country.
"Waterboarding is torture," Daniel Levin was to write. Daniel Levin was no theorist and no protester. He was no troublemaking politician. He was no table-pounding commentator. Daniel Levin was an astonishingly patriotic American and a brave man.
Brave not just with words or with stances, even in a dark time when that kind of bravery can usually be scared or bought off.
Charged, as you heard in the story from ABC News last Friday, with assessing the relative legality of the various nightmares in the Pandora's box that is the Orwell-worthy euphemism "Enhanced Interrogation," Mr. Levin decided that the simplest, and the most honest, way to evaluate them ... was to have them enacted upon himself.
Daniel Levin took himself to a military base and let himself be waterboarded.
Mr. Bush, ever done anything that personally courageous?
Perhaps when you've gone to Walter Reed and teared up over the maimed servicemen? And then gone back to the White House and determined that there would be more maimed servicemen?
Has it been that kind of personal courage, Mr. Bush, when you've spoken of American victims and the triumph of freedom and the sacrifice of your own popularity for the sake of our safety? And then permitted others to fire or discredit or destroy anybody who disagreed with you, whether they were your own generals, or Max Cleland, or Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame, or Daniel Levin?
Daniel Levin should have a statue in his honor in Washington right now.
Instead, he was forced out as acting assistant attorney general nearly three years ago because he had the guts to do what George Bush couldn't do in a million years: actually put himself at risk for the sake of his country, for the sake of what is right.
And they waterboarded him. And he wrote that even though he knew those doing it meant him no harm, and he knew they would rescue him at the instant of the slightest distress, and he knew he would not die - still, with all that reassurance, he could not stop the terror screaming from inside of him, could not quell the horror, could not convince that which is at the core of each of us, the entity who exists behind all the embellishments we strap to ourselves, like purpose and name and family and love, he could not convince his being that he wasn't drowning.
Waterboarding, he said, is torture. Legally, it is torture! Practically, it is torture! Ethically, it is torture! And he wrote it down.
Wrote it down somewhere, where it could be contrasted with the words of this country's 43rd president: "The United States of America ... does not torture."
Made you into a liar, Mr. Bush.
Made you into, if anybody had the guts to pursue it, a criminal, Mr. Bush.
Waterboarding had already been used on Khalid Sheik Mohammed and a couple of other men none of us really care about except for the one detail you'd forgotten - that there are rules. And even if we just make up these rules, this country observes them anyway, because we're Americans and we're better than that.
We're better than you.
And the man your Justice Department selected to decide whether or not waterboarding was torture had decided, and not in some phony academic fashion, nor while wearing the Walter Mitty poseur attire of flight suit and helmet.
He had put his money, Mr. Bush, where your mouth was.
So, your sleazy sycophantic henchman Mr. Gonzales had him append an asterisk suggesting his black-and-white answer wasn't black-and-white, that there might have been a quasi-legal way of torturing people, maybe with an absolute time limit and a physician entitled to stop it, maybe, if your administration had ever bothered to set any rules or any guidelines.
And then when your people realized that even that was too dangerous, Daniel Levin was branded "too independent" and "someone who could (not) be counted on."
In other words, Mr. Bush, somebody you couldn't count on to lie for you.
So, Levin was fired.
Because if it ever got out what he'd concluded, and the lengths to which he went to validate that conclusion, anybody who had sanctioned waterboarding and who-knows-what-else on anybody, you yourself, you would have been screwed.
And screwed you are.
It can't be coincidence that the story of Daniel Levin should emerge from the black hole of this secret society of a presidency just at the conclusion of the unhappy saga of the newest attorney general nominee.
Another patriot somewhere listened as Judge Mukasey mumbled like he'd never heard of waterboarding and refused to answer in words ... that which Daniel Levin answered on a waterboard somewhere in Maryland or Virginia three years ago.
And this someone also heard George Bush say, "The United States of America does not torture," and realized either he was lying or this wasn't the United States of America anymore, and either way, he needed to do something about it.
Not in the way Levin needed to do something about it, but in a brave way nonetheless.
We have U.S. senators who need to do something about it, too.
Chairman Leahy of the Judiciary Committee has seen this for what it is and said "enough."
Sen. Schumer has seen it, reportedly, as some kind of puzzle piece in the New York political patronage system, and he has failed.
What Sen. Feinstein has seen, to justify joining Schumer in rubber-stamping Mukasey, I cannot guess.
It is obvious that both those senators should look to the meaning of the story of Daniel Levin and recant their support for Mukasey's confirmation.
And they should look into their own committee's history and recall that in 1973, their predecessors were able to wring even from Richard Nixon a guarantee of a special prosecutor (ultimately a special prosecutor of Richard Nixon!), in exchange for their approval of his new attorney general, Elliott Richardson.
If they could get that out of Nixon, before you confirm the president's latest human echo on Tuesday, you had better be able to get a "yes" or a "no" out of Michael Mukasey.
Ideally you should lock this government down financially until a special prosecutor is appointed, or 50 of them, but I'm not holding my breath. The "yes" or the "no" on waterboarding will have to suffice.
Because, remember, if you can't get it, or you won't with the time between tonight and the next presidential election likely to be the longest year of our lives, you are leaving this country, and all of us, to the waterboards, symbolic and otherwise, of George W. Bush.
Ultimately, Mr. Bush, the real question isn't who approved the waterboarding of this fiend Khalid Sheik Mohammed and two others.
It is: Why were they waterboarded?
Study after study for generation after generation has confirmed that torture gets people to talk, torture gets people to plead, torture gets people to break, but torture does not get them to tell the truth.
Of course, Mr. Bush, this isn't a problem if you don't care if the terrorist plots they tell you about are the truth or just something to stop the tormentors from drowning them.
If, say, a president simply needed a constant supply of terrorist threats to keep a country scared.
If, say, he needed phony plots to play hero during, and to boast about interrupting, and to use to distract people from the threat he didn't interrupt.
If, say, he realized that even terrorized people still need good ghost stories before they will let a president pillage the Constitution,
Well, Mr. Bush, who better to dream them up for you than an actual terrorist?
He'll tell you everything he ever fantasized doing in his most horrific of daydreams, his equivalent of the day you "flew" onto the deck of the Lincoln to explain you'd won in Iraq.
Now if that's what this is all about, you tortured not because you're so stupid you think torture produces confession but you tortured because you're smart enough to know it produces really authentic-sounding fiction - well, then, you're going to need all the lawyers you can find ... because that crime wouldn't just mean impeachment, would it?
That crime would mean George W. Bush is going to prison.
Thus the master tumblers turn, and the lock yields, and the hidden explanations can all be perceived, in their exact proportions, in their exact progressions.
Daniel Levin's eminently practical, eminently logical, eminently patriotic way of testing the legality of waterboarding has to vanish, and him with it.
Thus Alberto Gonzales has to use that brain that sounds like an old car trying to start on a freezing morning to undo eight centuries of the forward march of law and government.
Thus Dick Cheney has to ridiculously assert that confirming we do or do not use any particular interrogation technique would somehow help the terrorists.
Thus Michael Mukasey, on the eve of the vote that will make him the high priest of the law of this land, cannot and must not answer a question, nor even hint that he has thought about a question, which merely concerns the theoretical definition of waterboarding as torture.
Because, Mr. Bush, in the seven years of your nightmare presidency, this whole string of events has been transformed.
From its beginning as the most neglectful protection ever of the lives and safety of the American people ... into the most efficient and cynical exploitation of tragedy for political gain in this country's history ... and, then, to the giddying prospect that you could do what the military fanatics did in Japan in the 1930s and remake a nation into a fascist state so efficient and so self-sustaining that the fascism would be nearly invisible.
But at last this frightful plan is ending with an unexpected crash, the shocking reality that no matter how thoroughly you might try to extinguish them, Mr. Bush, how thoroughly you tried to brand disagreement as disloyalty, Mr. Bush, there are still people like Daniel Levin who believe in the United States of America as true freedom, where we are better, not because of schemes and wars, but because of dreams and morals.
And ultimately these men, these patriots, will defeat you and they will return this country to its righteous standards, and to its rightful owners, the people. "
A ‘Paper Coup,’ and Blackwater Eyes Midtown Manhattan, by Naomi Wolf, Huffington Post (November 5, 2007)
"I have argued that in the closing stages of a `fascist shift’, events cascade. I am hearing about them, even across the globe. Here in Australia I hear from the nation’s best-know feminist activist, and former adviser to Paul Keating, Anne Summers, who was also at the time this took place Chair of the Board of Greenpeace International. Summers was detained by armed agents for FIVE HOURS each way in LAX on her way to and from the annual meeting of the board of Greenpeace International in Mexico, and her green card was taken away from her. `I want to call a lawyer’, she told TSA agents. `Ma’am, you do not have a right to call an attorney,’ they replied. `You have not entered the United States.’
Apparently a section of LAX just beyond the security line is asserted to be `not in the United States’ — though it is squarely inside the airport — so the laws of the US do not apply. (This assertion, by the way, should alarm any US citizen who is aware of how the White House argued that Guantanamo is not `in the United States’ - is a legal no-man’s land — so the laws of the US do not apply.) Toward the end of her second five-hour detention she asked, `Why am I being detained?’ `Lady, this is not detention,’ the TSA agent told her. `Detention is when I take you to the cells out back and lock you up.’
Last week in Boston, while attending Bioneers by the Bay, I heard that one of the speakers for our event, an environmentalist named Gunter Pauli, was going to miss the time of his scheduled speech; he had been physically taken OFF THE PLANE by TSA agents and had to take a much later flight. More chillingly, the camerawoman doing my interview said that another well-known environmental writer found that his girlfriend was effectively `disappeared’ for three days as she sought to enter the US from Canada. Lisa Fithian, an anti-globalization activist, was denied entry across the Canadian border in 2001 and was offered the choice of turning back or being arrested.
A friend emails me a story from USA Today about a 24-year-old college graduate who testified before Congress about her family of immigrants and the difficulties they face; shortly afterward, the entire family was arrested by immigration agents. Another online piece reports that Blackwater is setting up operations along the US/Mexico border and an insightful post on Daily Kos describes how the TSA list will revert from the airlines to the management of the Department of Homeland Security shortly and that by February we may well face the need to apply to the State for permission to travel. If this proposed regulation goes through, we will move from 1931 to about 1934–when the borders started to close– with the stroke of a pen. Jews in America have hardwired into their DNA a sense of the distinction between those who got out before the borders closed and those who waited a moment too long.
Why should Congress impeach and prosecute this instant, not waiting till February? Why should this impeachment and prosecution be solidly bipartisan? After February it is the leaders on both sides of the aisle — and the people writing these essays — who are at most risk of being turned back at the border. People who can’t leave in a police state are effectively silenced. And history shows that Republicans are at the exact same risk as Democrats of being violently silenced once liberties are lost. I am reading about IBM’s close, profitable involvement with Nazi Germany — much akin to Prescott Bush’s well-documented close and profitable involvement with Nazi Germany through German industrialist, Fritz Thyssen. Right up to the top of the solidly Nazi hierarchy of the IBM affiliate, corporate executives were terrified of taking a wrong step in the eyes of the Party: `There are concentration camps’, they would whisper to their US backers. The teenage son of one solid Nazi ally was taken hostage when he resisted Party orders. So alignment with the regime in a police state offers no ultimate protection.
Let us think like business consultants analyzing the decisions of a business that claims it is going to close its door in just a year. What kinds of decisions is it making? Here is a quiz, if you still doubt that we need to shift our thinking and recognize what appears to be ‘a paper coup.’:
- Is building a US Embassy in Baghdad the size of eighty football fields and at a cost of well more than half a BILLION dollars evidence of short- or long-term thinking?
- These walls would crumble if the next legitimate president independently ends the war. How about defending and expanding the basis for FISA violations at this late stage — after all, these folks will be gone in a year?
- How about the decision to fight so hard for a US attorney who will defend the view that the President is above the law?
- Why would that matter so much in an administration folding its tents?
- Why the rush to establish Guantanamo as a permanent part of the landscape and even seek money at one point to double its size — if the next President, a truly independent Republican or Democrat, might just close it down?
- Why the push to expand a war that makes no military or popular sense, rush through military tribunals that the next President might just disband, and, by the way, drum up a fresh new World War III?
- Do the neo-cons advising Giuliani look like a fresh page for an independent, transparent election or an ideological continuity of government in themselves?
- Do these look like the short-term tactics of a fading administration — or the institutional strategic bases for some kind of new long-term beginning?
- Why work so hard to make sure that the man who defended the infamous “enemy combatant” concept will be the new Attorney General?
Increasingly, reputable figures are starting to talk about `a coup.’ Jim Hightower notes in an important essay, “Is a Presidential Coup Under Way?,” that a coup is defined in the dictionary as a sudden forced change in the form of government. (He also spells out the basis for a rigorously modeled impeachment and criminal prosecution.) Daniel Ellsberg’s much-emailed speech on recent events notes that, in his view, a `coup’ has already taken place. Ron Rosenbaum speculates in an essay on Slate about the reasons the Bush administration is withholding even from members of Congress its plans for Continuity of Government in an emergency — noting that those worrying about a coup are no longer so marginal. Frank Rich notes the parallels between ourselves and the Good Germans. And Congress belatedly realizes as if waking from a drugged sleep that it might not be okay for the Attorney General to say the President need not obey the law. Congress may realize why Mukasey CAN’T say that `waterboarding is torture’ — the minute he does so he has laid the grounds for Bush, Cheney and any number of CIA and Blackwater interrogators to be tried and convicted for war crimes. They are so keenly aware that what they have been doing is criminal that laws such as the Military Commissions Act of 2006 have been drafted specifically to protect them and the torturers and murderers they have directed from criminal prosecution. That is why insisting that Mukasey say that waterboarding is torture is, in spite of the alarming apparent defection of Feinstein and Schumer, an important tactic and even the perfect opening for the impeachment bid that Kucinich is bringing on November 6th to be followed by Congressional investigations into possible criminality.
This is the “Blackwater Tactical Weekly.” (Yes, Blackwater has its own weekly e-newsletter.) Look at “Islamist protest in N.Y. - ‘Mushroom cloud on way’” — it is reasonable to speculate that Blackwater is focusing on becoming more active domestically in managing domestic protests and rallies. (Regarding this particular rally, note the repetition of the White House `Mushroom Cloud’ sound-bite and other signs bearing current White House talking points, that are attributed to alleged Muslim protesters in New York City. The US has a long history of using agents provocateurs — people dressed as those they are targeting, who pose as conveying a more violent or threatening message than that of the real group itself or who commit acts of violence to stigmatize the group. The Cointelpro program of the 1970’s discredited many rallies in this way. An alleged or infiltrated violent, threatening Muslim rally would be the perfect defensible trigger for a Blackwater response.)
See also that Blackwater may be exploring the management of private flights in US airports because of a threat or `threat’ to private aircraft. (”Extremists may target private US planes: TSA.”) This entry point to the air travel system would seem defensible — after all Blackwater personnel do in fact guard airports around the world, for example in Bosnia. The danger is that a bleeding of Blackwater into US airport security in general would affect a coup in essence — quite quickly and serenely — even as a coup in fact need not be declared. It is a short step from managing private plane and private airport security to aiding the TSA — which is a branch of Homeland Security — and Homeland Security and Blackwater have already worked in alliance with one another in New Orleans. A TSA agent blogged about having signed up for Blackwater — at ten thousand a month, which is a lot more than TSA agents make now and a real incentive — but I have no evidence of reverse movement. The White House recently announced that the Watch List and No-Fly List together have 775,000 citizens and that they are adding 20,000 A MONTH. This trend on both sides, if not confronted, points to an easy slide to a paramilitarized domestic flight experience in the US and a routine aggressive searching of hundreds of thousands of citizens, the growth being exponential enough so that being aggressively searched could easily soon become a common experience at airports. Nothing at present prevents Blackwater agents from being deployed to help or replace the TSA domestically. Or from being deployed at the next New York City rally such as the one that is being featured on their website. And airports being the lifeline of freedom, if you are scared to fly or can be bullied, interrogated, tasered or worse when flying, you are no longer free. History shows that there is no easy retroactive movement toward a free society once travel is truly restricted.
The Mukasey hesitation on torture is our cue to call a halt to these crimes. (By the way, strapping victims to boards to prepare them for torture was common at Buchenwald.)
Congress must ask:
- What is torture?
- Has it happened?
- Who ordered it?
- How high up the chain of command does this go?
- And what does our system of laws say about such crimes and those who commit them?
If it takes hearings and possible prosecutions to restore the rule of law and maintain a free society, then it is past time for the hearings to begin."
While Most of the Democrats in Washington Cower The Presidency Is Taking Over the Courts and Congress, by Jim Hightower, Hightower Lowdown (October 23, 2007)
"Where is Congress? It's way past time for members to stand up. Historic matters are at stake. The Constitution is being trampled, the very form of our government is being perverted, and nothing less than American democracy itself is endangered - a presidential coup is taking place. I think of Barbara Jordan, the late congresswoman from Houston. On July 25, 1974, this powerful thinker and member of the House Judiciary Committee took her turn to speak during the Nixon impeachment inquiry.
"My faith in the Constitution is whole; it is complete; it is total," she declared in her thundering voice. "And I am not going to sit here and be an idle spectator to the diminution, the subversion, the destruction, of the Constitution."
Where are the likes of Barbara Jordan in today's Congress? While the BushCheney regime continues to establish a supreme, arrogant, autocratic presidency in flagrant violation of the Constitution, members of Congress largely sit there as idle spectators - or worse, as abettors of Bush's usurpation of their own congressional authority.
Why It Matters
Separation of powers. Rule of law. Checks and balances. These may seem to us moderns to be little more than a set of dry, legal precepts that we had to memorize in high-school history class but need not concern us now. After all, the founders (bless their wigged heads!) established these principles for us back in 17-something-or-other, so we don't really have to worry about them in 2007. Think again. These are not merely arcane phrases of constitutional law, but the very keystones of our democracy, essential to sustaining our ideal of being a self-governing people, free of tyrants who would govern us on their own whim. The founders knew about tyranny. The monarch of the time, King George III, routinely denied colonists basic liberties, spied on them and entered their homes at will, seized their property, jailed anyone he wanted without charges, rounded up and killed dissidents, and generally ruled with an iron fist. He was both the law and above the law, operating on the twin doctrines of "the divine rule of kings" and "the king can do no wrong."
.....
The list of Bushite excesses is long ... and growing:
Their sweeping, secret program of warrantless spying on Americans - in direct violation of a long-standing federal law intended to forestall such flagrant intrusions into people's privacy.
The usurpation of legislative authority by attaching "signing statements" to laws passed by Congress, openly asserting Bush's intention to disobey or simply ignore the laws. He has used this artifice to challenge over 1,150laws, even though the Constitution and the founders never conceived of such a dodge (signing statements were concocted by Ed Meese, Reagan's attorney general, and were pushed at that time by a young Reaganite lawyer who is now ensconced for life on the Supreme Court, Sam Alito).
Suspension of habeas corpus for anyone whom Bush deems to be an "enemy combatant"-allowing innocent people to be detained indefinitely in prison without charges or civil trial, subjected to abuse and even torture, and denied access to judicial review of their incarceration (thus usurping the power of the courts). The routine and illegal assertion of "executive privilege" to stonewall Congress's legitimate efforts to perform its constitutional obligation of executive oversight and to prevent the questioning of top officials engaged in outright violations of American law.
The assertion of a "state secrets" doctrine to prevent citizens and judges from pursuing legitimate lawsuits on the spurious grounds that even to have the executive's actions brought before the court would endanger national security and infringe on executive authority.
An ever-expanding grab bag of autocratic actions, including using "national security letters" to sidestep the courts and spy on American political groups and individuals with no connection at all to terrorism; censoring executive-branch employees and government information for political purposes and using federal officials and tax dollars to push the regime's political agenda; and, of course, outright lying to Congress and the public, including lying for the most despicable purpose of all - putting our troops, our public treasury, and our nation's good name into a war based on nothing but hubris, oil, and ideological fantasies (including Bush's latest blatant lie that "progress" in Iraq warrants the killing and maiming of additional thousands of American troops - none of whom comes from his family).
....."
The "Good Germans" Among Us, by Frank Rich, NY Times (October 14, 2007)
""Bush lies" doesn't cut it anymore. It's time to confront the darker reality that we are lying to ourselves.
Ten days ago The Times unearthed yet another round of secret Department of Justice memos countenancing torture. President Bush gave his standard response: "This government does not torture people." Of course, it all depends on what the meaning of "torture" is. The whole point of these memos is to repeatedly recalibrate the definition so Mr. Bush can keep pleading innocent.
By any legal standards except those rubber-stamped by Alberto Gonzales, we are practicing torture, and we have known we are doing so ever since photographic proof emerged from Abu Ghraib more than three years ago. As Andrew Sullivan, once a Bush cheerleader, observed last weekend in The Sunday Times of London, America's "enhanced interrogation" techniques have a grotesque provenance: "Verschärfte Vernehmung, enhanced or intensified interrogation, was the exact term innovated by the Gestapo to describe what became known as the ëthird degree.' It left no marks. It included hypothermia, stress positions and long-time sleep deprivation."
Still, the drill remains the same. The administration gives its alibi (Abu Ghraib was just a few bad apples). A few members of Congress squawk. The debate is labeled "politics." We turn the page.
There has been scarcely more response to the similarly recurrent story of apparent war crimes committed by our contractors in Iraq. Call me cynical, but when Laura Bush spoke up last week about the human rights atrocities in Burma, it seemed less an act of selfless humanitarianism than another administration maneuver to change the subject from its own abuses.
.....
We can continue to blame the Bush administration for the horrors of Iraq — and should. Paul Bremer, our post-invasion viceroy and the recipient of a Presidential Medal of Freedom for his efforts, issued the order that allows contractors to elude Iraqi law, a folly second only to his disbanding of the Iraqi Army. But we must also examine our own responsibility for the hideous acts committed in our name in a war where we have now fought longer than we did in the one that put Verschärfte Vernehmung on the map.
I have always maintained that the American public was the least culpable of the players during the run-up to Iraq. The war was sold by a brilliant and fear-fueled White House propaganda campaign designed to stampede a nation still shellshocked by 9/11. Both Congress and the press — the powerful institutions that should have provided the checks, balances and due diligence of the administration's case — failed to do their job. Had they done so, more Americans might have raised more objections. This perfect storm of democratic failure began at the top.
As the war has dragged on, it is hard to give Americans en masse a pass. We are too slow to notice, let alone protest, the calamities that have followed the original sin.
......
Our moral trajectory over the Bush years could not be better dramatized than it was by a reunion of an elite group of two dozen World War II veterans in Washington this month. They were participants in a top-secret operation to interrogate some 4,000 Nazi prisoners of war. Until now, they have kept silent, but America's recent record prompted them to talk to The Washington Post.
"We got more information out of a German general with a game of chess or Ping-Pong than they do today, with their torture," said Henry Kolm, 90, an M.I.T. physicist whose interrogation of Rudolf Hess, Hitler's deputy, took place over a chessboard. George Frenkel, 87, recalled that he "never laid hands on anyone" in his many interrogations, adding, "I'm proud to say I never compromised my humanity."
Our humanity has been compromised by those who use Gestapo tactics in our war. The longer we stand idly by while they do so, the more we resemble those "good Germans" who professed ignorance of their own Gestapo. It's up to us to wake up our somnambulant Congress to challenge administration policy every day. Let the war's last supporters filibuster all night if they want to. There is nothing left to lose except whatever remains of our country's good name."
American Tears, by Naomi Wolf, Huffington Post (October 12, 2007)
"I wish people would stop breaking into tears when they talk to me these days.
I am traveling across the country at the moment — Colorado to California — speaking to groups of Americans from all walks of life about the assault on liberty and the 10 steps now underway in America to a violently closed society.
The good news is that Americans are already awake: I thought there would be resistance to or disbelief at this message of gathering darkness — but I am finding crowds of people who don’t need me to tell them to worry; they are already scared, already alert to the danger and entirely prepared to hear what the big picture might look like. To my great relief, Americans are smart and brave and they are unflinching in their readiness to hear the worst and take action. And they love their country.
But I can’t stand the stories I am hearing. I can’t stand to open my email these days. And wherever I go, it seems, at least once a day, someone very strong starts to cry while they are speaking.
In Boulder, two days ago, a rosy-cheeked thirtysomething mother of two small children, in soft yoga velours, started to tear up when she said to me: “I want to take action but I am so scared. I look at my kids and I am scared. How do you deal with fear? Is it safer for them if I act or stay quiet? I don’t want to get on a list.” In D.C., before that, a beefy, handsome civil servant, a government department head — probably a Republican — confides in a lowered voice that he is scared to sign the new ID requirement for all government employees, that exposes all his most personal information to the State — but he is scared not to sign it: “If I don’t, I lose my job, my house. It’s like the German National ID card,” he said quietly. This morning in Denver I talked for almost an hour to a brave, much-decorated high-level military man who is not only on the watch list for his criticism of the administration — his family is now on the list. His elderly mother is on the list. His teenage son is on the list. He has flown many dangerous combat missions over the course of his military career, but his voice cracks when he talks about the possibility that he is exposing his children to harassment.
Jim Spencer, a former columnist for the Denver Post who has been critical of the Bush administration, told me today that I could use his name: he is on the watch list. An attorney contacts me to say that she told her colleagues at the Justice Department not to torture a detainee; she says she then faced a criminal investigation, a professional referral, saw her emails deleted — and now she is on the watch list. I was told last night that a leader of Code Pink, the anti-war women’s action group, was refused entry to Canada. I hear from a tech guy who works for the airlines — again, probably a Republican — that once you are on the list you never get off. Someone else says that his friend opened his luggage to find a letter from the TSA saying that they did not appreciate his reading material. Before I go into the security lines, I find myself editing my possessions. In New York’s LaGuardia, I reluctantly foudd myself putting a hardcover copy of Tara McKelvey’s excellent Monstering, an expose of CIA interrogation practices, in a garbage can before I get in the security line; it is based on classified information. This morning at my hotel, before going to the sirport, I threw away a very nice black T-shirt that said “We Will Not be Silenced” — with an Arabic translation — that someone had given me, along with a copy of poems written by detainees at Guantanamo.
.....
I read the news in a state of something like walking shock: seven soldiers wrote op-eds critical of the war — in The New York Times; three are dead, one shot in the head. A female soldier who was about to become a whistleblower, possibly about abuses involving taxpayers’ money: shot in the head. Pat Tillman, who was contemplating coming forward in a critique of the war: shot in the head. Donald Vance, a contractor himself, who blew the whistle on irregularities involving arms sales in Iraq — taken hostage FROM the U.S. Embassy BY U.S. soldiers and kept without recourse to a lawyer in a U.S. held-prison, abused and terrified for weeks — and scared to talk once he got home. Another whistleblower in Iraq, as reported in Vanity Fair: held in a trailer all night by armed contractors before being ejected from the country.
.....
In Germany, according to historian Richard Evans, in 1931-1932, if enough Germans of conscience had begun to say No — history would have had an entirely diferent outcome.
If we go any further down this road the tears will be those of conservatives as well as progressives. They will be American tears.
The time for weeping has to stop; the time for confronting must begin."
The Allure of Cryptofascism, by P.M. Carpenter, pmcarpenter.blogs.com (October 11, 2007)
"With respect to the Fourth Amendment hatchet known as the Protect America Act, may I ask what constituency Congressional Democrats are politically nervous about other than the cryptofascist crowd?
More than enough is never enough for the Bush administration. It has sought and received legislative approval after approval that enhance its anticonstitutional aims, yet once again, enough is not enough. Yesterday the House Judiciary and Intelligence committees crafted and approved legislation that "provides authority for the government to obtain 'basket' or 'umbrella' warrants for bundles of overseas communications" -- an unwarranted offense to the Fourth Amendment -- which prompted not smiles, but rage by the administration.
.....
But since we've thrown logic to the specious winds, at least we can enjoy Congressional Republicans' rather paradoxical democratic dabbling in cryptofascism.
One, they have "attacked the legislation, saying it [gives] too much authority to judges who are not competent to be reviewing intelligence programs" -- oh, that one is just too easy -- and two, they say "that the failure to provide immunity to telecommunications companies would deter companies from cooperating with intelligence agencies in the future" -- even though each and every lawsuit would get automatically kicked by the state secret doctrine.
But, as stated, you can't beat anticonstitutional thugs with logic, because logic isn't what you're fighting.
So what's left of Republicans' arguments? Nothing, of course, but pure cryptofascist appeal. The only way to secure the American Way is through its destruction, step by itty-bitty step, or, by leaps and bounds, if you prefer. And there's no constituency so motivated to democratically condone its destruction like the cryptofascist crowd. It's one of the more curious manifestations of philosophical suicide known to man.
....."
Orwell in 2007, by Robert Weiner, Oregonian (October 7, 2007)
"In “1984,” the novel that most baby boomers read in high school, George Orwell creates a theoretical modern-day government with absolute power — a state in which government, called the Party, monitors and controls every aspect of human life to the extent that even having a disloyal thought is against the law.
On Sept. 26, a federal judge in Eugene ruled that crucial parts of the USA Patriot Act are unconstitutional because they allow federal surveillance and searches of American citizens without demonstrating probable cause. U.S. District Judge Ann L. Aiken said the federal government would “amend the Bill of Rights, by giving it an interpretation that would deprive it of any real meaning.”
Ruling in favor of an Oregon lawyer who challenged the act after he was mistakenly linked to the 2004 train bombings in Madrid, Spain, Aiken stated: “A shift to a nation based on extra-constitutional authority is prohibited, as well as ill advised.”
Earlier in September, another federal judge, this one in New York, ordered the FBI to stop obtaining e-mail and telephone data without first securing a warrant. The secrecy provisions are “the legislative equivalent of breaking and entering, with an ominous free pass to the hijacking of constitutional values,” U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero wrote.
In “1984,” the Party barrages citizens with psychological stimuli designed to overwhelm the mind. The giant telescreen in every room monitors behavior. People are continuously reminded of government’s surveillance, especially by omnipresent signs reading, “BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU.” Individuals are encouraged to spy on each other, even children on their parents, and report any instance of disloyalty to the Party — i.e., government.
“1984″ is happening in 2007.
Signs along interstate highways urge citizens, “Report Suspicious Behavior.” Cameras mounted at strategic locations monitor our everyday movement (just as in the novel). Red, orange and yellow are no longer just bright, pretty colors: They now represent levels of national security alerts. Intelligence agencies now define “chatter” as “terrorist speak.”
The Party in “1984″ uses psychological manipulation to make citizens “doublethink” — hold two contradictory ideas contrary to common sense.
Back to 2007: The Patriot Act by its very name defies individuals to disagree with it, for to do so would be “unpatriotic.”
The Patriot Act was passed hastily in October 2001, under a cloak of fear in response to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Some of the fundamental changes to American’s traditional legal rights include:
Establishing a huge surveillance system on millions with no court approval, without probable cause.
Holding citizens indefinitely without access to the courts or counsel.
Monitoring library withdrawals and Internet communications.
Taping attorney-client communications.
Creating a national system for citizens to monitor and report on each other, regardless of reason, including paranoia or ethnic bias.
Developing a massive computer system to monitor every purchase.
Creating a national identification card.
....."
"But What Can We Do?", by William Blum, Information Clearing House (October 2, 2007)
I used to give thought to what historical time and place I would like to have lived in. Europe in the 1930s was usually my first choice. As the war clouds darkened, I'd be surrounded by intrigue, spies omnipresent, matters of life and death pressing down, the opportunity to be courageous and principled. I pictured myself helping desperate people escape to America. It was real Hollywood stuff; think "Casablanca". And when the Spanish Republic fell to Franco and his fascist forces, aided by the German and Italian fascists (while the United States and Britain stood aside, when not actually aiding the fascists), everything in my imaginary scenario would have heightened -- the fate of Europe hung in the balance. Then the Nazis marched into Austria, then Czechoslovakia, then Poland ... one could have devoted one's life to working against all this, trying to hold back the fascist tide; what could be more thrilling, more noble?
Miracle of miracles, miracle of time machines, I'm actually living in this imagined period, watching as the Bush fascists march into Afghanistan, bombing it into a "failed state"; then Iraq: death, destruction, and utterly ruined lives for 24 million human beings; threatening more of the same endless night of hell for the people of Iran; overthrowing Jean-Bertrand Aristide in Haiti; bombing helpless refugees in Somalia; relentless attempts to destabilize and punish Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Gaza, and other non-believers in the empire's god-given mission. Sadly, my most common reaction to this real-life scenario, daily in fact, is less heroic and more feeling scared or depressed; not for myself personally but for our one and only world. The news every day, which I consume in large portions, slashes away at my joie de vivre; it's not just the horror stories of American military power run amok abroad and the injustices of the ever-expanding police state at home, but all the lies and stupidity which drive me up the wall. I'm constantly changing stations, turning the TV or radio off, turning the newspaper page, to escape the words of the King of Lies and the King of Stupidity -- those two twisted creatures who happen to occupy the same humanoid body -- and a hundred minions.
Nonetheless, I must tell you, comrades, that at the same time, our contemporary period also brings out in me a measure of what I imagined for my 1930s life. Our present world is in just as great peril, even more so when one considers the impending environmental catastrophe (which the King of Capitalism refuses to confront lest it harm the profits of those who lavish him with royal bribes). The Bush fascist tide must be stopped.
Usually when I'm asked "But what can we do?", my reply is something along the lines of: Inasmuch as I can not see violent revolution succeeding in the United States (something deep inside tells me that we couldn't quite match the government's firepower, not to mention their viciousness), I can offer no solution to stopping the imperial beast other than: Educate yourself and as many others as you can, increasing the number of those in the opposition until it reaches a critical mass, at which point ... I can't predict the form the explosion will take.
.....
One final thought. On the Democratic Party's failure to stand up to the Bush fascist tide. Here, from the first-person account of a German living under Hitler in the 1930s, his observation about the leading German political party, the Social Democrats, the Democratic Party of its time: The Social Democrats, he wrote, "had fought the election campaign of 1933 in a dreadfully humiliating way, chasing after the Nazi slogans and emphasizing that they were 'also nationalist'. ... In May, a month before they were finally dissolved, the Social Democratic faction in the Reichstag had unanimously expressed their confidence in Hitler and joined in the singing of the 'Horst Wessel Song,' the Nazi anthem. (The official parliamentary report noted: 'Unending applause and cheers, in the house and the galleries. The Reichschancellor [Hitler] turns to the Social Democratic faction and applauds.')"
....."
Naomi Wolf's Call to Patriots -- Today's Echoes of Goebbels, and the Fragility of Liberty, buzzflash interview (September 25, 2007)
".....
Wolf structures her book into identifying 10 usurpations of democracy that are underway. When combined with the other assaults on our Constitutional checks and balances, we agree with Wolf that we are on the precipice of seeing this great experiment in Constitutional democracy disappear as our Bill of Rights is steadily eroded.
Careful to document her thesis with parallels to the rise of fascism in other times, Wolf speaks with a sincere and highly credible sense of urgency. She lays out the roadmap to authoritarian rule -- and we are being driven down that road without most Americans even realizing it.
What she asks of us is simple: to awaken to the danger before it is too late, if it isn't already.
......
BuzzFlash: You have
outlined ten steps to dismantling a democracy, which the Founders of our country
also recognized as threats. How did you come to pick those ten?
Naomi Wolf: Basically they leapt out as a pattern in the reading I was doing. I read about these different times of crisis, specifically the Twenties in Italy, the Thirties in Germany, the Fifties in East Germany, 1968 in Czechoslovakia, 1973 in the coup in Chile, and the late Eighties/early Nineties which saw the crushing in China of the pro-democracy movement.
What jumps up when you read those histories is that essentially, the practice of crushing an open society was essentially invented by Mussolini. It was then developed and elaborated on by the other great tyrants of the twentieth century, and then they studied each other. Hitler studied Stalin. Both of them studied Mussolini. Subsequently, the other dictators all over the world go back and look at what works.
The School for the Americas, basically teach it -- this blueprint was passed on to any number of would-be Latin American dictators and military leaders. Tyrants all over the world take the same ten steps. And it really is like a blueprint.
I start the book saying, in Thailand this coup took a week.
This is what they did -- boom, boom, boom. It's like they had a shopping list,
and, really, they did, because, by now, people who want to crush a democracy
know what to do. The people who live in a democracy don't know what these ten
steps are. Otherwise, we would absolutely be thronging the streets right now. We
might realize that we're in a state of crisis rather than just shopping online
and watching "America's Top Model."
But how did those ten steps arrive on my list? Various writers on fascism try to identify what the key steps are. Hannah Arendt, Umberto Eco, and Robert O. Paxton have all written about the elements of the totalitarian or fascist mind. All the writers look at different things, and they don't all correspond to my list, although Eco's list had some of the same elements. It just seemed very clear to me from my reading that you see these ten things again and again and again, such that you know what's going to happen. It's so predictable; it's so well-established.
Here's one. Categorically, in every closing society, someone
who wants to crush democracy will establish a military tribunal system which
parallels or is outside of the established judiciary. Once you create a prison
system outside of the rule of law -- I call it a secret prison system,
unaccountable, not transparent, where people get disappeared, where people get
tortured -- can you name a society that did that that did not eventually have
fascist rule?
As I was writing the book, someone sent me documentation of the expansion of the definition of terrorists to apply to activists. It was so clear that the definition of terrorist in every fascist shift expands to include more and more, to reach closer to the heart of civil society. You start to see the expansion of the term traitor, treason, espionage. Look at the censure by the Senate of an ad -- the notion that criticism is unpatriotic and bordering on treason. Stalin and Goebbels both developed that tactic. You start to see the broader and broader use of accusations of treason and espionage, like the calls we heard after the SWIFT banking story broke to try citizens under the 1917 Espionage Act -- an Act which, most Americans do not realize, was used at the end of the teens in this country to round up and arrest thousands of people like you and me; some were beaten in prison. Eugene Debs got a ten-year sentence under the Espionage Act for a speech about the First Amendment. The White House led a drumbeat of voices calling for the trial of New York Times executive editor Bill Keller for "treason" when he published the SWIFT banking stories. The penalty for treason in this country can be execution.
Sure enough, if you go back to history, you find that Nikolai Bukharin, the publisher of Izvestia, was tried in the third Moscow show trial and was in fact executed for treason. So these things are like part of a game plan, part of a blueprint. And there are so many parallels I found, which I point out in the book, that it is very hard to avoid the hypothesis that someone brilliant in this administration studied history and is replaying elements, language, and tactics from violently closing societies that worked in the past.
I really saw the same tendencies happening again and again in the reading I did about how open societies dismantled parliamentary democracies and constitutions, and how they were crushing pro-democracy uprisings.
......
You and I are in the same position -- and everyone on the Internet. We have to switch our model of leadership and return it to the Revolutionary American model of citizen leaders. The Congress is not going to save us. The mainstream media is not going to save us. The pundits are not going to save us. The U.N. is not going to save us. The European Union is not going to save us. There is not a force on earth that can save us, except for our own talking to each other, clearly and urgently, to explain and convey the nature of this threat, and then for us to take radical action NOW. So that's why I wrote it this way.
Our strategy has to be that thousands, and we hope soon
millions, of other citizens who are persuaded by the argument will speak to each
other and then mobilize in a hurry to confront these abuses. It depends on
citizens acting as journalists, citizens acting as advocates, citizens acting as
leaders and revolutionaries to mobilize one another. So that's A.
B is, you're absolutely right about the incremental nature of this kind of shift. That's why I spend so much time looking at the early years of earlier such shifts. Americans tend to think that the closing down of a modern parliamentary society happens in some giant, dramatic explosion. But it doesn't. In a democracy as sophisticated or resilient as ours had been, it's going to be closed down incrementally.
If you go back to Berlin in 1931, it wouldn't have looked so unrecognizable to us. There was a Parliament that was meeting there. There was a constitution. There were abortion rights organizations, human rights lawyers and activists. There were gay rights organizations. There was modern art. People were doing what we're doing. People were going to the movies. They kept living -- and that's why I draw on diaries and memoirs and personal accounts. People were doing what we're doing. They were shopping. They were leading their lives, even as the catastrophe was tightening and tightening around them.
There are scenes in the books I cite that are exactly the same as the scene that played out in the University of Florida last week when the kid was tasered for asking a question and everyone sat still as he was dragged out. That scene was described by Count Kessler, by Victor Klemperer, in memoirs of Germany form 1931-1933. And people then were saying what we are saying: surely this can't get worse; people will come to their senses.
Historians such as Richard Evans point out that, at that point, if the people of Germany had arisen and confronted the abusers of parliamentary process and of the Constitution, the horrors could have been averted. By the way, I am not looking at Germany to make an analogy of any kind about outcomes. I am Jewish and do not take that issue lightly. What I am doing, and I think we honor the victims of the Holocaust by doing so, is looking at how there are threads that recur in the early years of a fascist shift, and lessons we have to learn in time. What we really have to realize is that in a modern democracy, the shift to a closed society doesn't happen overnight.
.......
BuzzFlash: Your book
does a tremendous job of putting together the ten different threats running in
parallel and intertwined courses. The power of the ten together leads to a
tipping point, as you've called it, which, at some point becomes the point of no
return. That type of concurrence is described in the book
They Thought
They Were Free by an American Jew who, after World War II, went back to
Nazi Germany to find out how it happened. The Germans thought they were free
until they weren't any longer.
In the mainstream news, and certainly in a lot of the political discourse, the Republicans in general, and Bush, are portrayed as the patriots, the champions of freedom, the ones who are the "strict constructionists" in terms of the Constitution, and so forth. You and I would argue that, in reality, what is happening under the current administration is a radical assault on our Constitution, on our freedoms, on the vision of Founding Fathers. The radicals are the people in the government who are trying to change the very foundation of the country. But they wrap themselves in the wrapping paper -- disguise themselves as the champions of the Constitution.
How do you break through to the American public? The
mainstream press doesn't seem to be able to even begin to penetrate the
dissonance and the contradiction in the narrative as the administration presents
it.
Naomi Wolf: I try to avoid theorizing in the book, and instead just let the reader decide for him or herself what inferences may be drawn about this White House. But it's very hard to avoid a hypothesis that the White House has studied twentieth century history in some detail. When despots are trying to close down an open society, and Orwell pointed this out, they call something the opposite of what it is. Goebbels, for one, was a master of saying something the opposite of what it was. If you read Mein Kampf, and look at Hitler's speeches, he is continually invoking democracy and freedom, democracy and freedom, the rule of law. I'm upholding the rule of law; he actually said he was simplifying democracy. Indeed, it was the prior administration that had opened the door to him, and they weren't even national socialists, but they weakened the constitution so badly that it left the field wide open for him to do what he wanted to do.
I have a section in the book about how lies in a fascist shift serve a different purpose than they do in a democracy. In a democracy, people lie to deceive. In a fascist shift, lies serve to disorient. Lies in the service of a fascist shift make it hard for citizens to trust their own judgment about what's real and what's not. Once citizens don't know what's real and what's not real, they are profoundly disempowered. The Bush administration seems to have learned that lesson, and they regularly name things the opposite. And there's a long historical precedent for making people feel that there is no such thing as truth.
There's another tipping point in closing down a democracy when the leaders no longer are accountable for disclosing the truth. Why is the mainstream media not more rigorous?
I think has to do with, first, corporate ownership. There are just some issues you really can't pursue. Recently someone pitched a renewal of a famous program that taught children about democracy, and checks and balances, to a major network. They basically said we don't want to do anything to rock the boat. Even librarians are affected. I've been offering to give librarians copies of the Constitution to distribute, and they say, we can't do that because that'll be too controversial. I'm not kidding. The Constitution's become too controversial.
So the networks have some profound vested interests, which I track in the book, that would be served by a dismantling of the Constitution in this country, and by an ongoing war on terror that never ends. These are powerful industries, and millions of dollars are at stake. And they have lobbyists. They contribute to political campaigns, and it's not negligible.
The second reason, I think, is, it's hard for the mainstream media, even when they're privately owned, to say certain things for psychological reasons. There's a mindset that it's taboo to say in America that an American president might try to bring down democracy. There are a lot of taboos. You're not allowed to look at the history of Germany. That's a social taboo. You're not allowed to suggest in a mainstream context that an American president might have radically oppressive motives, just like dictators all over the world. It's like this collective wish to believe our leaders are always benign, our system will always endure, even if we don't do anything to protect it. We are always safe. We are always the exception. There's a kind of regressive, almost infantile fantasizing that Daddy could never actually be abusive-- it is this magical thinking -- and there's a lot of it.
......
In Italy, in the early 1920s, people just couldn't believe it. And in Germany, from 1931-1933, they just couldn't believe it. You read the memoirs, and people were saying, surely, no one's going to go for this. Surely, this can't last. Surely, no one will put up with these thugs marching in the streets like this. Surely, we will all come to our senses.
The trouble is, this mindset is very, very dangerous when it's a different game being played. There is this scene in which Mussolini is marching on Rome, and the members of Parliament are still trying to negotiate with him -- offering him various cabinet positions. They think it's still a democracy, and he just waits for them to get it.
As I say at the end of the book, I feel like there's very little time left for us to act. I'm very worried about the upcoming elections, and here's why. One of the things very few people followed up on is that there's a strong indication that when they fired the US attorneys, they were considering purging all of the US Attorneys -- all of them, all at once. That's essentially what Goebbels did in 1933 with the civil service. The White House has fought any disclosure of the e-mails about the US Attorneys purge, or would-be purge. It's a classic move in a takeover to purge the civil service, and especially the lawyers and the judges, and replace them with your own cronies -- that's a standard, recognized tactic.
.....
The national socialists continually invoked Bolshevik terrorism and violence. And there was Bolshevik terrorism and Bolshevik violence. There were communist terrorists. By the same token, Pinochet eased his way in by telling Chilean citizens about insurgents who were going to engage in this spectacular act of terrorism, a mass assassination, and he showed citizens the purported weapons caches on television. He used fake documents to hype a real threat, which again is quite common in history -- like the fake documents the White House relied on to lie to us about the yellowcake threat.
It's absolutely standard for would-be dictators to invoke a terrorist threat, and it can be a real terrorist threat. What they'll do is they'll hype it, or manipulate the information. Or heighten the fear level. The reason is it enables them to subdue people.
I feel like it's actually liberating for readers to read about
how this has been used in other countries. First, it lets them snap out of that
kind of frightened feeling of, oh, my God, the terrorists have struck from al
Qaeda. The terrorist threat from al Qaeda changes everything. We must give up
our liberties in order to be safe. It's just not true. There are historical
precedents for it not being true.
I also note that Spain and England, which are countries that suffered very serious terrorist attacks, by the same terrorists that threaten us, responded very differently. They responded with transparent trials. Their trials of the accused terrorists are on the Internet. They responded by upholding their values of democracy and openness and freedom. And in England, Gordon Brown says terrorism is a crime, not a cause. Israel has nothing like the red, yellow, orange alert that we do, and they fight terrorists every day.
......
Center for Constitutional Rights attorney Michael Ratner, who represented Guantanamo detainees before the Supreme Court, is really eloquent about the legal analogies between what happened in Germany and what's happening now. And Harper's recently made some of the same points. What you're talking about is a process that the National Socialists perfected, called coordination. That's why looking at Germany is so necessary now -- because they coordinated every aspect of civil society. And when you've got people who understand that their tenure depends on following the party line, you do get a rigged system.
What's happening with the military -- JAG -- lawyers is also important. These are lawyers, so their job is to uphold the rule of law and do good jobs representing their clients. And again and again, these brave, decent, honorable men and women, probably many of them Republicans, have suffered career setbacks or worse simply trying to do their jobs as lawyers, and not sell out their clients, and not hand over their clients to a rigged system.
And you're right to point out people really don't understand what fascism looks like. They think it looks kind of like goose-stepping military and barbed wire everywhere. It doesn't look like that. I give examples of closed societies in the book, and after a society is closed, there will often still be a judiciary. There will be journalism. There will be radio. There will even be television. There will be universities and students. Many aspects of the institutions of civil society continue. What happens, though, is everybody knows how far you can go before you lose your job, or how far you can go before getting arrested. And it's actually very important for some dictators to maintain a facade of the rule of law, to maintain a facade of elections, and to maintain a facade of a working civil society system, because it gives the regime legitimacy. You saw that in Italy and in Germany. You see it throughout Latin America.
Our system is so fragile. If we woke up to learn that all of the U.S. attorneys had indeed been fired and replaced with lawyers loyal to the machine, it would still be America. We'd still have a lot of the stuff that we have now. It would look familiar. But it would be a different reality. The election campaign would be like election campaigns in weak or struggling democracies where a lot of it is sham. A lot of it is wishful thinking. People who go ahead and register voters or fight for candidates who are not in the party line, who are not 'coordinated,' face investigations, face harassment, face warrants for arrest on various minor violations. Would that be America in more than name? Or would that be the end of America?
We'd still have the Internet. We'd still have a judiciary. But it wouldn't be freedom. And it is really important for your community, for all of us, to understand that it's going to take a citizen uprising right now -- I mean a civil uprising -- to hold accountable people who would dismantle our democracy in this way, and to use democracy to heal democracy while we still can, because we still can.
That's why we started the American Freedom Campaign to parallel the American Freedom Agenda. Millions of Americans can compel Congress to pass the legislative agenda that would rewrite these horrific laws, and would restore checks and balances, and, I think, compel Congress to confront the people who have committed crimes against the Constitution. We're still in the state where democracy can heal democracy. That's why we have to act.
......
None of us knows in our bones what it's like to live in a police state. My warning is that, when you get a state using violence against the individual in the act of suppression of democracy, you change your whole reality. Most Americans have a sense of physical invincibility. If we sign a petition somewhere, if we register as a Democrat, someone might know about it, but we still can't believe that anyone would ever hurt us in our democracy.
But people should be aware of how aggressively this administration has sought to assert the right that it has to call any American an enemy combatant and to mistreat them on a physical level. They've been very clear. Think of the abuses against Jose Padilla. And Dick Cheney has said he's outside the system, right?
.....
Really, this is where we choose. History will look back and say, either we saved the country or we didn't. Either we stopped it at a point where we could restore democracy, or we didn't, and someone else will be writing the histories.
.....
What did the Founders intend to have happen when there was a leader that systematically dismantled their checks and balances, and systematically dismantled our system of government? That debate hasn't happened in a principled, educated, patriotic way, and that debate has to happen. What do you do when there are assaults like this? I don't think it's Nancy Pelosi who decides preemptively. I think in a democracy, it's the people who decide.
And the abuses are escalating every day. The Senate just censured MoveOn for speech -- and argues that criticizing anyone in the armed forces is a sign of treason. This is exactly what the National Socialists did. They created these third rail subjects and created strictures that expanded all the time, criminalizing or punishing speech as unpatriotic and eventually criminalizing opposition itself. This is a horrific development, no matter what you thought of the wording of the ad, and Congressional democrats who do not stand up to it -- indeed Republicans as well -- should know they are playing into a very dark development historically.
......"
This Coup and the Next One, by Daniel Ellsberg, commondreams.org (September 27, 2007)
"I think nothing has higher priority than averting an attack on Iran, which I think will be accompanied by a further change in our way of governing here that in effect will convert us into what I would call a police state.
If there’s another 9/11 under this regime … it means that they switch on full extent all the apparatus of a police state that has been patiently constructed, largely secretly at first but eventually leaked out and known and accepted by the Democratic people in Congress, by the Republicans and so forth.
Will there be anything left for NSA to increase its surveillance of us? … They may be to the limit of their technical capability now, or they may not. But if they’re not now they will be after another 9/11.
And I would say after the Iranian retaliation to an American attack on Iran, you will then see an increased attack on Iran - an escalation - which will be also accompanied by a total suppression of dissent in this country, including detention camps, mainly for Middle Easterners but not exclusively.
It’s a little hard for me to distinguish the two contingencies; they could come together. Another 9/11 or an Iranian attack in which Iran’s reaction against Israel, against our shipping, against our troops in Iraq above all, possibly in this country, will justify the full panoply of measures that have been prepared now, legitimized, and to some extent written into law. …
This is an unusual gang, even for Republicans. [But] I think that the successors to this regime are not likely to roll back the assault on the Constitution. They will take advantage of it, they will exploit it.
.....
Let me simplify this and not just to be rhetorical: A coup has occurred. I woke up the other day realizing, coming out of sleep, that a coup has occurred. It’s not just a question that a coup lies ahead with the next 9/11. That’s the next coup, that completes the first.
The last five years have seen a steady assault on every fundamental of our Constitution, … what the rest of the world looked at for the last 200 years as a model and experiment to the rest of the world - in checks and balances, limited government, Bill of Rights, individual rights protected from majority infringement by the Congress, an independent judiciary, the possibility of impeachment.
There have been violations of these principles by many presidents before. Most of the specific things that Bush has done in the way of illegal surveillance and other matters were done under my boss Lyndon Johnson in the Vietnam War: the use of CIA, FBI, NSA against Americans.
I could go through a list going back before this century to Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus in the Civil War, and before that the Alien and Sedition Acts in the 18th century. I think that none of those presidents were in fact what I would call quite precisely the current administration: domestic enemies of the Constitution. What I swore as a Marine officer and State and Defense Department official-along with every other officer and official and member of Congress-to defend the Constitution against, along with foreign enemies.
I think that none of these presidents with all their violations, which were impeachable had they been found out at the time and in nearly every case their violations were not found out until they were out of office so we didn’t have the exact challenge that we have today.
That was true with the first term of Nixon and certainly of Johnson, Kennedy and others. They were impeachable, they weren’t found out in time, but I think it was not their intention to in the crisis situations that they felt justified their actions, to change our form of government.
It is increasingly clear with each new book and each new leak that comes out, that Richard Cheney and his now chief of staff David Addington have had precisely that in mind since at least the early 70s. Not just since 1992, not since 2001, but have believed in Executive government, single-branch government under an Executive president - elected or not - with unrestrained powers. They did not believe in restraint.
When I say this I’m not saying they are traitors. I don’t think they have in mind allegiance to some foreign power or have a desire to help a foreign power. I believe they have in their own minds a love of this country and what they think is best for this country - but what they think is best is directly and consciously at odds with what the Founders of this country and Constitution thought.
They believe we need a different kind of government now, an Executive government essentially, rule by decree, which is what we’re getting with signing statements. Signing statements are talked about as line-item vetoes which is one [way] of describing them which are unconstitutional in themselves, but in other ways are just saying the president says “I decide what I enforce. I decide what the law is. I legislate.”
It’s [the same] with the military commissions, courts that are under the entire control of the Executive Branch, essentially of the president. A concentration of legislative, judicial, and executive powers in one branch, which is precisely what the Founders meant to avert, and tried to avert and did avert to the best of their ability in the Constitution.
....."
Pro-Democracy Means Anti-Fascism, by Cindy Sheehan, commondreams.org (September 28, 2007)
"......
According to Chris Rowthorn, in his brilliant article, When America Went Fascist, we went fascist on December 11, 2000 when the Supreme Court appointed George as our unelected, un-democratic and illegal President. Although it is easy and tempting to blame everything on BushCo, this is about the only assertion that I disagree with in his article.
What about during the Clinton regime? Does anyone remember Elian Gonzales or The Branch Davidians in Waco? Let’s go back further. What about when Truman dropped to WMD on hundreds of thousands of innocent victims in Japan? What about Korea? Eisenhower and the Military Industrial Complex? What about the Gulf of Tonkin? What about Watergate? What about Panama? Kosovo? Nicaragua? Free trade agreements that hurt workers in all countries that are involved in them and what about the abuse of language in this country: Patriot Act; Homeland Security; Clear Water and Clean Skies—and the No Child Left Behind Act that leaves every child behind and is just a funnel to the recruiter’s office?
There are just a few measures that we can use to stop this slide and Rowthorn articulates what has become an important part of my platform. Only vote for candidates that promise the following things…for president, or any other federal elective offices:
* Repeal the Patriot Act
* Repeal No Child Left Behind
* Scale down the Department of Homeland Security and rename it so it loses its Nazi
tone and is brought under civilian control.
* Restore habeas corpus and close all torture camps by repealing the Military Commissions’ Act.
* Repeal all contracts with paid mercenary killer companies.
* Restore the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878.
* Repeal all BushCo-Presidential directives (especially Directive 51) and review all laws that contain signing statements.
* Restore the 4th Amendment by enforcing warrants for spying on Americans.
* Impeach Bush and Cheney-post presidency so they can’t receive federal benefits.
* Bring all troops home from Iraq and Afghanistan and review military needs for other bases around the world.
* Repeal all free trade agreements.
* Kick AIPAC and other lobbyists out of the halls of Congress where they have no business.
One of the most profound ways we can stop this descent into fascism is by impeaching, removing from office and incarcerating George Bush and Dick Cheney, et al. I am very skeptical of a complicit Congress, Inc doing anything about them in this term. I am also very skeptical of a “professional” and fascist military leadership taking their oath of service seriously and above their corporate-military allegiance to the Executive Branch recently and so tellingly revealed by General Betray-Us, so a military coup is out of the question and has the tricky element of becoming a military dictatorship.
....."
When America Went Fascist, by Chris Rowthorn, The Smirking Chimp (September 25, 2007)
"It is a truism in the blogosphere that one more terrorist attack will turn America into a fascist state. People speculate about what fascism in America will look like, or how they might fight it. Others boast that they plan to flee the country ahead of the coming fascist takeover of the United States. One cannot read these posts without a sense of bitter irony, because one thing is clear to those who are watching carefully:
The United States of America is already a fascist state.
The United States turned fascist on December 11, 2000. On that day, the Supreme Court essentially appointed George W. Bush president of the United States, stopping the recount of Florida votes, and, hence, the democratic process. The justices of the court then slipped away by night, ashamed of their role in murdering America's great experiment in democratic rule.
The Supreme Court decision of December 11, 2000 is the modern American equivalent to German President Hindenburg's swearing in of Hitler as chancellor of Germany on January 30, 1933. By swearing in Hitler as chancellor, Hindenburg set in motion a process which led to the Nazi dictatorship and World War II. In the case of the Nazis, the Reichstag fire of February 27, 1933 was the catalyst they needed to cement their grip on power. In the case of Bush and his backers, the tragedy of September 11, 2001 was the catalyst they needed to complete their full takeover of the American government.
When one looks at present-day America and reads plaintive musings about if and when America will turn fascist, it is useful to ask oneself the following question: When do you think the average German realized that he or she was living under a fascist dictatorship? How about the Japanese or Italians of the same period? Do you think that Hitler, Mussolini or Tojo made a public announcement to the effect of, "Dear Citizens: Please be advised that you no longer have any rights or political power. We have taken control of the government. Opposition and resistance are futile and will be punished."
The fact is, most of the "good" citizens of these countries clung desperately to the notion that it was business as usual long after constitutional government was dead and buried. Sure, they knew that their governments were a little further to the right than normal, but as long as they kept earning money and eating well, they ignored the grim realities of fascism.
It's easy to understand why: the "good" citizens weren't members of officially scapegoated groups or political activists, and thus they never felt the iron first of fascism. It's not like the government just suddenly started rounding up people at random and trucking them off to camps and executing them. No, it was only the "bad ones" who were carted off. It was the John Walker Lindhs, the Jose Padillas, the illegal immigrants and the Muslim Americans of their day who were carted off.
In fact, for the average citizen of Germany, Japan or Italy, it was only when the military adventures of their fascist governments started to go seriously awry did the reality dawn on them. Until then, if anything, they merely felt the stirrings of extreme patriotism and perhaps even satisfaction as their countries expanded outward. Indeed, for many, it was only when their countries lay in ashes did they fully understand what had happened. Only then could they see that a kind of cancer had run wild in their countries and come perilously close to destroying them.
In 2007, the average American is in exactly the same position as the typical German, Japanese or Italian citizen of the early to mid-1930s. Unless you happen to be a Muslim, a left-wing political activist, or a regular reader of left-wing political websites or journals, you could be forgiven for thinking that it's business as usual in the United States of America. You rise in the morning, read the morning paper, commute to work, get a paycheck, hit the ATM and watch the usual shows on television in the evening. Sure, we're officially "at war" but other than a few news stories and the usual yellow ribbons and bumper stickers, this doesn't really intrude into our realities.
But while all of us go about our lives like nothing has changed, the Constitution of the United States has been suspended, and with it, the democracy that it enshrines. Sure, Bush has never announced that he has suspended the Constitution. Rather, he has subjected it to a death by a thousand cuts. For, at last count, George W. Bush has appended 139 signing statements to laws passed by Congress, containing challenges to over 750 individual laws. These signing statements amount to 139 written declarations that George W. Bush and his allies consider themselves to be unconstrained by the law of the land and the will of the people. Or, to quote Mr. Bush: "(The Constitution) is just a goddamned piece of paper!"
On top of this, the Bush administration has repeatedly ignored subpoenas asking for information and directed aides not to comply with requests for information. And, more broadly, the Bush administration has made it clear that it will respond neither to the will of the people nor the will of Congress. Thus, in word and deed, the Bush administration is a dictatorship. And a country under the rule of a dictator is, at least by the definition at the start of this article, a fascist country.
Thus, in the last seven years, the United States has gone from a weak democracy, in which the people had weak but nominal control over their government, to a system where the government is under the control of "a unitary executive." And, of course, "unitary executive" is how you say "fuhrer" in modern American English.
Of course, this is not news to those unfortunate Americans who are presently languishing in military prisons without access to lawyers or due process. But, for most Americans, it seems absurd or even hysterical to declare that we are living in a fascist state. Arguments about signing statements, unitary executive theory or past Supreme Court decisions are mere abstractions and gain little traction.
Perhaps this is because fascism is like pornography: it's hard to define, but you know it when you see it. Indeed, the best way to distinguish pornography from art is not logical but aesthetic. Similarly, I would suggest that the best way to determine if a country is fascist is not intellectual at all, but aesthetic.
Fascism has a style, a language and a mood all its own. When enough of these outward signs of fascism are present, you can reasonably conclude that the country in question is fascist. For this reason, I have put together this short guide to some of the more obvious distinguishing features of fascism.
.......
--Hypnotized by symbols
.....
--Impoverished language
....
--Mood of pervasive fear
....
--The nation as homeland
....
At this point, it is clear that America is in the early stages of fascism; it hasn't yet metastasized into the outright jackbooted fascism of Nazi Germany. But the country is poised like a boulder at the top of a slope, ready to roll into the abyss. In fact, it will take a miracle to keep this from happening. Consider the factors that could easily unleash outright fascism in the United States: the accelerating collapse of the US dollar; the follow-on effects from the subprime loan debacle; soaring energy prices (peak oil); catastrophic weather events caused by global warming; and, of course, the one thing that Bush's entire foreign policy seems almost guaranteed to bring about: another large-scale terrorist attack on American soil. Any one of these by itself could trigger outright fascism. Combine two or more, and American fascism is 100% certain.
We must realize that the full machinery of outright fascism is already in place. Private security firms like Blackwater are ready and willing to serve as the new Blackshirts. Patriot Act II has been written and provides the full "legal" framework for completely revoking the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and establishing martial law. The Pentagon has established Northcom to organize military operations in the United States and Canada. The Posse Comitatus Act has been gutted to allow the National Guard to serve in police actions all across the country. And detention centers have been built across the land and plans have been laid to intern millions of Americans.
History teaches that there is a point of no return in the evolution of a fascist state. Once that line is crossed, there is no turning back until the country lies in ashes and millions lie dead both inside and outside the country. If you don't think it could happen in the United States of America, then you don't remember how easily Americans let themselves be robbed of their precious civil liberties in the aftermath of 9-11.
Thus, a presidential candidate who does not make restoration of constitutional government the centerpiece of his or her campaign should not even be considered. The first and most pressing order of business must be to repeal the Patriot Act in its entirety. Provisions that Democratic lawmakers deem essential to national security can be restored on a piece-by-piece basis as parts of other legislation. The Military Commissions Act of 2006, which suspended habeas corpus, must be repealed. The Department of Homeland Security must be downsized and brought under full and transparent civilian control.
In the longer term, meaningful campaign finance reform and public funding for elections must be enacted in order to put political power back into the hands of the people and to take it out of the hands of the Pentagon and allied industries. Because ultimately, it is the military-industrial complex, working with the electoral support of right-wing religious fundamentalists, that is behind American fascism.
....."
Are You on the Government's 'No Fly' List?, by Naomi Wolf, alternet.org (September 13, 2007)
"Protest has been lively in our nation throughout most of our history because being free means that you can't be detained arbitrarily. We have also felt free in the security of our homes, believing that the state can't break in and go through our possessions. All that is changing.
In 2002, I began to notice that almost every time I sought to board a domestic airline flight, I was called aside by the Transportation Security Administration and given a more thorough search. When this was happening on nine flights out of ten, I asked the officials about the special search. They told me that the search was due to the quadruple "S" that routinely came up on my boarding pass. There are several reasons why one might receive a quadruple "S" on one's boarding pass if one doesn't fit a terrorist profile: buying a ticket at the last minute, for instance, or paying in cash. But those circumstances didn't apply to me. I kept asking, but not getting real answers.
This stepped-up search became so routine as I traveled that companions who were flying with me began to simply say, "I'll meet you at the gate," even before we got through the security line.
On yet another preboarding search, I asked yet again. The TSA agent searching me, a young woman, said pleasantly, "You're on the list."
"The list?" I asked. "What list?" Her supervisor abruptly ended our exchange, took over from her, and then moved me on.
Indeed, the TSA Administration does keep a "list." The American citizens on the list who do not fit a terrorist profile range from journalists and academics who have criticized the White House to activists and even political leaders who have also spoken out
These TSA searches and releases would be trivial in a working democracy. In the 1960s, peace activists found it merely irksome to be trailed by FBI agents, and in the 1980s those who organized The Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES) on college campuses were even amused sometimes to find, on submitting a Freedom of Information Act request, that there was a file open on them. But once the first steps in a fascist shift are in place, being on "the list" is not really funny any more.
When you are physically detained by armed agents because of something that you said or wrote, it has an impact. On the one hand, during these heightened searches of my luggage, I knew I was a very small fish in a very big pond. On the other hand, you get it right away that the state is tracking your journeys, can redirect you physically, and can have armed men and women, who may or may not answer your questions, search and release you.
......
In America, people are not supposed to be detained because of their political beliefs. But Senator Edward M. "Ted" Kennedy, the liberal senator from Massachusetts who is a thorn in the side of the Bush administration, was detained five times in East Coast airports in March, 2004. Democratic Congressman John Lewis of Georgia has also been subjected to extra security measures.
.....
Jan Adams and Rebecca Gordon, American peace activists, tried to check in at the San Francisco airport for a trip to Boston in August 2002. Airport personnel who said that these middle-aged women were on the "master list" called the police and notified the FBI. At least twenty other peace activists are confirmed to be on the list: A 74-year-old Catholic nun who works for peace was detained in Milwaukee; Nancy Oden, a leader of the Green Party, was prevented from flying from Maine to Chicago.
Free speech advocates are on the list: King Downing of the ACLU was detained in the Boston airport in 2003. David Fathi, also of the ACLU, was detained as well. Scholars who defend the Constitution are on the list: in 2007, Professor Walter F. Murphy, emeritus of Princeton, one of the nation's foremost Constitutional scholars, who had recently spoken critically of Bush's assault on the Constitution, was detained for being on a "watch list." A TSA official confirmed informally that it was probably because Murphy had criticized the President, and warned him that his luggage would be ransacked.
.....
Where did the list come from? In 2003, President Bush had the intelligence agencies and the FBI create a "watch list" of people thought to have terrorist intentions or contacts. These agencies gave the list to the TSA and the commercial airlines. 60 Minutes got one copy of the list: It was 540 pages long. That list of people to be taken aside for extra screening had 75,000 names on it.
.....
On December 6, 2006, Democrats in Congress tried to find out more about recent reports that the Department of Homeland Security "was using a scoring system" that rated the dangers posed by people crossing American borders. The Democrats were worried that these lists did not simply keep people from flying-they could keep them from getting jobs as well.
According to the New York Times, Vermont Senator Patrick J. Leahy said that "the program and broader government data-mining efforts could make it more difficult for innocent Americans to travel or to get a job -- without giving them the chance to know why they were labeled a security risk." So now there is not just the anxiety that you might be detained-you could also, if you are on certain secret lists, be turned down for a job and never know why.
Being on the list can get also get some people detained and tortured -- although they are innocent.
Maher Arar is a Canadian citizen, a software consultant, husband, and father -- a North American yuppie. The United States detained Arar when he was changing planes at Kennedy Airport in 2002. He was "rendered" to Syria. Security forces there kept him in prison for over a year, beating him repeatedly with a heavy metal cable. The Canadian government pursued a two-year investigation and concluded that it had all been a terrible mistake -- Arar actually had no ties to terrorists whatsoever. Canadians were so appalled by this miscarriage of justice that the head of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police resigned. After he was released with his government's help, Arar, emboldened perhaps by living in a working North American democracy, sued the U.S. government.
.....
Making it more difficult for people out of favor with the state to travel back and forth across borders is a classic part of the fascist playbook. As Nazi Germany closed down, borders tightened and families fleeing internment were traumatized by the uncertainties that they knew they faced at the borders. When reporter Timothy Garton Ash published essays that offended the Stasi, he was forbidden to re-enter the GDR. The United States has recently been refusing visas to various respected Muslim scholars from universities such as Oxford -- scholars with no ties whatsoever to terrorists -- because they have been critical of U.S. policy. This has happened before in America: in the 1950s the FBI confiscated the passports of intellectuals and journalists who had been critical of anticommunist witch hunts.
.....
Are the cases we hear of Americans being caught up in detention, searches, and releases merely Homeland Security or TSA zealotry? Or are the stories effective PR about a new reality? Fascist propagandists target individuals, detain and release them, and then publicize the stories. Could all these -- Bensman the fish defender and Cat Stevens the balladeer and the little elderly nun and the lady peace activists -- be victims not of simple clumsiness but, rather, examples of the fact that perfectly ordinary Americans can now get entangled in the increasingly punitive apparatus of the state?
....."
A Shocking Moment for Society: Tasering at University of Florida, by Naomi Wolf, Huffington Post (September 19, 2007)
"Today’s news shows a recognizable shock moment in the annals of a closing society. A very ordinary-looking American student — Andrew Meyer, 21, at the University of Florida - was tasered by police when he asked a question of Senator John Kerry about the impeachment of President George Bush. His arms were pinned and as he tried to keep speaking he was shocked — in spite of begging not to be hurt. A stunning piece of footage but unfortunately, historically, a very familiar and even tactical moment.
It is an iconic turning point and it will be remembered as the moment at which America either fought back or yielded. This violence against a student is different from violence against protesters in the anti-war movement of 30 years ago because of the power the president has now to imprison innocent U.S. citizens for months in isolation. And because, as I have explained elsewhere, we are not now in a situation in which ‘the pendulum’ can easily swing back. That taser was directed at the body of a young man, but it is we ourselves, and our Constitution, who received the full force of the shock.
There is a chapter in my new book, The End of America, entitled “Recast Criticism as ‘Espionage’ and Dissent as ‘Treason,’” that conveys why this moment is the horrific harbinger it is. I argue that strategists using historical models to close down an open society start by using force on ‘undesirables,’ ‘aliens,’ ‘enemies of the state,’ and those considered by mainstream civil society to be untouchable; in other times they were, of course, Jews, Gypsies, Communists, homosexuals. Then, once society has been acculturated to that use of force, the ‘blurring of the line’ begins and the parameters of criminalized speech are extended — the definition of ‘terrorist’ expanded — and the use of force begins to be deployed in HIGHLY VISIBLE, STRATEGIC and VISUALLY SHOCKING WAYS against people that others see and identify with as ordinary citizens. The first ‘torture cellars’ used by the SA, in Germany between 1931 and 1933 — even before the National Socialists gained control of the state, during the years when Germany was still a parliamentary democracy — were informal and widely publicized in the mainstream media. Few German citizens objected because those abused there were seen as ‘other’ — even though the abuse was technically illegal. But then, after this escalation of the use of force was accepted by the population, students, journalists, opposition leaders, and clergy were similarly abused during their own arrests. Within six months dissent was stilled in Germany.
What is the lesson for us from this and from other closing societies, some of them democracies? You can have a working Congress or Parliament; newspapers; human rights groups; even elections; but when ordinary people start to be hurt by the state for speaking out, dissent closes quickly and the shock chills opposition very, very fast. Once that happens, democracy has been so weakened that major tactical and strategic incursions — greater violations of democratic process — are far more likely. If there is dissent about the vote in Florida in this next presidential election — and the police are tasering voters’ rights groups — we will still have an election.
What we will not have is liberty.
We have to understand what time it is. When the state starts to hurt people for asking questions, we can no longer operate on the leisurely time of a strong democracy — the ‘Oh gosh how awful!’ kind of time. It is time to take to the streets. It is time to confront those committing crimes against the Constitution. The window has now dropped several precipitous inches and once it is closed there is no opening it without great and sorrowful upheaval.
We also need to understand from history that the temptation at a moment like this to grow more quiet — to stay out of the line of fire — is the wrong choice by far. History shows categorically that if citizens do not stand up now to confront and imprison the abusers, things do not get safer — they get much more dangerous for ordinary people, activist or not.
I was scared when I wrote The End of America — personally scared because the blueprint I was tracing in the summer of 2006 showed clearly that protesters and critics would start to be hurt within the year. When I told a dear friend that I was scared, he gently reminded me of the history I was reading. He asked, will things be scarier for you and the ones you love if you speak up now — or if you are silent?
We don’t just need to speak up now. We need to act. It is time to rebel in the name of the flag and the founders."
Why Cheney Really Is That Bad, by Scott Ritter, truthdig.com (August 22, 2007)
" Karl Rove, interchangeably known as "Boy Genius" or "Turd Blossom," has left the White House. The press conference announcing his decision to resign has been given front-page treatment by most major media outlets, but the fact of the matter is the buzz surrounding Rove's departure is much ado about nothing, especially in terms of coming to grips with the remaining 16 months of the worst presidency in the history of the United States.
Rove is a domestic political marauder, the personification of a conservative movement which lacks a moral compass and has a complete disregard for facts. The master of exploiting mainstream America's predilection for news-as-entertainment, under which the likes of Rupert Murdoch can manufacture headlines out of thin air, Rove helped turn "fair and balanced" into a national joke which everyone laughs at but few actually comprehend. Rove served as the maestro of a political-smear orchestra composed of such intellectually challenged muckrakers as Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter, manipulating the NASCAR/professional wrestling crowd's addiction to seedy gossip in an effort to maintain the all-important 51 percent majority needed to win elections.
....
Being the Brain of the most vapid, intellectually shallow president ever creates an apt epitaph for Rove's tenure at the White House. The Bush administration has never won accolades for its substance. Its best frontman, Colin Powell, self-destructed in front of the U.N. Security Council in February 2003. Powell's nemesis, Donald Rumsfeld, followed suit shortly thereafter, unable to coherently explain where Saddam Hussein had hidden all those WMD we went to war for, and ultimately telling the average foot soldier to pound sand when it came to the lack of adequate equipment needed to fight and survive in occupied Iraq. Bush's singular appeal has been the impression of steadfastness in the eye of the storm, even if the storm is for the most part self-created. For this we must look not to "Bush's Brain," but instead peer deep into the dark recesses of the White House, where we can glimpse the awful "soul" of the president-Dick Cheney.
The vice president is the single greatest threat to American and international security in the world today. Not Osama Bin Laden. Not the ghost of Saddam Hussein. Not Ahmadinejad or Kim Jung Il. Not al-Qaida, the Taliban, or Jose Padilla himself. Not even George W. Bush can lay claim to this title. It is Dick Cheney's alone. Operating in a never-never land of constitutional ambiguity which exists between the office of the president and the Congress of the United States, Cheney's office has made its impact felt on the policies of the United States of America as had no vice president's office before him. Granted unprecedented oversight over national security and foreign policy by executive order in early 2001, many months prior to the terror attacks of 9/11, Cheney has single-handedly steered America away from being a nation among nations (albeit superior), operating (roughly) in accordance with the rule of law, and toward its present manifestation as the new Rome, a decadent imperial power bent on global domination whatever the cost.
The absolute worst of the rot that has infected America because of the policies and actions of the Bush administration has originated from the office of the vice president. The nonsensical response to the terror attacks of 9/11, seeking a "global war" versus defending the rule of law at home and abroad, taking the lead in spreading the lies that got us involved in Iraq, legitimizing torture as a tool of American jurisprudence, advocating for warrantless wiretappings of U.S.-based communications (regardless of what the Fourth Amendment says against illegal search and seizure), and pushing for an expansion of America's global conflict into Iran-all can be traced back to the person of Cheney as the point of origin.
America today is very much engaged in a life-or-death struggle against the forces of evil. The enemy resides not abroad, however, but at home, vested in the highest offices of the land. Neither Osama Bin Laden nor Saddam Hussein threatened the life blood of the United States-the Constitution-to the extent that Cheney has. Not Hitler, Stalin, Mao or Ho Chi Minh. Not since the American Civil War has there been a constitutional crisis of the magnitude that exists today, threatening to rip the very fabric of American society apart at the seams, courtesy of Dick Cheney.
....
The Democrats need to stand for something. Cheney has provided the sort of political ammunition that would enable them to fight, and win, a constitutional battle over the heart of America, the kind of defining struggle which I believe the vast majority of Americans would rally around. Unless the Democrats start separating themselves from the policies of the Bush administration, and take an active role in outing and suppressing the true evil that is Dick Cheney, all they will achieve in the coming years is a change in the titular political orientation of America, without the kind of deep-seated break from the failures and crimes of the past six-plus years that have taken our nation, and the world, right up to the edge of chaos.
"Bush's Brain" may be gone, but his "Soul" lives on. It is high time all of America put Dick Cheney fully in the spotlight of collective accountability, purging our nation of this scourge which has harmed us in so many ways. If there is any case for impeachment to be made against any member of the Bush administration today, it can be made against a vice president who has shamed our nation, destroyed our moral standing and broken our laws."
Dr. J.'s Commentary: Karl Rove and American Fascism, by Steven Jonas, buzzflash.com (August 21, 2007)
Fascism can be briefly defined as a politico-economic system in
which there is: total executive branch control of both the legislative and
administrative powers of government; no independent judiciary; no Constitution
that embodies the Rule of Law standing above the people who run the government;
no inherent personal rights or liberties; a single national ideology that first
demonizes and then criminalizes all political, religious, and ideological
opposition to it; and total corporate determination of economic, fiscal, and
regulatory policy."
....
Either out-in-front or behind the scenes, Karl Rove will play a pivotal role in the 2008 election as he drives to create the Permanent Republican Presidency, his chosen political successor to the Permanent Republican Majority that he was unable to achieve. The former, however, is very much a possibility. Even for these folks who so easily convert improprieties into "proprieties," he could hardly play an active role in any Republican Presidential Campaign while still holding the title "Deputy Chief of Staff" at the White House. To be active in 2008, he had to leave now. Just like virtually everything else that goes on in the BushCheney Administration, this one was most likely fully stage-managed among the three of them (and maybe Josh Bolton).
....
No, Rove will likely go with the current choice of the Republican
Right, Rudy Giuliani, who also happens to have a real chance of winning in 2008,
regardless of whom the Democrats put up (and especially if it is Hillary). A)
Giuliani needs Rove to do all the political plastic surgery he needs to have
done on his image, and who better? If the man could sell George Bush, he can
sell anyone. B) Giuliani is Rove's kind of guy. Yes, he does have a strong
fascist streak (and I am hardly the only one to have said that he is a candidate
in search of a balcony overlooking the plaza in front of the Vittorio Emmanuel
II monument in Rome --- yes, that would be Mussolini's favorite talking perch).
Fits right in with Rove. And it is Rove's political philosophy, not his
political tactics (as reprehensible as they are) that presents the biggest
danger to our nation and its future.
In The Guardian (UK) of November 25, 2004, political analyst Sidney Blumenthal
had a column "One gulp and Bush was gone" about the opening ceremonies for the
Clinton Presidential Library in Little Rock, AR.
In reference to Karl Rove, Blumenthal noted that "offstage, beforehand, Rove and
Bush had had their library tours. According to two eyewitnesses, Rove had shown
keen interest in everything he saw, and asked questions, including about costs,
obviously thinking about a future George W. Bush library and legacy. 'You're not
such a scary guy,' joked his guide. 'Yes, I am,' Rove replied. Walking away, he
muttered deliberately and loudly: 'I change constitutions, I put churches in
schools ...' "
One does not have to look at Cheney and Addington and Yoo and Gonzales for the
source of the Bush approach to amending the Constitution (although they have
certainly been at the center of it as well): who needs Congress and the States;
do it on your own. Either simply ignoring the Constitution, as the Bushies have
done, or legally in the first instance changing it beyond recognition, as Hitler
did to the German Weimar Constitution, is at the center of establishing fascism
in an existing Constitutional Democracy. And here is Karl Rove, at the center of
the Georgite Revolution, not only on the tactical side, but on the strategic
side as well. Look out for him, folks. He is hardly done yet."
Why We Should All Start Shouting about Airport Expansion, by Johan Hari, The Independent (August 20, 2007)
"The press coverage has howled about “bomb plots” and “anarchists” and “eco-fundamentalists” - so as they watched the Heathrow protest against Weather of Mass Destruction erupt this weekend, many ordinary people will be asking: why?
Why are so many people so disturbed by the idea of a third runway at Heathrow that they are prepared to scale buildings and face down the police to protest against it? In the late 1960s, a pair of psychologists called John Darley and Bibb Latané conducted an experiment that helps to explain what the protesters are trying desperately to do. The subject of the experiment - let’s call her Linda - was taken to the top of a tall building and put in a room with three other people. She was introduced to the others as more random people were plucked off the street, and they were all told to fill in a questionnaire before the test began. The room then began to fill with thick black smoke.
Linda didn’t know the other three people were actors who had been told not to react to the smoke in any way. What Darley and Latané discovered about human nature in the experiment was extraordinary. Linda would look at the smoke and try to make anxious eye contact with the others - but when she saw they were carrying on as normal, so did she. No matter how many times they ran the experiment, only when Linda - or any of the dozens of other subjects - could barely breathe would she stand up, interrupt the others, and say: “There’s a fire!”
We are, collectively, sitting in that smoke-filled room, carrying on as if nothing is wrong. The hottest years on record have all happened in the past 20 years. Hurricanes have doubled in intensity since the 1970s. Half of Bangladesh is under water now, today. The Arctic ice is disappearing even faster than climate scientists feared. Well, everyone else is carrying on as if it’s normal. Keep your head down, keep filling in the questionnaire; it will all be OK.
Building a third runway at Heathrow is one extreme symptom of this carry-on-the-smoke’s-not-there mindset. The science shows unequivocally that every airport is a minor act of ecocide, and every flight helps to send the planet’s climate spiralling a little bit further into chaos.
...."
You Have No Rights, Truthdig (August 14, 2007)
"James Harris: Here again on Truthdig this is James Harris with Josh Scheer. On the phone is Matthew Rothschild, the editor of The Progressive and the author of the new book "You Have No Rights." I feel like I have some rights left, and so do other Americans. So why did you choose this title for your book?
Matthew Rothschild: I took the title of the book from a couple of brothers, Yasser and Hany Ibrahim, who were Egyptians living in the United States after 9/11. They had the police come knock on their door, come in and drag them away and hold them in a pen for 24 hours where they weren't allowed even to go to the bathroom. And then they dragged them through the Metropolitan Detention Center, banging their heads against the walls, especially on the wall that had an American flag on it. And then these guards played a little sadistic game, stepping on the chain between their legs, and then they'd fall down, and then the guards would say "Get up!" and then they'd step on the chain and then they'd say "Get up!" again. Ultimately, one of the brothers said to the guards, "Look, don't we have any rights here?" And the response came back, "You have no rights." What rights do we have, actually, if the president can say, even of U.S. citizens, that you're enemy combatants and throw you in jail as he did, into solitary confinement, of two American citizens: Yaser Hamdi and Jose Padilla. The Military Commissions Act allows them to identify any of us as an enemy combatant, and if you're not a U.S. citizen you can be thrown into jail and never have a right to talk to a lawyer or see a courtroom again for the rest of your lives.
Josh Scheer: Or they can outsource you for torture.
Rothschild: They can disappear you. Bush and Cheney-they act like we're an Argentinean junta and they're disappearing people here, or sending them overseas to secret CIA prisons.
.....
Rothschild: What Fourth Amendment rights to privacy do we have if the NSA, the National Security Agency, can spy on us without a warrant when the law says they need to have a warrant to spy on us? What First Amendment rights do we have to protest if we can't protest in front of the president or the vice president, if we have to go to some free-speech zone a half-mile or a mile or a mile and a half away where they can't even see us?
Harris: You've been called a madman. I'm sure you've been called anti-American. I don't know if you know, but an executive order was issued by the president, I believe on the 17th of July, and it said, basically, that if you protest or threaten what he calls "stabilization efforts in Iraq," your property can be seized and you can be detained. Were you aware of that?
Rothschild: I have the order in my hand. I was just writing something on the computer to update our website with something on that. Yeah. If you are-in the mind of the secretary of the Treasury-posing a significant risk of committing an act of violence-you don't have to have committed an act of violence. If he thinks you are at risk of committing an act of violence in order to protest the policies of the Iraqi government or the Bush administration's policies to promote what it calls "economic reconstruction and political reform in Iraq," then the secretary of the Treasury can put a freeze on all your assets. This is unbelievable. What Bush is trying to achieve here, by executive order, are things that he can achieve legislatively. Someone's got to put a stop to this. Congress has got to put a stop to it because he is seizing all sorts of authoritarian powers right now by executive decree.
.....
Harris: How many people do you think are aware of these kinds of nuances?
Rothschild: The problem with the mainstream media is that it has not been reporting these cases in any kind of systematic way. To the extent that they cover the stories, they cover it one at a time as if it's just a crazy, isolated incident that has nothing to do with any other related incidents and nothing to do with this edifice of repression that Bush has constructed. Some people may remember the story, vaguely, of the guy with the T-shirt in New York, at a New York mall, who was a lawyer named Steven Downs, and I profile here. All he did was, he went into the mall and he put on a T-shirt that said, "Give peace a chance" on one side and "Peace on Earth" on the other, and he was arrested in the shopping mall for putting on that shirt. People may vaguely have remembered that, but they don't connect it with all these other petty-to-really-scary acts of repression that have happened along the way, so they don't really see the picture. And then they forget.
Scheer: There was a book-we actually did an interview with the guy a few days ago and his book comes up behind yours on Amazon. It's the same kind of thing about losing our democracy. He talks about some similar issues. I think you go more into the details with individual cases.
Harris: It's "The Last Days of Democracy" is the title, but, yeah.
Scheer: He talks about how we're becoming more like Nazis or fascists. Do you feel that way with the government? Do you think we're going that path to fascism?
Rothschild: I've been very careful not to use the f-word here for about 27 years in public because I don't think we're a fascist state right now. Otherwise, you and I would not be having this conversation and I wouldn't be able to publish this book, I wouldn't be able to publish The Progressive magazine or go out and speak in public. But I do think there are clouds of neofascism in the sky and they're not on the horizon; they're getting closer to being overhead. The problem is, if we don't fight for our rights now, by the time a kind of neofascist government fully took over it would be too late. And let's be clear here: There are plans for martial law in this country. Tommy Franks, who led the invasion of Iraq, said that if we're attacked again by terrorists with weapons of mass destruction this time, we will have to set aside the Constitution. Then a guy who just died a few days ago, Wayne Downing, who was Condoleezza Rice's deputy at the National Security Council, he said the exact same thing, essentially: If we're attacked again by terrorists with weapons of mass destruction, we're going to have to impose martial law. That was a quote he had in the Washington Post. And so we need to be alert to that. Just last week Barbara Boxer said to Ed Schultz on the Ed Schultz radio program that this is as close as this country has ever come to a dictatorship. Dictatorship was her word. A senator, Barbara Boxer.
....."
Living in the Weimar Republic of America, buzzflash.com editorial (August 8, 2007)
"It's become a bit of a cliché to compare the rise of Cheney-Bush fascism to the ascendancy of the Third Reich, but the analogy does reveal a fundamental truth about power and politics.
Fascists or Bolsheviks (just look at the short-lived Alexander Kerensky republic in Russia that fell to the Soviets in 1917) proceed on a premise that liberals are ambivalent about asserting power -- and take full advantage of that weakness.
Bush may be a tin horn cowboy propped up by Rove and Cheney, but almost all of his power at this time is derived by the unprecedented unitary authority granted to him by a Democratic Congress. In short, an utterly failed president guilty of illegal activity, whose poll numbers are in the dust, is able to make enough Democrats fearful that they give him power when they should be aggressively taking it away from him.
.....
The Weimar Republic fell because the advocates of democracy in Germany were too timid to fight back against the thuggish tactics of Hitler's storm troopers. They passed the "enabling act" after the Reichstag fire (read terrorist act) that gave him virtually omnipotent power to "protect the homeland."
The right wing is right about one thing: the Democrats in Congress don't have the will or the wherewithal to put up a fight for the Constitution. Bullying works against a caucus without a backbone.
Hitler's power was legally granted to him by those who thought that the "homeland" faced grave threats.
The gravest threat, of course, that the German homeland faced was Hitler himself.
That is an analogy to Congress's abject surrender to Bush that is, indeed, worth repeating."
Bush Fulfills His Grandfather's Dream, by David Swanson, Atlantic Free Press (July 29, 2007)
".....
Prescott Sheldon Bush (1895 to 1972) attended Yale University and joined the secret society known as Skull and Bones. Prescott is widely reported to have stolen the skull of Native American leader Geronimo. As far as I know, this has not actually been confirmed. In fact, Prescott seems to have had a habit of making things up. He sent letters home from World War I claiming he'd received medals for heroism. After the letters were printed in newspapers, he had to retract his claims.
If this does not yet sound like the life of a George W. Bush
ancestor, try this on for size: Prescott Bush's early business efforts tended to
fail. He married the daughter of a very rich man named George Herbert Walker
(the guy with the compound at Kennebunkport , Maine , that now belongs to the
Bush family, and the origin of Dubya's middle initial). Walker installed
Prescott Bush as an executive in Thyssen and Flick. From then on, Prescott 's
business dealings went better, and he entered politics.
Now, the name Thyssen comes from a German named Fritz Thyssen, major financial
backer of the rise of Adolph Hitler. Thyssen was referred to in the New York
Herald-Tribune as "Hitler's Angel." During the 1930s and early 1940s, and even
as late as 1951, Prescott Bush was involved in business dealings with Thyssen,
and was inevitably aware of both Thyssen's political activities and the fact
that the companies involved were financially benefiting the nation of Germany.
In addition, the companies Prescott Bush profited from included one engaged in
mining operations in Poland using slave labor from Auschwitz . Two former slave
laborers have sued the U.S. government and the heirs of Prescott Bush for $40
billion.
Until the United States entered World War II it was legal for Americans to do
business with Germany , but in late 1942 Prescott Bush's businesses interests
were seized under the Trading with the Enemy Act. Among those businesses
involved was the Hamburg America Lines, for which Prescott Bush served as a
manager. A Congressional committee, in a report called the McCormack-Dickstein
Report, found that Hamburg America Lines had offered free passage to Germany for
journalists willing to write favorably about the Nazis, and had brought Nazi
sympathizers to America . (Is this starting to remind anyone of our current
president's relationship to the freedom of the press?)
.....
The BBC report provides a good account of the basic story. Some of the wealthiest men in America approached Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler, beloved of many World War I veterans, many of them embittered by the government's treatment of them. Prescott Bush's group asked Butler to lead 500,000 veterans in a take-over of Washington and the White House. Butler refused and recounted the affair to the congressional committee. His account was corroborated in part by a number of witnesses, and the committee concluded that the plot was real. But the names of wealthy backers of the plot were blacked out in the committee's records, and nobody was prosecuted. According to the BBC, President Roosevelt cut a deal. He refrained from prosecuting some of the wealthiest men in America for treason. They agreed to end Wall Street's opposition to the New Deal.
.....
Prescott 's grandson proceeded to weaken or eliminate most of the
Bill of Rights in the name of protection from a dark foreign enemy. He even
tossed out habeas corpus. The grandson of Prescott, that dreamer of the 1930s,
established with very little resistance that the U.S. government can kidnap,
detain indefinitely on no charge, torture, and murder. The United States under
Prescott Bush's grandson adopted policies that heretofore had been considered
only Nazi policies, most strikingly the willingness to openly plan and engage in
aggressive wars on other nations.
At the same time, Dubya has accomplished a huge transfer of wealth within the
United States from the rest of us to the extremely wealthy. He's also effected a
major privatization of public operations, including the military. And he's kept
tight control over the media.
Dubya has given himself the power to rewrite all laws with signing statements.
He's established that intentionally misleading the Congress about the need for a
war is not a crime that carries any penalty. He's given himself the right (just
as Hitler did) to open anyone's mail. He's created illegal spying programs and
then proposed to legalize them. Prescott would be so proud!
The current President Bush has accomplished much more smoothly than his
grandfather could have imagined a feat that was one of the goals of Prescott 's
gang, namely the elimination of Congress."
The Threat of U.S. Fascism: An Historical Precedent, by Alan Nasser, commondreams.org (August 2, 2007)
"Perhaps the most alarming slice of twentieth-century U.S. history is virtually unknown to the general public, including most scholars of American history. One hopes that a recent BBC documentary titled The Plot Against America and an article of the same name by Columbia Law School professor and longtime human rights activist Scott Horton, on the website of Harper’s magazine, will sound an alert.
In 1934 a special Congressional committee was appointed to conduct an investigation of a possible planned coup intended to topple the administration of president Franklin D. Roosevelt and replace it with a government modelled on the policies of Adolph Hitler and Benito Mussolini. The shocking results of the investigation were promptly scotched and stashed in the National Archives. While the coup attempt was reported at the time in a few newspapers, including The New York Times, the story disappeared from public memory shortly after the Congressional findings were made available to president Roosevelt. It was the recent release from the Archives of the Congressional report that prompted the BBC and Horton commentaries.
The Congressional committee had discovered that some of the foremost members of the economic elite, many of them household names at the time, had indeed hatched a meticulously detailed and massively funded plot to effect a fascist coup in America. The owners of Bird’s Eye, Maxwell House and Heinz, among others, totaling about twenty four major businessmen and Wall Street financiers, planned to assemble a private army of half a million men, composed largely of unemployed veterans. These troops would both constitute the armed force behind the coup and defeat any resistance this in-house revolution might generate. The economic elite would provide the material resources required to sustain the new government.
.....
And of course we must not forget that FDR was himself a (somewhat renegade) member of the very class that would have toppled him. While FDR was open to watered-down Keynesian policies in a way that very few of his class comrades were, his commitment (like Keynes’s) to the “free enterprise” system was unconditional. He had no interest in publicizing a plot that might constitute a public-relations victory for anti-capitalist politics. He therefore refused to out the plotters, and sought no punitive measures against them. In the end, class solidarity carried the day for Roosevelt. The Congressional committee cooperated by refusing to reveal the names of many of the key plotters.
Thus, fascist tendencies gestating deep within the culture of the U.S. ruling class were effectively left to develop unhindered by mass political mobilization.
Might this grisly episode have important implications for our understanding of the current political moment? One may be inclined to think so on the basis of the fact that one of the architects of the plot was one Prescott Bush, grandfather of George W. Bush. Bush, along with many other big businessmen, had maintained friendly relations in 1933 and 1934 with the new German government of Chancellor Adolph Hitler, and was designated to form for his class conspirators a working relationship with that government.
.....
Today’s Democrats’ abdication of the role of opposition party is far more consequential than Roosevelt’s decision to permit our embryonic fascists to continue to gestate. The difference between FDR and his Republican antagonists was far greater than the difference between the Republicans and the Democrats today. Today’s Democrats have internalized and identified with the interests of those whom they should be actively mobilizing the population against. The Republocrats are now all of them heir to the fascist instincts inherent in the ruling elite. Republican elites manifest this in their policies as the party in power; Democratic elites evidence their unsavory class heritage by railing ritualistically against the Republicans even as they betray their fed-up constituencies by supporting the fundamental policies of their alleged “opponents”.
Effective opposition at the current historical juncture requires the only force capable of defeating the neoliberal and imperialist obsessions of the mainstream parties and their financial masters: street politics, the mobilization and eventual organization of the people against a ruling establishment seen by an increasing number of Americans as terminally corrupt and indifferent to their most pressing needs.
...."
1934: The Plot Against America, by Scott Horton, Harpers (July 28, 2007)
"....
In November 1934, federal investigators uncovered an amazing plot involving some two dozen senior businessmen, a good many of them Wall Street financiers, to topple the government of the United States and install a fascist dictatorship. Roth’s novel is developed from several strands of this factual account; he assumed the plot is actually carried out, whereas in fact an alert FDR shut it down but stopped short of retaliatory measures against the plotters. A key element of the plot involved a retired prominent general who was to have raised a private army of 500,000 men from unemployed veterans and who blew the whistle when he learned more of what the plot entailed. The plot was heavily funded and well developed and had strong links with fascist forces abroad. A story in the New York Times and several other newspapers reported on it, and a special Congressional committee was created to conduct an investigation. The records of this committee were scrubbed and sealed away in the National Archives, where they have only recently been made available.
The Congressional committee kept the names of many of the participants under wraps and no criminal action was ever brought against them. But a few names have leaked out. And one is Prescott Bush, the grandfather of the incumbent president. Prescott Bush was of course deep into the business of the Hamburg-America Lines, and had tight relations throughout this period with the new Government that had come to power in Germany a year earlier under Chancellor Aldoph Hitler. It appears that Bush was to have formed a key liaison for the group with the new German government.
Prescott Bush, of course, went on to service as a U.S. Senator from Connecticut, and his son, George H.W. Bush emerged from World War II as a hero.
The Plot Against America portrayed in this episode of the BBC series “Document” gives fascinating insight into a dark and little known piece of American history in which the nation stood on the brink of betrayal. The role of the most powerful political dynastic family in the nation’s history in this whole affair is shocking."
Heroism and The Language of Fascism, by Rosa Brooks, LA Times (August 3, 2007)
"‘Everyone’s a hero, everyone’s a star,” sings Jon Bon Jovi on his 2005 album, “Have a Nice Day.” It’s an insipid song, but a fitting anthem for what has become a thoroughly insipid age.
Once upon a time, you had to do something truly exceptional to qualify as a full-fledged hero: single-handedly hold off a battalion of enemy soldiers to allow your platoon to escape, or rescue 100 children from a Nazi concentration camp. But today, just showing up at your Army recruiting station makes you an instant hero — and getting yourself hurt or killed doubles your heroism, even if you were sound asleep when your supply convoy went over an IED.
The empty rhetoric of heroism is everywhere these days. You know what I mean. Pat Tillman — the former NFL star — is “an American hero,” apparently because he volunteered for duty along with several hundred thousand other people, then had the misfortune to be accidentally shot by his own side. Every wounded service member is a “hero” too: Sen. Hillary Clinton proudly sponsored the “Heroes at Home Act of 2007,” intended to improve medical care for wounded military personnel, and the Defense Department recently sponsored the “Hiring Heroes Career Fair” to encourage companies to hire wounded veterans. No soldier left behind!
Bah, humbug.
....
But there’s a deeper reason to be wary of the “everyone’s a hero” rhetoric. Simply put, it fits neatly alongside other terms beloved of the powers that be, such as “warrior” and “the Homeland”: It’s part of the language of fascism.
For a chilling account of another society in which “the devaluation of the concept of heroism” was “proportional to the frequency of its use and abuse,” check out Ilya Zemtsov’s “The Encyclopedia of Soviet Life.” In 1938, Zemtsov notes, the Soviet Union instituted “the title ‘Hero of Socialist Labor’. . . . Thousands of those heroes emerged. . . . The hero was supposed to die in the name of Stalin during wartime [and] give his or her all in labor on communist constructions. . . . [But] a person upon whom the title ‘hero’ is bestowed has often performed no heroic deed whatsoever, but may receive the title . . . merely in return for displaying loyalty and/or diligence. . . . With time, the awarding of the title came to be used as a token to be disbursed or withheld according to political considerations. . . . ”
In other words, comrades, whenever it seems as if they’re handing out “hero” medals for free, look out: There’s usually a hidden price."
To Punish and Enslave', by William Norman Grigg, lewrockwell.com (July 31, 2007)
"....
Mark and Deborah Kuhn of Asheville, North Carolina are devoted activists who pursue political change using non-violent means. The message on their answering machine – which I've heard twice, in unsuccessful attempts to contact them directly – offers the greeting: "Peace and love."
Mortified over the violent, corrupt, and increasingly degenerate nature of the regime that rules us, the Kuhns displayed, on their own property, a U.S. flag – an item they had legally purchased – displayed upside-down. This is a universally recognized distress sign, and the Kuhns' intent was to underscore the plight of our country, which is being destroyed by the regime.
This was, in brief, a patriotic protest, which is why it attracted the malign attention of a servant of the regime.
On July 18, the Kuhns report, they received a visit from a police officer who asked them if everything was all right. He was reportedly polite and professional, and told them that there was no statute or ordinance forbidding them to display the flag upside-down. In the interests of clarifying their point, the Kuhns attached a small sign to the flag explaining the purpose of the display, and another handbill calling for the overdue removal of George W. Bush from the White House.
Shortly thereafter, an individual clad in fatigues and driving a car with US Government license plates – the latter being the unmistakable token of a parasite – paid a visit to harass the Kuhns about their display.
This vigilant fellow was Staff Sergeant Mark Radford of the 105th Military Police Battalion of the North Carolina National Guard. Acting as a dutiful spitzel, this self-appointed guardian of nationalist purity contacted a friend at the Buncombe County Sheriff's Department. Early on the morning of July 25, Deputy Brian Scarborough swaggered up to the door and demanded that the Kuhns take down the flag, which they did. Scarborough then demanded that the couple present ID and accept a citation for "flag desecration" – which is forbidden by a pointless and facially unconstitutional ordinance that had fallen into desuetude.
"We refused," recalled Deborah. "We said, `Why should we show you our ID – are you arresting us?' so we walked back into the house and closed the door."
Were Brian Scarborough a sentient being, rather than state enforcement agent, he would have let the matter drop. It's likely that even ten years ago, the typical Deputy Sheriff in this situation would have simply asked the couple to take down their flag, tipped his hat, and left it at that.
But this is the era of the "New Police Professionalism," and Scarborough is an agent of the Homeland Security State. He was clad in the majesty of the regime, and the Kuhns had refused to submit to his will. Accordingly, he kicked the door, punched out the glass (thereby cutting his hand, a consequence he was apparently too dim to foresee), and forced his way inside.
Scarborough would later insist that Kuhn inflicted that injury by slamming the door on his hand. He lied, of course: Several eyewitnesses confirm that the Deputy cut himself breaking in to the Kuhns' home.
....
I cannot improve on Mark Kuhn's summary of his experience, which resonates with Alexander Solzhenitsyn's lament, as quoted above:
"If Americans don't wake up to the martial state we're in, the cops, the police, the sheriffs, the state police will all come to our door and take us away if we allow this to happen – it's time for America to wake up."
Kuhn is convinced his case is not an aberration. I wholeheartedly agree.
Witness the arrest of Alan McConnell of Silver Spring, Maryland, on ginned-up trespass charges after the 74-year-old activist continued to sell pro-impeachment buttons at a local farmer's market. Local town officials insisted that McConnell was "aggressive," that his buttons were divisive, and by selling them he was making people "uncomfortable." So they instructed the police to issue a no-trespass order which was in fact a bill of attainder intended to shut down McConnell's commerce.
.....
The results can be seen in the photo above, as well as the fact that this elderly patriot faces six months in jail and a $1,000 fine for refusing to permit the local Politburo to deny him his right to express his opinions in a free marketplace.
Colorado resident Steve Howards likewise learned that peacefully expressing his political views was a crime. His antagonist wasn't the local Politburo: It was the Chief Commissar himself, Dick Cheney and the U.S. Secret Service (or SS).
During a chance encounter with Comrade Cheney outside a mall in Beaver Creek, Colorado last June, Howards approached the Vice President and in a voice of polite disapproval said: “Your policies in Iraq are reprehensible.” He then walked away.
Now, you just know this wasn't going to go unpunished.
After all, an SS spokesdrone told the Vail Daily News after the incident, Howards had drawn attention to himself by his "odd actions near Cheney"; he "wasn't acting like other folks in the area."
Indeed: Where others were awed into paralyzed deference by Cheney's malignant majesty, Howards remembered that he is a citizen, and acted like one. Such things just aren't permissible, of course.
A few minutes after his encounter with Cheney (and doubtless following the mental and spiritual equivalent of a cleansing shower), Howards was tracked down by a Secret Service agent, handcuffed in front of his 8-year-old son, and accused of “assaulting the Vice President.” Jailed for three hours and released on a $500 bond, Howards was charged with the lesser offense of harassment, a charge that was eventually dropped. After all, the point was made: Criticizing our rulers to their faces will be treated as a criminal offense.
“I was incredulous this could be happening in the United States of America,” recalls Howard. “This is what I read about happening in Tiananmen Square.”
....
n all of the foregoing incidents we see the local police (and the SS, collaborating with the local police) acting as enforcers of political orthodoxy, rather than defenders of persons and property.
They were acting as the security "Organs" of the Regime, not as peace officers defending the rights of peaceful, law-abiding citizens.
It's not difficult to imagine how the incidents described above would be perceived had they occurred in Venezuela or Iran – and in those benighted countries, incidents of this sort (and others much worse than these) are common.
The point, of course, is that things of this sort are becoming common here, where they should never happen at all. We've not yet reached the dismal situation described by Solzhenitsyn, but if he were living here today he'd have little difficulty recognizing the familiar odor of incipient totalitarianism in our Homeland Security State.
...."
Time for a Democracy Movement, by Naomi Wolf, Huffington Post (July 31, 2007)
"America is looking less and less like America. And more and more Americans are worried about it.
What country is this? The president is claiming the right to keep his aides from testifying for Congress about the U.S. attorneys scandal; hundreds of men — according to a Seton Hall study, many of them innocent — are in legal limbo in Guantanamo Bay; U.S. agents are kidnapping people off the streets in Italy and Macedonia and `rendering’ them to be tortured; the president and his lawyers claim the executive has the right to call anyone — U.S. citizen or not — an `enemy combatant’ — and the person who should decide what that means is the President himself; civil rights organizations say peaceful citizens’ groups are being infiltrated and put under surveillance; and a new bill just made it easier, as Senator Patrick Leahy warned, for the president — any president of whatever party — to declare martial law.
Americans across the political spectrum are increasingly uneasy. We have always had a sense of our own invincibility in relation to our democracy: the system, many of us believe, simply rights itself. But we have to face the fact that when checks and balances are being systematically dismantled — when the Constitution is under such sustained assault — our assumption that democracy will protect us without our active intervention is dangerously naive.
The time has come for a grassroots democracy movement in America. I am relieved to be able to say that today the American Freedom Campaign (AFC) — a new organization prepared to engage hundreds of thousands of American citizens in restoring democracy and the rule of law — is ready for action.
....
There is no time to waste. We have to get it — in a hurry — that the assaults we are witnessing are unprecedented and demand unprecedented responses from us. There have been times of state repression in our nation before now; as others such as Joe Conason, author of It Can’t Happen Here, and Bruce Fein, a founder of the American Freedom Agenda, have pointed out, `the pendulum’ has swung to extremes before now: President Lincoln suspended habeas corpus in some areas during the civil war — but it was restored after the war came to an end. 120,000 Japanese American citizens were interned in detention camps (the fear was that they would engage in `espionage’ and `sabotage’) during World War Two — and when that hysteria subsided, the camps were closed and these innocent Americans released. Both writers note that previous eras of repression had endpoints: the wars ended, the threat subsided — but the War on Terror is defined as open-ended in time and in space: there will never be a day of victory, and the whole world is a battlefield. So we can’t count on the pendulum to swing back as it always has — that is, not without a citizen uprising in defense of liberty.
Other times and places are worth thinking about when we witness these events. History, which Americans never take to naturally, has a great deal to warn us about right now. The historical record — and the contemporary record — is incontrovertible on the fact — a fact that flies in the face of the `democracy myth’ we cherish, that we are somehow exempt from these pressures — that while it is difficult to build and sustain a democracy, closing one down is actually quite easy. There is practically a blueprint for it, which would-be dictators and autocrats around the world have followed. All leaders who seek to close down an open society — or push back a democracy movement — do the same key things. Among other steps, they invoke an internal and external threat (it can certainly be real); create a surveillance apparatus aimed at ordinary citizens; establish military tribunals; infiltrate citizens’ groups; make it easier to detain citizens; target key individuals with job loss or other penalties if they speak out; reframe criticism as `treason’ or `espionage’; and pass laws that make it easier to circumvent or override a Constitution because of the threat that has been invoked or in the name of `restoring public order.’ It is also clear from the record that the Founders were right to tell us to be vigilant in defense of liberty — because democracy can become weakened and a point can be reached at which democracy cannot simply heal itself.
That is why everyone who is concerned about the abuses of power we are witnessing under the current administration should sign on to the American Freedom Campaign. As noted above, the AFC is backed by a dynamic coalition of some of the key organizations devoted to restoring the Constitution and defending freedom.
...."
Corporate America: Freedom's Greatest Threat, by Pastor Chuck Baldwin, Raiders News Network (July 27, 2007)
Most of us who believe in the free enterprise
system have been taught that business interests normally work to the betterment
of America's overall health, both commercially and politically. While there
might have been a time when this was true, it is definitely not true today. Not
only has Big Business become unfriendly to the principles of freedom, it has
also become freedom's greatest threat.
To say that Corporate America is America's greatest threat is a harsh
accusation, but one that I believe is warranted. I will even be so bold as to
say that freedom has much more to fear from today's Chambers of Commerce than it
does from Al Qaida.
Today's Americans need to carefully heed the sage counsel of Thomas Jefferson,
who said, "Merchants have no country. The mere spot they stand on does not
constitute so strong an attachment as that from which they draw their gains."
The truth of that statement aptly explains the serious damage that Big Business
is currently inflicting upon our liberties.
Someone rightly observed that one can determine the focus of, and influence
upon, societies by analyzing its architecture. For example, from the founding of
Jamestown in 1607 through the beginning of the War for Southern Independence,
the most notable buildings (in most communities) belonged to churches. From the
mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, the most prominent
buildings belonged to various governments. From the mid-twentieth century to the
present, the biggest, most lavish, and most notable buildings belong to Big
Business. This is not accidental or coincidental. These buildings are the
monuments of men to the ideas that mean the most to them. Accordingly, a vast
number of today's Americans have come to worship at the shrine of Big Business.
However, this idolatry comes at great price. Not the least of which is the way
we have allowed Big Business interests to virtually control governmental policy,
including our war and defense policies.
For example, I recently obtained a copy of the
U.S. Navy's "Playbook." This Playbook succinctly summarizes the Department of
the Navy's policies and guidelines, and is made available to naval officers and
to public affairs professionals. Under the section entitled "Vision" it states,
"Americans secure at home and abroad; sea and air lanes open and free for the
peaceful and productive movement of international commerce; enduring national
and international naval relationships that remain strong and true; steadily
deepening cooperation among the maritime forces of emerging partner nations . .
."
Notice the emphasis of "international commerce," "international naval
relations," and "emerging partner nations."
Under the section entitled "Focus On Execution" it states, "We must continue to
embrace the vital contributions that out [sic] partners make in working to
secure the global community."
Notice that part of our Navy's policy is to "secure the global community." So,
who is our military charged to defend? Is it the American people? Is it the
"global community," or is it Big Business? Navy brass might answer, "All of the
above." However, it should seem obvious to anyone who is paying attention that
in the grand scheme of things, the will and interests of the American people are
being submerged under the will and interests of Big Business, which is creating
the global community.
Under the section "Maritime Strategy" it states, "This new Maritime Strategy is
required to face the threats of our interdependent societies and global
economy."
Can the reader not see how that even our military and defense departments are
being coerced and manipulated by the interests of Big Business? Need more
evidence? Look at Iraq.
.....
No, my friends, our government has no
intentions of pulling out of Iraq. Not next year. Not ever! Why? It is the
desire of Big Business that we be there.
Consider, too, the way that the Chambers of Commerce around America attempt to
facilitate the flow of illegal aliens into our country. In fact, the national
Chamber of Commerce is one of the biggest proponents of amnesty for illegal
aliens. Many within Corporate America also support "sanctuary cities" for
illegal aliens. They lobby our congressmen in Washington, D.C., and in state
capitols to NOT enforce our nation's laws against companies that hire illegals
and against illegals themselves.
....
Another sign of Corporate America's treachery:
just last Tuesday (July 24, 2007), Westinghouse Electric Company signed a deal
to build four nuclear power plants in China and to transfer technology for its
newest reactor to a Chinese partner. According to Westinghouse president, Steve
Tritch, the Chinese nuclear plant deal is worth "multibillion-dollar contracts."
But the Chinese buyers asked the company not to disclose details. (Source: the
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette) Just like we will never be told why China is buying up
all the raw materials that go into making ammunition.
Of course, the marriage of Corporate America with the communist elite in China
is now well established. USA Today recently reported that "U.S. corporate
profits in China passed $2 billion the first six months of 2006." Companies
currently doing business in China include Caterpillar, Starbucks, Greif (a
Delaware, Ohio-based maker of industrial packaging), General Motors, Google,
UPS, Microsoft, Nike, AT&T, and of course, Wal-Mart. In addition, the Chrysler
Corporation recently announced that it will begin importing cars made in China.
In fact, the American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai represents over 1,300
corporations, including 150 Fortune 500 companies, and the U.S.-China Business
Council represents 250 companies doing business all across China. (Source:
Multinational Monitor)
Plus, we should realize that it is Corporate America that is behind the push to
outsource America's jobs and industries. It is also Corporate America that is
behind the push to create a NAFTA superhighway and North American Community. In
short, it is Corporate America that is behind the push to sacrifice America's
national sovereignty and independence.
It is also Corporate America that opposes Country Of Origin Labeling (COOL) laws
that would require companies to tell consumers where their food comes from. In
fact, such a law was passed back in 2002 and signed by President Bush, but
Corporate America's lobbyists successfully blocked the implementation of that
law. Therefore, you and I still have no idea where the food we purchase comes
from.
The list just goes on and on.
As one can easily see, Corporate America has morphed into an international
juggernaut that threatens our safety and security, as well as our liberty and
independence in a way that foreign terrorists could only dream about. The
American people need to start seeing these giant corporations for what they
really are: freedom's greatest threat. "
The Whitehouse Coup, BBC Radio (July 23, 2007)
"Document uncovers details of a planned coup in the USA in 1933 by a group of right-wing American businessmen.
......
The coup was aimed at toppling President Franklin D Roosevelt
with the help of half-a-million war veterans. The plotters, who were alleged to
involve some of the most famous families in America, (owners of Heinz, Birds
Eye, Goodtea, Maxwell Hse &
George Bush’s Grandfather,
Prescott)
believed that their country should adopt the policies of Hitler and Mussolini to
beat the great depression.
Mike Thomson investigates why so little is known about this biggest ever
peacetime threat to American democracy."
The Reich Wing: Bush-Era Conservatism as Reductio Ad Absurdum, by William Norman Grigg, lewrockwell.com (July 24, 2007) [by a REAL conservative]
As the Iraq war ripens into the largest strategic catastrophe in our nation's history, dead-enders among the Bu'ushist faithful confront a sobering question. No, that question is not how to extricate our nation from the Mesopotamian morass, but rather how to deal with internal dissent.
It's really quite simple, sighed 35-year-old Hillary-Ann, a professional woman from California with sufficient disposable income to drop at least $1,200 to spend a week confined on a cruise ship with the editorial staff of National Review.
"Of course, we need to execute some of these people ... [a] few of these prominent people who are trying to demoralize the country," she commented with languid indifference as she waded waist-deep in the Pacific. "Just take a couple of these anti-war people off to the gas chamber for treason to show, if you try to bring down America at a time of war, that's what you'll get. Then things'll change."
There's nothing novel about the kind of "change" desired by this fully indoctrinated member of the Reich Wing: For devotees of a certain variant of statist conservatism, seizing dissenters and shipping them off to gas chambers is old hat. What makes this off-hand expression of an authentically fascist sentiment so remarkable is the fact that it was typical conversational chatter among the 500 or so National Review groupies who took part in the cruise, according to British journalist Johann Hari, who tagged along incognito.
I would be inclined to dismiss Hari's account as the dishonest fantasy of a Euro-Trash bien-pensant were it not for the fact that such sentiments are readily on display practically everywhere Bush-aligned conservatives feel comfortable to give expression to their deepest sentiments.
It is difficult to predict what will be the most significant "legacy" left by George W. Bush, assuming that word can be properly applied to the accumulated residue of lawless violence and official corruption that have typified his reign. Will it be metastasizing foreign hostility, and proliferating foreign conflicts? Will it be the collapse of the economy beneath the weight of profligate spending? Will it be the official adoption of such malapropisms as "terrists" and "nukular" as part of our long-suffering language?
My suspicion is that Bush's most important and lasting contribution has been the creation of a purely limbic form of conservatism, in which the amygdala (that portion of the brain focusing on fear and related base emotions) plays the defining role in interpreting reality.
....."
Ship of Fools: Setting Sail With ‘The National Review’, by Johann Hari, Independent/UK
(July 13, 2007)"The Iraq war has been an amazing success, global warming is just a myth - and as for Guantanamo Bay, it’s practically a holiday camp… The annual cruise organized by the ‘National Review’, mouthpiece of right-wing America, is a parallel universe populated by straight-talking, gun-toting, God-fearing Republicans.
I am standing waist-deep in the Pacific Ocean, both chilling and burning, indulging in the polite chit-chat beloved by vacationing Americans. A sweet elderly lady from Los Angeles is sitting on the rocks nearby, telling me dreamily about her son. “Is he your only child?” I ask. “Yes,” she says. “Do you have a child back in England?” she asks. No, I say. Her face darkens. “You’d better start,” she says. “The Muslims are breeding. Soon, they’ll have the whole of Europe.”
I am getting used to these moments - when gentle holiday geniality bleeds into… what? I lie on the beach with Hillary-Ann, a chatty, scatty 35-year-old Californian designer. As she explains the perils of Republican dating, my mind drifts, watching the gentle tide. When I hear her say, ” Of course, we need to execute some of these people,” I wake up. Who do we need to execute? She runs her fingers through the sand lazily. “A few of these prominent liberals who are trying to demoralize the country,” she says. “Just take a couple of these anti-war people off to the gas chamber for treason to show, if you try to bring down America at a time of war, that’s what you’ll get.” She squints at the sun and smiles. ” Then things’ll change.”
I am traveling on a bright white cruise ship with two restaurants, five bars, a casino - and 500 readers of the National Review. Here, the Iraq war has been “an amazing success”. Global warming is not happening. The solitary black person claims, “If the Ku Klux Klan supports equal rights, then God bless them.” And I have nowhere to run.
....
I am back in the docks of San Diego watching these tireless champions of the overdog filter past and say their starchy, formal goodbyes. As Bernard Lewis disappears onto the horizon, I wonder about the connections between this cruise and the cruise missiles fired half a world away.
I spot the old lady from the sea looking for her suitcase, and stop to tell her I may have found a solution to her political worries about both Muslims and stem-cells.
“Couldn’t they just do experiments on Muslim stem-cells?” I ask. ” Hey - that’s a great idea!” she laughs, and vanishes. Hillary-Ann stops to say she is definitely going on the next National Review cruise, to Alaska. “Perfect!” I yell, finally losing my mind.
“You can drill it as you go!” She puts her arms around me and says very sweetly, “We need you on every cruise.”
As I turn my back on the ship for the last time, the Judge I met on my first night places his arm affectionately on my shoulder. “We have written off Britain to the Muslims,” he says. “Come to America.”"
Impeach Now - Or Face the End of Constitutional Democracy, by Paul Craig Robert, Information Clearing House (July 17, 2007)
"Unless Congress immediately impeaches Bush
and Cheney, a year from now the US could be a dictatorial police state at war
with Iran.
Bush has put in place all the necessary measures for dictatorship in the form of
"executive orders" that are triggered whenever Bush declares a national
emergency. Recent statements by Homeland Security Chief Michael Chertoff, former
Republican senator Rick Santorum and others suggest that Americans might expect
a series of staged, or false flag, "terrorist" events in the near future.
Many attentive people believe that the reason the Bush administration will not
bow to expert advice and public opinion and begin withdrawing US troops from
Iraq is that the administration intends to rescue its unpopular position with
false flag operations that can be used to expand the war to Iran.
Too much is going wrong for the Bush administration: the failure of its Middle
East wars, Republican senators jumping ship, Turkish troops massed on northern
Iraq's border poised for an invasion to deal with Kurds, and a majority of
Americans favoring the impeachment of Cheney and a near-majority favoring Bush's
impeachment. The Bush administration desperately needs dramatic events to scare
the American people and the Congress back in line with the militarist-police
state that Bush and Cheney have fostered.
...."
How The White House Will Manipulate Events and Emotions to Maintain GOP Executive Branch Control in 2008, buzzflash editorial (July 21, 2007)
"Okay, let’s look at some Bushevik assaults on democracy this last week:
Bush and Cheney Make the Novel and Totalitarian Assertion that the Department of Justice is Prohibited from Investigating a Congressional Contempt Citation Over Anyone (Even if They are No Longer Working for the Government) Asserting Executive Privilege
Bush’s PR Operation Claims to Issue a New Document Forbidding Torture, When the Details Actually Just Reconfirm the Right of the CIA to Continue Renditions and Torture
A Bushevik Partisan Hack Judge Throws Out the Plame Civil Suit Against the Bush Administration, Just as the Same Bush-Appointed Judge Has Made Partisan Decisions Before that Favor Bush
A Pentagon Official Who is a Former Cheney Aide Accuses a Sitting U.S. Senator (Hillary Clinton) of Being a Traitor for Exercising Her Rights to Receive Military Readiness Information
Bush Accuses the Dems of Holding Up Funds and Safety Equipment for Our Troops When the White House Told the GOP to Sink a Bill Last Week That Would Have Mandated Proper Preparedness, Proper Training, Adequate Rest, and Adequate Protective Gear. The Republicans, Under White House Orders, Defeated the Bill that Would Have Supported Our Troops.
That’s a lot to swallow in just one week, and those are just some egregious examples of the slow creep into fascism that never seems to halt no matter how badly Cheney and Bush fare in the polls, and no matter how strongly Americans oppose the Iraq War.
The Democrats MUST remember this most important axiom about Bush, Cheney and Rove: Their interest is not necessarily to stay in Iraq forever; it is to ensure that the Republicans can hold onto power indefinitely.
.....
So why are the Busheviks continuing to proceed full steam ahead in seizing absolute powers and barreling ahead in Iraq?
BuzzFlash speculates that one of the reasons relates to their confidence in their ability to continue to manipulate events and emotions. Although the mainstream media has started to expose more of the reality of the utter debacle of the Iraq War, it still is more likely than not to give a White House spin to headlines and stories, as it did in Bush’s completely hypocritical and mendacious attack on Democrats for allegedly not legislatively "supporting our troops."
In a crisis, moreover, the mainstream media, which surfs the news cycles without a nano-second of historical context, is likely to completely hop aboard the White House propaganda express again, as it did post-9/11 – and is it did for nearly four years of a record of failed declarations and promises in the Iraq War.
Rove knows that one big event that is perceived as a military challenge to America can erase all the accumulated negative perceptions of Bush for enough time to ride the next Republican presidential candidate through an election cycle (or according to the worst fears of some, suspend the elections based on Executive Branch emergency powers that Bush has been incrementally accumulating through executive orders and with the consent of Congress.)
So what might these precipitated "rally round the president" crisis events be?
Here are three options – and they are not the only possible ones – that we are sure that Rove and Cheney and others are mulling over:
1) A short-term military assault on the Pakistani "tribal lands," bordering Afghanistan, where the Saudi dominated Al-Qaeda has allegedly been living openly and freely --- and where Osama bin Laden has possibly been ensconced for several years. If Bush were able to score a real or propaganda hit on Al- Qaeda, the Democrats would have little alternative but to congratulate him for doing what they have been advocating all along. The mainstream media would applaud Bush for finally accepting a need for recalibrating the "War on Terror."
.....
2) An air attack, likely employing nuclear weapons, on Iranian nuclear facilities. Cheney and his Neo-Con cheerleaders are just dying to pull this one off. It would precipitate a right wing echo chorus of the need to rally behind the president in a time of war and that only traitors wouldn’t support our troops in combat. It would further bolster the "U.S.A. # 1" empire contingent and play to the wounded egos of Americans who don’t like to lose wars, as is the case in Iraq. Also, the Iranian president has made himself especially unlikable, so the Busheviks have another bogeyman to demonize.
....
3) A 9/11 repeat attack on U.S. soil. Despite the fact that such an attack would make a mockery of the often stated Bush mantra that "we are fighting them over there, so we don’t have to fight them over here," the Republicans would – in their usual disciplined message point fashion – quickly blame the Democrats for not supporting the Iraq War. The mainstream media would disseminate the Republican message points pretty much intact. Bush would be positioned as having been right "all along" about the ongoing terrorist threat and seen as a seer and leader, who was wrongfully scorned. In fact, more than one Republican leader has implied that they would welcome a terrorist attack on the U.S., because – as their twisted and destructive desire to hold power dictates – it would "validate" the Bush/Cheney war strategy.
....."
FDL Book Salon Welcomes Chris Hedges, by James F. Trumm, firedoglake.com (June 3, 2007)
"Books about the scarier aspects of the religious right are something of a preferred genre in our house. What's uniquely insightful about Hedges' book is the connection he makes between the ongoing destruction of the American middle class and the rise of the megachurch political machine. People who have been disposessed from their livelihoods and communities are prime candidates for recruitment by preachers and politicians who offer easy answers, convenient scapegoats, and both earthly and heavenly salvation. Just vote for me and give me your credit card number, and everything will be fine.
Despite his in-your-face title, Hedges doesn't toss the F-word around casually. He prefaces the book with Umberto Eco's essay on Eternal Fascism. Eco lists fourteen features of what he calls Ur-Fascism, which may be summarized like this:
.....
Bush Anoints Himself as the Ensurer of Constitutional Government in Emergency, by Matthew Rothschild, The Progressive (May 18, 2007)
"With scarcely a mention in the mainstream media, President Bush has ordered up a plan for responding to a catastrophic attack.
Under that plan, he entrusts himself with leading the entire federal government, not just the Executive Branch. And he gives himself the responsibility "for ensuring constitutional government."
He laid this all out in a document entitled "National Security Presidential Directive/NSPD 51" and "Homeland Security Presidential Directive/HSPD-20."
The White House released it on May 9.
Other than a discussion on Daily Kos led off by a posting by Leo Fender, and a pro-forma notice in a couple of mainstream newspapers, this document has gone unremarked upon.
The subject of the document is entitled "National Continuity Policy."
It defines a "catastrophic emergency" as "any incident, regardless of location, that results in extraordinary levels of mass casualties, damage, or disruption severely affecting the U.S. population, infrastructure, environment, economy, or government function."
This could mean another 9/11, or another Katrina, or a major earthquake in California, I imagine, since it says it would include "localized acts of nature, accidents, and technological or attack-related emergencies."
The document emphasizes the need to ensure "the continued function of our form of government under the Constitution, including the functioning of the three separate branches of government," it states.
But it says flat out: "The President shall lead the activities of the Federal Government for ensuring constitutional government."
...."
America's Coming Dictatorship - The theory and practice of oligarchical "conservatism", by Justin Raimondo, antiwar.com (May 4, 2007)
"The Iraq war and the inquiry into its origins has provoked interest in a number of subjects formerly considered obscure, the discussion of which was once limited to the rarified aeries of academia and specialty journals. Some examples are neoconservatism, just war theory, and, most surprisingly, the theories of Leo Strauss, the philosophical avatar of a cynical Machiavellianism that promotes the idea of the "noble lie." As the disaster in Iraq unfolded, subjects once considered abstruse were introduced into the pages of the popular press, so that, at one point, we were treated to a long explanation of the doctrines of Strauss in the pages of the New York Times.
....
Since we are now permanently at war, the ideal atmosphere for a Straussian (or any authoritarian) to theorize in, this is the time for the War Party to come out in the open with its theory of government, which, in normal times, is dressed up as "peace through strength," and now comes out of the closet as "peace through dictatorship." Aside from rationalizing a regime based on lies, the Straussian method, and philosophy, is useful in other ways. The prominent Straussian Harvey Mansfield, a professor of government at Harvard, demonstrates his usefulness as a promoter of the regime's authority, and specifically the supremacy of the executive branch of government in wartime. Mansfield makes "The Case for the Strong Executive" in the pages of the Wall Street Journal, and it is an argument that constitutes a vital part of the intellectual blueprint for the dictatorship I wrote about the other day.
.....
Rights are not inherent, in the Mansfieldian-Straussian universe, but purely conditional, and our condition today is one that cannot afford such luxuries.......
I won't dispute Mansfield's reinterpretation of the Lockean position on natural rights, except that it resembles a Bizarro Locke, inverting the philosopher's defense of natural rights and limited government, and somehow managing to turn it into the manifesto of a super-centralism that the 17th century English liberal would recoil from in horror. This is typical of the Straussian method.
Leaving Locke entirely out of it, however, let us look at the Mansfieldian theory of "civil liberties" as forever "subject to circumstances" – just like our "flexible" Constitution, and, of course, the "secure but changeable" Bill of Rights. In the Bizarro-Mansfieldian world of perfect "freedom," where "a free government should show its respect for freedom even when it has to take it away," there is no right to free speech, no right to assemble, nor, really, any rights at all, including the right to hold property: all of these are merely temporary privileges, and are particularly ethereal in wartime. Inalienable rights? Not if the President says otherwise.
This is nothing less than a rationalization for a dictatorship. It is authoritarianism dressed up in seemingly "American"-sounding verbiage, a prescription for fascism just as surely as the rantings of Alfred Rosenberg or the polemics of Robert Brassillach. As John T. Flynn, the liberal-turned-‘Old Right' opponent of the New Deal put it:
"When fascism comes it will not be in the form of an anti-American movement or pro-Hitler bund, practicing disloyalty. Nor will it come in the form of a crusade against war. It will appear rather in the luminous robes of flaming patriotism; it will take some genuinely indigenous shape and color, and it will spread only because its leaders, who are not yet visible, will know how to locate the great springs of public opinion and desire and the streams of thought that flow from them and will know how to attract to their banners leaders who can command the support of the controlling minorities in American public life. The danger lies not so much in the would-be führers who may arise, but in the presence in our midst of certain deeply running currents of hope and appetite and opinion. The war upon fascism must be begun there."
Flynn, one of FDR's bitterest opponents, wrote these words in As We Go Marching, his indictment of a postwar America that had fought national socialism – and was beginning to fight Soviet totalitarianism as the book was published – but, he feared, would lose the fight against incipient authoritarianism on the home front. Flynn defined fascism in a way that was congruent with the rising Welfare-Warfare State, founded on the principle of Big Government at home and militarism abroad. "First let us state our definition of fascism," he writes:
"It is, put briefly, a system of social organization in which the political state is a dictatorship supported by a political elite and in which the economic society is an autarchic capitalism, enclosed and planned, in which the government assumes responsibility for creating adequate purchasing power through the instrumentality of national debt and in which militarism is adopted as a great economic project for creating work as well as a great romantic project in the service of the imperialist state."
What a near-perfect anticipation of our present state! He must have seen it in a dream. As an unpopular war reaches its horrific crescendo, and the President upholds his "right" to wage it in defiance of Congress and the popular will, the theoreticians of the new fascism – what Lew Rockwell trenchantly calls "red-state fascism" – are given ample space on the editorial page of the War Street Journal to make their case. Are the masses growing increasingly discontented with the "wisdom" of their rulers, who are, after all, by definition, their betters? Well then, let us endow the President with kingly powers, so he can disregard the "temporary delusions" of the people, as Mansfield puts it – such as, for example, the "delusion" that we cannot win the war in Iraq, and shouldn't have gone there in the first place – and let our glorious Leader and Commander-in-chief get on with the job. This, Mansfield avers, is true "greatness." Naturally he invokes the spirit of FDR, among others (Lincoln, the great "emancipator," who jailed his opponents and closed down newspapers for "seditious" utterances, also gets Mansfield's strong endorsement).
...."
Fascist America, in 10 easy steps, by Naomi Wolf, The Guardian (April 24, 2007)
"....
It is my argument that, beneath our very noses, George Bush and his administration are using time-tested tactics to close down an open society. It is time for us to be willing to think the unthinkable - as the author and political journalist Joe Conason, has put it, that it can happen here. And that we are further along than we realise.
Conason eloquently warned of the danger of American authoritarianism. I am arguing that we need also to look at the lessons of European and other kinds of fascism to understand the potential seriousness of the events we see unfolding in the US.
1. Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy
.....
2. Create a gulag
....
3. Develop a thug caste
....
4. Set up an internal surveillance system
....
5. Harass citizens' groups
....
6. Engage in arbitrary detention and release
....
7. Target key individuals
....
8. Control the press
....
9. Dissent equals treason
....
10. Suspend the rule of law
....
Right now, only a handful of patriots are trying to hold back the tide of tyranny for the rest of us - staff at the Center for Constitutional Rights, who faced death threats for representing the detainees yet persisted all the way to the Supreme Court; activists at the American Civil Liberties Union; and prominent conservatives trying to roll back the corrosive new laws, under the banner of a new group called the American Freedom Agenda. This small, disparate collection of people needs everybody's help, including that of Europeans and others internationally who are willing to put pressure on the administration because they can see what a US unrestrained by real democracy at home can mean for the rest of the world.
We need to look at history and face the "what ifs". For if we keep going down this road, the "end of America" could come for each of us in a different way, at a different moment; each of us might have a different moment when we feel forced to look back and think: that is how it was before - and this is the way it is now.
"The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands ... is the definition of tyranny," wrote James Madison. We still have the choice to stop going down this road; we can stand our ground and fight for our nation, and take up the banner the founders asked us to carry."
Republican Presidential Candidate Ron Paul: US in Danger of Dictatorship, Raiders News Network (April 11, 2007)
For the Christian Right, Gay-Hating Is Just the Start, by Chris Hedges, truthdig (March 19, 2007)
"As the Christian right works hard to make gays and lesbians second-class citizens, society needs to make a stand -- or else the same tactics will soon be used against other "social deviants."
....
I spent two years reporting and writing "American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America." At the numerous gatherings I attended around the country, one of the driving forces and most effective mobilizing agents was the issue of sexuality. This mass movement, led by figures such as James Dobson, claims that tolerance of "alternative lifestyles" is eroding the American family. They describe "same-sex attraction" as a disease that can be cured. And they condemn all sexual love that is not heterosexual as an abomination in the eyes of God.
.....
Gays and lesbians, like other enemies of Christ, are not fully human. They are "unnatural." And preachers in the movement argue that if America does not act soon to eradicate homosexual behavior, God will punish the nation.
These attacks mask a sinister agenda that has nothing to do with sexuality. It has to do with power. The radical Christian right -- the most dangerous mass movement in American history -- has built a binary worldview of command and submission wherein male leaders, who cannot be questioned and claim to speak for God, are in control and all others must follow. Any lifestyle outside the traditional model of male and female is a threat to this hierarchical male power structure. Women who do not depend on men for their identity and their sexuality, who live outside a male power relationship, challenge this pervasive cult of masculinity, as do men who find tenderness and love with other men as equals. The lifestyle of gays and lesbians is intolerable to the Christian right because its existence is a threat to the movement's chain of command, one they insist was ordained by God.
.....
My ethics professor at Harvard Divinity School, Dr. James Luther Adams, told us to watch closely what the Christian right did to homosexuals. He had seen the same tactic in Nazi Germany, where he spent 1935 and 1936 working with the underground anti-Nazi church known as the Confessing Church. The Nazis also used "values" to launch state repression of opponents. Hitler, days after he took power in 1933, imposed a ban on all homosexual organizations. He ordered raids on places where homosexuals gathered, culminating in the ransacking of the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin and the permanent exile of its director, Magnus Hirschfeld. Thousands of volumes from the institute's library were tossed into a bonfire. The stripping of these Germans' civil rights was largely cheered by the public and the German churches. But it legitimated tactics, outside the law, that would soon be employed against others. Adams said homosexuals would also be the first "social deviants" singled out and disempowered by the Christian right, but not the last.
Should another catastrophic attack such as 9/11 occur, should we enter into a period of prolonged instability and fear, what will prevent these preachers from calling for the punishment, detention and quarantining of gays and lesbians, as well as abortionists and Muslims and other nonbelievers to safeguard the nation? What will staunch hate crimes and physical attacks against those deemed immoral by fearful and angry Christians, against those whom these preachers have condemned as responsible for the nation's abandonment by God? How will the nation function rationally if homeland security depends on an elusive piety as it is interpreted by the Christian right? And most ominously, the fringe groups of the Christian right believe "Bible-believing Christians" have been mandated by God to carry out Christian terrorism, to murder doctors who perform abortions and godless Muslims. In a time of anxiety and chaos, of overwhelming fear and uncertainty, how many more will be prodded by this talk of terror and divine vengeance to join the ranks of these Christian extremists?"
Was I a Good American in the Time of George Bush?, by Rebecca Solnit, The Guardian/UK (March 14, 2007)
"Was I a good American? How good an American was I? Did I do what I could to resist the takeover of my country and the brutalisation of my fellow human beings? How much further could I have gone? Were the crimes of the Bush administration those that demand you give up your life and everyday commitments to throw yourself into maximum resistance? If not, then what were we waiting for? The questions have troubled me regularly these last five years, because I was one of the millions of American citizens who did not shut down Guantánamo Bay and stop the other atrocities of the administration.
I wrote. I gave money, sometimes in large chunks. I went to anti-war marches. I demonstrated. I also planted a garden, cooked dinners, played with children, wandered around aimlessly, and did lots of other things you do when the world is not crashing down around you. And maybe when it is. Was it? It was for the men in our gulag. And the boys there. And the rule of law in my native land.
Before the current administration, it had always been easy to condemn the "good Germans" who did nothing while Jews, Gypsies and others were rounded up for extermination. One likes to believe that one will be different, will harbour Anne Frank in one's secret annex, smuggle people across the border, defy the authorities who do evil. Those we scornfully call good Germans merely did little while the mouth of hell opened up.
I now know the way that everyday life can be so absorbing, survival so demanding, that it seems impossible to do more on top of it or to drop the routine altogether and begin a totally different life. There is the garden to be watered, the aged parent in crisis, the deadline looming; but there are also the crimes against humanity waiting to be stopped. Ordinary obligations tug one way even when extraordinary ones tug the other way. The Bush administration is by no means the Third Reich, but it produced an extraordinary time that made extraordinary demands on US citizens, demands that some of us rose to - and too many did not.
...."
It Can Happen Here, by Joe Conason, alternet (February 23, 2007)
"Can it happen here? Is it happening here already? That depends, as a recent president might have said, on what the meaning of "it" is.
To Sinclair Lewis, who sardonically titled his 1935 dystopian novel "It Can't Happen Here," "it" plainly meant an American version of the totalitarian dictatorships that had seized power in Germany and Italy. Married at the time to the pioneering reporter Dorothy Thompson, who had been expelled from Berlin by the Nazis a year earlier and quickly became one of America's most outspoken critics of fascism, Lewis was acutely aware of the domestic and foreign threats to American freedom. So often did he and Thompson discuss the crisis in Europe and the implications of Europe's fate for the Depression-wracked United States that, according to his biographer, Mark Schorer, Lewis referred to the entire topic somewhat contemptuously as "it."
If "it" denotes the police state American-style as imagined and satirized by Lewis, complete with concentration camps, martial law, and mass executions of strikers and other dissidents, then "it" hasn't happened here and isn't likely to happen anytime soon.
For contemporary Americans, however, "it" could signify our own more gradual and insidious turn toward authoritarian rule. That is why Lewis's darkly funny but grim fable of an authoritarian coup achieved through a democratic election still resonates today - along with all the eerie parallels between what he imagined then and what we live with now.
For the first time since the resignation of Richard M. Nixon more than three decades ago, Americans have had reason to doubt the future of democracy and the rule of law in our own country. Today we live in a state of tension between the enjoyment of traditional freedoms, including the protections afforded to speech and person by the Bill of Rights, and the disturbing realization that those freedoms have been undermined and may be abrogated at any moment
...."
Christianists on the March, by Chris Hedges, truthdig.com (January 28, 2007)
"Dr. James Luther Adams, my ethics professor at Harvard Divinity School, told his students that when we were his age - he was then close to 80 - we would all be fighting the "Christian fascists."
The warning, given 25 years ago, came at the moment Pat Robertson and other radio and television evangelists began speaking about a new political religion that would direct its efforts toward taking control of all institutions, including mainstream denominations and the government. Its stated goal was to use the United States to create a global Christian empire. This call for fundamentalists and evangelicals to take political power was a radical and ominous mutation of traditional Christianity. It was hard, at the time, to take such fantastic rhetoric seriously, especially given the buffoonish quality of those who expounded it. But Adams warned us against the blindness caused by intellectual snobbery. The Nazis, he said, were not going to return with swastikas and brown shirts. Their ideological inheritors had found a mask for fascism in the pages of the Bible.
He was not a man to use the word fascist lightly. He had been in Germany in 1935 and 1936 and worked with the underground anti-Nazi church, known as the Confessing Church, led by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Adams was eventually detained and interrogated by the Gestapo, who suggested he might want to consider returning to the United States. It was a suggestion he followed. He left on a night train with framed portraits of Adolf Hitler placed over the contents of his suitcases to hide the rolls of home-movie film he had taken of the so-called German Christian Church, which was pro-Nazi, and the few individuals who defied the Nazis, including the theologians Karl Barth and Albert Schweitzer. The ruse worked when the border police lifted the tops of the suitcases, saw the portraits of the Führer and closed them up again. I watched hours of the grainy black-and-white films as he narrated in his apartment in Cambridge.
Adams understood that totalitarian movements are built out of deep personal and economic despair. He warned that the flight of manufacturing jobs, the impoverishment of the American working class, the physical obliteration of communities in the vast, soulless exurbs and decaying Rust Belt, were swiftly deforming our society. The current assault on the middle class, which now lives in a world in which anything that can be put on software can be outsourced, would have terrified him. The stories that many in this movement told me over the past two years as I worked on "American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America" were stories of this failure - personal, communal and often economic. This despair, Adams said, would empower dangerous dreamers - those who today bombard the airwaves with an idealistic and religious utopianism that promises, through violent apocalyptic purification, to eradicate the old, sinful world that has failed many Americans.
....
The radical Christian right, calling for a "Christian state" - where whole segments of American society, from gays and lesbians to liberals to immigrants to artists to intellectuals, will have no legitimacy and be reduced, at best, to second-class citizens - awaits a crisis, an economic meltdown, another catastrophic terrorist strike or a series of environmental disasters. A period of instability will permit them to push through their radical agenda, one that will be sold to a frightened American public as a return to security and law and order, as well as moral purity and prosperity. This movement - the most dangerous mass movement in American history - will not be blunted until the growing social and economic inequities that blight this nation are addressed, until tens of millions of Americans, now locked in hermetic systems of indoctrination through Christian television and radio, as well as Christian schools, are reincorporated into American society and given a future, one with hope, adequate wages, job security and generous federal and state assistance. The unchecked rape of America, which continues with the blessing of both political parties, heralds not only the empowerment of this American oligarchy but the eventual death of the democratic state and birth of American fascism."
Bloodthirsty Bitches and Pious Pimps of Power: The Rise and Risks of the New Conservative Hate Culture (Hardcover), by Gerry Spence - Buzzflash Review (January 29, 2007)
""These members of Team Hate are the new conservative mouthpieces for a power structure that's selling us into a murky, dead world where people can no longer love, where God is money, where the earth is a commodity to be destroyed for profit, where people are but digits in a money machine,
