Surprise, surprise, surprise!

Raw Story has an article here about G.I. Joe Lieberman calling today for a preemptive attack on Yemen.


The world is full of bad people who want to inflict violence on others, and some of those bad people are members of the US Senate. Joe Lieberman is the leading incumbent neocon warmonger zombie in the Western World, and his flights from reality become more and more desperate and degenerate as he wears out his welcome in decent society and his circle of influence shrinks and fades. He never saw an American use of force that he did not like, nor an Israeli strike that he did not want to back up with American funds, blood and credibility. As is well known, he wants -- as a matter of high principle -- to dramatically increase the American commitment and footprint in Iraq and Afghanistan, he wants Iran attacked big, bad, and soon, and now he heaves and froths with bloodlust for that well-known military threat to America, Yemen.


I wonder who Joe and his neocon colleagues think will lend us the money for this noble effort. To hear them tell it we have no money for anything but creating useless trouble for ourselves and everyone else. For that, money grows on trees.

Osama Bin-Laden wanted to create a spectacular enough attack so that Americans like Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld would impulsively jump into a quagmire with both feet. He read the neocons well and succeeded beyond any reasonable hopes. To this day, Senators like Lieberman, McCain, Kyl, and Spectre, and their allied jackals of the press -- Bill Kristol, Charles Krauthammer, and George Will, among others -- press every opportunity to call for bleeding this country a little more in some fruitless, senseless, vile vanity of an empire in decay, decline, debt and denial. If not here, then there will do just as well.

The good news is that the influence of the neocons is almost certainly over with. The bad news is that they have been creating a lot of trouble for a long time and we still have to clean it up, and G.I. Joe and his ilk can't seem to keep their mouths shut. And here we are, about hip-deep in the big muddy and a long, long way to go.

Reflecting on slavery, Thomas Jefferson said "I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just." He could not have imagined the suffering, the destitution, the malignant violence and chaos and insanity that his worlds presaged. What kind of blowback are we asking for? What price are we gonna have to pay when we have to pay it, as we surely will? What horrors are we giving birth to in the name of some half-bright overdignified revenge fantasy? Does Joe know, or care?


Joe Lieberman is not the problem but it is very important to understand what he is. He and his philosophical cohort represent a kind of American who has always gotten us, and everyone else, into a lot of trouble. He is not a clown or a fool. He is a clever zealot in a high place, a true believer who thinks he might actually be going down and intends to make an awful lot of noise on the way out, consequences be damned. Like Joe McCarthy, he has a gifted eye for the most attention-getting and outrageous stunts, and he revels in being thought of as a problem. He has at least the rest of his Senate term to say stupid things publicly, annoy his grownup Senate colleagues, and court the long-term affections of defense contractors, insurance conglomerates, and Fox News. Not a bad gig, if you really weren't raised to know better.

During the 2000 Presidential election, Ralph Nader said that there was no meaningful difference between Al Gore and George W. Bush. That was, and is, nonsense. But in retrospect, to put someone like Joe Lieberman on the ticket as nominee for Vice-President speaks so poorly of Al Gore's judgement and values that it is almost impossible to care very much any more.

During the 2000 Vice Presidential debate, Cheney and Lieberman made a big to-do about what close friends they were and how much they agreed on things. Cheney said that he loved having dinner with Lieberman at the table of Lieberman's mom, which he had done many times -- because he was so close to his buddy Joe. That about says it all.

A justly managed Hell would make sure that Joe Lieberman would spend eternity selling life insurance door-to-door in the bad part of Baltimore in the winter. He is less scrupulous than W.C. Fields, less sane than Howard Hughes, less responsible than Inspector Cleuseau, and he has the moral compass and high public purpose of Spiro Agnew. His career and persona will stand forever as a monument to how corrupt, inbred and cynical the American political system has become by the year 2010. One look at his bland, insincere face is all you need to know how foul and viscous the rot really is at the bottom of the barrel.

When Joe McCarthy's hubris and insanity caught up with him, the Senate, too slowly as usual, condemned him publicly. A consensus had formed that McCarthy was so outrageously irresponsible and out of control that he was on the verge of destroying the reputation of the Senate and the cause of anti-communism. Ralph Flanders of Vermont led the charge with a ringing and a courageous speech that included this soundbite: "If the junior Senator from Wisconsin was a paid communist, he could not have done a better job for them." When the bill really comes due for the folly and the crimes of the neocons, something like that will have to be said for Joe Lieberman.

America and the world are long overdue for a vacation from each other.

There's a fear down here we can't forget, hasn't got a name just yet

KUMBAYAH MOMENT II

Violence is not merely killing another. It is violence when we use a sharp word, when we make a gesture to brush away a person, when we obey because there is fear. So violence isn't merely organized butchery in the name of God, in the name of society or country. Violence is much more subtle, much deeper, and we are inquiring into the very depths of violence.... When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a European, or anything else, you are being violent. Do you see why it is violent? Because you are separating yourself from the rest of mankind. When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence. So a man who is seeking to understand violence does not belong to any country, to any religion, to any political party or partial system; he is concerned with the total understanding of mankind.

---Jiddu Krishnamurti

Car bombs, snipers, drone missiles, death penalty. Parents screaming at children, children being cruel to each other. Layoffs, drive-bys, planes crashing into buildings, being rude in public. Cruelty to animals, hate groups, gang wars, death camps. Neglect, indifference, torture, exploitation.

We are taught to use all types of violence -- emotional, economic, psychological, physical -- as tools with which to manage our way in the world. Every cold word, every implied threat, every refusal to consider the outstretched hand or needs of another, every dismissal of an overture, are all violent abuses, and worse they coarsen the world and teach others that violence is the ordinary, natural, given way. We are taught, falsely, that the proper use of this or that technique of violence will allow us to dominate, or manipulate, or exploit circumstances to our advantage. In many ways that is the very heart of our civilization All brutality, all acts of violence, all efforts to intimidate and bully, are in essence the same. To destroy another human being with a gun, coldly and wantonly, is more heinous and a greater crime than a harsh word, but in intent and character they are the same. And they are both what keeps the world locked in its accelerating descent into the abyss of hell. Sometimes one act of violence is preferable to another -- for instance in the case of a just war, or to protect a helpless person. But this is very unusual. And to take part in violence reinforces, in our minds, one of the greatest illusions of all: that we are using violence, instead of the violence using us.Ordinarily, if we are are at all awake, we realize -- almost always too late -- that the violence we have thought of as a tool for our use is, more often than not, making us do its bidding. The violence uses us; we are its tools. We either inflict it or suffer it, or both. We can be mean, or miserable, or we can be both. But it goes on, growing and refining itself into ever more cruel and lethal permutations. From slings to bows and arrows to catapults to muskets to grenades to V-2 rockets to H-bombs to God knows what is next. And whether in a given instance we are inflicting the violence or suffering it, the violence itself, regardless of what side we are on, isolates us and utterly impoverishes out inner world. Violence is dehumanizing, degrading, and crippling to everyone it touches. And we are all implicated. What is more important than confronting this problem?

Unforgiven.is one of the finest American films ever made, and it is self-consciously a meditation on the nature and consequences of violence. A Clint Eastwood Western, the film begins with a banal but painful insult: a saloon prostitute makes fun of a cowboy's genitalia. Enraged and humiliated, he retaliates by cutting her face. That altercation begins a furious cycle of retaliation and escalation, braggadocio and opportunism, power grabs and score settling, tall tales and yellow journalism, that ends in an orgy of murder so devastating and final that it is possible to imagine the whole world dead or dying. The climactic moment of the film is the final murder. Clint Eastwood has arrived in the classic saloon, and confronts the man he came for. "I'm William Munny," he says. "I've killed women and children. I've killed everything that walks or crawls at one time or another. And now I'm here to kill you, LIttle Bill." Moments later, most of the men in the saloon are dead, and Little Bill lays on the floor, looking up the barrell of Eastwood's rifle. Little Bill pleads for his life: "I don't deserve this. I was building a house."

"Deserve's got nothing to do with it," Eastwood says. And he pulls the trigger.

And that is the largest truth. Trying to use violence is like trying to use a tornado or an earthquake. Violence goes through the human race like an electric current spitting out from a fallen power line, hissing and twisting this way and that until it decides, for its own reasons, to stop. And it maims and destroys people without regard to what they deserve, or do, or have, or are. It just gets the people who are there, because they are there. Once violence is truly loose, we are helpless, faceless, and nameless...lost and broken people adrift in a lost and broken world.

But are we also hopeless?. History is full of leaders, saviors, teachers, all of whom have tried to lead humanity out of its violence from the top down. It has not worked; our violence and our potential for violence have only increased. Perhaps the answer lies in the other direction, in the direction of bottom up, from the individual hearts and minds of each individual resisting the impulse to use any kind of violence at all. I don't know. Do you?

John Lennon is not dead

Some people do not die. Martin Luther King is not dead. Thomas Paine is not dead. William Shakespeare is not dead. And John Lennon is not dead.

Abraham Lincoln said, upon the death of his beloved son Willy, "Our poor boy. He was too good for this world." Contemplating the demise of certain persons, the world understands. Like all parents, the Lincolns could never really let go of their son; and for 29 years as of tonight, the world has refused to let go of John Lennon. In life, his impact was massive, inescapable, relentless. In death, he has become a secular, omnipresent Saint of the World, with more authority in more places with more people than any other artist, living or dead. But his is not top-down authority; it is the authority of the sincerely angry and affronted rebel of intellect and integrity, demanding that all tyrants and brutes, of the world and of the soul, be denounced and dethroned. He was always insistent that he and Yoko were artists first, not revolutionaries; but to him, that made his obligations -- to tell the truth, to live the truth, and to take the next step that truth required -- greater, not lesser. Feeling stuck in the fishbowl of Beatle-era publicity, he turned his honeymoon into an attention-getting gimmick for peace. The first years of his post-Beatle career produced as many, if not more, memorable interviews as songs -- all straightforward and earnest discussions of his views on war and peace, women's equality, art in politics, and drug culture. The charm of those interviews is the undeniable openness and spontaneity he displays, and it seems entirely plausible that his series of interviews --particularly those with Mike Douglass and Dick Cavett -- were so different from everything before, so off the cuff, so obviously -- forgive me -- live, that they led inexorably to what we now think of as Phil Donahue and Oprah. Media to the People, Right On!!!!!

Those interviews in particular display what gives him his continuing power and stature as an artist and a human being. He never, even before the Beatles, pretended to feel what he didn't feel, to want what he didn't want, to see what he didn't see. He called it as he saw it and damn the consequences, but more often than not his good nature made him think that the Truth -- his Truth, your Truth, any Truth -- could, in the long run, only set you Free, and the more Free, the better. He would put on a suit and tie for more money, and then tell the audience at the Royal Command Performance "Those of you in the cheap seats clap. The rest of you rattle your jewelry." The audience laughed politely enough, but everyone in the room suddenly knew where the real power was. That was a truthful joke, and a profoundly rebellious one. His emotional letdown and weight gain after the first huge wave of Beatlemania became the muse for the profoundly personal and moving "Help!" Hating himself for backtracking after the "Bigger than Jesus" episode, he let it all hang out and was perhaps a little too public about drugs, sex, nudity. The lyrics of his best work dwell on his inner state and betray a martyr complex: "I'm so tired," "they're gonna crucify me," "I'm only sleeping," and the longing for redemption of the Two Virgins concept and "Starting Over." To him, the blunt Truth about his life, as he found it on whatever Day in the Life he found it, was always the best fodder for his art and explains the personal power his persona and his work contains. He was never into silly love songs (to coin a phrase) for their own sake. The truthfulness of his art is the source of its power and immediacy, and it keeps him alive today.

He did not think of Art as a hammer with which to shape society, but he found himself an an accomplished artist who wanted change in the world, and he communicated that if he were a dentist or a landscaper or a waiter he would be equally obligated to try, and since he was an artist he would do what he could with his art, but all the people who were not artists had an obligation as well to do what they could, and if enough people saw through the lies and the brutality and the dull stupid worship of useless petty authority figures that there was a chance that the world could save itself and create the paradise it naturally deserved.

Like the man said.: Imagine.

There's nothing you can do that can't be done

There's nothing you can sing that can't be sung

Nothing you can say but you can learn how to play the game

It's easy

There's nothing you can make that can't be made

No one you can save that can't be saved

Nothing you can do but you can learn how to be you in time

It's easy

All you need is love......

Two words that he is not using

President Obama is going through the motions of a "jobs summit" today -- la de da. He has to do it, but does anyone think this is anything more than PR?

What he is doing that matters, though, is what he does very well: he is letting the populist pot boil Out There and in the Congress....Barney Frank and Ron Paul have actually put some fear into big banks with their financial reform bill...Bernie Sanders has put a hold on Barneke's renomination, and the realization is sinking in that this may be more than a mere affront to "China Ben"'s dignity...contrary to all expectations as recently as the end of summer, there is very little question that a heathcare reform bill is actually gonna become law, and it may be somewhat different from the pig-with-lipstick that Big Pharma and the Insurance Cartel have paid for...318 members of the House, and some 18 Senators, have signed letters of intent to support legislation to require the renegotiation of NAFTA...surprising numbers of Blue Dog Democrats, Wall Street Democrats, and Corporatist Republicans are suddenly deciding this is a good time to retire...and there is more news along these lines, and this time next week, there will be more still.

This Gathering Storm was not part of the Program that Henry Paulson, Robert Rubin, Alan Greenspan et al had promised their patrons in the upper 1%. If you listen carefully, you can hear the spleens chafing all over Wall Street....WHAT IS GOING ON? And Barak Obama has figured some kind of a way to stay above it all and not get in the way . No one knows what he really thinks. Like Lincoln, he is the Benign Sphinx. At a meeting in the Cabinet Room, he famously, and with a certain deliberate and detached silkiness, told the assembled leaders of the finance industry, "Gentlemen, my Administration is all that is standing between you and the pitchforks."

I'll bet you they remember that.

As unemployment and the fear of unemployment ramps up during the holiday season and after, as the 2010 political cycle gets going, and as class consciousness continues its explosive and vengeful return, there will be widespread demand for populist and regulatory reform that will make Ralph Nader look like Phil Graham, and corporate prosecutors like Elliot Spitzer and Andrew Cuomo are going to be very, very popular in about a year....Cuomo is almost guaranteed to be Governor of New York.

This momentum is growing every day, and so far Obama has not gotten his hands dirty.

If he wants to create good jobs for Americans, he will concentrate on two words that have been absent from political conversation, in a meaningful way, since about the time of Jimmy Carter: TRADE and WAGES. Those words are coming back, and for now, the best thing Obama can do is not do anything to upset the momentum.

Man, who cares about Tiger Woods and his girlfriends?

I don't.

President Obama, mystery man

Sometimes, Presidential rhetoric is about blunt truths, boldly proclaimed. And sometimes, a different approach is best.

FDR said to a campaign audience in 1940 "Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars." In that campaign, he famously said "I hate war." To us, it is clear that both times he plainly, obviously, blatantly, was saying the opposite of what he meant and what he wanted; that he knew he was saying the opposite of what he meant and wanted; that he felt a higher good -- his continued service in a war he knew was coming -- gave him licence to misrepresent his thinking like this; that he felt, and he was probably right, that in some byzantine metaphysical crafty way he was, by these very prevarications, helping the country lead itself to the conclusion he had already long since reached. Arguably, among the results of this attitude was Unconditional Surrender on both sides of the world.





Dwight Eisenhower, regarded by most Americans at the time at the distilled essence of the benign, decent and straightforward Ordinary American, was indeed that and, in addition to that, was as shrewd, subtle, ruthless, and cunning a leader and orator as American history has produced. His is not called the Hidden Hand Presidency for nothing. Referring to Ike's routinely circular stream-of-consciousness outbursts at press conferences, Garry Wills writes in Nixon Agonistes:




What, then, is one to make of those famous meanderings at press conferences? They were a proof of Eisenhower's sense of priorities. He was intensely briefed by twenty or thirty staff experts before each press conference. He went into each session with certain things clearly in mind -- things he was determined to say, and the way they should be said; things he was determined not to say, and ways to circle around them. And he got the job done. The rest was fluff and filler -- but fluff under control. Even Hughes, Eisenhower's critic, grants that he "made not one politically significant verbal blunder throughout eight years of press conferences and public addresses."...Eisenhower revealed his conscious strategy in these matters during the tense days of the Quemoy-Matsu crisis. His press secretary, James Hagerty, advised him to take a no-comment stand. " 'Don't worry, Jim,' I told him as we went out the door. 'If that question comes up, I'll just confuse them.' "






The Eisenhower era is defined by this kind of calculated, soothing playacting, and so successful was it that many reputable historians still fall for the canard that Ike's Presidency was one of passivity, of indifference to results, of snoozy self-satisfaction -- almost the opposite of the plain record. John Kennedy based his Presidential campaign on it.

And Kennedy in his Inaugural Address gave an example of the other kind of Presidential leadership. Bluntly, shrilly, and stridently, he proclaimed a new era and a new kind of Total War that trapped the New Frontier, and his successors, in a bloody and expensive box. The famous passage "pay any price, bear any burden, support any friend, oppose any foe" defined his Presidency and left no room for the creative uncertainty, for the calming pause, for the relaxation of tension that can enhance perspective and broaden available prospects and options. That he and his court thought this kind of soaring bellicose rhetoric was in any way useful or constructive is in retrospect an alarming indication of their lack of preparation for high office, and explains much of what followed in Kennedy's conduct -- often reckless, impulsive, and ill-informed -- of foreign policy.




Wednesday night, from West Point, Obama delivered his formal rational for his decision to send some 30,000 more American military personnel to Afghanistan, coupled with an apparently firm 18-month drop dead date. A masterpiece of Presidential half-and-half, the speech left no one really certain what he thinks or is inclined to do. To be fair, it was consistent with his campaign rhetoric. In 2008 he said clearly and prominently that the "real war" was in Afghanistan and that our intervention in Iraq was a distraction as well as wrong and impractical. He believes it, and has in fact substantially drawn down America's footprint in Iraq and committed his Presidency to a complete evacuation by mid-2011. Given what is at stake in Pakistan, it should not be surprising that exiting Afghanistan is a more delicate matter.





Nonetheless, to those Americans like me who long for the day that America will leave Afghanistan and Iraq (not to mention many, many other places)-- thinking it long, long overdue even today -- the decision to send more troops is objectively a serious disappointment and a dismaying, perplexing setback. It is very easy to conclude, in the context of many other seeming compromises of principle, that he simply caved in to personal pressure from demanding Generals. To propose what is in effect a surge when increasing numbers of people in the country and the Congress can barely stomach being there (yesterday a Pew poll reported that 49% of Americans -- the highest number ever -- agree with the statement that "America should mind its own business internationally and let other countries get along as best they can") can only provoke the impulse to get out. But while getting out is a great big change from staying there without a surge, it is a bigger change still with a surge.


If, as many anguished liberals are starting to say out loud, Barak Obama is a pushover, a sellout, a compromiser of convenience, a man who cannot bear to tell anyone something that will make them stop smiling; if he has found his comfort zone in a pattern of capitulating to Republicans; if, indeed, he is a man with no convictions stronger than his own narcissism and relentless self-promotion -- and I would be the last to say there is no chance that any of the foregoing is, to one degree or another, true -- then his Presidency is indeed lost, all his supporters have been bitterly betrayed, and the right-wing reaction will be swift in coming and terrible to behold. And of course, that would be bad.



But perhaps things are not really the way they seem on the surface. In the same speech were these words:

As President, I refuse to set goals that go beyond our responsibility, our means, our or interests. And I must weigh all of the challenges that our nation faces. I do not have the luxury of committing to just one. Indeed, I am mindful of the words of President Eisenhower, who - in discussing our national security - said, "Each proposal must be weighed in the light of a broader consideration: the need to maintain balance in and among national programs."

Over the past several years, we have lost that balance, and failed to appreciate the connection between our national security and our economy. In the wake of an economic crisis, too many of our friends and neighbors are out of work and struggle to pay the bills, and too many Americans are worried about the future facing our children. Meanwhile, competition within the global economy has grown more fierce. So we simply cannot afford to ignore the price of these wars.

All told, by the time I took office the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan approached a trillion dollars. Going forward, I am committed to addressing these costs openly and honestly. Our new approach in Afghanistan is likely to cost us roughly 30 billion dollars for the military this year, and I will work closely with Congress to address these costs as we work to bring down our deficit.

But as we end the war in Iraq and transition to Afghan responsibility, we must rebuild our strength here at home. Our prosperity provides a foundation for our power. It pays for our military. It underwrites our diplomacy. It taps the potential of our people, and allows investment in new industry. And it will allow us to compete in this century as successfully as we did in the last. That is why our troop commitment in Afghanistan cannot be open-ended - because the nation that I am most interested in building is our own.

Barak Obama has been paying careful attention to the thinking of the nation. The schizophrenic nature of the speech -- melding Bush-esqe boilerplate about the Taliban with the growing anti-interventionist sentiment of the nation -- does not clarify anything about the President's thinking or future intent. But that was not the purpose of the speech. The purpose of the speech was to raise further questions about what the country wants in the future in the way of a foreign policy, and to do so in a fashion that the power centers in Washington cannot ignore. He has dramatically expanded the boundaries of permissible and relevant discussion, and all in the direction of "Come home, America."


Obama is emerging as a master at subtle techniques of discrete leadership. He is quietly and patiently guiding the re-emergence of populist agitation and making the Beltway respect it. He really is going to send the additional troops to Afghanistan, just like Roosevelt really could not prematurely rearm the nation; but as sentiment hardens and reality sets in, public support will identify him as the guy who honestly thought this through along with the nation. That is an enourmous asset to a President who may, after all, have to call for more sacrifice.

George W. Bush believed in the direct, full-frontal assault on questions and problems. And here we are. If Obama listened to his far-left base and pulled out of Afghanistan without sufficient Republican and right-wing cover, and without the certain concurrence of the people, he would be blamed for any and all consequences and the blowback could be bad enough to put the far right in power for a generation. The Democratic base has to wait a little while so Obama can be assured of enough national support that doing the right thing in this case does not, in the end, make Dick Cheney President.

There really are crazies out there who might soon get nukes. How does that translate into this country, of all countries on Earth, doing all the heavy lifting of trying to stop it while nations like China and Russia -- much closer to the danger zone -- sit on the sidelines and feather their nest? If we face dangers from that part of the world, is it not true that the nations there face at least as great a danger? That is the growing attitude of this country, and that is where the momentum is. President Obama has put his finger on the pulse of the nation.

Freefall Nation

Students in the University of California system have begun a cycle of escalating protests against fee and tuition hikes and class cuts. Staff at the San Francisco City Hall have engaged in strikes against staff cuts. More labor and worker actions are surely on the way as the realization sinks in that the country really is broke and the problem is not "out there," but in the everyday lives of all Americans.

These conditions are intolerable and should be protested, but perspective is critically important. These problems did not come out of nowhere. The whole country is economically crippled, and that includes city and state governments and the institutions, like public universities, that cities and states operate. Why is this? There are a lot of reasons, but one stands out as most important. In the sweep of history it will be recorded that over the last thirty years, the United States freely decided, as a matter of policy, to relinquish and liquidate its economic engines and let all the hard-won historical miracles of the affluent American Century -- the broad-based middle class, the expanding tax base, the huge manufacturing capacity, the availability of higher education, the massive and cutting-edge infrastructure, the increasingly progressive social safety net, and many other attributes -- evaporate or find greener pastures in other lands. The escalating catastrophe in the economy and in public finances is merely the dropping of the other shoe of the globalist/free trade/neocon travesty that came to power with Ronald Reagan and Proposition 13. Protest specific budget cuts as long and as loud as you like, but as long as those policies hold sway, we are headed for the poorhouse.

The export of American jobs, wealth, income, and factories has hollowed out our capacity to take care of ourselves, much less pose as some kind of global role model. `In the glory days of the American Miracle, the University of California was lavishly funded by the State, awash in revenue from the expanding tax base and increasing revenues from taxes on steeply appreciating property. Now, the reverse gives us a double whammy, and there is no option for budgetmakers: everyone has to do with less, and less again every year. That kind of society is not what we are accustomed to. Therefore, these kinds of arguments and rancor are going to increase in number and intensity.

This is what Free Trade looks like from the inside, and it is exactly what the corporate elites want for us. They have paid well for the privilege of taking American wealth far out of reach of ordinary Americans, to places where things like union shops, environmental protection, civil liability and firm tax structures have little or no meaning. As America withers, their bottom lines set new records.

The students are finding out the hard way that when you let big companies sell the geese that lay the golden eggs, the golden eggs go with them.

The best political action they can engage is is to oppose and end free trade.

The Kennedys and church-state separation

Representative Patrick Kennedy (D-RI) is a pro-choice liberal and the son of Ted Kennedy and the nephew of John Kennedy. He recently made news by revealing that he had been told by his Church that he would no longer be welcome to receive Communion because his pro-choice position keeps him from being a good Catholic. There is apparently a more complicated story here, and there has been some back and forth in the press with Church officials, some of whom dispute Kennedy's representations about what happened. But what is striking is how his story rings true, and also the perverse contrast with a famous story about John Kennedy. In 1960, Kennedy encountered enough anti-Catholic prejudice that he felt compelled to make a major address to to a national Protestant convention in Houston. Among other things, he said:

I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute, where no Catholic prelate would tell the president (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote; where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference; and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the president who might appoint him or the people who might elect him.

What happened to that America? How far have we come? It was a point of pride to separate Church and State in 1960. It represented an attribute of an increasingly civilized, stable, and friendly society. But today, when you see a religious figure on TV, don't you habitually expect to heat some sort of partisan, contentious, stemwinding harangue about public policy? For that matter, it seems like about half the time politicians talk they feel like they have to invoke religion in one way or another.

John Kennedy was concerned that voters might think that he would be influenced by the authorities in his religion on matters of public policy, and he went to pains to make clear that he knew that was not the American way. Now, fifty years later, priests who no doubt have studied that story felt empowered to throw their clerical weight around and pressure JFK's nephew on what is, after all, public policy. It is as cynical and dense a move as any public figures have made in a long time, and it is a bit embarrassing to watch.

As a child, I was taught that talking about religion in public was bad manners. I miss that kind of thinking.

ABC News is reporting that protesters showed up at the offices of Kennedy's priest saying that he should spend less time criticizing Catholic politicians and more time keeping pedophile priests away from children. Good for them.

Froma Harrop, as usual, has written a great blog about this here at RealClearPolitics. And the whole of John Kennedy's speech is below.

Rev. Meza, Rev. Reck, I'm grateful for your generous invitation to speak my views.
While the so-called religious issue is necessarily and properly the chief topic here tonight, I want to emphasize from the outset that we have far more critical issues to face in the 1960 election: the spread of Communist influence, until it now festers 90 miles off the coast of Florida; the humiliating treatment of our president and vice president by those who no longer respect our power; the hungry children I saw in West Virginia; the old people who cannot pay their doctor bills; the families forced to give up their farms; an America with too many slums, with too few schools, and too late to the moon and outer space.
These are the real issues which should decide this campaign. And they are not religious issues — for war and hunger and ignorance and despair know no religious barriers.
But because I am a Catholic, and no Catholic has ever been elected president, the real issues in this campaign have been obscured — perhaps deliberately, in some quarters less responsible than this. So it is apparently necessary for me to state once again not what kind of church I believe in — for that should be important only to me — but what kind of America I believe in.
I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute, where no Catholic prelate would tell the president (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote; where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference; and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the president who might appoint him or the people who might elect him.
I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish; where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the Pope, the National Council of Churches or any other ecclesiastical source; where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials; and where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as an act against all.
For while this year it may be a Catholic against whom the finger of suspicion is pointed, in other years it has been, and may someday be again, a Jew— or a Quaker or a Unitarian or a Baptist. It was Virginia's harassment of Baptist preachers, for example, that helped lead to Jefferson's statute of religious freedom. Today I may be the victim, but tomorrow it may be you — until the whole fabric of our harmonious society is ripped at a time of great national peril.
Finally, I believe in an America where religious intolerance will someday end; where all men and all churches are treated as equal; where every man has the same right to attend or not attend the church of his choice; where there is no Catholic vote, no anti-Catholic vote, no bloc voting of any kind; and where Catholics, Protestants and Jews, at both the lay and pastoral level, will refrain from those attitudes of disdain and division which have so often marred their works in the past, and promote instead the American ideal of brotherhood.
That is the kind of America in which I believe. And it represents the kind of presidency in which I believe — a great office that must neither be humbled by making it the instrument of any one religious group, nor tarnished by arbitrarily withholding its occupancy from the members of any one religious group. I believe in a president whose religious views are his own private affair, neither imposed by him upon the nation, or imposed by the nation upon him as a condition to holding that office.
I would not look with favor upon a president working to subvert the First Amendment's guarantees of religious liberty. Nor would our system of checks and balances permit him to do so. And neither do I look with favor upon those who would work to subvert Article VI of the Constitution by requiring a religious test — even by indirection — for it. If they disagree with that safeguard, they should be out openly working to repeal it.
I want a chief executive whose public acts are responsible to all groups and obligated to none; who can attend any ceremony, service or dinner his office may appropriately require of him; and whose fulfillment of his presidential oath is not limited or conditioned by any religious oath, ritual or obligation.
This is the kind of America I believe in, and this is the kind I fought for in the South Pacific, and the kind my brother died for in Europe. No one suggested then that we may have a "divided loyalty," that we did "not believe in liberty," or that we belonged to a disloyal group that threatened the "freedoms for which our forefathers died."
And in fact ,this is the kind of America for which our forefathers died, when they fled here to escape religious test oaths that denied office to members of less favored churches; when they fought for the Constitution, the Bill of Rights and the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom; and when they fought at the shrine I visited today, the Alamo. For side by side with Bowie and Crockett died McCafferty and Bailey and Carey. But no one knows whether they were Catholic or not, for there was no religious test at the Alamo.
I ask you tonight to follow in that tradition, to judge me on the basis of my record of 14 years in Congress, on my declared stands against an ambassador to the Vatican, against unconstitutional aid to parochial schools, and against any boycott of the public schools (which I have attended myself)— instead of judging me on the basis of these pamphlets and publications we all have seen that carefully select quotations out of context from the statements of Catholic church leaders, usually in other countries, frequently in other centuries, and always omitting, of course, the statement of the American Bishops in 1948, which strongly endorsed church-state separation, and which more nearly reflects the views of almost every American Catholic.
I do not consider these other quotations binding upon my public acts. Why should you? But let me say, with respect to other countries, that I am wholly opposed to the state being used by any religious group, Catholic or Protestant, to compel, prohibit, or persecute the free exercise of any other religion. And I hope that you and I condemn with equal fervor those nations which deny their presidency to Protestants, and those which deny it to Catholics. And rather than cite the misdeeds of those who differ, I would cite the record of the Catholic Church in such nations as Ireland and France, and the independence of such statesmen as Adenauer and De Gaulle.
But let me stress again that these are my views. For contrary to common newspaper usage, I am not the Catholic candidate for president. I am the Democratic Party's candidate for president, who happens also to be a Catholic. I do not speak for my church on public matters, and the church does not speak for me.
Whatever issue may come before me as president — on birth control, divorce, censorship, gambling or any other subject — I will make my decision in accordance with these views, in accordance with what my conscience tells me to be the national interest, and without regard to outside religious pressures or dictates. And no power or threat of punishment could cause me to decide otherwise.
But if the time should ever come — and I do not concede any conflict to be even remotely possible — when my office would require me to either violate my conscience or violate the national interest, then I would resign the office; and I hope any conscientious public servant would do the same.
But I do not intend to apologize for these views to my critics of either Catholic or Protestant faith, nor do I intend to disavow either my views or my church in order to win this election.
If I should lose on the real issues, I shall return to my seat in the Senate, satisfied that I had tried my best and was fairly judged. But if this election is decided on the basis that 40 million Americans lost their chance of being president on the day they were baptized, then it is the whole nation that will be the loser — in the eyes of Catholics and non-Catholics around the world, in the eyes of history, and in the eyes of our own people.
But if, on the other hand, I should win the election, then I shall devote every effort of mind and spirit to fulfilling the oath of the presidency — practically identical, I might add, to the oath I have taken for 14 years in the Congress. For without reservation, I can "solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of president of the United States, and will to the best of my ability preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution, so help me God.

We liberals are all so smart, aren't we?

Ronald Reagan won office in California after listening to three months of liberals making fun of his movies and his intelligence. He won re-election the same way. He was elected President in 1980 -- in a landslide -- and there the liberals were, telling each other how stupid he was. In 1984, he was re-elected pretty much the same way, but this time with a bigger landslide. 16 years in high office, and the liberals never stopped calling him stupid.

George W. Bush was called stupid nonstop for 8 years by liberals who could not be bothered to take a breath and figure out how to oppose him effectively. The results need not be elaborated here. But the liberals, presumably, are assured of their own intelligence, good intentions, and social hygiene.

Now they are calling Lou Dobbs and Sarah Palin stupid. Fill in the blanks for yourself.

Hey, liberals: Stupid is as stupid does.

Simple and plain: OUT NOW!!!

At this writing, President Obama has let it be known that his long-anticipated decision about new troop deployments to Afghanistan will be announced shortly after turkey day. As is his wont, he has, for months now, made things look as if he were delaying and dithering, just to allow himself to get out of the way while the pot boils out there in the country and some sort of out-of-Beltway consensus can form. He has followed this same strategy on health care and any number of economic issues, and it may very well in the end prove to work to his advantage. Obama has the most sophisticated and sensitive political antennae of anyone in Washington today and probably of any President going back to FDR. He is well aware the the country is looking inward, that the country regards every dime spent overseas as a dime not spent in Oakland or Boise or Peoria, that after eight years the end of the country's patience is well and truly in sight. And of course, he knows the arguments for staying and escalating. Many of those arguments are no doubt powerful and compelling. Nonetheless, if he escalates, without at the same time making some kind of irrevocable moves towards getting out, he will make a fatal mistake both for his Presidency and for the country.

There is no good choice but for America to get out, and get out now. What we are doing is plainly no good for anyone but overpaid pirate contractors and corrupt Afghans. All the cautionary horror stories of the consequences of a rash pullout -- that the region will be destabilized; that the Afghan nation will fail and fall into the hands of tyrants and genociders; that jihadis worldwide will be emboldened -- are valid(to the extent that they are true) whether we are there or not. The only difference is that if we are gone, we won't be not dying and paying to be there. If could influence events to our liking, we would surely have done so by now.

Does anybody have a satisfactory answer as to what we are doing there? Looking for Osama? Killing Taliban? Making a perfect nation in our image? If we don't have a clear idea of what our mission is -- and we do not -- we have absolutely no business being there. And certainly no reason to spend the money we are spending.

World War II ended in 1945, and our troops are still all over Europe. The Korean War ended in 1953, and we are still there. Is there any doubt that in the event of victory in Afghanistan or Iraq, our troops would be there for sixty, seventy, eighty years or more? Other than inertia, what the hell is going on? Why do always have money for this, but not for health care, student loans, or basic research? What are we doing, trying to be the world's cop? Are we trying to make the world safe for itself? How did the world get along without us? Who do we think is going to lend us the money to keep traipsing about to make things perfect? Are we insane? Suicidal? Psychotic?

This is increasingly the majority view in this country and Obama and every Member of Congress all know it. There is so little public support for our foreign adventures that it is almost politically dangerous to even bring the subject up for discussion.

The Soviet Union and Britain learned the hard way about overextending empire in Afghanistan. So are we. No amount of earnest study and careful thought will change the basic fact: they live there, and we don't. Kinda like Vietnam. It cannot reduce from that.

This is an opportunity for Obama to become the American Gorbachev. A principled and orderly withdrawal could provide a prelude to American Glasnost and Perestroika. Perhaps that is wishful thinking, but this much is certain: the end of the money is in sight, and no money, no adventures.

Most empires in history have ended when they ran out of money or military capacity. If we chose to walk away from an entanglement before we are chased off an Embassy rooftop, grasping at the legs of a helicopter, we will have done ourselves and the world a great favor.

Happy Effing Holidays!

The mood of the country at this point is hard to fully capture. Words like sour, exasperated, infuriated, bewildered, disillusioned, anxious, bitter and vengeful come to mind, but somehow seem pallid and inadequate. Retailers sense another weirdly tepid and morose gift-buying season, most likely a lot worse than last year. The real-estate industry is getting tired of its own happy talk. The investor class is coming to grips with the emerging reality of a double-dip recession, the second dip due pretty soon. Unemployment and the fear of unemployment continue to rise; the official jobless rate in Michigan, not so long ago the crown jewel of America's industrial capacity, is over 15%. Congress is starting to feel the heat in ways they have not felt it in a very long time, and a sense of dreadful worry -- about nothing and everything -- has settled over D.C. like a Scottish fog. Welcome to the New Normal, and enjoy it before it gets any worse.

Thanksgiving is today. We should all be thankful that we have everything we need to solve all these problems. Better get busy.

Those poor Republicans

Here is a prediction: after the election in November of 2010, the Republican Party will deeply, deeply regret letting some 30 Senators vote against the Franken Amendment prohibiting government contractors from forcing employees to settle sexual abuse claims in private arbitration rather than the courts.

There is a quiet rage in the country about this among the kind of women who might or might not vote Republican. My guess: almost none of them will, and it will hurt the GOP more than they can imagine right now.

Lou Dobbs

It is a great big mistake for establishment media lefties to crow too much about Lou Dobbs leaving CNN. Casting him as some sort of straw-man racist, and thereby dismissing what he has to say, is self-destructive and mechanical.

However objectionable some of Lou Dobbs' views, he may be the face of right-wing populism, and if the lefties want to win they had better start making coalition politics with all the populists they can find. Do the lefties want to be in the position of disputing Lou Dobbs on things like outsourcing, tax fairness, executive compensation, and free trade? Only if they want to lose.

To say it again: populism is surging on the left and the right and the two sides are finding more points of agreement all the time. The worst nightmare of Corporate America is a true coalition between people like Lou Dobbs, Pat Buchanan, and Ron Paul on one side, and Ralph Nader, Bernie Sanders, and Dennis Kucinich on the other. Such a coalition is increasingly possible and if it came to power about three fourths of our current grief would just disappear. Bickering between the right and the left wings of populism only feeds the current power structure.

Here is hoping.....

This may be wrong. I hope not

Two related news stories today look like signals from the White House. Raw Story reported that Colin Powell advised Obama to "take his time" on sending more troops to Afghanistan. There was also a leak of a memo from the US ambassador to Afghanistan strongly advising against sending more troops. As I say I may be wrong, but this looks to me a lot like Obama preparing the country for a decision to tell the Generals no and not send any more troops. We will see.....

Buying slave labor is like buying a slave

The moral implications of cheap crap at Walmart are many and disturbing.

The historic crime represented by the fraud we refer to as "free trade" is slowly revealing itself and the picture is not a pretty one. As if we humans had not made enough of a hell of the paradise we have been given here on Earth for our short and wonderful lives, we chose in the last 30 years or so to return to law of the jungle and deregulate, privatize, exploit, leverage, arbitrage, fold, spindle, mutilate and otherwise manipulate anything that was there for the manipulating that would cherry up the bottom line of some company, somewhere, no matter the cost or the consequences to others. This is crystallized most powerfully in the malignant and perverse free trade discourse brought to us courtesy of the Masters of the Universe and their Chicago School, neocon, supply-side, tax-cutting, deregulating, monetarist minions. The broad principle that corporate hegemons throughout the world, but principally in the USA and Europe, bribed their captive governments to adopt was the "free movement of labor, goods, and capital across borders." This was sold as some sort of enlightened, humanistic, forward-looking way to put international capitalism on steroids and max out the benefits of capitalism for all -- especially the poor of the Earth.. And the biggest selling point of all was the benevolent, progressive, and decent character of the Our Brave Corporate State and the Rugged Individualists who command it. Lots of our pampered and overpaid public servants, elected and unelected, went along with a straight face, and a few got impressive amounts of chump change for doing so. And as we all know now, it has not quite worked out so well for everyone but the corporations.

We have been educated, propagandized, intimidated, pressured, call it what you will, into accepting as facts of life things like the explosion of public and private debt, the institutionalization of the destabilizing boom-bubble-bust cycle in all the sectors of the world economy, the shuttering of American factories and the evaporation of the American manufacturing and skills base, the shrinking American middle class, the evisceration of labor unions, the starvation of state and local budgets, outsourcing of work, job exporting, cross-border employment migrations, the degradation of the public infrastructure, the accelerated despoliation of the commons, the most extreme and sudden concentration of wealth ever in American history, the almost complete deregulation of big business and the hegemony of the corporate class above the law and the broad masses who constitute the population of the planet. And more. And this has happened in a relatively short time.

Corporations are increasingly free to move anywhere around the world to evade taxes, which has impoverished governments everywhere. And to move wealth, and the multiplier effects that go with wealth, hither and yon as the fancy moves them, without regard to the destabilizing effect this has on societies.

Corporations are increasingly free to move around the world to evade environmental regulations, which amounts to a license to pollute and waste resources all over the planet.

Corporations are increasingly free to put prospective host governments in competition with each other to offer the least meaningful and least intrusive legal regulation in terms of workplace safety, union organizing, child labor, sexual exploitation, and any other humane framework of imposition of the public authority onto the private. This degrades all humanity, enables organized crime, and cultivates legitimate public rage and radicalization.

But all these things, toxic as they are, are not the truly hypnotic attraction of free trade to the Masters of the Universe. The real incitement to move factories and jobs around the world is low wages and the possibility of creating a vicious cycle of low-wage competition that will over time drastically reduce wages worldwide and ultimately gut anything like Social Democracy and reduce the global working population to a debilitated, helpless serf status. Something like the return of feudal privilege is what the Masters of the Universe are after. Desperate,hopeless people who know they are trapped in the "race to the bottom" make compliant, cheap, grateful employees who do not make trouble. And that is truly what this free trade disgrace is about.

If ever a tail wagged a dog, this is it.

One very famous and revealing outrage about free trade involves Tom Delay and Jack Abramoff and the garment companies of the Mariana Islands [CNMI]. According to Democratic Underground of April 5, 2005:

So how did this play out in the Mariana Islands? After years of reports of corruption and abuse, an undercover Interior Dept investigation brought 400 reports from CNMI workers to the halls of Congress. Among the “free market” practices of the Mariana Islands was the ability to label garments “Made in the USA” and ship them to the US, duty free, while dispensing with all US immigration, minimum wage and labor standards. Unscrupulous manufacturers brought Chinese workers into the CNMI and kept them under harrowing conditions. The Chinese workers were lured into signing contracts that promised them work, housing and health care in the US, many paid $5,000 - $7,000 fees for the privilege. The contracts also stated they would be deported if they complained of working conditions, practiced their religions, engaged in political activity, became pregnant or even got married. Underage girls in nude clubs, forced prostitution and coerced abortions were routine. Even after a 3 year investigation, Tom Delay continued to hail the “free market” of the CNMI and said “the United States should establish an identical “guest worker” program ‘where particular companies can bring Mexican workers in.’ The Mexicans would be paid ‘at whatever wage the market will bear.’”

Imagine that: this report to Congress occurred during the Bush administration. How bad must it have been to embarrass Bush?

This is one instance that we know about. It is typical. It is the tip of the iceberg. Unquestionably, it is still happening, all over the world, every day, worse than ever. And all because some greedy corporate zombies bought enough influence to stand above any oversight, law, regulation or scruple between a respectable profit and one dollar more. As long as we practice free trade, we are stuck with it. Sweatshops for prosperity. Brothels for democracy. Rape, pillage and plunder as national policy and an expression of what we stand for. Do we really think this is not going to blow back on us? Do we really think we are getting rich this way? Do we really think we do not have blood on our hands over this? Do the mercenary hoodlums at Blackwater in Iraq or the vicious pimps and overseers in the sweatshops really represent what we must tolerate in order to have our precious video games, SUVs, and MacMansions, or is it just easier to not argue about it? Is this really how we want to live? Are we proud of this? Is this the best we can do?

On all the planet, there is no more dangerous and destructive force -- none -- than the depraved indifference to ordinary standards of human decency displayed by the international corporate hegemon and codified in the degenerate, twisted and fascistic abortion known as "free trade."

A heavy and serious moral burden rests with the decent people of the world to use the force of law and government to stop this, peacefully and civilily.

It is said that the Dutch bought the island of Manhattan from the Canarsee Delaware Indians for a handful of pretty beads. Free trade is a similar swindle. The cheap and shiny crap from Walmart may well, in the long run, prove very expensive indeed.

This is not what the American Revolution was about. And one way or another, the moral arc of the Universe will respond.

The end of politics as spectacle

For fifty years or more, American politics has been largely a spectator sport -- not merely in the sense that the hoopla and the horserace aspect are wonderful fodder for armchair warriors, but in the larger, more insidious sense that important policy choices and foreign adventures have seemed to be largely consequence free for Americans. So much of the costs of our Empire and its mistakes have been borne by Vietnamese, Iraqis, Saudi dissidents, and so forth. Only in a very small way have our policies seemed to blow back on our fat and happy ways here at home. That is of course an illusion, but an important one for the maintenance of our political economy. The limits we have reached on our economic and military power mean that illusion may no longer be tenable. And if it ends, our politics and our lives will have wrenching and far-reaching adjustments to make.

Dick Cheney, a joke in search of a punchline.

Good old Dick Cheney just can't keep away from the TV cameras with his cheery, friendly, positive take on the world around us. Whether it is war, torture, terrorism or shooting his friend in the face, there is no subject so grisly and depressing that Gladhand Slim can't turn it into a sunny affirmation of everything sweet and lovely in life. Why does he do it? Of course, there really is an upside: he is building himself up to a point where, sooner or later, he is gonna have to become a laughingstock. And when he does, he will be one of the biggest laughingstocks in the history of the world.

I am old enough to remember the Watergate hearings. Now there was a gang of vicious, humorless, constipated old gasbags who made sure to keep everyone in the country impressed with how scary and smart they were...and it worked for a while. But at a certain point, for whatever reasons, people started laughing at them, and that was the beginning of the end. They lost all their power and looked pathetic. Many went to jail. And it really was made possible by laughter. Al Haig and J. Edgar Hoover, too, had their balloons deflated by jokes. And the same will happen to Cheney.

Try it. The next time he is on TV, snarling and spitting his demented, twisted vision of an America free of the Bill of Rights and any restraints on the cruelty of the King, ask yourself who could best play him in a comedy film. John Candy? Jack Black? The guy who played the skipper on 'Gilligan's Island?'

See? Don't you feel better?

And Again

As I write this the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge is closed on an emergency basis due to a suspension cable snapping. The bridge was built in the 1930s as a WPA project and was recently repaired, so there is considerable concern that this may presage a tremendous problem with the structural safety of the bridge.

There is something sad about this, and a little unfamiliar. There was a time when an incident like this would not have provoked responses like "Can we afford to fix it?" or "Do we have the skills and knowledge to fix it?" or even "Can we we get someone to do a good job?" We have learned both to take our infrastructure for granted, and to have very little confidence in the plant itself and the ability of our people to maintain and grow it.

The infrastructure nationally has been neglected; we have spent our money on other things. But we have build lots of bridges in other counties since the Bay Bridge was built. We have spent a great deal of treasure, blood, energy and intellect to ensure the economic and political well-being of other countries. We don't even notice our self-neglect anymore. It just seems someone long ago wrote in stone that America must always place the needs of other countries over those of America and Americans. It is as if that is our job. Today a total of 8 American soldiers were killed in Afghanistan; what is that, a detail? How many bridges could we have built with what we did not need to spend in Afghanistan?

We cannot be good to anyone else until we are good to ourselves first. And it is too easy to make mistakes -- lethal and shameful mistakes -- in someone else's country.

We are skipping around in the world on borrowed money, at this point. The day will come, and sooner rather than later, when that money runs out.

It is time to come home and stay home. America and the world need a vacation from each other.

Things that should be lavishly (and in some cases prohibitavely) taxed

Things that should be lavishly (and in some cases prohibitively) taxed


new single-family housing construction (especially condominiums)
salt, refined white sugar, high fructose corn syrup
tobacco and alcohol
gasoline for private transportation
imported energy
imports of finished goods
exports of raw materials
all incomes over $300,000 per year
Any obscene corporate profits
foreign ownership of American real estate, assets, stocks, bonds, or debt
exporting, outsourcing, offshoring of any American jobs, financial assets, factories, or funds
the hiring of any foreign workers, legal or illegal (lower rate for legal)
agribusinesses that farm over 5,000 acres
plastic
landfills
disposable food containers and plate ware.

Things that should be free

things that should be free

a base level of housing
a base level of health care
a base level of nutrition
a base level of education
running for public office
land and taxes for clean factory start ups, labor intensive manufacturing, and all recycling
land and taxes for all export industries, particularly high value-added manufacturing
public transportation

A KUMBAYA MOMENT

There is a place in this world for a little kumbaya.

"To truly listen is to transform."
----J. Krishnamurti

What can we lonely, separated, isolated individuals do about all the needless, endless, senseless suffering in our world?

In our contemporary civilization we all spend a large proportion of our lives walking around in the intersection between our own individual private Hell and the great big complicated plastic public Hell we have made of the world . As a species, we use our precious time, energy and talent to bang away violently and noisily at obstacles, ourselves, and each other, in a vain effort to evade and deny what our lives truly, urgently demand of us. As individuals we grope blindly and lamely in the dark, this way and that, hoping to find ourselves here, then there, finally settling for simple, comfortable habits, willing to tolerate the brutality, the cruelty, the tragedy that our confusion enables, just so long as we are left alone spinning on our wheels. And all the while the beauty and magic of the world, which wants to find us and be one with us forever, slips through our fingers like sand, grain by grain, each grain a private tragedy and an incalculable loss for all humanity. Pain that should never be provokes tears that are never shed. Bewildered and bitter, we come to think we love the heavy chains of indifference and despair we forge for ourselves; and our society praises and rewards this indifference and despair. And yet, the beauty of life never stops offering itself to us, patiently pleading to be let in, to heal and delight and redeem us in spite of ourselves. And we say no. Why must this be? And what can be done about it?

It all comes from one overarching thing -- our individual unwillingness, inability, and fear to truly listen and to truly consider what the world, our lives, ourselves, and others are, and what they are trying to tell us. We pretend to hear what ourselves, or others, or the world, are trying to say while, in fact, we ignore, dismiss, deny or resist what they are. We fear the act of listening because of what we have to hear about ourselves before we can hear anything else. We fear the content of listening because of what we might have to face about the world.

Listening is not only powerful because of the impact it has on the object of the listening. To truly listen does not require an object. In fact, one cannot listen to a person, a piece of music, a dog barking, without orienting oneself to the world in such perfect attenuation such that the world, the Universe, God, call it what you will, is listening to you and what you are in perfect tandem with your listening to the person, the music, the dog. The act of listening is so important that the object is almost incidental. And yet, when you truly listen, the object of your listening is overwhelmed with a feeling of fulfillment and peace.

Listening is the most creative, the most powerful, the most characteristically human thing that we can possibly do. All human fulfillment comes from listening. All violence and suffering comes from the failure to listen. Compassion and love are the children of listening. Anger and destructiveness are what happens when a human soul is starved for listening. How often have you heard an angry person suddenly exclaim "I can't get anyone to listen to me!" There is the heart of the matter revealing itself. That is the truth pleading to be heard and answered. When you see an angry crowd of people seething with hostility and irrationality, that is a balloon begging to be popped by the peaceful sword of listening.

Listening is the guarantor of all happiness, peace, and freedom.

To truly listen is to destroy suffering and violence.

This poem was read to me in a Yoga class by our teacher:

What if you slept,
and what if,
in your sleep, you dreamed?
And what if,
in your dream,
you went to heaven
and there picked
a strange and beautiful flower?
And what if,
when you awoke,
you had the flower in your hand?
What then?

I discovered this on my own. It changed my life.

"Loneliness is life's most awkward and hurtful condition, yet it breeds art and culture, hope and aspiration, and then slays the best and the strongest. Loneliness has destroyed more lives than warfare, and it has filled our jails a thousand times. Loneliness causes pimps, whores, free sex and Jesus. Funny, our greatest geniuses have been the most lonely people, and yet they found a cure for their loneliness in working. Scientists, thinkers and warriors have been driven on by one fuel: loneliness. Funny, there are two causes for loneliness. One cause is greed, and the other causes is love. Greed wants your naked body, and love does too. Love wants the thoughts in your mind, and greed does too. Love and greed are twin brothers. Could love and greed be sweethearts? They sure sleep under the same covers.
" My loneliness is deep and incurable. I ache and hurt inside because we haven't destroyed fascism and slavery yet. I ache and hurt inside because the world needs so much fixing.
"Thank the lord for loneliness."
Woody Guthrie

And here is one of my many favorite quotes from Abraham Lincoln:
" Do I not destroy my enemy when I make him my friend?"

BRING THEM ALL HOME NOW, AND KEEP THEM HERE

At this writing, President Obama is in the midst of dramatic meetings foreshadowing major decisions about troop deployments to Afghanistan and Iraq. The situation with Iran is also escalating, and the real possibility exists that America alone, Israel alone, or America and Israel together will conduct some sort of military strike to destroy Iran's embryonic nuclear capacity. There is the hope that a wider coalition involving China and/or Russia could be brought into being, but that is still a long shot, at least in the immediate short term.

No one seems to know what the President will decide. He is getting a diverse spectrum of advice from Joe Biden, HIllary Clinton, John Kerry, and the military.

If he wants my advice, here it is:

Get out of both Iraq and Afghanistan right now. Today. Don't spend another thin dime or another drop of blood on either effort. Don't go into Iran. Immediately begin a top-to-bottom review of every single agreement, contract, treaty, and "entangling alliance" with each and every nation on the planet. Other than Marines guarding American Embassies, start with the assumption that the presence of one American soldier, sailor, marine or airman on soil other than American has to be rejustified on some grounds other than mere inertia. If it can be justified on grounds of genuine national interest, let them be there. If it can't be so justified, bring them home in a Chicago minute.

Since the end of World War II, we have all been educated to accept as normal the deployment of American troops, bases, missions, ad infinitum hither and yon. Foreign aid in the hundreds of billions has been lavished upon the world. All the hot spots of the world have become accustomed to high-profile American dignitaries endlessly seeking a dialogue, agreement, common ground. All this has been based upon the supposition that American power and wealth were boundless and endless.

But the farther into the past is the end of WW2, the more diminished the returns and the less sense this makes. The peace and progress of the world cannot depend on the US policing all the possibilities of conflict on Earth forever and ever. It is madness and folly to think it can. We have hundred if not thousands of bases over the globe. We protect lots of friendly regimes. We are holding down a lid on lots of incipient violence. But inevitably there is another side. This looks and feels a lot like an empire; it certainly costs as much as an empire would. We have made friends, we have done a lot of good, and at the same time we have found ourselves involved a lot of conflicts alien to our national interest. We have hollowed out our economy to spare trade competitors the expense of managing their own protection and we are approaching the point where the end of the money is in sight. We have courted resentment, quagmire and penury. Increasingly, this is futile, counterproductive, and self-destructive. This is not good for anyone, in particular us.

What are we doing, in 2009, with our huge complex of bases throughout Europe? South Korea? Japan? Must this really go one for another 60 years? 100? 200? We are borrowing money to keep this going, and we are neglecting our own pressing needs.

Mr. President, if you brought the troops home from Iraq and Afghanistan tomorrow, I would say that is a real good start, but only a start.