March 9, 2011 in Wisconsin

Long time, no talkee.

Sorry. I've been rescuing Dobermans and working to improve as a artist in polymer clay. If anyone wants to see my work, I can post an image or two, but that's another world, really.

So much of note I've ignored here, or missed. Maybe others can do it, but I can't stay fixated on, mired day in and day out in, politics. If I try, I lose perspective. And yet, of course, I can't be unaware, any more than I can unsee a brutal car accident I've just driven past. The thing is, though, there's no driving past, or out of, one's historical time and place. I merely avert my eyes for a moment, aware of the obscenity of privilege.

So the Republicans in Wisconsin have offered us a moment of particular import tonight. In one fell swoop, they've stripped the public sector of the right to pursue collective bargaining, and said outright that the purpose is to try to de-fund the Wisconsin Democratic Party and thus weaken the Obama campaign in 2012.

If I've got this right, Republicans -- not just in Wisconsin -- are actively creating a one-party state (nation) and a disarmed middle and working class. I believe this is called fascism.

I'm reminded of Martin Niemoller's famous confession.

Do we need an engraved announcement?

Apartheid Returns to America: SB 1070, the "Papers Please" Law

There’s only one way an American can repay the debt for our Constitution and Bill of Rights—among the world’s greatest guarantees of dignity, liberty, and equality—and that’s to pay it forward. When we fail to do that, when we deliberately jettison somebody else’s rights and dignity, we spit in the face of God.

SB 1070, the harsh new “Papers Please” law that Arizona’s GOP government just enacted, requires Arizona police to demand the papers of anyone they “reasonably suspect” is in the country illegally. It also says that any person can sue the authorities if they don’t do just that.

Ironically, SB 1070 does nothing to stop illegal border crossing. Nor is it actually aimed at “illegal immigration” generically. It isn’t aimed at Canadians or Europeans or Icelanders or Polynesians. In Arizona, illegal immigration is a south of the border thing, meaning that this law’s effective impact is exclusively directed at Latinos, Mestizos, and Hispanics.

Unlike a border control station, SB 1070 just doesn’t treat all people equally. Blue eyed, fair skinned “illegals” have no worries. The chances they’ll be carded are zero. That makes this law unconstitutional.

Effective impact means how this law will operate in real life, so let’s get honest. There’s no way to tell by looking who’s here illegally. Given this new mandate and our proximity to Mexico, that’s going to pose a big problem for our police, because here in Arizona, 10% of the population is Native American, and 30% of the population is Latino, Mestizo, or Hispanic.

Of that combined 40%, hundreds of thousands of Arizona residents belong to families who have inhabited this land long before any Anglo ever did, which should make the prospect of carding any one of them cause repeated reflexive vomiting. And then there’s our indigenous American population. Thousands and thousands of them are in fact physically indistinguishable from a Mestizo or an indigenous Mexican, Honduran, Guatemalan, or Ecuadorian, and all of them are in fact citizens of the 21 other sovereign nations in Arizona that we call tribes.

Because this law requires our police to detain anyone they merely suspect might be here illegally; and because it targets Latinos, Mestizos, Hispanics, and Native Americans exclusively, it combines everyone in these groups—US citizens, tribe members, legal residents, illegal residents alike—into one giant suspect class based on nothing but racial characteristics such as skin and eye color, facial structure, and body type.

In other words, unless our governor in her vast wisdom produces other criteria for identifying a suspected illegal immigrant, it seems inescapable that SB 1070 will force Arizona's jurisdictions to engage in illegal racial profiling—there being no alternative—or be sued. That’s called legitimized race discrimination.

So, thanks to SB 1070, now all Arizona residents whose skin or eye color, facial structure, or body type may provide “reasonable suspicion” of illegal residency must now carry papers in case they are stopped--on mere suspicion and without warrant. My citizen friend Antonio, who looks like a Mayan prince, could be detained when he walks his dog. My citizen friend Roberto, a former Senate chief of staff, could also be detained, as could any Hispanic, Latino, Mestizo, or indigenous US soldier. As could their families. As could physicians, and educators, and hard-working roofers, construction guys, gardeners, nannies, chefs, inventors, investors, citrus pickers, miners, architects, waiters, and artists, all because the police can’t tell by looking and our GOP government doesn’t really give a good goddamn about the US Constitution and Bill of Rights.

This makes me almost indescribably angry. But it gets worse.

Added to the powers to arrest, detain, and deport without warrant, giving police the power to demand proof of citizenship on the basis of mere suspicion and without warrant is as fundamental to the police state as a network of secret prisons. In fact, it is the ground-level, on-the-street hypodermic syringe that every single one of them must have in order to inject into their people the pervasive terror that keeps them in power. Get it?

What you get when you add race discrimination to police state powers is called Apartheid. It is no less Apartheid in Phoenix than it was in Johannesburg. It is no less ugly, no less an affront to human decency, and no less a threat to the entire citizenry here in the US of A than it was in South Africa, because once this kind of thing is permitted to take root, it will only grow.

For this (I would think obvious) reason, our brilliant Constitution limits police powers, reserves border control to the federal government, protects us from unreasonable search and seizure, and prohibits indefinite detention without specific cause and due process. We undermine and debase those protections at everyone’s peril, because the generation that will sells its country’s freedoms at any price is also least equipped to buy them back again.

The bottom line here is that, as history repeatedly affirms, if given enough popular fear and outrage, lawmakers everywhere can and will justify anything, no matter how heinous or obscene. In my view, that simple truth puts the participation of Tom Tanton’s Immigration Reform Law Institute in writing SB 1070 into what I hope is horrifying focus. Please: Follow that link.

A lawyer for the Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI)--the group that helped write Arizona's law--boasted about being "approached by lawmakers from four other states who have asked for advice on how they can do the same thing. IRLI is the legal arm of the Federation for American Immigration Immigration Reform (FAIR), an extreme anti-immigrant group that has recently been designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. 'In a nutshell, the IRLI has been behind most, if not every, local legislative immigration crackdown over the past few years. . . .'

[The Progress Report, April 29, 2010] Please: Follow that link, too.

In other words, entities that the very estimable Southern Poverty Law Center calls “hate groups,” entities that, with the help of Fox News and Lou Dobbs and Glen Beck and Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh other loud-mouthed Far Right propagandists, have been spewing virulent lies for years about the extent and consequences of illegal Hispanic, Latino, Mestizo, and indigenous immigration are now drafting Arizona state law.

If that doesn't frighten you and make you hopping mad, either you’re not breathing or you’re stupider than a can of sand, and you sure as hell aren’t an American patriot.

I'm scared and I'm furious. I’m also frightened and sickened by the enormous erosion in the last 30 years of Americans’ common understanding of ourselves as a people and of what we stand for as a nation. More and more of us—mostly good people, many well educated—are entirely ready to jettison somebody else’s constitutional protections in less time than it takes to strike a match, and then have a party to brag about it.

We’ve already seen Americans lie down and take it as GOP lawmakers happily cut out some of our constitutional right of privacy and some of our habeas corpus protection in the wake of 9-11. We’ve also mostly kept our mouths shut as state after state has made a lower caste of gays and lesbians. And now the Arizona GOP, unwilling to name, much less target, the real causes of illegal immigration, drug smuggling, and human trafficking, has made itself a racist police state the likes of which the USA hasn’t seen since Jim Crow.

Horribly, mystifyingly, no body of fact, no argument however elegant, no appeal to reason or Christ or common decency--no force in the known universe can make these people see that it actually isn’t white skin, flag waving, Bible thumping, and prayer in public schools that makes a person an American.

What makes us real Americans is standing up to fascism whenever, wherever, and however it arrives. It doesn’t make a bit of difference whether fascism gets here on the tip of a missile, carrying a cross and draped in the flag, or on the pen of a fundamentalist, white supremacist lawmaker, because once we let it in the door, it’s hell to get it out again. As we know.

From its predictable and profound negative economic, tourist, and international repercussions, to the human fodder this law throws to Arizona’s obscene for-profit prisons, to the hoped-for decimation of Hispanic votes in November, to the legislature’s usurpation of exclusively federal powers to regulate immigration, this law is a travesty.

But note well: This isn’t Arizona’s first modern venture into Apartheid.

In recent years, anyway, the first was Arizona’s segregation of GLBT people into a second class for which marriage and its enormous social and economic benefits are simply not accessible.

So it’s natural, now that we have yet another instance when an Arizona Republican government has intentionally created a lower-caste citizenry, that sentient beings might wonder what the third, fourth, and fifth instances will be. I’m deadly serious. These Christianist, Far Right extremists have a rather developed taste for limiting other people’s freedoms. As they’ve got Tom Tanton and Fox News to give them political cover, and an unusually high number of really whipped-up bone-stupid voters, and don’t hold themselves even the teensiest bit accountable to the Constitution and Bill of Rights, what’s to stop them?

People will always find reasons, but both the truth of history and the founding of our own country surely shout that nothing ever justifies spitting on the principles that make us uniquely American and for which many generations of our families and neighbors—yes, even “anchor babies,” “coloreds,” “Indians,” and “queers”—have died.

As pundit Michael Gerson put it in yesterday's Washington Post, the only truly American answer to “May I see your papers, please?” is “Go to hell! I’ll see you in court.”

Soon as that's past our lips we'd best deal quickly with the REAL causes of illegal immigration, starting with multinationals' pillaging of the nations south of the border, the American agribusiness, meatpacking, construction, and entertainment business demand for cheap (and even slave) labor, and shoe-shined Wall Street coke dealers.

Grab Bag

Weather Underground Prosecuter Bashes McCain Campaign
From Church of What's Happening Now:

"In a letter to the New York Times on Friday, the lead prosecutor of the Weather Underground "Weathermen" in the early 1970's, William Ibershof, expresses outrage and amazement at the efforts to link Barack Obama to William Ayer's former criminal activities."

He would know.

More on [Disgusting] For-Profit Immigrant Detention Centers
From Facing South, more about the profoundly disturbing GOP-driven practice of profiteering on immigrant detention:

"We've been hearing horror stories about detainees being put into prison with other criminals when all they have done is be here without documentation. Our goal is to keep them safe," Spates said. "But I want to be honest with you. We do stand to gain financially from this."

During a public meeting in Farmville [VA], ICA spokesperson Ken Newsome projected that at 85 percent capacity the facility will generate $322,000 annually in fees for the city in addition to an estimated $450,000 in tax revenue for Farmville and Prince Edward County. According to the Washington Post, if the facility does run at the projected capacity, ICA stands to gross $20 million in federal tax dollars annually.

Privately-run immigrant detention centers of this type have been plagued by scandal, lawsuits and controversy. The private-prison watchdog group Grassroots Leadership has documented a pattern of abuses. They cite examples including a center in Elizabeth, N.J. that was shut down temporarily when immigrants were awarded $2.5 million in damages after an investigation showed that poorly trained guards served rotting food and physically and mentally abused prisoners. ICE turned the facility over to Correctional Corporation of America (CCA), despite this group also having a documented history of abuses in its facilities. In March of last year, nearly 1,000 immigrant prisoners in the 1,500-bed facility run by CCA in Lumpkin, Ga. went on a hunger strike protesting conditions including lack of medical care.

Private companies like ICA [the start-up in question] profit from inefficiency in the immigrant detention system. A recent article by the Washington Post documents immigrants languishing in ICE custody for months even after signing a voluntary deportation order. This means more days of space "purchased" from companies like ICA at taxpayer expense.

The demand for these spaces is at an all-time high with the recent increase in ICE raids, and all indications are that it will continue to rise. Under the Secure Communities plan, ICE will be expanding enforcement efforts and initiating deportation proceedings against any noncitizen, documented or not, who is arrested.

Viable alternatives to immigrant incarceration do exist at a fraction of the cost. With their Appearance Assistance Program, the Vera Institute for Justice achieved a 93 percent appearance rate in court including final appearances at a cost of $12 a day. ICA's $63 dollar per day rate is at the low end of the range of per diem charges in the region where Alexandria tops the list at $113 daily.

Can anybody miss noticing the direction of incentives here? That's one of the two main things wrong with private, for-profit prisons. The other is the authority/legitimacy thing. If you'll pardon a stretched comparison, they're kind of like political churches. There's no way to know for sure who's talking. [Emphasis added throughout. Please see original for significant links.]

Was Civil Rights Hero Rep. John Lewis Wrong?
Not "No." "Hell no!" One of the clearest signs that Palin isn't qualified is her blissful recklessness. Apart from the fact that her kind of "otherizing" points to her fascistic inclinations and her hypocrisy to her struggle to cover it up, this kind of thing--equating Obama with terrorists--is nothing if not inciting the crowds to a level of rage that she can't control even if she wanted to. When a guy like John Lewis speaks of the dangers of mob violence, people should sit down, shut up, and listen.

Those were hideously dangerous times. They were days of rage built up, on the Right, by decades of racism and by escalated terrors of Communism evoked by Kruschev, Castro, and Joe McCarthy, and on the Left, by waves of protest against a culture twisted by a myriad inequalities, an insatiable lust for violence, and out-of-control materialism.

We still haven't gotten over the 1960s. But today, ten factors in addition to racism and the spectre of a foreign devil are at work. The first is the resentment borne of the whole of the Vietnam experience--the war, the results, and the return. The second is an intentional 30-year secular and religious media campaign devoted to demonizing the Left. The third is the politics of Lee Atwater brought to full fruition by Karl Rove and the swiftboaters, and the resulting rage. The fourth is an extreme, highly politicized Christianist Right active in politics and zealous in creating a theocratic society in the name of Jesus. The fifth is the economic crash and the desperation that has created nationally, especially among the poorest and least educated. The sixth is the systematic outsourcing of working class and middle class jobs. The seventh is a privatized military and privatized, for-profit prisons that depend for their daily bread on a steady crop of "criminals." The eighth is the so-called "Patriot Acts" and "legalized" domestic espionage, dedicated to providing them. The ninth is a systematic attack on the idea of education and on public schools, resulting in a less educated population less capable of navigating change and challenge. The tenth is the unparalleled speed with which today's news and disinformation travel, and the closely related capacity for organizing bestowed by the Internet.

Arguably, today's environment is much more volatile, and the people much more divided, than in the 1960s. I was there then, too, and I think it is worse today. It's just different now: It's a systematized, establishment fascism today threatening chaos from the top down. That's way scarier than a rag-tag bottom-up movement of peaceful pro-Constitution activists.

AZ's SB 1108: Thought Control for the Homeland

Frankly, we should welcome this bill because it outlines the world that Pearce and Kavanagh, with the blessings of Uberchancellors Bush, Cheney, McCain, and Kyle, would have in store for us.

This analysis explains that what is not said is actually as important as what is said.

SB 1108 in effect defines non-white persons as de facto threats to national security; proposes an unelected, partisan, ideologically-driven Council of Censors to determine the content of Arizona public education curriculum from first grade through college or university; legislates replacing the liberal arts curriculum that made America great with pure, ideologically-driven far-Right indoctrination; encourages far-Right forces to disrupt public education with bogus "bias" lawsuits, defines nonconformists as agents of sedition and so subtly legitimizes the use of violence against non-white students and educators who are perceived to violate The Plan; proposes to use your tax dollars to force Arizona teachers to become indoctrinators, not educators; and establishes vague and unspecified punishment anybody who doesn't get in line.

Here is the text of SB 1108, a bill sponsored by AZ Republican state Rep. Russell Pearce and others to revise Sec. 41-4258, Arizona Revised Statutes, relating to the Homeland Security Advisory Council. As here, I’ve italicized key phrases for your reference when reading the comments that follow. Also, as you read the italicized passages, keep in mind their authors' implied objectives and the administrative infrastructure that would be required to implement this measure.

This is the bill to which I've referred sarcastically in a couple of previous posts. Now I'm taking a more serious look. First the bill, then my comments.

COMMITTEE ON APPROPRIATIONS
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES AMENDMENTS TO S.B. 1108

Section 1. Title 15, chapter 1, article 1, Arizona Revised Statutes, is amended by adding sections 15-107 and 15-108, to read: 15-107. Declaration of policy. The legislature finds and declares that:

1. A primary purpose of public education is to inculcate values of American citizenship.

2. Public tax dollars used in public schools should not be used to denigrate American values and the teachings of western civilization.

3. Public tax dollars should not be used to promote political, religious, ideological or cultural beliefs or values as truth when such values are in conflict with the values of American citizenship and the teachings of western CIVILIZATION.

15-108. Denigration, disparagement or encouragement of dissent from values of American democracy and western civilization; prohibition; enforcement; prohibition of race-based organizations; definition:

A. A public school in this state shall not include within the program of instruction any courses, classes or school sponsored activities that promote, assert as truth or feature as an exclusive focus any political, religious, ideological or cultural beliefs or values that denigrate, disparage or overtly ENCOURAGE dissent from the values of American democracy and western civilization, including democracy, capitalism, pluralism and religious toleration.

B. This section does not prohibit the inclusion of diverse political, religious, ideological or CULTURAL beliefs or values if the course, CLASS or school sponsored activity as a whole does not denigrate, disparage or overtly ENCOURAGE dissent from the values of American democracy and western civilization.

C. On request of the superintendent of public instruction or the superintendent's designee, a public school shall promptly provide copies of curricula, course materials and course syllabi to the superintendent of public INSTRUCTION. The superintendent of public instruction, after providing appropriate notice and conducting an appropriate hearing, may withhold a proportionate share of state monies from any public school that violates subsection A. The superintendent of public instruction may take reasonable and APPROPRIATE regulatory actions to enforce this subsection. Nothing in this subsection shall be construed to enlarge the authority of the superintendent of public instruction to regulate the CONTENT of curriculum in public schools.

D. A public school in this state, a university under the JURISDICTION of the arizona board of regents and a community college under the JURISDICTION of a community college DISTRICT in this state shall not allow organizations to operate on the CAMPUS of the school, UNIVERSITY or community college if the organization is based in whole or in part on race-based criteria.

E. For the purposes of this section, "public school" means any of the following:
1. A school district.
2. A school in a school district.
3. A charter school.
4. An accommodation school.
5. The arizona state schools for the deaf and the blind."

Pico's Comments

Frankly, we should welcome this bill because it outlines the world that Pearce and Kavanagh, with the blessings of Uberchancellors Bush, Cheney, McCain, and Kyle, would have in store for us.

This analysis shows that what is not said is actually as important as what is said.

SB 1108 in effect defines non-white persons as de facto threats to national security; proposes an unelected, partisan, ideologically-driven Council of Censors to determine the content of Arizona public education curriculum from first grade through college or university; legislates replacing the classic liberal arts curriculum that made America great with pure, ideologically-driven far-Right indoctrination; encourages far-Right forces to disrupt public education with bogus "bias" lawsuits at will; defines nonconformists and non-whites as agents of sedition and so subtly legitimizes the use of violence against students and educators who are perceived to violate The Plan; proposes to use your tax dollars to force Arizona teachers to become indoctrinators, not educators; and establishes vague and unspecified punishment for anybody who doesn't get in line.

Historically, in rightwing discourse, the word "race," unless modified by "white," is code for non-white races. Here, because the bill is attached to a state homeland security law instead of to a tax bill, say, or to a public school funding bill, we see plainly that its authors regard "race" as a national security issue: Non-white = threat to national security.

Militia types and other far-Right fascists always co-opt the American flag to symbolize their hate-based ideology. This is the statutory equivalent.(PS: Isn't it about time for us to be flying the American flag on our side of the street where it belongs?)

"A primary purpose of public education is to inculcate values of American citizenship."

By definition, there's only one primary (first, leading, main, most important) purpose of anything. The proper article isn't "a," it's "the." So for Pearce (and Bush, and Cheney, and all the rest of the GOP), we see a very telling confusion about the meanings of "indoctrinate" and "educate."

I grant that one purpose of education is to socialize each generation with the norms of its culture. But education and socialization are not the same thing. If they were, we could scrap our entire school system and save gazillions. Our kids could be indoctrinated in a select few mantras by age 5 without ever leaving the house. Perhaps that's the plan.

Education, which also differs from training, is about critical thinking skills. These cannot be taught without exposing students broadly to conflicting ideas, good 'uns and bad 'uns, and debating them.

Measures like this actually imply that the US Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and the Bill of Rights are too fragile to withstand alternatives. Oh. Er. Oops. Silly me. When they say "the values of American citizenship," I thought they meant LIBERTY AND JUSTICE FOR ALL. FREEDOM OF THOUGHT. FREEDOM OF ASSEMBLY. FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION. FREEDOM OF SPEECH. That kind of thing.

Clearly they have something else in mind, so let's ask them: What, precisely, are "the values of American citizenship and where are they found?" What, exactly, sets "American citizenship" apart from, say, "Canadian citizenship" if not the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights"?

This should be fascinating. If the anwer is anything other than our founding documents, the bill's backers will have to tell us what it is and when we ratified it. If the answer is our founding documents, they'll have to explain why they propose to nullify large chunks of our guaranteed freedoms.

This bill shows between its lines that people like Pearce in fact despise the founding documents and actually do propose to nullify large chunks of our guaranteed freedoms. As American neo-fascist racists, they have no alternative. America, by origin and law, is a classic liberal culture that, by design, is meant always to stand for liberty and justice for all. This is the meaning of American patriotism. But because that isn't good news for white supremacist American neo-fascists, these sacred founding principles really must be put squarely in their gun sights along with people of color.

In truth, small-minded people fear your liberty. If the last seven years under far-Right GOP rule haven't taught Americans that much, we really are on the verge of losing everything.

Public tax dollars should not be used to promote political, religious, ideological or cultural beliefs or values as truth when such values are in conflict with the values of American citizenship and the teachings of western CIVILIZATION.

But according to this bill, they can and must be used to promote far-Right ideology and to fund an unelected Council of Censors to decide which is which. Well, isn't that special. Shades of the Spanish Inquisition. Such an irony!

All the obvious questions--So, we can't excoriate Enron? Which teachings of "Western civilization"? When does "Western civilization" begin? What cultures does it encompass? Is it English-speaking only? Who decides? Based on what qualifications, please?--all these are moot. This bill is "need to know." If the bill's sponsors know the answers, you don't need to know them.

Fortunately, the bill is so flagrantly unconstitutional that, at least for now, it can't stand. Meanwhile, a word to the wise is sufficient: The whole point is that it isn't merely unconstitutional. It's anti-constitutional.

The rest of the measure--the parts about what may be taught and who may assemble--don't just go to the heart of our constitutional liberties. Again, that's the point. These sections also subtly encourage nuisance lawsuits against courses and instructors perceived as violating far-Right ideological mandates.

We know that all across the country, rightwing financed interests have challenged specific courses and individual instructors as promoting a "liberal" bias when, in fact, they are actually teaching solid constitutional values. Here, Pearce et al. are providing the legal underpinnings for those interests to make war on traditional constitutional values in Arizona courts using your tax dollars. (Do you begin to see why Bush has seeded the US Court of Appeals with far-Right judges?)

Finally, SB 1108 encourages violence against non-white persons because it links "race" explicitly to national security, and defines "race-based" assemblies, multicultural content, and dissent as sedition.

Bottom line: For Pearce and the Uberchancellors--Bush, Cheney, Alito, Kyle, McCain, and the rest--the idea is that, for classic constitutional liberals and people of color, it's going to be a short walk from ASU or Rio Salado Community College to your friendly local detention center. For Pearce, McCain, Bush, and the rest, it's a win-win. After all, prison privatization is just a permanent employment plan and stream of cash for Republican cronies, and the state pays by the head.

That would be your head and mine.

Call your state legislator. Now.

PS: Grab an American flag and start showing Americans what "patriotism" really means.

"You Have Failed Us Miserably and We Won't Take it Anymore"

Address by Mayor Ross C. "Rocky" Anderson on October 27, 2007
By David Swanson
From AfterDowningStreet.org

Monday 29 October 2007

Salt Lake City, Utah -

Today, as we come together once again in this great city, we raise our voices in unison to say to President Bush, to Vice President Cheney, to other members of the Bush Administration (past and present), to a majority of Congress, including Utah's entire congressional delegation, and to much of the mainstream media: "You have failed us miserably and we won't take it any more."

"While we had every reason to expect far more of you, you have been pompous, greedy, cruel, and incompetent as you have led this great nation to a moral, military, and national security abyss."

"You have breached trust with the American people in the most egregious ways. You have utterly failed in the performance of your jobs. You have undermined our Constitution, permitted the violation of the most fundamental treaty obligations, and betrayed the rule of law."

"You have engaged in, or permitted, heinous human rights abuses of the sort never before countenanced in our nation's history as a matter of official policy. You have sent American men and women to kill and be killed on the basis of lies, on the basis of shifting justifications, without competent leadership, and without even a coherent plan for this monumental blunder."

"We are here to tell you: We won't take it any more!"

"You have acted in direct contravention of values that we, as Americans who love our country, hold dear. You have deceived us in the most cynical, outrageous ways. You have undermined, or allowed the undermining of, our constitutional system of checks and balances among the three presumed co-equal branches of government. You have helped lead our nation to the brink of fascism, of a dictatorship contemptuous of our nation's treaty obligations, federal statutory law, our Constitution, and the rule of law."

"Because of you, and because of your jingoistic false 'patriotism,' our world is far more dangerous, our nation is far more despised, and the threat of terrorism is far greater than ever before.

It has been absolutely astounding how you have committed the most horrendous acts, causing such needless tragedy in the lives of millions of people, yet you wear your so-called religion on your sleeves, asserting your God-is-on-my-side nonsense - when what you have done flies in the face of any religious or humanitarian tradition. Your hypocrisy is mind-boggling - and disgraceful. What part of "Thou shalt not kill" do you not understand? What part of the "Golden rule" do you not understand? What part of "be honest," "be responsible," and "be accountable" don't you understand? What part of "Blessed are the peacekeepers" do you not understand?

Because of you, hundreds of thousands of people have been killed, many thousands of people have suffered horrendous lifetime injuries, and millions have been run off from their homes. For the sake of our nation, for the sake of our children, and for the sake of our brothers and sisters around the world, we are morally compelled to say, as loudly as we can, 'We won't take it any more!' "

"As United States agents kidnap, disappear, and torture human beings around the world, you justify, you deceive, and you cover up. We find what you have done to men, women and children, and to the good name and reputation of the United States, so appalling, so unconscionable, and so outrageous as to compel us to call upon you to step aside and allow other men and women who are competent, true to our nation's values, and with high moral principles to stand in your places - for the good of our nation, for the good of our children, and for the good of our world."

In the case of the President and Vice President, this means impeachment and removal from office, without any further delay from a complacent, complicit Congress, the Democratic majority of which cares more about political gain in 2008 than it does about the vindication of our Constitution, the rule of law, and democratic accountability.

It means the election of people as President and Vice President who, unlike most of the presidential candidates from both major parties, have not aided and abetted in the perpetration of the illegal, tragic, devastating invasion and occupation of Iraq. And it means the election of people as President and Vice President who will commit to return our nation to the moral and strategic imperative of refraining from torturing human beings.

In the case of the majority of Congress, it means electing people who are diligent enough to learn the facts, including reading available National Intelligence Estimates, before voting to go to war. It means electing to Congress men and women who will jealously guard Congress's sole prerogative to declare war. It means electing to Congress men and women who will not submit like vapid lap dogs to presidential requests for blank checks to engage in so-called preemptive wars, for legislation permitting warrantless wiretapping of communications involving US citizens, and for dangerous, irresponsible, saber-rattling legislation like the recent Kyl-Lieberman amendment.

We must avoid the trap of focusing the blame solely upon President Bush and Vice-President Cheney. This is not just about a few people who have wronged our country - and the world. They were enabled by members of both parties in Congress, they were enabled by the pathetic mainstream news media, and, ultimately, they have been enabled by the American people - 40% of whom are so ill-informed they still think Iraq was behind the 9/11 attacks - a people who know and care more about baseball statistics and which drunken starlets are wearing underwear than they know and care about the atrocities being committed every single day in our name by a government for which we need to take responsibility.

As loyal Americans, without regard to political partisanship - as veterans, as teachers, as religious leaders, as working men and women, as students, as professionals, as businesspeople, as public servants, as retirees, as people of all ages, races, ethnic origins, sexual orientations, and faiths - we are here to say to the Bush administration, to the majority of Congress, and to the mainstream media: "You have violated your solemn responsibilities. You have undermined our democracy, spat upon our Constitution, and engaged in outrageous, despicable acts. You have brought our nation to a point of immorality, inhumanity, and illegality of immense, tragic, unprecedented proportions."

"But we will live up to our responsibilities as citizens, as brothers and sisters of those who have suffered as a result of the imperial bullying of the United States government, and as moral actors who must take a stand: And we will, and must, mean it when we say 'We won't take it any more.'"

If we want principled, courageous elected officials, we need to be principled, courageous, and tenacious ourselves. History has demonstrated that our elected officials are not the leaders - the leadership has to come from us. If we don't insist, if we don't persist, then we are not living up to our responsibilities as citizens in a democracy - and our responsibilities as moral human beings. If we remain silent, we signal to Congress and the Bush administration - and to candidates running for office - and to the world - that we support the status quo.

Silence is complicity. Only by standing up for what's right and never letting down can we say we are doing our part.

Our government, on the basis of a campaign we now know was entirely fraudulent, attacked and militarily occupied a nation that posed no danger to the United States. Our government, acting in our name, has caused immense, unjustified death and destruction.

It all started five years ago, yet where have we, the American people, been? At this point, we are responsible. We get together once in a while at demonstrations and complain about Bush and Cheney, about Congress, and about the pathetic news media. We point fingers and yell a lot. Then most people politely go away until another demonstration a few months later.

How many people can honestly say they have spent as much time learning about and opposing the outrages of the Bush administration as they have spent watching sports or mindless television programs during the past five years? Escapist, time-sapping sports and insipid entertainment have indeed become the opiate of the masses.

Why is this country so sound asleep? Why do we abide what is happening to our nation, to our Constitution, to the cause of peace and international law and order? Why are we not doing all in our power to put an end to this madness?

We should be in the streets regularly and students should be raising hell on our campuses. We should be making it clear in every way possible that apologies or convoluted, disingenuous explanations just don't cut it when presidential candidates and so many others voted to authorize George Bush and his neo-con buddies to send American men and women to attack and occupy Iraq.

Let's awaken, and wake up the country by committing here and now to do all each of us can to take our nation back. Let them hear us across the country, as we ask others to join us: "We won't take it any more!"

I implore you: Draw a line. Figure out exactly where your own moral breaking point is. How much will you put up with before you say "No more" and mean it?

I have drawn my line as a matter of simple personal morality: I cannot, and will not, support any candidate who has voted to fund the atrocities in Iraq. I cannot, and will not, support any candidate who will not commit to remove all US troops, as soon as possible, from Iraq. I cannot, and will not, support any candidate who has supported legislation that takes us one step closer to attacking Iran. I cannot, and will not, support any candidate who has not fought to stop the kidnapping, disappearances, and torture being carried on in our name.

If we expect our nation's elected officials to take us seriously, let us send a powerful message they cannot misunderstand. Let them know we really do have our moral breaking point. Let them know we have drawn a bright line. Let them know they cannot take our support for granted - that, regardless of their party and regardless of other political considerations, they will not have our support if they cannot provide, and have not provided, principled leadership.

The people of this nation may have been far too quiet for five years, but let us pledge that we won't let it go on one more day - that we will do all we can to put an end to the illegalities, the moral degradation, and the disintegration of our nation's reputation in the world.

Let us be unified in drawing the line - in declaring that we do have a moral breaking point. Let us insist, together, in supporting our troops and in gratitude for the freedoms for which our veterans gave so much, that we bring our troops home from Iraq, that we return our government to a constitutional democracy, and that we commit to honoring the fundamental principles of human rights.

In defense of our country, in defense of our Constitution, in defense of our shared values as Americans - and as moral human beings - we declare today that we will fight in every way possible to stop the insanity, stop the continued military occupation of Iraq, and stop the moral depravity reflected by the kidnapping, disappearing, and torture of people around the world.

The Paralysis of Good People

This is what we need to hear, this more than anything, right now, while there's time, to hold close, think about, figure out how to break free of. I can't say it better, so I'm quoting from the godsend that is Orincus:

The evil genius of the Nazi regime is that it created, and imposed on its world, a social regime in which the worst traits of humanity -- greed, selfishness, mendacity, betrayal, cowardice -- become the supreme social traits, not just in the camps (though there especially) but throughout Nazi society, because it was precisely those traits which insured one's survival.

Milton Mayer's remarkable book They Thought They Were Free, built around a series of interviews he conducted with "ordinary Germans" who lived through Nazi society, talked about the mechanism by which this happened:

"You see," my colleague went on, "one doesn't see exactly where or how to move. Believe me, this is true. Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for the one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don't want to act, or even to talk, alone; you don't want to "go out of your way to make trouble." Why not? - Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty.[Emphasis added]

"Uncertainty is a very important factor, and, instead of decreasing as time goes on, it grows. Outside, in the streets, in the general community, "everyone is happy. One hears no protest, and certainly sees none. You know, in France or Italy there will be slogans against the government painted on walls and fences; in Germany, outside the great cities, perhaps, there is not even this. In the university community, in your own community, you speak privately to you colleagues, some of whom certainly feel as you do; but what do they say? They say, "It's not so bad" or "You're seeing things" or "You're an alarmist."

"And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can't prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don't know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, the end? On the one hand, your enemies, the law, the regime, the Party, intimidate you. On the other, your colleagues pooh-pooh you as pessimistic or even neurotic. You are left with your close friends, who are, naturally, people who have always thought as you have.

"But your friends are fewer now. Some have drifted off somewhere or submerged themselves in their work. You no longer see as many as you did at meetings or gatherings. Informal groups become smaller; attendance drops off in little organizations, and the organizations themselves wither. Now, in small gatherings of your oldest friends, you feel that you are talking to yourselves, that you are isolated from the reality of things. This weakens your confidence still further and serves as a further deterrent to – to what? It is clearer all the time that, if you are going to do anything, you must make an occasion to do it, and then you are obviously a troublemaker. So you wait, and you wait.

"But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That's the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and the smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked – if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in "43" had come immediately after the "German Firm" stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in "33". But of course this isn't the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D."

It is by small steps of incremental meanness and viciousness that we lose our humanity. The Nazis, in the end, embodied the ascension of utter demonic inhumanity, but they didn't get that way overnight. They got that way through, day after day, attacking and demonizing and urging the elimination of those they deemed their enemies.

They did this by not simply creating them as The Enemy, but by denying them their essential humanity, depicting them as worse than scum -- disease-laden, world-destroying vermin, in desperate need of elimination. But that kind of behavior, over the years, has hardly been relegated merely to the Nazis; indeed, it has a long history in America as well, and has been bubbling up on the right increasingly in recent years.

American Dynasty + The Shock Doctrine = Enlightenment

From conservative political commentator and former White House advisor Kevin Phillips' American Dynasty (Viking: 2004, p. 267):

The political economics of the Bush dynasty over four generations, two of them presidential, suggested no such nation-building commitment [as building democracy in Iraq]. Indeed, their taste for covert operations and transactions suggests the reverse. As good a case could be made that their exercise of power has been biased toward destabilization: in Central America, Chile, Afghanistan, and Iraq. The family's ties were to wealthy U.S. and foreign elites--from Cuban sugar plantation owners to Persian Gulf sheikhs--as well as to the intelligence and national security establishment, the oil business, 'crony' capitalism, and related foreign policy specialists. Ground-level popular democracy has more often been something to subvert rather than something to promote.

No other family in American history has sat at the precise intersection of oil, banking, armaments, intelligence, and the White House. No other is as closely associated as the Bushes with 'arms deals,' 'clandestine operations,' and 'cover-ups.' (Phillips, 268.)

The usual, predictable response to suggestions that the Bush family is anything but patriotic is to make fun of tin-hatted conspiracy theorists. It's the same approach that blinded us to the 30-year rise of a deadly fundamentalist theocratic Right.

But there's this problem. At some point, coincidences cease to be accidents of fate and become so many deliberate acts woven together by specific personalities, ideology, self-interest, and power. Only fools ignore them then.

We know the Bush mentality--wealth and power have one obligation: to generate more wealth and more power. We know a good deal about the nasty lineage of its wealth, from early Brown Brothers Harriman and Union Banking Corporation ties to Nazi financiers, to the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, Arbusto, Harken Energy, to its intimate personal and financial ties to Saudi investors, including Salem bin Laden and Khalid bin Mahfouz, Osama's brother-in-law), to the Carlyle Group and to Sun Myung Moon's fascist empire.

We also know a little about the large and growing web of direct financial involvements of W, his family, and his advisors--Cheney, Perle, Bremer, Ridge, and others--to manufactories and consultancies in homeland security, defense, and "private military corporations." Just recently we found out about BlackwaterUSA.

We know about this President's crusade to concentrate unprecedented powers in the White House, even to the extreme of dismissing the law, the Constitution, the Congress, and the courts.

We know the enormous, largely secret, and extra-legal domestic spying apparatus he has constructed, and the work in progress to construct 40,000-bed domestic detention facilities here in the US, operated by private, for-profit prison management firms.

We even know that, under Bush, we've experienced a national conversion from human rights advocacy to torture.

We know the deep ideological commitment of this President, his advisors, and his Cabinet to Milton Friedman "privatization" and a "free market economy," the twin engines that drove Chile's Pinochet into power, launched a bloody terrorizing domestic house-cleaning, and plunged a 160 year-old democracy into ruin. Beyond its ideological family tree, we know the infrastructure required to pull off that coup: secret ties among high military officers, a vast detention capability, CIA-trained experts in torture and reprogramming.

We even know that three major shocks have occurred during this administration, each resulting in more presidential power, more war, more war- and security/defense profiteering, and in the largest "homeland security" concentration in US history, with yet more privatization, secrecy, destruction of federal documents, and domestic spying.

It might be a good idea to look more closely now in the directions suggested by renewable energy, such as Brazil's sugarcane business and its utilization of slave labor. At the privatization of water worldwide and, increasingly, in the US. At the outsourcing of middle class jobs in America, and the systematic, 35-year decline in middle America's standard of living. At the concomitant astronomical rise in CEO compensation and the wealth of the upper 5% of the population from an economy designed to benefit just that sector. At the Republican Party's inroads into controlling American elections and disenfranchising minorities and Democrats. At Bush appointments to the the agencies and departments comprising the Executive Branch. At Bush appointments to our courts. At the gradual dismantling of workplace, labor, product, investment, telecommunications, and banking regulations. At Enron and its relationship to the Republicanization of California. At the President's insistence on retroactive immunity for war crimes and crimes against the Constitution.

Somehow, it all seems of a piece.

Dropped Stitches: GOP Candidates Can't Sew

I'm watching the Republicans debate tonight, and I'm reminded of the older women in my life. They sewed. They made clothes, and quilts, and drapes, and coats, and whatever else needed making. Their hearts, minds, and eyes were always focused on the needs of the people they loved and for whom they were responsible.

I'm not the first to see a quilt as a metaphor for a nation. A quilter knows that any quilt is only as strong as its weakest stitch. A quilter knows to look at the whole quilt before saying "Mission Accomplished," because the mission is not accomplished until everyone's last stitch is firmly in place, and every bed is warm.

A dropped stitch -- really a knitting term -- is a stitch that didn't take, that missed its mark, that doesn't hold.

Republicans don't understand about that. Over and over again, it's clear from what the candidates say that seeing a world whole, or even a country whole is just not part of a Republican's conceptual or emotional framework.

Should we sell 20% of the US stock market to Dubai? Sure, as long as Dubai passes a safety and security test. That's nice, except regimes change. Ministers come and go. Loyalties ebb and flow. Personal ambitions, even of the native born, rarely coincide with national interests. Corporate profits aren't necessarily in sync with the public wellbeing. A dropped stitch.

How's the US economy? Just ducky! Inflation's down, the market's up, umpteen million jobs have been added (source undisclosed), and our economy is "the greatest story never told." That's nice, except that everyone I know is scared to death of their economic future. Every dip of the market causes most of us to feel real fear, which is not something millionaires relate to. Everyone I know is aware of the millions who aren't prepared for retirement. None of the Republicans seems to have a clue about that.

Millions of Americans are losing their houses to predatory lenders. Half the country is working two or three jobs and still has to reach up to touch bottom. Major sectors of the economy--agriculture, mining, and construction--are headed for a train wreck because of shoot-first, racist, xenophobic immigration "solutions." Free trade is about jobs going thataway, not about workers or jobs or benefits or a sound workplace ecology coming thisaway.

Our jobs are being rapidly outsourced, and CEOs are sucking up the fruits of the economy at the rate of 500 times what the lineworker is making. Doesn't seem fair because it isn't fair. It's Republican. Dropped stitches.

How about trade policy? It's terrific except that China cheats, so we really ought to fix that. Someday. Outsourced American jobs? Impact on the global economy? We're pillaging Third World countries. If their workers can come here, they're coming. If they can't, they're killing each other or starving or dying of AIDS. And the American Middle Class is in a nosedive.

Impact on the environment? What environment? On global warming? What global warming? Dropped stitches.

Privatization and global poverty? Whatever can you mean? Dropped stitches.

War in Iraq? Wise choice. Going well, except maybe we could do better "politically." Of course oil had nothing to do with it. It was about terrorism and WMD and Saddam. Iraqis will come around. What's good for Halliburton is good for America. Dropped stitches.

Planning for retirement? Simple: People need to save. Never mind that "people" make minimum wage, work two jobs, have a spouse that works two jobs, and share the flat with another family and still there's nothing left to save.

Sanctions on Iran? Great idea. Never mind that sanctions hit the people, not the leaders. Never mind that sanctions didn't work to stop Saddam, and sanctions won't work to stop Ahmadinejad. Dropped stitches.

Free market? Essential. The story of America. Except for the part about robber barons and the Great Depression. Great suffering for a great many. Republicans don't seem to know or care about that. Dropped stitches.

Republicans see nothing except money, unilateral US power, and white male supremacy. Let them scream. The proof is in the policy. This isn't an aberrant GOP. This IS the GOP.

They see corporate health but not people's health. They see oil but not a ravaged Wyoming and a destroyed Iraq. They see sanctions but not children dying of starvation and infectious diseases. They see outlawing abortion but not women. They see life in the womb but not life in the ghettos or abroad. They see prosperity for the wealthy and indentured servitude for the rest of us. Consistently, Republicans drop the single most important stitches of all: the people and the planet. This isn't any religion I know about.

Without setting the health, welfare, and stability of the people and the planet as its highest priorities, a nation is a nasty thing, a Petri dish for predatory corporations, war-mongering, religious tyranny, and fascism. That's why we have a Constitution.

Use it or lose it.

SLORC

The State law and Order Restoration Council, aka SLORC, is the name that the Burmese junta calls itself. It is so perfectly fascist it even sounds fascist. It sounds like Golum's brother, who is named, in turn, for the bilious slime that covers him.

Except that it's deadly serious. Monks and the best and brightest of Burma's citizens are being slain in the streets and monasteries and torture suites because they hold a vision for a better country, in which brute intimidation, despotism, greed, and corruption don't govern. Where SLORC doesn't rule.

God bless the dissidents. Power to the people of Burma.

Superb Read on US White Supremacy and Fascism

Sowing the Seeds of Fascism in America
A Dig led by Stan Goff
Author Stan Goff, a retired 26-year veteran of the U.S. Army Special Forces, sounds a warning call that many of the historical precursors of fascism—white supremacy, militarization of culture, vigilantism, masculine fear of female power, xenophobia and economic destabilization—are ascendant in America today.

Here is a rare thing: An analysis of sexism, white supremacy, and militarism by a miltary guy. This is one scary read, but, like so much else out there, we gotta face up to it. A lot of the enemy is us.

If you doubt it, what are your more afraid of: losing your outsourced job, losing your house, being targeted for revenge by a raving GOP maniac radical Righwing white supremacist, or getting bombed at Linens N Things by a Muslim fanatic?

The Long US March to Christo-Fascism: Part I

Note: This is Part I of a three-part series intended as a broad rather than deep overview of the Christo-Fascist Right's rise to near-domination of US government. Each of its links leads to a world of other links from which the range of individuals, families, businesses, and organizations which comprise it can be identified and explored. The reach and power of the Christo-Fascist Right should horrify every sentient American. This series will be updated and revised as information and time are available. Part II. Part III.


As we are reeling from this week’s revelations about Blackwater, not to mention other monumental developments of the last six years, many wonder how in the hell we got here.

It will take time to tell the whole story—this overview doesn’t pretend to be exhaustive—but while the rest of America was focused elsewhere, a fluid coalition of secular economic and political conservatives, cultural/religious conservatives, and other hard rightwingers launched two brilliant, loosely coordinated strategies to seize control of the country for the Right. The secular strategy came from the establishment. The cultural/religious one originated at the grassroots. Both eventually attracted followers at all levels. This takeover began in earnest in the early 1970s.

For 30 years, the Right has branded the New Deal as "communism" and the sixties a wholesale assault on decency. What actually happened in the sixties was that “the new generation”—now aging Boomers—saw certain dominant but fundamental and entrenched American values as they are, and we challenged them. Numerous radical thinkers on the Left (radical = root, fundamental) had said it all before in miles of manifestos, but Charles Reich preached it to the suburbs in his best selling The Greening of America (1970):

The logic and necessity of the new generation -- and what they are so furiously opposed to -- must be seen against a background of what has gone wrong in America. It must be understood in light of the betrayal and loss of the American dream, the rise of the Corporate State of the 1960's, and the way in which that State dominates, exploits, and ultimately destroys both nature and man. Its rationality must be measured against the insanity of existing "reason" -- reason that makes impoverishment, dehumanization, and even war appear to be logical and necessary. Its logic must be read from the fact that Americans have lost control of the machinery of their society, and only new values and a new culture can restore control. Its emotions and spirit can be comprehended only by seeing contemporary America through the eyes of the new generation.

By the mid-60s, building on the Enlightenment, the nobler tendencies of populism, the labor movement, and New Deal forebears, and working both in and outside the system, we had begun to change the nation. What stunned the Right were gigantic waves of reform to US government, law, culture, religion, and business. All were fueled conceptually and politically by thousands of little-known and famous radical-to-liberal "micro-projects," like Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, and Ralph Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed, and by the much larger civil rights, labor, and anti-war movements.

These waves took their main visible form as Medicare and Medicaid (1965), The Civil Rights Act of 1964, and a host of consumer protections, environmental safeguards, workplace regulations, think tanks, publications, and nonprofits. These continued over the coming decades to empower minorities, women, workers, and the elderly, and even began to lift up the unemployed poor.

Meanwhile, we also forced Americans to see, beneath the veneer of flags and rhetoric, the lies and devastation of war and the corruption of the “military-industrial complex" that Republican President Dwight Eisenhower so presciently warned us about:

Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence -- economic, political, even spiritual -- is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together

What we accomplished was not too shabby. Be proud, sisters and brothers of the Left. Be damned proud.

Turns out it wasn’t drugs, sex, or hair that galvanized powerful stakeholders in a full-scale, brilliant, long-term reactionary war. It was, above all, what was framed as the new generation's “frontal assault on free enterprise”―ironically an assault grounded, among other sources, in profound regard for the US Constitution.

In the 1970s two camps emerged, each bitterly opposed to the nation’s movement toward its constitutional potential—a Liberal society with at least some of its most cannibalistic capitalist tendencies at least somewhat constrained by tax and regulatory policy. [Continued in Part II.]

On The New Sanctuary Movement, Difference, and Me

I expected a day like yesterday, but then I ran into Chris Hedges.

Two concepts, one that has never occurred to me, and one that is currently on the front burner in my own life, smacked me in the head, pretty much derailing whatever little task list I had planned for this day.

But about the one that I’m dealing with right now, in my own life.

I haven’t seen it put so well as in this excerpt from Hedges’ review for Truthdig of John Gray’s Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia:

What Gray fails to grasp is the transcendence and power that comes with achieving the moral life, a life a realist has to concede is absurd. There is a meaning to existence. It is found, as Fyodor Dostoevsky, Joseph Conrad and Vasily Grossman knew in simple, blind acts of human kindness, especially towards the outcast and the stranger. It is discovered when we confront and acknowledge the inevitable chains and limitations of human nature but do not completely succumb to them. These small acts of compassion, never free from the taint of self-interest, do not make the world a quantifiably better place. We will not be rewarded for them. We will not save ourselves from evil, suffering and death. But these acts mean that we have, if only for a moment, felt what it means to be fully human. We have reacted not as animals in a herd, but as individuals who rose above our baser instincts and the clamor of the mob to defy hatred and bigotry and to cherish life. These acts of compassion allow us to become conscious, if only for a moment, in an unconscious world. [Emphasis added.]

I live in Arizona, where the “border crisis” is a very present personal moral challenge. Like many others, I am struggling with the problems and opportunities offered by The New Sanctuary Movement. My first instinct is to run away. I am too easily confused by legalities, when the transcendent truth, as Tex Sample recently pointed out to me, is that we have a legal system that frequently achieves technical legality but often doesn't achieve justice.

Anyway, I’m still on the periphery of The New Sanctuary Movement-Arizona, a project of Intefaith Worker Justice. I’m not yet on the front lines, so I don’t want any confusion about the strength of my character on this issue.

What I do want to say is this. The one reliable, fail-safe, within-myself touchstone that I know I have for getting clear about human justice issues is my queerness.

As I've written about before, recently I had to confront Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s hotline for reporting “illegals.” My off-the-top reaction was, “Well, I wouldn’t report anybody myself, but what’s so wrong with that?” However, once I thought of my own experience on the other side of the border, so to speak, I understood immediately what’s wrong with that. A lot.

Arpaio’s hotline is immoral for at least three big reasons, all of which boil down to doing serious damage to what Martin Luther King, Jr. called “the beloved community.”

One, it targets certain human beings in a way that encourages racist profiling. Though there is no way to tell by looking who is an “illegal immigrant” and who is an American citizen, we are being encouraged to act as if there were and follow our worst inclinations.

Two, it reduces human complexity—our individual humanity, the one thing that lets us recognize each other as embodiments of the Sacred—to one mere action, and that one is of highly questionable “illegality.”

Three, it injects fascism directly into to our neighborhoods. Hotlines like this institutionalize anonymous ratting, which enables individuals and communities to sustain the myth of superiority: Ratters never have to confront the consequences of their actions.

The assumption behind the hotline is that every caller will be right and all will call for legitimate reasons only. Meanwhile, however, there is no accountability whatsoever for the consequences of simply being wrong, let alone for being intentionally mean, delusional, racist, vindictive, etc. When there is no accountability, we humans let our nasty side out to play in what soon becomes an endless spiral of suspicion, ratting, revenge, violence, and community breakdown. Didn't we learn all about this from the French Revolution and Nazi Germany? Ain't we been there, done that?

Finally, by shifting responsibility for immigration law enforcement to average folks who are neither trained nor authorized (read given structures of accountability and procedure) to take them on, it makes us all auxiliary vigilantees. Which brings us back to fascism.

However. I know that I wouldn’t get this if I hadn’t personally been on the receiving end of the Arpaio vigilantee mentality. My queerness, in a culture that perceives gay and lesbian people as outlaws, through projection and propaganda, is their "illegal alienness" in a culture that perceives undocumented immigrants in the same way.

Which brings me back to The New Sanctuary Movement. I believe that Hedges is right:

There is a meaning to existence. It is found, as Fyodor Dostoevsky, Joseph Conrad and Vasily Grossman knew, in simple, blind acts of human kindness, especially towards the outcast and the stranger. It is discovered when we confront and acknowledge the inevitable chains and limitations of human nature but do not completely succumb to them.

When the Sanctuary Movement sticks to a core principle from all great religions – that we are called to give our best to -- TaDa! --none other than the stranger and the outcast--and does not allow itself to exploit people in the process of creating public education moments, then it gives us a personal opportunity to

[rise] above our baser instincts and the clamor of the mob to defy hatred and bigotry and to cherish life. These acts of compassion allow us to become conscious, if only for a moment, in an unconscious world.

Two last thoughts. The reason for our myriad personal differences may then be that, if they are lived out fully and considered intentionally (a big if), they become the thing that lets us discern the true difference between mere legalism and justice, and give us the courage to act on that insight.

These days I often feel powerless to stop the BushCo juggernaut of fascism, greed, brutality, and violence that’s rolling over our country at high speed. What my personal struggle suggests to me--still, yet again, one more time--is that we are most powerful change agents when we act in our own communities. That is a battleground of human scale, where victories are imaginable and can sustain us when they occur. That’s where we can best stop fascism, racism, apocalyptic Christianist fundamentalism, and corporatist greed. That's where our focus as progressives should be: thinking globally, acting locally. (You want an example? Local elections were the tool that the fascist Right used to take over the GOP. If they can do that, we can, too.)

We're Getting the Country We Deserve, Aren't We?

First posted as a comment on Truthdig, 9-19-07


There’s no question that fascism has come to the US.

We have a rogue president and vice president claiming unprecedented, flagrantly anti-constitutional powers.

We have an elaborate, un-checked domestic corporate/government spying apparatus unleashed on all of us. If you think they’re not spying on everyone who expresses concern or plans to run against them, guess again.

We have sabotaged voting machines manufactured by the president's partisans, and fraudulent elections shored up by a partisan high Court.

We have a fanatical Christianist military command willing to impose its bizarre beliefs on our military academies, by threat of retaliation if necessary.

We have a completely docile media fully owned and controlled by the military-industrial complex that’s fully owned and controlled by the Carlyle Group that’s fully owned and controlled by the president and his men and his Middle Eastern allies.

Instead of asking why the GOP is enabling and sustaining this coup d’etat, our media distort facts, indicting only Democrats who at least are speaking out even though they don’t have the numbers to run Congress. When they’re not blaming the Democrats, they’re feeding us nothing but Britney and OJ. Bread and circuses.

We have a paralyzed and largely bought-and-paid-for Congress.

We have BlackwaterUSA, the president’s personal praetorian guard owned by a fanatical Christianist billionaire who is locked into a cyclical group-grope with our tax dollars and has been written out of range of any law that I know of, here and in Iraq.

We have the most secret government in US history. Fanatically secretive. Known to have removed warehouses full of documents to places unknown. That's our national history we're talking about.

We have a president ready, able, and willing to kill hundreds of thousands merely because he wants to be “a war president,” poised now to nuke Iran on a lie, and happy to perjure himself and gut the Constitution he swore to uphold, again and again.

We have a once-brave people terrified by our shadows, and lining up to sell its children down the river environmentally, constitutionally, and economically if Herr Bush only barks loud enough.

Instead of seeing the real threat, we are focused on a bunch of Mexican peasants. As if.

Our jobs are going or have gone, our houses are worth less by the hour, our economy is teetering in the hands of a hostile China, and our living standard is lower than it was in 1973. But our CEOs make 500 times what the line worker makes, so be still. It will all trickle down by and by.

Our public education system has been eroded or sabotaged or supplanted by a Christo-fascist turn-key home schooling program (fully orchestrated curriculum), and university education is for the elite, alone. That ain't you or me, baby.

Our predatory leaders are willing to rape and pillage New Orleans for their own gain, and able to watch 1,500 people drown and say nobody knew this could happen. We're hearing a lot of that shit lately.

So if we don’t have fascism and a citizenry deliberatly rendered powerless and poised on destitution, exactly what are we lacking? It’s here. It patrolled the streets of New Orleans and it will be coming soon to a theatre near you.

We are at the rising of the curtain at a drama that’s been 30 years in the works, and these are the main acts. Ralph Reed said we wouldn’t see them coming until we were in the body bags. I didn’t realize that he meant that literally until I sat and watched them drown New Orleans.

The question is, where are the “patriots” when you need them? Where are the Freepers and all the people who were flapping panicked about black helicopters now that the black helicopters are actually here? What kind of "patriotism" do they represent that opens the doors to rapacious fascists and clams them on the people who are hanging two lanterns in the old church tower.

This isn’t the country my Dad fought for in WWII. He was a paratrooper and lost his eye in North Africa. I’m glad he’s dead, because I don’t think he could endure this.

Why are we enduring it? Are we just frozen in our tracks? Have we no memory of revolution, or do we just find it embarrassing?

I just wonder what the senior military, intelligence, and diplomacy officers think of all this. They surely must see what’s going down. Are they just waiting for their turn through the revolving door? Or, like Alan Greenspan and John Warner, waiting for retirement (when they have their fortunes) to speak out?

We’re getting the country we deserve, aren’t we?

Fascism Isn't Coming to The USA. It's Here.

Today’s latest Senate disgrace needs to be evaluated in the context of a purely fascist ideology that, gradually over the past 30 years, has seized our country while we were busy refusing to suspend our disbelief that it could happen here.

To some, today’s Senate resolution condemning MoveOn.org’s New York Times ad seems just garden-variety congressional stupidity. In the scheme of things, it is admittedly a smallish thing seen next to anti-war soldiers mysteriously dying, but I think it is more worrisome than mere stupidity. The US Senate, part of the highest tier of government, has chosen to strike directly at our constitutional right of free speech. This seems to suggest the coming-out of something quite troubling.

When God and Country are conflated in an increasingly Christianist military force that, in turn, symbolizes the perfect righteousness of our ends and means, the suggestion that its senior spokesman might be a fraud – could be corrupt, deceitful, and complicit -- is the one implication that a fascist regime cannot afford to let walk unassailed into daylight.

But this ad, which simply asked, “General Petraeus or General Betray-Us?,” publicly pinned the lie to the symbolic heart of fascism. An attack was inevitable.

This isn't so much about the person. I don't know what Petraeus believes, but it's hard to think much of the principles of a commander who doesn't really know whether the deaths he oversees are doing anything to make us safer, but nevertheless hasn't resigned for that reason.

This is about symbolism. The decorated uniform of highest rank wasn’t just meant to lend credibility where it has been so lacking. In the context of everything else we've seen in the last 30 years--especially the last six as the curtain has risen--I'm comfortable saying more. I believe it was also meant to suggest subtly that "moral authority" could be enthroned by force here, too, if necessary, and yes, to dissuade any challenges. By costuming him in full, decorated uniform, the theatre manager intended us to understand that the USA is now God, Might, and Fatherland conflated, and that to question him is to question the new ruling trinity.

But the ad pre-empted the vignette, and in my view, the ad stands as a distinctively populist and distinctively brave American impertinence.

It speaks aloud what we’ve all had to live with for some time: That our leaders, some civilian, some military, some corporate, are equally comfortable eating lobster bisque in a zone of atrocity as perpetrating undeniably deep and extravagant violations of human dignity and the moral, cultural, social, and economic order of Iraq and of our own country. And are happy to lie about it all. If this isn't fascism, I don't know what is.

Thus, the despotic little tanty voiced in the Senate today was inevitable. That it was authentic fury and fear just unmasks these fascists, and their appeasers, for who they are.

We citizens shouldn't let this stand. Small as it may seem, today's resolution must become a turning point at which we call a fascist an un-American, anti-constitution fascist, and demand their resignations en masse. The resignations won't happen, I know, but let us at least get out the checkbooks for MoveOn.org and let our voices be heard.

Now is just not the time to sit down and shut up.

Wake-Up Call: Neo-Cons, the Reptilian Cortex, and Iran

This week, the 100th monkey seems to have woken up. From Jane Smiley to Naomi Klein to Drew Westin at Emory University, to Gary Kamiya at Salon, to researchers at NYU and UCLA, everyone seems to be getting the big picture. There’s something that links such developments as privatization, Katrina, Iraq, outsourcing, the unitary presidency, and even the GOP campaign style in a brutish, evil whole. Unless we all wake up, it may end up eating the world as we know it.

Underneath it all, neo-conservatism’s entire ideological smorgasbord--economics, domestic policy, and global domination--is pure Hobbes. All its themes are present there: constant war [war on “terror”], selfish individualism [privatization, dismantled social safety net, market deregulation], fear of violent death [our daily mantra], and a monarch above the law [King George].

The specific issue doesn’t matter. Hysteria R Us: over Al Qaeda, immigration, gay marriage, universal health care, Katrina, God in the public square. Take any of them, boil it down, and the neo-conservative response is obvious: take or be taken, kill or be killed.

This is clear even in the prevailing commentary. Everything is presented as if there are only two options: premature withdrawal or stay the course; invasion or a border wall; sanctity of marriage or demise of civilization; fight them there or fight them here.

Where did this collective panic come from?

The rise of conservatism in the US is not about nostalgia for an airbrushed 1950s. It’s not even about 9/11. It goes so much deeper. Like islanders in a dying culture, we are living within a crumbling global order and we know it. Look around. Everything we thought we knew for sure is gone or in doubt. Heaven, the weather, polar bears, public trust, US invincibility, borders, the American Dream, gender roles, even, mein Gott im himmel!, gender itself.

The things we once thought were immutable are not. Confusion is everywhere. Terra is not firma.

Now more than ever, we need anchors. And this is neo-conservativism’s taproot. Lacking anchors, every threat—perceived or real—looms dire, lethal, and immediate, like Iran’s nuclear capability. Like Saddam’s alleged WMDs. There is no time to think. Ready? Shoot! Aim!

America’s got HOS (Hobbes on Steroids), and we are behaving frighteningly like Germany pre-WWII. When terror, humiliation, and confusion predominate, then as now, the default human response is unquestionably atavistic and instinctual. Individually, we try to tamp down the rising panic with food, booze, drugs, sex, spas, shopping, and speaking in tongues. Nationally, we use bigger guns.

It is as if 9/11 finished off our capacity to foresee the consequences of our own behavior. It appears to have reduced our country to a left brain—-rational, uncharismatic, and effete [Al Gore]--and a reptilian cortex--charismatic, savage, and lacking reason altogether [George Bush].

If you want to take it this far, the fall of the phallic Towers hit America where we live.

Weare panicked, but as Naomi Klein forces us to see, the neo-cons are not. They are poised and ready to impose a new order. Alongside the quest for oil-—itself a throw-back--this is the reason for the war on Iraq, for the appalling drama BushCo served up in New Orleans, for the constant reiteration of 9/11, for the rising drumbeat about Iran’s nuclear power, and for their doing nothing at all to stem global warming and everything to make it worse.

The constant harping on of, and invitation to, cataclysmic terror isn’t just about the war or even domestic intelligence. Sustaining our panic is about acclimating us to a shockingly regressive government that will be brutal and rapacious whenever it chooses to be. As long as we are terrorized, we will submit.

That is why, in six years, the flood of books, editorials, op-eds, blogs, protests, revelations, and lawsuits against them have not even dented Bushco. The rational left brain, represented by moderates and progressives, is being trounced by the reptilian cortex, represented by neo-cons and fundamentalists because we are panicked.

Until the zeitgeist changes and the terror passes, or until we awake to the catastrophes we are causing in our adrenalin-testosterone toxicity, we are unlikely to alter course. We will accept a fascist dictatorship, we will enable a neo-Hitlerian global imperialism, and we will not hesitate to use nuclear weapons on Iran. This is the Rove/Cheney/Rumsfeld/Bush wet dream. It needn't be ours.

Wake up, everybody. Now. Please.

K-Ville: Pro-Fascist Propaganda?

Propaganda may be tolerable enough when we know its goals up front and can recognize propaganda for what it is. We still have our powers of reason and refusal then. It’s another matter when we don’t even know we’re being manipulated and haven’t been told the agenda.

But against the backdrop of unauthorized domestic wiretapping, unitary presidents, domestic detention centers, acknowledged FBI harassment of anti-war protesters, disappeared dissenting soldiers, and sanctioned torture, propaganda is far more sinister, especially when its agenda is to accustom Americans to subvert our own Constitution

This is the context for K-ville, a new Fox series about post-Katrina New Orleans that premiers on Monday, September 17. Read Jordan Flaherty’s excellent heads-up on this subject at Dissident Voices.

America the Moribund?

Today I’m stuck on Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "beloved community," Robert Putnam’s research on “social capital,” Joe Bageant’s observation that most Americans are living in a happy hologram, and an article in The New Republic called “Death Grip,” which purports to explain why people vote for George Bush.

If you haven’t gotten to know Joe Bageant, it’s time. Here’s a sample:

Americans, rich or poor, now live in a culture entirely perceived through simulacra-media images and illusions. We live inside a self-referential media hologram of a nation that has not existed for quite some time now, especially in America’s heartland. Our national reality is held together by a pale, carbon imprint of the original. The well-off with their upscale consumer aesthetic, live inside gated Disneyesque communities with gleaming uninhabited front porches representing some bucolic notion of the Great American home and family. The working class, true to its sports culture aesthetic, is a spectator to politics. . . politics which are so entirely imagistic as to be holograms of a process, not a process. Social realism is a television commercial for America, a simulacran republic of eagles, church spires, brave young soldiers and heroic firefighters and ‘freedom of choice’ within the hologram. America’s citizens have been reduced to Balkanized consumer units by the corporate state’s culture producing machinery.

We no longer have a country—just the hollow shell of one, a global corporation masquerading electronically and digitally as a nation called the United States.

You know it’s true. Gated communities spring up like Hollywood sets all over the country. My cousin calls them “happy towns” because people believe that if they can just live there, they’ll finally be happy.

Everybody’s got to believe in something, I guess. Lacking anything substantial, we’ll take the simulacra, please. Make that with beer and chips.

Which brings me to Putnam. Social capital is, basically, the fabric that knits us together, unit by unit, into a shared and beloved nation. It’s all the little grids made up of churches, associations, social clubs, Tupperware parties, Red Cross tents, League of Women voters, Rotary Clubs, and PTAs that give us ways to interact and form allegiances, and the resulting bonds of acquaintance, friendship, shared interests, and trust that allow us to function in concert for mutual benefit.

The analogy is to capital as in real property, wealth, and we’re just about broke.

Despite the fact that numerous studies here and abroad show a powerful correlation between high levels of social capital and all kinds of social benefits – lower crime, better schools, more and faster economic development, more effective government, higher voting levels, more altruism, etc.--America’s social capital has been declining since the mid-60s/early 70s.

This was first brought to our attention by Robert Putnam, in Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community and later treatments, and he suspects that the cause wasn’t hippies after all, but television. Writing for The American Prospect in 1996, Putnam concluded:

Moreover, just as the erosion of the ozone layer was detected only many years after the proliferation of the chlorofluorocarbons that caused it, so too the erosion of America's social capital became visible only several decades after the underlying process had begun. Like Minerva's owl that flies at dusk, we come to appreciate how important the long civic generation [those born roughly between 1910 and 1940] has been to American community life just as its members are retiring. Unless America experiences a dramatic upward boost in civic engagement (a favorable "period effect") in the next few years, Americans in 2010 will join, trust, and vote even less than we do today. (Emphasis mine.)

Basically, more of us live our lives very close to home, in relative isolation from everyone except our immediate families, if we have families, and fewer of us belong to churches, civic groups, professional, interest, or trade associations, labor unions, garden clubs, PTAs, bridge clubs, and so on, or even socialize with friends much. Not even the advent of Internet-based association has improved our social capital. The groups we do belong to—like MoveOn.org—whatever—don’t really involve actually seeing each other’s faces, much less the human touch. Membership is likely to boil down to reading a website and clicking a VISA icon to pay our dues.

By the way, the seeming countertrend since Putnam first wrote Bowling Alone—church membership—is limited to the right wing of the Protestant half of Christianity and even this, despite the much touted mega-churches, is showing signs of disintegration. Members who joined seeking spiritual sustenance are leaving within a year or two, having found mostly infotainment and coffee bars instead.

Which brings me to the prevailing Republican political ideology—a virulent form of social Darwinism evident in any number of anti-regulatory and “free market” Republican policies, in GOP political advertising distortions that pit each of us against the other (the “gay agenda,” “socialized" medicine), and in the GOP’s apparently thorough repudiation of core human decency (honesty, fairness, personal integrity, tolerance, empathy, the sanctity of the vote, etc.).
So my question is this. What happens to the common good when the majority of citizens, already unplugged from social networks and living in a holographic projection of an actual country that is still blessed with real ungenetically engineered food, real know-the-neighbors neighborhoods, real people of different shapes, colors, sizes, and relationships, real dogs and cats, and genuine shared aspirations, are fed, day in and day out, with xenophobia, hyper brown-shirt patriotism, terror, rage, violence, and paranoia?

What happens when these same souls see super-machismo, blind allegiance, and boythink (see my earlier post of this title) as synonymous with patriotism, and getting rich as necessarily respectable? What happens when mass-marketed historical revisionism defines “liberalism” as moral depravity instead of what it actually is—Freedom’s Power, in Paul Starr’s apt title—and hyper Ayn Rand individual-rightsism is touted as the Way, the Truth, and the Light?

What happens when society’s single most important common socializing force, the public school, is either allowed to deteriorate or is replaced by home schooling; when the most productive curriculum in history--traditional liberal arts, with its emphasis on tools for independent thinking—is replaced by pre-packaged, mail-order rightwing propaganda that our kids are force-fed in isolated little pod houses?

What happens when 50% of kids are dropping out of high school—I mean, apart from the inevitable collapse of our competitive market, AKA our economy, and the mass production of a bunch of illiterate little twerps who can shoot a 9mm but can't find China on a map?

What happens when systematic exposure to other cultures, religions, values systems, social and political solutions—once regarded as the mark of culture and a prerequisite for trustworthy political leadership—is labeled as a “war on Christianity”?

What happens when our president replaces a traditional military and its traditional rules of engagement with a Christianist private mercenary militia accountable to nobody because its values are solely self-referential?

Which brings me to “Death Grip,” and what political psychologists believe about why certain people voted for George Bush:

. . . Bush's popularity in the years after September 11 stemmed in part from Americans' need for a charismatic figure who could help them overcome these thoughts [unconscious thoughts of their own deaths, triggered by reminders of 9-11 and the Word Trade Center]. Bush's appeal, the psychologists speculated, lay ‘in his image as a protective shield against death, armed with high-tech weaponry, patriotic rhetoric, and the resolute invocation of doing God's will to rid the world of evil.'

Everything we said about how the Bushies manipulate terror alerts for political advantage wasn't just correct. It was scary correct.

What worries me is that if this thug was that popular in 2004, how much more popular will a grown-up fascist be in 2010, all things considered?