Arizona Apartheid

Do you have any idea how embarrassing it was to be in Europe when Gov. Jan Brewer signed this monstrous new anti-brown-people immigration bill? To have to admit that I live in this place?

We just got home a few hours ago. I need time to read the measure and the commentary, and then I will post about how it feels to live in Johannesburg, Arizona, USA.

Sen. Ted Kennedy, Presente!

In the end, the reason I'm a Democrat and not a Republican--never a Republican--is that the orientation of my party is outward, to ensure the wellbeing of all, and forward, to achieve the promise of the future.

The letter from Senator Edward M. Kennedy referenced by the President in Wednesday night’s address to the Joint Session of Congress.

May 12, 2009

Dear Mr. President,

I wanted to write a few final words to you to express my gratitude for your repeated personal kindnesses to me – and one last time, to salute your leadership in giving our country back its future and its truth.

On a personal level, you and Michelle reached out to Vicki, to our family and me in so many different ways. You helped to make these difficult months a happy time in my life.

You also made it a time of hope for me and for our country.

When I thought of all the years, all the battles, and all the memories of my long public life, I felt confident in these closing days that while I will not be there when it happens, you will be the President who at long last signs into law the health care reform that is the great unfinished business of our society. For me, this cause stretched across decades; it has been disappointed, but never finally defeated. It was the cause of my life. And in the past year, the prospect of victory sustained me-and the work of achieving it summoned my energy and determination.

There will be struggles – there always have been – and they are already underway again. But as we moved forward in these months, I learned that you will not yield to calls to retreat - that you will stay with the cause until it is won. I saw your conviction that the time is now and witnessed your unwavering commitment and understanding that health care is a decisive issue for our future prosperity. But you have also reminded all of us that it concerns more than material things; that what we face is above all a moral issue; that at stake are not just the details of policy, but fundamental principles of social justice and the character of our country.

And so because of your vision and resolve, I came to believe that soon, very soon, affordable health coverage will be available to all, in an America where the state of a family’s health will never again depend on the amount of a family’s wealth. And while I will not see the victory, I was able to look forward and know that we will – yes, we will – fulfill the promise of health care in America as a right and not a privilege.

In closing, let me say again how proud I was to be part of your campaign- and proud as well to play a part in the early months of a new era of high purpose and achievement. I entered public life with a young President who inspired a generation and the world. It gives me great hope that as I leave, another young President inspires another generation and once more on America’s behalf inspires the entire world.

So, I wrote this to thank you one last time as a friend- and to stand with you one last time for change and the America we can become.

At the Denver Convention where you were nominated, I said the dream lives on.

And I finished this letter with unshakable faith that the dream will be fulfilled for this generation, and preserved and enlarged for generations to come.

With deep respect and abiding affection,

[Ted]

A Verifiable National Threat: The GOP

"Republicans know how to run a business, run a government, and deal with national security."

This morning, as I contemplate our country's economic and national security catastrophe--we can't be in economic meltdown without being also being at grave security risk--I'm reminded that those who've run the government, the investment banks and the Big Three automakers into the ditch are Republicans.

I'm reminded, too, that Republicans love to boast about their patriotism. I just wonder where that patriotism was when the boys in the CEO suite made the decisions that trashed our flagship corporations, blew the world's confidence in our market, trashed our national honor, shipped our jobs offshore, and put the stockholder ahead of the nation.

This crisis -- too paltry a word -- didn't sweep upon us suddenly and without warning. For thirty years, Republicans have made major policy decisions that they knew or should have known would bring us to this point. Where was all that patriotism?

If any teenage mom can explain the flaw in the notion that people will self-regulate, nobody can tell me that our leaders weren't fully aware that deregulation would bring bags of loot to a few at the price of disaster for the rest of us. If you haven't, yet, please read The Shock Doctrine. You'll see just how knowing and deliberate it all is--is, and continues to be. Pray, where is that patriotism?

Since even I can predict a market meltdown if there's nothing but air to sell, you can't tell me that our national failure to ensure that we are a producing economy--a nation that actually makes tangible goods of value--wasn't understood to be a guarantee that one day, an economy built on vapors would collapse. So exactly where was all that patriotism?

And now, when Bush is shoveling our tax dollars and those of the next ten generations out the door in secret deals with family banks and massive bailouts to AIG executives who, as we speak, are again lolling poolside at Arizona's most expensive resports, where's the patriotism?

The lousy management of business, banking, government, and economy is more than evident. So where's the patriotism?

And by the way, Department of Justice: Aren't there laws to stop the looting of the national treasury? Aren't there laws that require our public officials to exercise fiduciary accountability? Isn't rank, bald-faced theft an actionable offense?

I heard this morning that if the Big Three automakers go down, three million American jobs will be gone. If that happens, we're in the second Republican-created Great Depression. Therefore, if that's true, we have no choice but to bail them out, even though they themselves created their own demise. So much for Republicans' mantra of personal responsibility. But what gets me is that everyone saw it coming. It makes me furious that we're in this situation, and it makes me crazy that even one American saw fit to vote for even one Republican last week. A-a-astonishing.

I don't know if there's anything that the American people can do to ensure that those responsible are made accountable in a tangible, meaningful way--as in a racketeering conviction or something--and that we are repaid when the economy finally crawls back into the black. But one thing I do know, now forever and indelibly, and I hope you do, too: Republicans suck at business, government, and national security. They're not just bad. They're verifiably dangerous.

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.