Journal29: We Kill For Our Right To Disagree
Completed: 3.17.7
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There are people, now, dying for our right to disagree!
www.newdemocracyproject.org (NDP) New Democracy Project
We will not be taken hostage, by friend or foe;
we must “TAKE BACK” our country from belligerence, & guns!
“Democracy can come undone; it’s not something that’s, necessarily, going to last forever once it’s been established!” – Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy
The religious right (“Christians”) want experimentation-“thinking” on the “unborn” possibly gay/lesbian; any child that may possibly be gay or lesbian (after birth); prior to birth, for “Christians”, it’s alright to practice “experimentation” (or abortion, rather than a gay child) to try to make the children “straight!” How sick the Republican/Religious Right/Fundamentalist/“Christian” are, just to destroy some lives! Of coarse, they don’t like science, or health care, except for their own “purposes!”
3.15.7
G. W. Bush will go down in history as the worst President, ever, PERIOD!
Nobody has done as much damage, & in so many categories, as G. W. Bush!
Political Officials, Government, Education, Healthcare, The social net:
It should all be about protection of the Commons, not about Capitalism!
The Government Officials are attracted to (political) devotion & loyalty (to each other) based on collusion (conspiracy, complicity, agreement, knowledge, consent, approval, involvement) & (previous) high crimes!
Congresspersons are political “animals;” they respond to the “greatest” amount of pressure put upon them; any pressure less than the “greatest” will not move them!
They’re selfish, & masochistic, & sadistic, for their issues/affairs! It isn’t so much about what’s right (compared with what’s wrong), what’s justice, what’s good & fair, what’s balanced, what’s objective, what’s unbiased, & what’s reasonable, sensible, levelheaded, and sound!
Government officials & those in power should be kissing our feet, rather than killing us!
Folks, we are in for a real “carnival,” here!
3.15.7
“To bring the troops home” fails, again!
Bush & Republicans eliminated the rights of black soldiers & voters (the ability to vote), in the 2004 Elections!
The Conservatives believe that “society” is distinctive by “each person working for their own personal gain;” it’s described as “chaos, anarchy, disorder, lawlessness, & rebellion!”
Conservatives live in a selfish “world” where “who ever gets there first ‘wins,’ or is ‘successful,’ & the hell with everyone else!”
We are only a great nation because we encourage & accept dissent, & we encourage & accept open-mindedness! Otherwise, we bring unto ourselves fascism unkind!
In order for a Democracy to survive, we have to have an education, & we have to care about education! Obviously, we don’t care about it! We are so small-minded; we cannot have a successful Democracy in an ignorant environment!
Artist: Lovin' Spoonful Song: Day Dream Album:
Daydream- Lovin' SpoonfulWhat a day for a daydreamWhat a day for a daydreamin' boyAnd I'm lost in a daydreamDreamin' 'bout my bundle of joyAnd even if time ain't really on my sideIt's one of those days for taking a walk outsideI'm blowing the day to take a walk in the sunAnd fall on my face on somebody's new-mown lawnI've been having a sweet dreamI been dreaming since I woke up todayIt's starring me and my sweet thing'Cause she's the one makes me feel this wayAnd even if time is passing me by a lotI couldn't care less about the dues you say I gotTomorrow I'll pay the dues for dropping my loadA pie in the face for being a sleep'n bull doag{Whistle}And you can be sure that if you're feeling rightA daydream will last long into the nightTomorrow at breakfast you may pick up your earsOr you may be daydreaming for a thousand yearsWhat a day for a daydreamCustom made for a daydreaming boyAnd I'm lost in a daydreamDreaming 'bout my bundle of joy{Whistle}
I am so embarrassed of/by our country; we are idiots; we are such dumb asses; we don’t support our troops; we make no sense; we accept all of this bull; we’re so polarized (damn the polarization, division, schism!); we won’t bring the troops home; we love football, & Superbowl Sunday, & television, & “American Idol;” where are we, what are we, why are we, who are we!!!??? Have a “happy meal,” & die!
We don’t have any conception of where things are! We don’t vote, we don’t read, we don’t care! We’re scared, & live by fear! America acts “stupid!” Fuck ourselves!
It’s not a war on terror!
We’re stealing resources; it’s about oil
With this war, It’s increased 7 fold: terrorism (terror as a tactic)
Terror is a tactic!
You can lead people to war in the night; just tell them what to be afraid of, (and) who to be afraid of, and to kill, occupy, & destroy!
Cronies have to be put into place to make sure that there is no Congress, and that there is no Democracy, and that there is no peace, and that there is no justice!
Look at all of the corruption that we have, and it’s only been two months of a Democrat-controlled Congress!
Dictatorship is “one-stop” shopping:
No Voting, No People, No Union’s, No Parliament!
It’s a $1000.00 Pizza, in Manhattan (NYC) !!!
The pizza includes 6 kinds of caviar, & red lobster; yes, it sells for $1000.00!
UNITE & FIGHT AGAINST THE AMERICAN GOVERNMENT, TO SAVE OUR COUNTRY, TO SAVE OUR CONSTITUTION, TO SAVE THE BILL OF RIGHTS, TO SAVE DEMOCRACY!
Prevent all the violence; that’s the Peace Plan!
It’s the Coalition of the Willing to do anything for money; WHORES!!!
This Country was born on (cheap) slave labor, anyway!
SO WHAT if several hundred thousand of us have to die, “it’s the game” of the oil companies, the elected officials, the Corporate-Government, the “business deals;” Chevron’s, Exxon-Mobil’s, Shell’s, British Petroleum’s capital (riches, principal, assets, turnover, returns, income, earnings, revenue, proceeds, yield, takings)!
“Buck up, you volunteered (for the war, for the agenda, to lose your leg or your brain or your arm or your marbles, to die)!”
There’s so much profit in war that they want to do it in Syria, Iran, Somalia, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, Lebanon, and countries, now, too! Who’s oil is it, anyway!!!???
Where is our economy going, & where are we going to end up (in) 2, 3, 4 years from now?
The Clinton Philosophy was:
Open Up The Borders, Let’s Have Free Trade!
And Clinton issued in NAFTA, and American jobs went to Mexico!
If America Doesn’t Stand For Honor & Decency, It’s Nothing To Be Proud Of; No Torture, No Exceptions!
Republicans are, now, saying that if things don’t work out with the war in Iraq & Afghanistan, that we’ll bring the troops home! Of coarse, that wont be “cut & run” because it’s the republicans “idea!” And it wont be until the end of 2008!
3.13.7
“We spent a lot of time talking about ‘very important’ issues!” – G. W. Bush
Politicians do what they do because of political cronyism; they follow through with the “Policy” of the President; the “will” of Bush (or the “will” of Cheney). But Bush, as the President, is responsible! They (in Office) are “public servants!” Public “servants” are “servants” of the people; we (the people) are not servants, or workers, of those in office!
GAY: It’s not a lifestyle (or a choice); it’s a “Life!” Vegetarian (or Lacto-vegetarian) is a lifestyle, & a choice! Vegan is a standard of life (way of life), & a choice!
Our President goes AWOL (absconding, running away, disappearance, abandonment), & no one seems to care, it appears to be! If you’re in the military, & you’re gay, you’re tossed (thrown, pitched, flung, lobbed, chucked, flipped, hurled) out! We ought to be doing that to our President, who shouldn’t be in the Oval Office! Toss the guy out!
The “morality-”gene has been infected, in some way (some how)! It’s a ridiculous way of thinking (it’s a outlandish idea) that we have, that we “can’t control” ourselves; that men are absolutely “fixated” on anal sex!
“Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (!); why did they even think that up?
The military is about “killing” people, and “blowing” things up, & breaking your back/brain in the process!
Somehow it doesn’t bother them; they don’t care about “women in the military,” or “gay’s in the military!”
It’s about an inherent part of our culture; our homophobia, our fear, our hatred, our fixation on anal sex, whatever!
If they’re really that concerned about the sexuality of someone next to them, it’s (really) just about themselves (that they have a difficult time exploring, that they’re not “at home,” & have a difficult time loving/accepting themselves)!
If there’s a woman out on the battlefield, and a man out on the battlefield, who would another man first protect; the man or the woman? The man! Men want to save men; women are viewed differently, if they’re on the battlefield!
The same goes with the “black man & white man” setting! White men will get saved before black men (get saved)!
Men have a tremendous “bond,” sexually, to each other, whether in the firehouse, or in the policehouse, or on the football team, or in the locker room & shower room, or in the college dormitory, or in the boyscouts, or in the military, or on the battlefield, etc. It’s the “homoerotic” atmosphere that men relish, crave, yearn, & long for!
We have a very big “sexuality problem,” here, in America! We have sexual-ignorance, sexual-frustration, sexual-misidentification!
The only way they can get oil out of the ground is to cheat, lie, & steal; they’ve robbed banks (Saving’s & Loan’s)! And, now, they’ve robbed the American Treasury! The Bush Man has no regard for any of us in the world!
Republican Administrations, Republican dominated Congress is the worst thing to ever happen to the military & to the nation, & to the world! They have, always, been bad for the country, for the U.S. Military, for the peoples of every land!
There’s time for fun (watching football games!), & there’s time for protecting your children! Unless, you’ll like (for) your children to be “cannon fodder!”
It’s called “Dying For Freedom!”
That’s what it’s all about:
The Sovereign Nation of the Middle East lies above the 2nd largest supply of oil in the nation! It’s Bush’s Occupation, Bush’s War; Politician’s are (all) full of crap, & full of lies, & full of shit!
It’s protofascism, spiraling into bona fide, big-time fascism!
American troops (driving down the road) shooting, randomly (Iraqi’s), & having so much fun, killing women, men, children, grandmothers, grandfathers, babies, everything in sight; THAT’S “pornography!”
And they’re going to tell us that we’re more “immoral” than they are! Oh, of coarse, they’re the “moral compass,” & we should listen to them! It’s okay for them to torture people, and it’s against their interest, also, that:
we can’t be homosexual, peace-lovers, anti-war, humanist, atheist, agnostic
(whatever we are)!
The Army & Marines is broken, wasted, & an embarrassment!
These military leaders are no more Commanders than I am a Nun!
We need honor & dignity put back into our Military!
America has got to stop being such giant hypocrites, such huge hypocrites!
We don’t want a “draft,” but we want more wars, a perpetual war, “a war on terror!”
There’s no such thing as a “war on terror!”
You can’t have a war on a “tactic!”
There is no winning because there is no war!
We’re doomed to being stunned and stupefied!
There is no winning it, & there is, also, no losing it, because there is no war on terror; there is an “occupation” in Iraq, & in Afghanistan!
“We have “psychos,” serial killer, murderers, assassins, slaughterers, executioners destroyers, eliminators, eradicators, slayers like these, in Office!”
We need to have a conversation, about who we are, what we want, & how we’re going to get it!!!
In the past 25 years, the Conservatives have been doing away with Tarriffs, & (doing away with) Protectionism!
The Corporation’s benefit, greatly (in a big way, seriously)!
1787 – Constitution first written
1789 – Constitution ratified
What is the purpose of Government & the Bush Administration? Does it serve us (the people), or do we serve it? Bush has convinced the citizens of America that we serve & work for them! Fuck Bush!
Fox News is “Bush’s Buddy!”
Fox News is a Political Commentator, just like the radio talk show hosts!
Fox News is not a legitimate News Organization/Party!
Fox News pretends to be a “legitimate ” News Association!
Fox News should not be given the opportunity to moderate the Presidential debates (ie: Political Primary events)!
Is our Economy for Capital, & for Free Enterprise, for Citizen’s, for Society, & for those who play the game?
Or is our Economy for Multi-National Corporation’s?
What is the purpose of the Economy? Does it (the Economy) serve us, or do we serve it (the Economy)?
When Bill Clinton was elected President, in Fall of ’92, he replaced U. S. Attorney’s with Attorney’s he could work with (in the first year of the first term of his Presidency); there was no “scandal” in that!
Under G. W. Bush, 8 Top Federal Prosecuting Attorney’s have been fired for refusing to “help” Republican’s in a tight Election. Bush fired 8 Attorney’s in the third year of his 2nd term; there is a “scandal” over that!
There is no comparison!
3.13.7 (Bush Administration Official) Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is being asked to step down, for his role in firing the 8 Federal Prosecuting Attorney’s! And (although) he admits that it was a “mistake” to terminate the Attorneys, but he stands by the firings, and he says that he won’t step down! OF COARSE!!!
Concerning “hiring & firing” U. S. Federal Prosecutors:
It’s all about character, for Karl Rove to come up & testify!
It’s all about “Scorched Earth Policy!”
And Karl Rove has no character!
Bush says:
“There were mistakes made, and, frankly, I am not happy about it …
the right to dismiss Attorneys, and it’s their right to do so …
they shouldn’t have gone up there to Capitol Hill to complain about this!”
SHOOT, & KILL! SHOOT, & KILL THEM!!!
Fascism is taking over this country at a fast rate! A “Fast” Rate!
Beat Back Fascism, & Tyrannical Dictatorship!
Bush said:
“Mistakes” were made, and I accept (take) responsibility!”
Bush did not say:
I made mistakes!
Government Officials, & Bush Administration Officials, are not any “nobler” than the “purse-snatcher,” (down) on 2nd Ave!
Killing over 600,000 Iraqi’s is moral!
“Loving, accepting, & being tolerant of Homosexuals is immoral!”
There are, purportedly, 65,000 gays & lesbians in the armed forces, at present. Since “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” was put into ruling, back in 1993, some 10,000 gays & lesbians have been discharged from the military by way of (having engaged in) homosexual “immoral acts” (sex), by means of “witch hunt,” through being “outed” (as homosexual), & by “outing” themselves (as homosexual)!
They let mentally disabled, & alcoholics, & druggies, & psychos & physically disabled people into the military, but not gays! It’s “sick, & twisted!”
They’re going to lecture us about “certain kinds of conduct,” & “morality,” that homosexuality is equal to adultery, incest, & “whatever else!” And, meanwhile, they’re killing over 600,000 innocent Iraqi’s, & killing tens of thousands of American soldiers, & they don’t care about Health Care, Veteran’s benefits & healthcare, education in America, National Security, the environment, our rights, etc!!!
We have military troops laying in urine, & feces, & they don’t care; and they’re going to talk about “morals,” with us!
“Money ‘trumps,’ (um…) peace, sometimes!” – G. W. Bush
“I don’t know where (Bin Laden) he is; and I (just) don’t spend that much time on it!” – G. W. Bush
“Don’t come & bother us, because we will come & kill you!” – G. W. Bush
Eliminate, Exterminate, Destroy All Humans!
3.12.7
Haliburton is trying to run for cover; “cut & run;” escaping!
Spear all of this evidence out of the country!
And, in moving to Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates (the financiers of 9.11); let’s have a “reality check!”
They don’t care who they do business with! They can do business with countries we call “enemies!”
They cheated us all; they cheated our soldiers!
They gave spoiled, dirty food to our soldiers, & contaminated water; it’s (just) too moral for them!
They want to do “business” with Iran (“Allaburton”)!
They want to avoid American taxes!
They want to avoid subpoena control!
They don’t have to keep business records, there!
They don’t have to be accountable, there!
Run Out Of The Country! Getting the heck out! They don’t want to go to jail!
And Cheney will continue to make his ($) billions off of Haliburton, whether the Corp. is in Houston, or in Dubai,
Shut Haliburton Down!
The “creepiest” American’s seem to be leaving the U. S!
Michael Jackson prefers a Monarchy, I guess, in Dubai. And, now (also), Haliburton is moving to Dubai!
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http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070312/green
article posted February 28, 2007 (March 12, 2007 issue)
How to Fix Our Democracy
Mark Green
Democracy can come undone. It's not something that's necessarily going to last forever once it's been established. --Sean Wilentz , The Rise of American Democracy
Now that the Democrats' "100 hours agenda" has at least passed the House--and as Bush & Co. head toward retirement--the hard work of restoring our democracy must begin. For while the President frequently talks about exporting democracy, he has systematically undermined it here at home.
Not that this democracy was perfect before Bush had his way with it. If democracy means majority rule, minority rights and the rule of law, then the Constitution contained language that was far from democratic. Only men with property could vote. Blacks counted as three-fifths of a person. The Senate was not elected, and states of varying sizes had the same representation.
Yet despite this flawed start, our system evolved into a stronger democracy. Senators became popularly elected in 1913; women won the vote in 1920 and African-Americans forty-five years later. In the 1930s, '60s and '90s, Democratic administrations showed that a democracy could expand public healthcare, provide for old-age insurance, make products safer and clean the air.
This two-century advance has recently been reversed. A powerful group of new authoritarians in the executive branch, Congress, the clergy and corporations have expressed enormous contempt for the conversation of democracy. Trampling on the values represented by the flag far more than the couple of fools a year who actually burn one, these leaders pose a clear and present danger to our constitutional traditions. This quiet crisis of democracy--lacking the vivid imagery of a Hindenburg, a 9/11 or soldiers being shot in Iraq--has attracted very little attention. But a better democracy requires better policies. With the Democrats finally back on the offensive, it's time to repair the broken machinery of government.
The Democracy Protection Act--developed by the New Democracy Project, the Brennan Center for Justice, Demos and The Nation--can help us recover from Bush's assaults as well as fix structural flaws that have long diminished our democracy and frustrated majority support for progressive reforms. It identifies five key areas calling out for popular reform.
Taking liberties with the law. Apparently, when Bush swore to "faithfully execute the laws," he took that oath literally. In just six years, his Administration has, in violation of the UN Charter, invaded a country, condoned torture, refused to seek warrants for wiretaps, leaked classified information for partisan gain, rounded up thousands of American Muslims without evidence, incarcerated hundreds at Guantánamo without charges, restricted habeas corpus and asserted the power to ignore hundreds of duly enacted laws--all because of an open-ended "war on terror."
For 200 years after Marbury v. Madison, courts had the final say on interpreting laws and the Constitution. Then Bush aides forwarded the "unitary executive" theory, according to which the President may nullify laws after signing them. He has produced 800 "signing statements" so far, asserting that if he thinks a law unwise, he simply won't enforce it--Marbury be damned.
When Bush, defending his flagrant violation of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, argued that the requirement of warrants for wiretaps could be ignored because of his "inherent powers" in wartime, it was too much even for a veteran of President Reagan's Justice Department. "This is a defining moment in the constitutional history of the United States," said Bruce Fein. "The theory invoked by the president...would equally justify mail openings, burglaries, torture or internment camps, all in the name of gathering foreign intelligence."
It took the Supreme Court--seven of whose nine members were appointed by conservative Republican Presidents--to remind Bush in both the 2004 Hamdi and 2006 Hamdan decisions that the rule of law is not a means but an end in itself. "A state of war," wrote Justice Sandra Day O'Connor in Hamdi, "is not a blank check for the President."
The legislative broken branch. Under the recent DeLay/Hastert Congressional regime, Democrats were cut out of bill-writing while corporate lobbyists sat with Hill staff drafting legislation. Congress abdicated its checks-and-balances function entirely, becoming little more than a West Wing of the White House. The House held 140 hours of hearings, for example, into whether President Clinton used his Christmas list for fundraising and twelve into abuses at Abu Ghraib. Speaker Dennis Hastert would only schedule a bill for a vote if it had support from a "majority of the majority" party and would hold a vote open for as many hours as necessary to secure--i.e., arm-twist--a victory. Senator Hillary Clinton was right to call that system "a plantation."
But the crisis of democracy in our legislative branch has hardly abated just because the GOP was trounced in November. Money rather than merit so often determines elections that Congressional incumbents listen more to donors than to voters. Accountability has been further eroded by politicized redistricting, which means fewer and fewer competitive elections. The defeat of twenty incumbent House Republicans (it was five in 2002 and four in 2004) is not serious evidence to the contrary: A twelve-point polling spread favoring Republicans in 1994 led to a fifty-two-seat switch that year, while a larger, fifteen-point gap favoring Democrats produced only a thirty-seat switch in 2006.
There is also a stunning violation of democracy built into the Senate that should be part of any discussion about majority rule. Today California, with a population of 36 million, elects 2 percent of the Senate, while twenty-one other states with the same total population elect 42 percent. It's surely not "one person, one vote" when people living in the smallest states have twenty times the say as people in the largest. The Electoral College is similarly biased toward small, rural, largely red states--something to recall next time a conservative politician rails against a judicial filibuster or affirmative action.
A democracy without voters. By the gauge of electoral turnout, America is in the bottom fifth of democracies in the world. Compare our recent average turnout of 48 percent of eligible voters in presidential years to Cambodia's 90 percent, Western Europe's 77 percent and Eastern Europe's 68 percent. If there were a World Bank index of "democracy poverty," the United States would be a candidate for massive international aid.
In most states, cumbersome rules discourage the vote. Why should voter registration laws presume that thousands of 18-year-olds each find their way to an Election Board, instead of having one Election Board representative go to each high school?
In addition, local political operatives often suppress the vote in discriminatory ways, as we witnessed in Ohio in 2004. Beyond the well-known example of Republican officials intentionally failing to provide sufficient voting machines in low-income Democratic precincts, conservative activists also put up signs in African-American areas of Cuyahoga County telling voters that if anyone in their family voted illegally they could lose custody of their children, that they couldn't vote if they had unpaid utility bills and that Republicans were supposed to vote on Tuesday and Democrats on Wednesday! The intent of these and other crass intimidation tactics was plainly revealed in 2004 by Representative John Pappageorge, a Michigan Republican, when he said, "If we do not suppress the Detroit vote, we're going to have a tough time in this election cycle."
One way most states, especially in the Old South, suppress the low-income vote legally is through felony disenfranchisement laws. Even though they've "paid their debt to society," ex-cons in thirty-five states are deprived of the right to vote, which means, for example, that one in six black men in Alabama is excluded. Seven million Americans--or one in thirty-two--are currently behind bars, on parole or on probation, and they are disproportionately African-American and Latino. Felony disenfranchisement laws are just another way to spell Jim Crow.
Nor has the controversy over counting votes ended with those chads in Florida. While the 2002 Help America Vote Act properly required that states move to electronic voting (something Brazil figured out how to do a decade ago), many of the electronic machines used last November provided no paper trail, a failure whose repercussions are now on view in the continuing imbroglio over the Sarasota, Florida, Congressional seat. And as the Brennan Center for Justice has documented, most electronic machines are easily hackable. Will we find out in twenty years that a handful of Republican operatives re-elected W. by rigging some software in Ohio?
Secrecy and democracy. Remember that early aphorism of the computer age, "Garbage in, garbage out"? Just as machines fail when fed corrupt information, democracy fails when important decisions are based on bad data or no data.
The good people of Salem, Massachusetts, were sure that certain women were possessed, and many Americans were convinced of the need to invade Iraq because George W. Bush downplayed the risks and hinted that Saddam played a role in 9/11. When ideology trumps facts, the results are often disastrous.
To insure a healthy democracy with plenty of well-reasoned debate, then, secrets should be kept to a minimum. Yet during the hot and cold wars of the twentieth century, as the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan pointed out, a "culture of secrecy" took root in Washington. And the Bush Administration has deepened this culture, skillfully capitalizing on the calamity of 9/11 to hide information in the name of "national security" and concentrate authority in the "war President." Patrick Leahy, chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, says, "Of the six administrations I've worked with, this is the most secretive."
The economics of democracy. Economist Jeff Madrick, writing in 2003, asked some difficult questions as part of a lengthy analysis of the US economy: "Where does income and wealth inequality start to impinge on civil and political rights and on America's long commitment to equality of economic opportunity? Where does it both reflect a failure of democracy and contribute to its weakening?" When the head of ExxonMobil recently earned $368 million in a year--more per hour than his workers earn per year--it's not hard to see why Madrick concluded, "There is a good argument to be made that we are already there." The rich have become the super-rich, and middle-class families feel as if they're running up a down escalator. Even a snapshot of the data is convincing: In 1980 the wealthiest 5 percent of US households earned 16.5 percent of all income; in 1990 it was 18.5 percent; in 2000, 22.1 percent. Meanwhile, real median income for men has fallen for five straight years. The number of poor has increased from 31 million to 37 million since 2000, and the number without health insurance rose from 41 million to 47 million.
Not since the Gilded Age, when wealthy businessmen effectively appointed senators, has big business held such sway in Washington. Scores of laws and policies implemented by Bush 43--cutting job-training programs, eroding the minimum wage, slashing taxes on the rich and social programs for the poor--have hastened the tilt from labor to capital. George Bush has redistributed wealth far more than George McGovern was ever accused of--except up, not down.
Or as Louis Brandeis wrote: "We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both."
Emergencies are easy ways to justify extremism, as radicals from Father Coughlin to Joe McCarthy have taught us. But today America is witnessing an authoritarian impulse from those at the highest levels of government.
When questioned two years ago about his failed policy in Iraq, Bush famously said, "We had an accountability moment and that's called the 2004 elections," casually dismissing the checks and balances built into our government for the 1,460 days between presidential elections. Last fall, former Speaker Newt Gingrich suggested that we suspend parts of the First Amendment during the "war on terrorism." In January White House press secretary Tony Snow said the President "has the ability to exercise his own authority if he thinks Congress has voted the wrong way." And now Bush and Cheney are implying that they can attack Iran at will, without any prior Congressional authorization, in clear violation of the Constitution and statutory law. We are edging toward what James Madison warned of, in a line cited in the Hamdan decision: "The accumulation of all powers legislative, executive and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny."
So just as the last half of the twentieth century saw a quadrupling of the number of democracies around the globe--just as, in the view of historian John Lewis Gaddis, "the world came closer than ever before to reaching a consensus...that only democracy confers legitimacy"--the world's oldest democracy is being systematically undermined by radical reactionaries. We are another Bush/Cheney White House, another DeLay Congress, another Scalia on the Court away from permanently losing our democracy. In six short years, George W. Bush has not only blown a large inherited federal surplus, he has also squandered an inheritance of centuries of democracy progress. That's not alarmist. It's merely descriptive of the quiet crisis our democracy now faces.
At a December colloquium on this subject in New York City, Bill Moyers (in a speech published in the January 22 Nation) observed that what America needs is not just a "must do" list from liberals but "a different story," one with the power to inspire us and challenge the prevailing conservative narrative of private = good, public = bad. That story is democracy. While theocrats and plutocrats pose as populists, it's essential that progressive patriots--for what can be more patriotic than democracy?--erect stronger levees to withstand the oceans of money, lobbyists and lawless officials threatening to drown America's constitutional traditions. For only then can our government represent the large majorities in favor of universal healthcare, stricter gun control, withdrawal from Iraq and more.
The Democracy Protection Act is offered up to officials, activists and citizens alike in the spirit of Walt Whitman, who wrote that "America is always becoming."
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http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070122/moyers
article posted January 5, 2007 (January 22, 2007 issue)
For America's Sake
Bill Moyers
The following is an adaptation of remarks made by Bill Moyers to a December 12 gathering in New York sponsored by The Nation, Demos, the Brennan Center for Justice and the New Democracy Project. View a video excerpt here. --The Editors
You could not have chosen a better time to gather. Voters have provided a respite from a right-wing radicalism predicated on the philosophy that extremism in the pursuit of virtue is no vice. It seems only yesterday that the Trojan horse of conservatism was hauled into Washington to disgorge Newt Gingrich, Tom DeLay, Ralph Reed, Grover Norquist and their hearty band of ravenous predators masquerading as a political party of small government, fiscal restraint and moral piety and promising "to restore accountability to Congress...[and] make us all proud again of the way free people govern themselves."
Well, the long night of the junta is over, and Democrats are ebullient as they prepare to take charge of the multitrillion-dollar influence racket that we used to call the US Congress. Let them rejoice while they can, as long as they remember that while they ran some good campaigns, they have arrived at this moment mainly because George W. Bush lost a war most people have come to believe should never have been fought in the first place. Let them remember, too, in this interim of sweet anticipation, that although they are reveling in the ruins of a Republican reign brought down by stupendous scandals, their own closet is stocked with skeletons from an era when they were routed from office following Abscam bribes and savings and loan swindles that plucked the pockets and purses of hard-working, tax-paying Americans.
As they rejoice, Democrats would be wise to be mindful of Shakespeare's counsel, "'Tis more by fortune...than by merit." For they were delivered from the wilderness not by their own goodness and purity but by the grace of K Street corruption, DeLay Inc.'s duplicity, the pitiless exploitation of Terri Schiavo, the disgrace of Mark Foley and a shameful partisan cover-up, the shamelessness of Jack Abramoff and a partisan conspiracy, and neocon arrogance and amorality (yes, amoral: Apparently there is no end to the number of bodies Bill Kristol and Richard Perle are prepared to watch pile up on behalf of illusions that can't stand the test of reality even one Beltway block from the think tanks where they are hatched). The Democrats couldn't have been more favored by the gods if they had actually believed in one!
But whatever one might say about the election, the real story is one that our political and media elites are loath to acknowledge or address. I am not speaking of the lengthy list of priorities that progressives and liberals of every stripe are eager to put on the table now that Democrats hold the cards in Congress. Just the other day a message popped up on my computer from a progressive advocate whose work I greatly admire. Committed to movement-building from the ground up, he has results to show for his labors. His request was simple: "With changes in Congress and at our state capitol, we want your input on what top issues our lawmakers should tackle. Click here to submit your top priority."
I clicked. Sure enough, up came a list of thirty-four issues--an impressive list that began with "African-American" and ran alphabetically through "energy" and "higher education" to "guns," "transportation," "women's issues" and "workers' rights." It wasn't a list to be dismissed, by any means, for it came from an unrequited thirst for action after a long season of malignant opposition to every item on the agenda. I understand the mindset. Here's a fellow who values allies and appreciates what it takes to build coalitions; who knows that although our interests as citizens vary, each one is an artery to the heart that pumps life through the body politic, and each is important to the health of democracy. This is an activist who knows political success is the sum of many parts.
But America needs something more right now than a "must-do" list from liberals and progressives. America needs a different story. The very morning I read the message from the progressive activist, the New York Times reported on Carol Ann Reyes. Carol Ann Reyes is 63. She lives in Los Angeles, suffers from dementia and is homeless. Somehow she made her way to a hospital with serious, untreated needs. No details were provided as to what happened to her there, except that the hospital--which is part of Kaiser Permanente, the largest HMO in the country--called a cab and sent her back to skid row. True, they phoned ahead to workers at a rescue shelter to let them know she was coming. But some hours later a surveillance camera picked her up "wandering around the streets in a hospital gown and slippers." Dumped in America.
Here is the real political story, the one most politicians won't even acknowledge: the reality of the anonymous, disquieting daily struggle of ordinary people, including the most marginalized and vulnerable Americans but also young workers and elders and parents, families and communities, searching for dignity and fairness against long odds in a cruel market world.
Everywhere you turn you'll find people who believe they have been written out of the story. Everywhere you turn there's a sense of insecurity grounded in a gnawing fear that freedom in America has come to mean the freedom of the rich to get richer even as millions of Americans are dumped from the Dream. So let me say what I think up front: The leaders and thinkers and activists who honestly tell that story and speak passionately of the moral and religious values it puts in play will be the first political generation since the New Deal to win power back for the people.
There's no mistaking that America is ready for change. One of our leading analysts of public opinion, Daniel Yankelovich, reports that a majority want social cohesion and common ground based on pragmatism and compromise, patriotism and diversity. But because of the great disparities in wealth, the "shining city on the hill" has become a gated community whose privileged occupants, surrounded by a moat of money and protected by a political system seduced with cash into subservience, are removed from the common life of the country. The wreckage of this abdication by elites is all around us.
Corporations are shredding the social compact, pensions are disappearing, median incomes are flattening and healthcare costs are soaring. In many ways, the average household is generally worse off today than it was thirty years ago, and the public sector that was a support system and safety net for millions of Americans across three generations is in tatters. For a time, stagnating wages were somewhat offset by more work and more personal debt. Both political parties craftily refashioned those major renovations of the average household as the new standard, shielding employers from responsibility for anything Wall Street didn't care about. Now, however, the more acute major risks workers have been forced to bear as employers reduce their health and retirement costs--on orders from Wall Street--have made it clear that our fortunes are being reversed. Polls show that a majority of US workers now believe their children will be worse off than they are. In one recent survey, only 14 percent of workers said that they have obtained the American Dream.
It is hard to believe that less than four decades ago a key architect of the antipoverty program, Robert Lampman, could argue that the "recent history of Western nations reveals an increasingly widespread adoption of the idea that substantial equality of social and economic conditions among individuals is a good thing." Economists call that postwar era "the Great Compression." Poverty and inequality had declined dramatically for the first time in our history. Here, as Paul Krugman recently recounted, is how Time's report on the national outlook in 1953 summed it up: "Even in the smallest towns and most isolated areas, the U.S. is wearing a very prosperous, middle-class suit of clothes, and an attitude of relaxation and confidence. People are not growing wealthy, but more of them than ever before are getting along." African-Americans were still written out of the story, but that was changing, too, as heroic resistance emerged across the South to awaken our national conscience. Within a decade, thanks to the civil rights movement and President Johnson, the racial cast of federal policy--including some New Deal programs--was aggressively repudiated, and shared prosperity began to breach the color line.
To this day I remember John F. Kennedy's landmark speech at the Yale commencement in 1962. Echoing Daniel Bell's cold war classic The End of Ideology, JFK proclaimed the triumph of "practical management of a modern economy" over the "grand warfare of rival ideologies." The problem with this--and still a major problem today--is that the purported ideological cease-fire ended only a few years later. But the Democrats never re-armed, and they kept pinning all their hopes on economic growth, which by its very nature is valueless and cannot alone provide answers to social and moral questions that arise in the face of resurgent crisis. While "practical management of a modern economy" had a kind of surrogate legitimacy as long as it worked, when it no longer worked, the nation faced a paralyzing moral void in deciding how the burdens should be borne. Well-organized conservative forces, firing on all ideological pistons, rushed to fill this void with a story corporate America wanted us to hear. Inspired by bumper-sticker abstractions of Milton Friedman's ideas, propelled by cascades of cash from corporate chieftans like Coors and Koch and "Neutron" Jack Welch, fortified by the pious prescriptions of fundamentalist political preachers like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, the conservative armies marched on Washington. And they succeeded brilliantly.
When Ronald Reagan addressed the Republican National Convention in 1980, he a told a simple story, one that had great impact. "The major issue of this campaign is the direct political, personal and moral responsibility of Democratic Party leadership--in the White House and in Congress--for this unprecedented calamity which has befallen us." He declared, "I will not stand by and watch this great country destroy itself." It was a speech of bold contrasts, of good private interest versus bad government, of course. More important, it personified these two forces in a larger narrative of freedom, reaching back across the Great Depression, the Civil War and the American Revolution, all the way back to the Mayflower Compact. It so dazzled and demoralized Democrats they could not muster a response to the moral abandonment and social costs that came with the Reagan revolution.
We too have a story of freedom to tell, and it too reaches back across the Great Depression, the Civil War and the American Revolution, all the way back to the Mayflower Compact. It's a story with clear and certain foundations, like Reagan's, but also a tumultuous and sometimes violent history of betrayal that he and other conservatives consistently and conveniently ignore.
Reagan's story of freedom superficially alludes to the Founding Fathers, but its substance comes from the Gilded Age, devised by apologists for the robber barons. It is posed abstractly as the freedom of the individual from government control--a Jeffersonian ideal at the root of our Bill of Rights, to be sure. But what it meant in politics a century later, and still means today, is the freedom to accumulate wealth without social or democratic responsibilities and the license to buy the political system right out from under everyone else, so that democracy no longer has the ability to hold capitalism accountable for the good of the whole.
And that is not how freedom was understood when our country was founded. At the heart of our experience as a nation is the proposition that each one of us has a right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." As flawed in its reach as it was brilliant in its inspiration for times to come, that proposition carries an inherent imperative: "inasmuch as the members of a liberal society have a right to basic requirements of human development such as education and a minimum standard of security, they have obligations to each other, mutually and through their government, to ensure that conditions exist enabling every person to have the opportunity for success in life."
The quote comes directly from Paul Starr, one of our most formidable public thinkers, whose forthcoming book, Freedom's Power: The True Force of Liberalism, is a profound and stirring call for liberals to reclaim the idea of America's greatness as their own. Starr's book is one of three new books that in a just world would be on every desk in the House and Senate when Congress convenes again.
John Schwarz, in Freedom Reclaimed: Rediscovering the American Vision, rescues the idea of freedom from market cultists whose "particular idea of freedom...has taken us down a terribly mistaken road" toward a political order where "government ends up servicing the powerful and taking from everyone else." The free-market view "cannot provide us with a philosophy we find compelling or meaningful," Schwarz writes. Nor does it assure the availability of economic opportunity "that is truly adequate to each individual and the status of full legal as well as political equality." Yet since the late nineteenth century it has been used to shield private power from democratic accountability, in no small part because conservative rhetoric has succeeded in denigrating government even as conservative politicians plunder it.
But government, Schwarz reminds us, "is not simply the way we express ourselves collectively but also often the only way we preserve our freedom from private power and its incursions." That is one reason the notion that every person has a right to meaningful opportunity "has assumed the position of a moral bottom line in the nation's popular culture ever since the beginning." Freedom, he says, is "considerably more than a private value." It is essentially a social idea, which explains why the worship of the free market "fails as a compelling idea in terms of the moral reasoning of freedom itself." Let's get back to basics, is Schwarz's message. Let's recapture our story.
Norton Garfinkle picks up on both Schwarz and Starr in The American Dream vs. the Gospel of Wealth, as he describes how America became the first nation on earth to offer an economic vision of opportunity for even the humblest beginner to advance, and then moved, in fits and starts--but always irrepressibly--to the invocation of positive government as the means to further that vision through politics. No one understood this more clearly, Garfinkle writes, than Abraham Lincoln, who called on the federal government to save the Union. He turned to large government expenditures for internal improvements--canals, bridges and railroads. He supported a strong national bank to stabilize the currency. He provided the first major federal funding for education, with the creation of land grant colleges. And he kept close to his heart an abiding concern for the fate of ordinary people, especially the ordinary worker but also the widow and orphan. Our greatest President kept his eye on the sparrow. He believed government should be not just "of the people" and "by the people" but "for the people." Including, we can imagine, Carol Ann Reyes.
The great leaders of our tradition--Jefferson, Lincoln and the two Roosevelts--understood the power of our story. In my time it was FDR, who exposed the false freedom of the aristocratic narrative. He made the simple but obvious point that where once political royalists stalked the land, now economic royalists owned everything standing. Mindful of Plutarch's warning that "an imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics," Roosevelt famously told America, in 1936, that "the average man once more confronts the problem that faced the Minute Man." He gathered together the remnants of the great reform movements of the Progressive Age--including those of his late-blooming cousin, Teddy--into a singular political cause that would be ratified again and again by people who categorically rejected the laissez-faire anarchy that had produced destructive, unfettered and ungovernable power. Now came collective bargaining and workplace rules, cash assistance for poor children, Social Security, the GI Bill, home mortgage subsidies, progressive taxation--democratic instruments that checked economic tyranny and helped secure America's great middle class. And these were only the beginning. The Marshall Plan, the civil rights revolution, reaching the moon, a huge leap in life expectancy--every one of these great outward achievements of the last century grew from shared goals and collaboration in the public interest.
So it is that contrary to what we have heard rhetorically for a generation now, the individualist, greed-driven, free-market ideology is at odds with our history and with what most Americans really care about. More and more people agree that growing inequality is bad for the country, that corporations have too much power, that money in politics is corrupting democracy and that working families and poor communities need and deserve help when the market system fails to generate shared prosperity. Indeed, the American public is committed to a set of values that almost perfectly contradicts the conservative agenda that has dominated politics for a generation now.
The question, then, is not about changing people; it's about reaching people. I'm not speaking simply of better information, a sharper and clearer factual presentation to disperse the thick fogs generated by today's spin machines. Of course, we always need stronger empirical arguments to back up our case. It would certainly help if at least as many people who believe, say, in a "literal devil" or that God sent George W. Bush to the White House also knew that the top 1 percent of households now have more wealth than the bottom 90 percent combined. Yes, people need more information than they get from the media conglomerates with their obsession for nonsense, violence and pap. And we need, as we keep hearing, "new ideas." But we are at an extraordinary moment. The conservative movement stands intellectually and morally bankrupt while Democrats talk about a "new direction" without convincing us they know the difference between a weather vane and a compass. The right story will set our course for a generation to come.
Some stories doom us. In Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, Jared Diamond tells of the Viking colony that disappeared in the fifteenth century. The settlers had scratched a living on the sparse coast of Greenland for years, until they encountered a series of harsh winters. Their livestock, the staple of their diet, began to die off. Although the nearby waters teemed with haddock and cod, the colony's mythology prohibited the eating of fish. When their supply of hay ran out during a last terrible winter, the colony was finished. They had been doomed by their story.
Here in the first decade of the twenty-first century the story that becomes America's dominant narrative will shape our collective imagination and hence our politics. In the searching of our souls demanded by this challenge, those of us in this room and kindred spirits across the nation must confront the most fundamental progressive failure of the current era: the failure to embrace a moral vision of America based on the transcendent faith that human beings are more than the sum of their material appetites, our country is more than an economic machine, and freedom is not license but responsibility--the gift we have received and the legacy we must bequeath.
In our brief sojourn here we are on a great journey. For those who came before us and for those who follow, our moral, political and religious duty is to make sure that this nation, which was conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that we are all created equal, is in good hands on our watch.
One story would return America to the days of radical laissez-faire, when there was no social contract and the strong took what they could and the weak were left to forage. The other story joins the memory of struggles that have been waged with the possibility of victories yet to be won, including healthcare for every American and a living wage for every worker. Like the mustard seed to which Jesus compared the Kingdom of God, nurtured from small beginnings in a soil thirsty for new roots, our story has been a long time unfolding. It reminds us that the freedoms and rights we treasure were not sent from heaven and did not grow on trees. They were, as John Powers has written, "born of centuries of struggle by untold millions who fought and bled and died to assure that the government can't just walk into our bedrooms and read our mail, to protect ordinary people from being overrun by massive corporations, to win a safety net against the often-cruel workings of the market, to guarantee that businessmen couldn't compel workers to work more than forty hours a week without extra compensation, to make us free to criticize our government without having our patriotism impugned, and to make sure that our leaders are answerable to the people when they choose to send our soldiers into war." The eight-hour day, the minimum wage, the conservation of natural resources, free trade unions, old-age pensions, clean air and water, safe food--all these began with citizens and won the endorsement of the political class only after long struggles and bitter attacks. Democracy works when people claim it as their own.
It is only rarely remembered that the definition of democracy immortalized by Lincoln in the Gettysburg Address had been inspired by Theodore Parker, the abolitionist prophet. Driven from his pulpit, Parker said, "I will go about and preach and lecture in the city and glen, by the roadside and field-side, and wherever men and women may be found." He became the Hound of Freedom and helped to change America through the power of the word. We have a story of equal power. It is that the promise of America leaves no one out. Go now, and tell it on the mountains. From the rooftops, tell it. From your laptops, tell it. From the street corners and from Starbucks, from delis and from diners, tell it. From the workplace and the bookstore, tell it. On campus and at the mall, tell it. Tell it at the synagogue, sanctuary and mosque. Tell it where you can, when you can and while you can--to every candidate for office, to every talk-show host and pundit, to corporate executives and schoolchildren. Tell it--for America's sake.
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A Little Bit of Trivia: There are 16,700 restaurants in Manhattan (NYC)!
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Daydream lyricsDaydream
- Lovin' Spoonful
What a day for a daydream
What a day for a daydreamin' boy
And I'm lost in a daydream
Dreamin' 'bout my bundle of joy
And even if time ain't really on my side
It's one of those days for taking a walk outside
I'm blowing the day to take a walk in the sun
And fall on my face on somebody's new-mown lawn
I've been having a sweet dream
I been dreaming since I woke up today
It's starring me and my sweet thing
'Cause she's the one makes me feel this way
And even if time is passing me by a lot
I couldn't care less about the dues you say I got
Tomorrow I'll pay the dues for dropping my load
A pie in the face for being a sleep'n bull doag
{Whistle}
And you can be sure that if you're feeling right
A daydream will last long into the night
Tomorrow at breakfast you may pick up your ears
Or you may be daydreaming for a thousand years
What a day for a daydream
Custom made for a daydreaming boy
And I'm lost in a daydream
Dreaming 'bout my bundle of joy
{Whistle}
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www.changingdiabetes.us.com
Karl Rove, otherwise known as Turd Blossom
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