THE BAILOUT BILL FAILS! THE PEOPLE WIN!

They’re calling it “Black Monday,” but this historic day, September 29, 2008, represents a bright victory for the People. The leadership of both the Republican and Democratic Parties ¾ particularly the latter ¾ with Bush right behind them, tried to ram the Wall Street Charlatans Relief Act into law this afternoon. But a funny thing happened. The People suddenly woke up and at long last realized they’re in a class war. They shouted “NO” with one voice ¾ and I mean that literally: according to one report I heard, emails and phone calls coming in to legislators were running 100 to 1 against the bailout bill as it stands. Whether any such bill can pass the Congress now is open to question. But the People certainly will not tolerate a measure that rescues the arrogant masters of the financial world ¾ who contribute little or nothing of value to the real world ¾ yet does nothing for ordinary folk and their increasingly terrifying problems.

One of the few positive provisions originally proposed for the bill ¾ but later rejected ¾ was one that gave bankruptcy judges the right to alter the terms of mortgages for homeowners facing foreclosure. And just this morning, in this interview, by Amy Goodman of Democracy Now of Congressman Dennis Kucinich, he revealed that he had been informed that his party’s presidential candidate, Barack Obama, during negotiations on the bailout at the White House last week, had specifically requested that the bankruptcy proposal mentioned above be excluded from the bill. So not only was Obama an eyewitness to this screwing of the average homeowner, he was actively complicit in the process.

In fact, both Obama and McCain (as well as Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank and the whole Democratic leadership) were playing it dumb today, casting blame on their opponents for the death of the bill. If they had any real political savvy, they would take credit for the bill’s failure, so hateful is that piece of legislation to most Americans!

I will have more to talk about on this in a future posting. Suffice it to say that this was a very bad day for Wall Street, which means that it was a very good day for the rest of us.

Bailout Madness!

According to this story in The New York Times, Washington was in a state of utter chaos on Thursday ¾ or, as Sean O’Casey would have said, “a state o’ chassis” ¾ over the proposed bailout, using taxpayer money, of the thieves and frauds of Wall Street. Actually the Times piece reads more like a Monty Python skit (see my post on Michael Palin, below), so full of demented dialogue and comic bits of business was the account (given by an eyewitness and several people briefed later) of the negotiations that went on in the White House, as both Democrats and Republicans tried to make up their minds how best to steal the people’s hard-earned cash. The POTUS, George W. Bush, was actually quoted as saying, “If money isn’t loosened up, this sucker could go down.” Apparently, the “sucker” to which Bush was referring was the American financial system as a whole, not John Q. Citizen… but I suppose that interpretation might also make sense.

Who put a stop to what had originally been planned as the biggest, fastest swindle on record? Was it Barack Obama or House Speaker Nancy Pelosi who declared that this act of highway robbery would not stand? Of course not. Exactly as occurred during the failed Supreme Court nomination of Harriet Myers, it was Bush’s own party that balked ¾ to the Democrats’ shame. No less a right-wing bigwig than House GOP Leader John Boehner came out publicly against the bailout, putting forth his own cockamamie plan that involved the use of government-backed insurance to purchase the failed banks’ mortgage-based securities. According to the article, for several days conservative Republicans on the Hill had fretted that a government intervention of such magnitude would serve as “a step down the path to socialism.” (If only…)

Meanwhile, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson (who, contrary to popular opinion, is unrelated to the late comedian and presidential candidate Pat Paulsen) made a desperate attempt to save his $700 billion bailout plan. His zeal was understandable, since the proposal, which eliminates all possibility of Congressional or judicial oversight, would have made the Secretary, whose lax supervision of the markets helped bring about the mess in the first place, a kind of tsar of the American economy. In the heat of the moment, Paulson in the Roosevelt Room actually got down on one knee before Pelosi, not to propose marriage but to beg her not to “blow it all up” by withdrawing her support for the bailout. To this, Pelosi was reported to have quipped, “I didn’t know you were Catholic.” (I’m not making this stuff up!) Then she added, all too accurately: “It’s not me blowing this up, it’s the Republicans.”

The real comic relief, though, was supplied by John McCain. Big John suddenly decided that he was so indispensable to the process that he suspended his campaign ¾ canceling and then uncanceling his scheduled appearance at Friday’s televised debate with Obama, with the McCain campaign stupidly declaring victory in an ad in the Wall Street Journal before the debate even took place ¾ and speeded to Washington to save the day, like a political superhero. When he got to the Big Meeting in the Cabinet Room, however, he had practically nothing to say, which is not surprising, as he apparently did not bother to read Secretary Paulson’s plan, which is all of three pages long and widely published on the Internet. Obama ¾ the smart imperialist to McCain’s buffoonish one ¾ reportedly “peppered” Paulson with questions without committing himself, and after this seasoning lambasted his opponent at a news conference for kibitzing where he wasn’t wanted. What is truly revolting, however, is what the Times article revealed in passing: that (if the Republican leadership is to be believed) the Democrats cynically tried and failed to “jam through” an agreement on Thursday morning ¾ one that would have cost every man, woman, teenager and toddler in America over $2000 ¾ just to deny McCain the opportunity to participate in the negotiations later on and possibly gain some political capital. 

The Times itself is clearly in favor of the biggest possible bailout as quickly as possible, ostensibly to avert a recession ¾ I thought we were already in one ¾ without taking into account such perils as inflation, or even hyperinflation. (That $700 billion has to come from somewhere, and since no sane politician is going to advocate the raising of that much money in new taxes, the cash would have to be produced by the government simply printing more money, devaluing the dollar yet further.) The prospect of America repeating the history of Germany in the 1920s, when ordinary people had to trundle their wildly inflated wages home in wheelbarrows, has now become by no means an improbable one. By throwing a monkey wrench into the bipartisan deal, Representative Boehner may have committed an inadvertently patriotic act.

By contrast, Green Party presidential candidate Cynthia McKinney has come up with an eminently reasonable proposal, one that favors ordinary Americans, not the masters of Wall Street. In her essay, Seize the Time, McKinney proposed the following list of steps (by no means exhaustive) to deal with the crisis:

1. Enactment of a foreclosure moratorium now before the next phase of ARM interest rate increases take effect;
2. Elimination of all ARM mortgages and their renegotiation into 30- or 40-year loans;
3. Establishment of new mortgage lending practices to end predatory and discriminatory practices;
4. Establishment of criteria and construction goals for affordable housing;
5. Redefinition of credit and regulation of the credit industry so that discriminatory practices are completely eliminated;
6. Full funding for initiatives that eliminate racial and ethnic disparities in home ownership;
7. Recognition of shelter as a right according to the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, to which the U.S. is a signatory, so that no one sleeps on U.S. streets;
8. Full funding of a fund designed to cushion the job loss and provide for retraining of those at the bottom of the income scale as the economy transitions;
9. Close all tax loopholes and repeal of the Bush tax cuts for the top 1% of income earners;
10. Fairly tax corporations, denying federal subsidies to those who relocate jobs overseas; repeal NAFTA.

So progressives have a critical choice this year. They will have to decide whether they want to give their vote and support to Cynthia McKinney, a candidate with fresh ideas who is not beholden to the money men (and if McKinney receives just five percent of the total vote on Election Day, the Green Party would then become a major force in U.S. politics), or an intelligent yet empty agent of the corporate state like Barack Obama. If they don’t choose correctly, the “sucker” may indeed “go down.”

Thank you, Doctor Paul!

We all know the old dance: it’s a very ancient and corrupt American custom. In an election year, two candidates of the same mainstream party bitterly contest the primaries. Each tries to make the case that to vote for the other guy or gal would be tantamount to destroying the country. To attain the Holy Grail of the party’s nomination, each candidate puts her/his opponent through a process seemingly designed not only to make him or her lose, but to sully that candidate’s professional and personal reputation beyond repair. And when the dust settles and one candidate emerges victorious, the defeated candidate suddenly forgets that the opponent is Evil Incarnate and for the sake of something called Party Unity casts aside all pretense of consistency, integrity and self-respect, shifting the axis of evil to the standard bearer of the other political party and embracing the new nominee and former enemy as a long lost buddy, with whom he/she has never had any ideological differences worth talking about (this last part, sadly, is almost always true).

But one major party candidate this year refused to perform this insane dance. Texas Congressman Ron Paul fought hard against John McCain during the Republican primaries, disagreed with him on practically every issue, and was ultimately buried by the McCain juggernaut. But he refused to play the game. He was much too principled, too committed to his core beliefs — of which McCain is the very antithesis — to compromise. So when the call came from his fellow Texan, Phil Gramm (by the way, isn’t Gramm not supposed to be working for the McCain campaign anymore?), with the message, “You need to endorse John McCain,” Ron Paul politely but firmly said No.

As the good doctor later described it, the demand was not quite as bullying as it may sound. Knowing well his colleague’s stubbornness, Gramm tried to make the argument in terms of his, Paul’s, self-interest. McCain, Gramm claimed, was going to cut taxes more than Obama, so logically the Republican candidate would do “less harm” than the Democratic one. But the congressman knew that to cave in now to GOP pressure would be to betray everything he’d worked and voted for in his career. Besides, as he would later remark, “I don’t like the idea of getting two or three million people angry at me.” The decision was not a difficult one.

But his next decision may well have been. Instead of fading into the night as the glare of the media spotlight moved on to McBama, Dr. Paul chose to be a beacon of true democracy. No longer a candidate himself, Paul called a press conference at the National Press Club on September 10th to bring attention to third-party candidates and thus shine a light not only on all the crucial issues that the two frontrunners refuse to tackle, but on the extent to which our democracy itself has been snuffed out by the single corporate party with two heads and its media lapdogs.

He invited to the press conference Independent candidate Ralph Nader, Constitution Party candidate Chuck Baldwin, Libertarian candidate Bob Barr (who for reasons of his own declined to appear) and my own candidate, Cynthia McKinney of the Green Party. Amazingly, the three politicians who showed up and Dr. Paul — despite their numerous and strong ideological differences — agreed on a four-point statement of principles, opposing:

1. A foreign policy that commits the US to disastrous foreign wars like the one in Iraq, which destroys lives and depletes our treasury;
2. The erosion of our constitutionally-protected civil liberties, including the Patriot Act, the approval of torture and the FISA bill;
3. The runaway growth of the national debt, which creates an intolerable burden for future generations; and
4. Corporate bailouts and the untrammeled power of the Federal Reserve system.  

Dr. Paul in his presentation was gracious, modest, eminently reasonable. He deplored the “lesser of two evils” psychology which leads citizens to vote for people of whom they do not approve. He urged people not to waste their vote on politicians and policies in which they don’t believe. He also deplored the mainstream media and its obsession with “lipstickgate” and other nonsensical “issues.”

Then the candidates each got up to speak.  Though they are united in their conviction that the system must be changed, each presented a different point-of-view. My candidate, Cynthia McKinney, reminded people of the Four Pillars of the Green Party: Peace, Social Justice, Ecological Wisdom and Grassroots Democracy. She remarked that when she left the Democratic Party, she “declared [her] independence” from an unjust system, a “politics of conformity and control.” She added that we engage in politics ”so we can have power over public policy.” Politics is, after all, the “authoritative allocation of values in a society,” and that only a tiny minority of Americans now have their values affirmed in this society, wheras most of us have our values affirmed “practically none of the time.” She urged voters to “declare [their] independence” from the current system.   

It must be said in truth that I disagree, and in some cases strongly disagree, with some of Ron Paul’s views. But I cannot help but admire his patriotism and integrity, as well as a virtue almost unheard of in politicians today: courage. Thank you, Dr. Paul!

Conference on Prosecuting High-Level American War Criminals

In Andover, Massachusetts on the weekend of September 13-14, there will be a conference exploring means to obtain prosecutions of Bush and high-level members of his administration for war crimes. It is being organized by Lawrence Velvel, the Dean of the Massachusetts School of Law. Though not the first such event (the World Tribunal on Iraq, a worldwide series of tribunals which explored the legal culpability of Bush and Blair for their actions before, during and after the invasion, held a session in New York City in May, 2004), the conference is a step in the direction of holding the Bushies legally accountable for their crimes.

The link to the conference home page can be found here.  

The following is their press release:

A two-day conference on obtaining prosecutions of high level American war criminals will open September 13th, in Andover, Mass.   The conference will explore the legal grounds for, and plan for, obtaining prosecutions of President Bush and top officials of his Administration for war crimes.

In the tradition of America’s Chief Prosecutor at the Nuremburg War Crimes Trials after World War II, Justice Robert Jackson, the Conference’s purpose is “to hold high U.S. officials accountable in courts of law and, if guilt is found, to obtain appropriate punishments. Otherwise,” said the Conference’s convener, Lawrence Velvel, “the future will be threatened by additional examples of Executive lawlessness by leaders who need fear no personal consequences” for their actions, leading to “the possibility of more Viet Nams, more Iraqs, and more repression.”

Velvel emphasized,  “This is intended to be a planning conference, one at which plans will be laid, and necessary organizational structures will be set up, to seek prosecutions to determine guilt and, if guilt is found, appropriate punishments.”

Attendees will hear from prominent authorities on international law, criminal prosecutions, and constitutional rights who are determined to give meaning to Justice Jackson’s words: “The common sense of mankind demands that law shall not stop with the punishment of petty crimes by little people. It must also reach men who possess themselves of great power and make deliberate and concerted use of it to set in motion evils which leave no home in the world untouched.”

Topics to be discussed, Velvel said, include:

• What international and domestic crimes were committed, which facts show crimes under which laws, and what punishments are possible.
• Which high level Executive officials — and Federal judges and legislators as well, if any — are chargeable with crimes.
• Which international tribunals, foreign tribunals and domestic tribunals (if any) can be used and how to begin cases and/or obtain prosecutions before them.
• The possibility of establishing a Chief Prosecutor’s Office such as the one at Nuremburg.
• An examination of cases already brought and their outcomes.
• Creating an umbrella Coordinating Committee with representatives from the increasing number of organizations involved in war crimes cases.
• Creating a Center to keep track of and organize compilations of relevant briefs, articles, books, opinions, and facts, etc., on war crimes and prosecutions of war criminals.

Scheduled to address the Conference include:

• Famed former Los Angeles prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi, author of the best-selling “The Prosecution of George W. Bush For Murder”(Vanguard).
• Phillippe Sands, Professor of Law and Director of the Centre of International Courts and Tribunals at University College, London . He is the author of “Torture Team: Rumsfeld’s Memo and the Betrayal of American Values” (Penguin/Palgrave Macmillan), among other works.
• Jordan Paust, Professor of Law at the University of Houston and author of “Beyond The Law.”
• Ann Wright, a former U.S. Army colonel and U.S. Foreign Service official who holds a State Department Award for Heroism and who taught the Geneva Conventions and the Law of Land Warfare at the Special Warfare Center at Ft. Bragg, N.C.  She is the coauthor of “Dissent:  Voices of Conscience.”
• Peter Weiss, Vice President of the Center For Constitutional Rights, which was recently involved with war crimes complaints filed in Germany and France against former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and others.
• Benjamin Davis, Associate Professor at the University of Toledo College of Law and former American Legal Counsel for the Secretariat of the International Court of Arbitration.
• David Lindorff, journalist and co-author with Barbara Olshansky of “The Case for Impeachment: Legal Arguments for Removing President George W. Bush from Office”(St. Martin ’s Press).
• Francis Boyle, Professor of International Law at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, responsible for drafting the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989, and the U.S. implementing legislation for the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention.
• Lawrence Velvel, a leader in the field of law school education reform, has written numerous internet articles on issues relevant to the conference.

Legal authorities, media representatives, and the general public are invited to attend the conference. Attendees will receive a special hotel rate of $99 per night.

Andover is nearly equidistant from both Boston’s Logan Airport , served by all major airlines, and the Manchester , N.H. , Airport, served by Southwest Airlines and USAir.

(Further Information: Jeff Demers (see above) or Sherwood Ross, Ross Associates, Suite 403, 102 S.W. 6th Ave., Miami, FL 33130 or sherwoodr1@yahoo.com)

The Juno Factor 2 – What If It Were Obama’s Kid Who Got Pregant?

In my last post, I pointed out that when teen pregnancy (or some other problematical social phenomenon) happens to others — particularly minorities – Republicans invariably consider it to be a moral plague, caused not by out-of-control hormones, but by out-of-their-minds liberals and their damnable liberal policies. However, when such a thing happens to one of their own — like Bristol Palin, the “Juno from Juneau” — then, of course, it becomes, using the same catchphrases of those same hated liberals, a “private matter” and “a family affair.” In this case, it may even be (glory hallelluia!) a cause for religious pride, due to the mother-to-be’s rejection of abortion and embrace of the venerable tradition of the shotgun wedding. (Never mind that, by any sane standard, neither Bristol nor her beau are anywhere near ready for Holy Matrimony.)

But let’s flip the script. Obama’s daughters are a tad too young to make Bristol’s mistake (they are about ten and seven, respectively). But what if they weren’t? I have a feeling that the Obama household keep a much tighter rein on their daughters than the Palins did. Yet these things occur in the best of families. So what would happen next?

The headlines would scream, “Obama’s daughter pregnant!” The news would sweep like wildfire through the blogosphere. Pundits would pontificate about this terrible blow to the campaign of the first black presidential nominee from a mainstream party, while hypocritically insisting that, of course, it shouldn’t matter. But of course it would matter, to white (and some black) voters of both parties. A pregnant Obama child would conjure up, in the imaginations of white people, images of countless black and Hispanic welfare mothers, parasitically draining the public treasury by their callous lack of self-control (though most welfare recipients, in fact, are white). Obama’s poll numbers would plummet approximately five times as fast as Bush’s did. McCain would publicly deplore the brouhaha, pretend to maintain focus on the “issues,” and swagger easily, smirking all the way, into the White House in January.

Why is this nightmare vision plausible? Because Americans, more even than most people around the world, tend to feel much more than they think — and feeling is essentially irrational. Symbol, myth and gesture, more than good sense –  or even common sense — rule our politics.

Americans might well take caution from a famous historical case of emotional prejudice triumphing over reason, to the detriment of all. In 19th Century Ireland, the parliamentarian Charles Stewart Parnell, through his tremendous political gifts and sheer charisma, became tremendously effective, far more than any Irish politican before or since, in bringing England around to the idea of respecting the Irish — and giving them a bit of freedom into the bargain. He was smeared by numerous scandals, including one which linked his name (through forged letters) to the infamous Phoenix Park murders, in which terrorists murdered two officials in that famous park in Dublin. Parnell survived all these tribulations and became in fact what he was commonly called by all: “the uncrowned king of Ireland.”

Then a fellow Irish MP named Captain O’Shea divorced his wife, Katherine O’Shea — and had the tactlessness to name Parnell as correspondent. Parnell, he claimed, had been his wife’s lover for years. Many assumed (and no doubt hoped) that this was just another smear. Unfortunately for Ireland, it wasn’t: its “king” was an adulterer. It didn’t matter a jot that he and Mrs. O’Shea were not casual sex partners (like so many of his fellow MPs and their mistresses), but hopelessly, devotedly and passionately in love; nor that she had been separated from Captain O’Shea even before she met Parnell; nor that, after her divorce became final, he did the honorable thing and married the lady immediately. The church hierarchy were furious, scandalized! And so were many humble and pious Catholic citizens — even some who owed their livelihoods to Parnell’s reforms.

From king, Parnell descended to renegade. Former allies now became bitter enemies. Ill but undaunted, our hero fought to bring himself and his cause back into his countrymen’s good graces. At one campaign stop, an enemy threw quicklime in his face. Manfully, he continued to make speeches, a bandana covering his injured eye, looking for all the world like a pirate. At last his body gave out. He died of pneumonia, age 45, and his cause died with him. It has been claimed that almost all Ireland’s political troubles for the next hundred years or so were caused directly or indirectly from the tragedy of Parnell’s fall — because the Irish preferred their puritanical morality to freedom.

Obama is no Parnell, of course. He is not a visionary (despite his visionary rhetoric), but a very clever and skillful politician, promising change with a militarist program that makes true change impossible. You should definitely vote against him, but not for the wrong reasons, particularly reasons of race — the issue which, when mixed with sex, is the real third rail of American politics. Nor for that matter, should you vote against McCain/Palin just because the daughter of the latter is in the family way. You should vote against them for their smugness, their hypocrisy, their double standard, their lack of humanity. That leaves only the third parties. If you’re a right-wing guy/gal, you should look into Bob Barr and the Libertarian Party. And if you’re a left-wing guy/gal, check out either Ralph Nader, running on the Independent Party line, or Cynthia McKinney of the Green Party. (Obviously, I’m biased toward the latter!)

The Juno Factor

Isn’t it ASTOUNDING how, as soon as the Republicans are themselves caught displaying the frailities and foibles — like drug addiction or sexual excess – that they constantly condemn in others, they suddenly become raving liberals?

Why Is This Girl Smiling?

Why should we care when an utterly unqualified Vice Presidential candidate suddenly and proudly presents us with her knocked-up teen daughter as an anti-abortion and pro-abstinence (!) role model?

Why Is *This* Girl Smiling?

The case for ignoring this whole mess is perhaps best put by Brian Alexander of MNSBC:

War in Iraq, economy imploding, energy transformation finally on America’s agenda, income disparity threatening the social order, cynicism infecting every corner of American life, a tectonic shift to a multi-polar world, a collapsing educational system, and you want to make the pregnancy of a 17-year-old a political issue?

Well… yes! Because the Republican Party – led by the fascist wing of Pat Buchanan and others like him — made, over the past two decades, their savage culture war on everyone private morality the defining aspect of contemporary politics, from Monica Lewinsky’s stained dress to  Elliot Spitzer’s blazing crash and burn. Their cries of pseudo-moral outrage overwhelm the sustained and sober thought necessary for Americans to deal rationally with any of the problems enumerated above — or to realize that the Repugs themselves, least of all Sarah Palin, haven’t a clue about how to solve any of it.

The tragedy behind this farce is that there really is a qualified candidate for President who does have ideas about what to do about our problems, but because of a total media blackout, you may not even have heard of her. She is Cynthia McKinney of the Green Party and she is the perfect embodiment of the Ten Key Values the Greens espouse:

• Grassroots Democracy
• Social Justice
• Ecological Wisdom
• Non-violence
• Decentralization
• Community-based Economics
• Feminism
• Diversity
• Responsibility
• Future Focus

(We apologize to the Christian Right that “Chastity” is not among them.)

Please check out Cynthia’s website. Go sane! Vote Green!