The Extinction Distinction

Column No. 230

There have been five Great Extinctions in the history of Earth. And yes, all you creationists out there, according to a great deal of scientific evidence, that is evidence that is based on observation, experimentation and reproducibility, the history of Earth does extend back just a bit more than 4-6000 years. 

There have also been about 20 others, big but not so big. The first of the Big Ones occurred at the end of what is called the Ordovician Period, about 450 million years ago. The last Big One, the one that knocked off the dinosaurs and put the mammals on the road to dominance, occurred about 65 million years ago. Now, it seems, we are all of a sudden facing the Sixth Big One.  What is the evidence for this?

For one thing, there is global warming and the massive climate change that will result from it. This is a fairly recent event, although the pace of global warming, as is well known, is accelerating. Some societal elements, like the carbon-extract-it-and-burn-it-now-and-forever industries like to tell us that global warming/climate change is all a myth. They have much in common with the folks at the creation Museum outside of Hebron (great name for its location, no?) Kentucky, who tell us that wearing saddles our forebears rode on dinosaurs and that Noah loaded dinosaurs on the Ark (baby ones to be sure, to keep the weight down). They don’t tell us what happened to them after the Flood, but that’s another story. 

Mythology can be such fun, but Creationist mythology is highly damaging on a variety of levels, beginning with its undermining of science, such as the science we will need if we somehow to survive global warming. And then too the carbon-extractive-industries mythology is highly damaging because it seems to be leading us down the primrose path to non-reversibility. Of course these industries also ignore that fact that the way they are burning the stuff up ensures that it will eventually run out. For no matter how much more is discovered, if we continue to burn it up it has to get used up eventually if for no other reason than that, those pesky Creationists to the contrary notwithstanding, all those dinosaurs which made it haven’t been around since their own extinction, about 65,000,000 years ago. And we do like to use fossil carbon for so many other purposes besides burning it. For example, no oil no plastic wrap, and that’s just for starters. But that’s another story. 

It happens that as virtually all of the readers of TPJmagazine know, the evidence is overwhelming that if nothing very serious is done about carbon pollution of both the atmosphere and the oceans, very soon it will overwhelm us along with a whole bunch of other species. According to The Millennium Project, which happened to be sponsored by such radical agencies as the World Bank, the Rockefeller Foundation and UNESCO, “an effort on the scale of the Apollo Mission that sent men to the Moon is needed if humanity is to stand a fighting chance of surviving the ravages of climate change.” (In my view, it will take something much greater than the Apollo Project. If we do get one, let’s just hope that Tom Hanks is still around to star in the movie.) I cannot recall seeing any mention of their report, “2009 State of the Future,” published on August 1, 2009, in the US media. But maybe I just wasn’t looking. I knew about it from a pre-release article in London’s “The Independent” by Jonathan Owen that appeared on July 13, 2009. I happened to be on a private circulation list which carried it.

Among the individual scientists concerned, James Hansen, Ph.D., Director of NASA’s Godard Institute for Space Studies who the Georgites tried everso hard to muzzle, has said that “partly on the basis of his latest modeling efforts and partly on the basis of observations made by other scientists, the threat of global warming is far greater than even he had suspected. Carbon dioxide isn’t just approaching dangerous levels; it is already there. Unless immediate action is taken --- including shutdown of all the world’s coal-fired plants within the next two decades ---- the planet will be committed to change on a scale society won’t be able to cope with.”

So our species could go very quickly, it seems. And, as noted, we could take bunches of others with us. In fact, we began doing that about 50,000 years ago, in Australia. The disappearance of a whole group of fantastic animals, like a land tortoise about the size of a VW beetle, coincided with the arrival of humans from Southeast Asia. Similar things happened more recently in North America and New Zealand. It is also likely that the humanoid species we call “Neanderthals” (actually the name comes from the German valley, the Neander thal, in which the first fossil remains of it were discovered), which happened to have larger brains than ours, was wiped out by us, Homo Sapiens. Currently frogs, toads, and coral among others are succumbing to malign human influence even without climate change. And of course the latter could kill bunches of others, indeed possibly leading to that Sixth Great Extinction. 

Add to climate change other human threats to the biosphere, such as over-population, nuclear war (of course Nuclear Winter would be one way to combat global warming --- I could see some NeoCon like Bill Kristol proposing that one if they haven’t done so already with the by-product of preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons themselves), the rapidly declining supply of pure water, to say nothing of the availability of sanitary sewage disposal, as well as massive pollution of the oceans both directly (detritus, as in that Texas-plus sized “plastic island” in the middle of the Pacific) and indirectly (acidification from excess carbon in the atmosphere), and there we have it. The Extinction Distinction: the first one to be caused by one particular species, in this case Homo Sapiens, rather than one or more external (asteroid) or other physical factors (massive volcanic explosions).

So why is this happening, one might ask. Not too many people do. Why is our species on its way to creating the Sixth Extinction. It goes back to that element of our nature and what we need to do to survive, both as individuals and as a species, which distinguishes us from all of the other species currently on Earth. (Presumably we did share this characteristic with other humanoid species, like the Neanderthals, but they are all long gone.) That is that in order to survive we need to take resources that we find in our environment and convert them to something else, like cooked food and woven clothing for openers. Every other species just uses what it does use from its environment directly, without modification, except in very simple ways, like nest building for birds and dam building for beavers. But in those cases either individuals or small teams do the conversion for themselves. 

For humans, as we became more sophisticated, means of production became common and more sophisticated themselves, like flour mills and cloth factories. With means of production came private ownership of them. With private ownership came employment of others to do the work, by the owners. And with employment of others to do the work came profit resulting from their labor. The same thing happened of course with the ownership of the natural resources used to both run and supply the raw materials for the conversion processes of the means of production. Profits were made from those activities too. Private profit, that is. And where, you might ask, does the resistance to doing anything significant about global warming, climate change, and species elimination come from? Well, just look at what is going on in the United States Congress over doing something really very minimal about climate change. The answer is obvious. 

As one liberal-sounding observer said recently: “The consumer societies and the wastage of material resources are incompatible with the idea of economic growth and a clean planet. The unlimited waste of non-renewable natural resources --- especially oil and gas accumulated throughout hundreds of millions of years and depleted in barely two centuries at the current rate of consumption — has been the major cause of climate change. Even if the unfriendly emissions of the industrialized nations were reduced, which would be commendable, it is a reality that 5.2 billion people on planet Earth, that is, three-fourth of the population, live in countries that are still in various stages of development and will therefore demand an enormous input of coal, oil, natural gas and other non-renewable resources that, according to the consumption patterns created by the capitalist economies, are incompatible with the objective of saving the human species."

Liberal sounding, but it did happen to be Fidel Castro, commenting on President Obama’s Sept., 2009 UN address. But it surely could have been a liberal. Trouble is, socialist or liberal, or even concerned capitalist, as at the World Bank and the Rockefeller Foundation, the profit-makers are going to simply ignore them, use every opportunity to obfuscate what they say, and continue on their merry way. After all, most of them will be dead anyway before the worst happens, or they think they will be. So why bother, when right now, for them life with lots of money is so much fun.

This is a theme to which I will be returning periodically in this space.

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(A partial list of resources for this column includes the abovementioned “2009 State of the Future;” the Owen article on it mentioned above; “The Sixth Extinction?” by Elizabeth Kolbert, The New Yorker, May 25, 2009; “The Catastrophist,” by Elizabeth Kolbert, The New Yorker, June 29, 2009; “Getting Serious About Global Warming,” The Progress Report, Sept. 23, 2209; EC-CCDS @ yahoo.groups.org   Sept. 26, 2009 for the Castro quote; “New Analysis Brings Dire Forecast of 6.3-Degree (F.) Temperature Increase,” Juliet Eilperin, Wash. Post, Sept. 25, 2009; “Aqua Shock: The Water Crisis in America,” a book by Susan J. Marks; and “Idiot America,” a book by Charles P. Pierce (yes, that aptly-named book is where I found the dinosaurs-into-the-ark story.)

President Obama and the One-Term Democratic Presidencies

Column No. 229

Jimmy Carter was in the post-Watergate, post-Viet Nam flush of Democratic victory. For the 1976 Presidential election, it had not been for Chappaquiddick, Sen. Ted Kennedy would likely have been the Democratic Party’s nominee (if he had not already been such in 1972). 

If it had not been for his bladder cancer, Sen. Hubert Humphrey might well have overtaken Carter in the later primaries. But Kennedy had Chappaquiddick and Humphrey had cancer and the Democrats had no one but a highly inexperienced, very nice, one-term governor of Georgia (the last Democrat to hold that position, I believe).   Nevertheless, the Democrats were riding high. The Nixon dragon had finally been slain. The foreign policy front was relatively quiet, funnily enough due in major part to Nixon. Kissinger’s détente with the Soviet Union was in place. Nixon/Kissinger had opened the door to China. Israel had conquered huge territories in the Six-Day and Yom Kippur Wars, but had not yet begun their policy of gradual annexation of the West Bank. 

On the domestic side, again funnily enough, Nixon had actually instituted several very important environmental programs. If it had not been for Watergate, he would very likely have gained the passage of the fairly strong national health insurance program that he had introduced to Congress in the spring of 1973. In this context, Carter was in a position to focus on domestic policy, actually building further on Nixon initiatives in that realm. As a matter of fact I heard Carter, in a speech to the 1976 Annual Meeting of the American Public Health Association, pledge that he would introduce and win passage of a national health insurance program. Well, Carter never quite got round to doing that. Nor, with the top of his staff drawn mainly from his Georgia Governor’s office (!!), did he do much else. Jimmy Carter is remembered for two things: the Camp David Accords and the Tehran Hostage Crisis. Why?

Primarily because, unlike Republicans when they are in office, Carter chose to try to work with the other side, even though he had majorities in both Houses of Congress. On the domestic side, Nixon’s positive initiatives or no, the GOP was able to bog down any major actions that Carter wanted to undertake. The Goldwater-Reagan right-wing of the party was moving into various positions of power both inside and outside of Washington. Carter did not get along well with the Kennedy/McGovern liberal wing of his own party and was never able to put together a team to get Democratic things done. Furthermore, he was saddled with the inflationary spiral that had begun under Nixon-Ford but which soon came to bear his name. (See any similarities there?) He was able to pull off the Camp David Accords because for different reasons both Israel and Egypt needed to quiet things down. And then came the Hostage Crisis.

Why did that happen? Simple. Carter did not know who his friends were and who his enemies were. On the second most important foreign policy decision of his Presidency, he listened to Republicans, to whom he did not have to listen, with disastrous results. There was a pro-western, secular overthrow of the Shah in 1978. There was a strong Islamist movement lead by the Ayatollah Khomeini, but it was by no means a sure thing that it would eventually take power. The Shah went into exile in 1979, ill with cancer. Kissinger and David Rockefeller, among other top Republicans, pleaded with Carter to admit the Shah to the US for treatment. The US Embassy in Tehran warned his very strongly against doing that, predicting several different very negative outcomes, including something like the one that actually happened. Carter gave in to the Republicans and the outcomes of the resultant Islamist takeover have reverberated negatively both for the Iranian people and of ourselves down to this very day. 

Going in to the 1980 elections, as is well-known, Carter was saddled with the hostage crisis, one that he very likely would not have had to deal with he not gone along with leading Republicans, instead of listening to his own State Department, and leading Democrats as well, who had no use for the Shah. Because he was so inactive on the domestic Democratic agenda, he might have lost anyway. But he was a one-termer, who gave us Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.

The Clinton Presidency was a one-termer in functional terms. The Republicans made sure of that from the git-go, from Gennifer Flowers (of whom they never let go) to White Water to the White House Travel Office and on and on, with a very well-funded “get Clinton” campaign. (Yes, there was indeed a “vast right-wing conspiracy,” lead by Richard Mellon Scaife.) Clinton’s biggest problem, before Monica Lewinsky, was that he was not a fighter. In fact, he was the classic child of two alcoholic parents: he wanted to please everybody, but especially his enemies. On the health care reform debate I happened to have had the opportunity, as a Designated Speaker for the Clinton Health Plan, to have seen this somewhat from the inside. 

He did not fight. Either he did not know what the GOP was out to do or he did not know how to deal with them. Bill Kristol sent around a memo in December, 1993 saying that the GOP must defeat the Clinton Health Plan (CHP), for political reasons (I’ve got a copy in my files). (Kristol has done the same thing now on the Obama initiative. Clinton did not use this. Bob Dole led the charge against the CHP in the Senate, which had major features in common with the Nixon Health Plan. Funny, but with an excellent speech about everything that was wrong with the US health care system in 1973 (I’ve got a copy of excerpts of that speech in my files too) it was none other than then Republican Minority Leader Bob Dole who had introduced the Nixon Health Plan to the Senate. Clinton did not use it either. He sat there and let Dick Morris (he who had formerly worked for Sen. Trent Lott and now is a right-wing shill, was likely a GOP agent) lead him into “triangulation,” of use primarily against the Democrats in the Congress.  

Then came Monica Lewinsky and the Paula Jones perjury trap that was neatly laid by Ken Starr who illegally fed the Lewinsky information to Jones’ legal team, leading to impeachment and the complete crippling of Clinton’s second. Of course, given the Lewinsky scandal what happened might have happened anyway, but it might well have turned out differently had Clinton been a Republican-fighter instead of a Republican-compromiser from the git-go. After all, the Lewinsky episode and the subsequent impeachment trial was about sex between consenting adults, not quite on the level of cheating one’s way into the Air National Guard or lying the nation into war. But that’s another story.

Which leads us to President Obama. This column is being written about a week in advance of his speech to the Congress on health care scheduled for September 9. Perhaps he will surprise us. But President Obama, like his two Democratic immediate predecessors in the White House, seems not to know who his enemies are. He seems not realize that the GOP has been out to get him since the Electoral College voted in December, 2008, if not before. They are not interested in “bi-partisanship.” They are a minority party. On the issue alone, they are destined to remain that way. After all, it is Republican polices that have put the nation into the mess it currently faces. They know that their only way back to power is to wage war, not on the objective elements of the issues, but on the person and with every Big Lie they can dream up. As is well-known, that they are now doing this to a fare-thee-well. As is well-known, it seems, to everyone except the President and his staff.

A strategic decision was made to try to “bring the country together.”  Well, from Rush Limbaugh’s “I hope he fails” statement onwards, it has been clear that to do their very best to make sure that that happens is the central element of the GOP strategy.  But the President persists. As of this writing (Sept. 4), he is said to be negotiating with Sen. Olympia Snow (!) for some kind of “compromise” on health care reform, that would put off the absolutely essential public option to some indeterminate date. That is a Republican policy that is a recipe for failure for any health care reform package. 

But beyond that, combined with buying into Republican recipe for the totally unwinnable (no matter which way you want to define it) Afghan War, President Obama is quickly paving the road down which he will travel to being the third one-term Democratic President in a row. Since the Goldwater-Reagan takeover of their party, the Republicans have known, most of the time, how to win: stay Republican, build on their base, cheat and lie a lot. It’s not too late for Obama to learn. He is a very smart man. He needs to learn just one thing: the modern GOP is the enemy. Hugh Scott, Jacob Javits, and John Chafee are no longer in the Senate. This bunch cannot be dealt with honestly. All President needs to do is, not lie, cheat, and encourage violence, but rather follow the truly Democratic policies that he actually won the election on.  He needs to become a real Democratic President doing battle with a real Party of Right-Wing Reaction. President Carter and Clinton have spent their post-Presidential years doing great charitable works both at home and abroad. If President Obama doesn’t wake up to reality, he can always go back to community organizing on the South Side of Chicago, instead of organizing his natural base to support him in full throat, and teaching constitutional law, instead of putting it into practice against the enemies of Constitutional government, like a certain former Vice-President.

Health Care Reform and the Fascist Response: Why?

Column No. 228

The GOP is in trouble. The Obama Administration has generally referred to that fact only in passing, although now is now doing that with a bit more frequency. However, (well-known to our readers here) it is the Bush/Cheney policies that for the most part have lead our nation into the fix in which it presently finds itself.

Some of these policies, such as the matter of “free trade,” in reality nothing more than the free export of capital that has lead to the massive de-industrialization that we have experienced over the last 20 years, were unfortunately presaged by Bill Clinton. But for the most part they are Republican-type policies, whether implemented by the Democrats or not. Indeed there were many policies, foreign and domestic, and I do not have to review them here, which have lead to very bad outcomes all around. In fact, it is hard to find one Bush/Cheney policy that has lead to a good outcome.

So what is the GOP to do? Obviously it cannot promote Bush/Cheney policy as the solution to the problems those policies created. Thus certain leaders, from time-to-time, have said "we have to come up with new solutions." The problem for them is that their ideology doesn't permit them to do that. This is because, as again is well-known to TPJmagazine readers, none of the necessary solutions, some (but not all) of which are being pursued by the Obama Administration, fit at all into the GOP playbook.

OK. So they can't come up with anything new that present alternatives to present Obama/Democratic Party policies that might actually solve problems. And so, as is well-known to everyone, they have become the Party of NO to any Obama/Democratic proposals. On the stimulus package: their solution, tax cuts for the rich and the big corporations. It happens that they didn't work for the original Bush Recession in 2001-02, so why should they work now? Bush got the nation out of that one by the classic right-wing stimulus package: military and tax-cuts-for-the-rich deficit spending. On global warming and climate change, their solution is again NO. Either there is no global warming and resultant climate change, or there is and let's do a bunch of things that are known either not to work or make things worse, like "drill, baby, drill." And then there is health care reform, for which they have offered no alternatives to any of the package of plans that various Democrats have been offering. So they have been attacking that package with increasing vigor and with an increasing separation from reality, with "just say NO," and nothing else.

They lie through their teeth, in multiple examples. It is not just their non-Congressional leadership, such as Savagely O'RHannibaugh, that does it. Their Congressional leadership, to say nothing of the likes of Newt Gingrich, is piling on with the lies. A couple of weeks ago it was, for example, Sen. Grassley, until recently one of Pres. Obama's favorite Republicans on health care, who was echoing Palin's looneyness and more importantly the use of the Big Lie Technique (right out of Mein Kampf) on the "death panels." Of course Savagely O'RHannibaugh fires up the violent protestors. But the Republican Congressional leadership, current, such as Boehner and McConnell, and former, such as Dick Armey, do it too. (Armey is in fact one of those who has been actively organzing them, to the extent taht that activity became too embarrassing even for the lobby firm that has his intials in its name.) And now some of those angry right-wingers are carrying guns into town hall meetings, or trying to. So what is really going on here?

What is really going on here is that the GOP has given up planning to win elections by contesting on policy. What is really going on here is that the GOP has recognized that its rock-solid far right-wing base, the Palin Faithful and then some, will never amount to much more than about 35% of the electorate (which is about the same number as the Nazis got in the last free election in Germany before their takeover). What is really going on here is that the GOP has recognized that the racism, which has carried it to so many election victories since Nixon initiated the Southern Strategy in 1968, is also running out of steam as a way to win national elections. It totally failed them in the recent one, obviously. So they have begun to think of other routes back to power. 

Racism is still a major part of their strategy, but now it’s a major tool for organzing their minority, not for winning over a majority. What is working extremely well for them now is the classic fascist tool of the Big Lie Technique: tell the same lie over and over again, as loudly as possible, and people will come to believe it. The massive drop in Pres. Obama’s poll numbers over the totally false claims that the GOP is screaming about with increasing ferocity is a testament to their success in using it. They have always used it, of course, from Reagan’s anti-Medicare ads in the 60s (it will lead directly to Communism) to the Swift-boating of Kerry, but now it is absolutely at the center of what they are doing on health care.

The word "fascism" has been given many definitions. My short one (and I've got a really long one too!) is: "Fascism is a politico-economic system in which there is: total executive branch control of both the legislative and administrative powers of government; no independent judiciary; no Constitution that embodies the Rule of Law standing above the people who run the government; no inherent personal rights or liberties; a single national ideology that first demonizes and then criminalizes all political, religious, and ideological opposition to it; the massive and regular use of hate, fear, racial and religious prejudice, the Big Lie technique, mob psychology and mob actions to achieve political and economic ends; and total corporate determination of economic, fiscal, and regulatory policy." Of course one thinks immediately of Bush/Cheney, but that is old news.

Total fascism has never come to a country peacefully. Violent repression of dissent is always at its center. In addition to organized armed force, it always relies on a loosely organized mob of one kind or another to take advantage of crisis situations and set the stage for the armed takeover of the pillars of the state. Thus what is going on now, most likely not yet consciously organized for that end in too many quarters, is the beginning of the setting of the stage and the training of the civilian troops.

Underlain by race, of course, is a total rejection of President Obama's leadership, a total rejection of the results of the election a little more than six months ago, the encouragement of violence and not just by some lunatic fringe. Lou Dobbs called for the execution, by a "stake through the heart," of former DNC Chair and Governor of Vermont, Dr. Howard Dean. (One notes with irony that Don Imus lost his job at CBS for calling the members of a women's basketball team "nappy headed ho's." Dobbs calls for the murder of a leader of the other side and that is met by a screaming silence at CNN corporate.) And that's just one example. Is a fascist revolution being actively plotted now? Except on the Far Right (currently) fringe, I doubt it. But as the Southern Poverty Law Center has just reported the Far Right militia movement is growing by leaps and bounds, fueled by racism and hate. But if the GOP keeps going in the direction it is currently goping, there is the armed force for a potential fascist takeover, at the right time. Rihgt now, on the side of Constitutional government, who and what would oppose that armed force, should it come to that?

The GOP is of course against health care reform because it would severely hurt the profit-making prospects of the sickness care insurance, pharmaceutical, and hospital supply industries. But there are Democrats who hold to that opposition to reform or the same reasons. (And for the time-being, at least, the Obama Administration has been able to buy off Big Pharma.) So that's not the only reason that the GOP is desperate to prevent reform, at least a reform that is meaningful. If Obama manages to get something passed with a public option and a couple of other critical elements, the GOP's electoral prospects go into the toilet for a number of elections to come. They know it and people such as Sen. Jim ("Gay Teachers Should be Banned from the Classroom" [yes, he took that position as a candidate]) DeMint and Bill Kristol (who took exactly the same position in opposing the Clinton Health Plan) know it. And what does that mean? Why the interests of their major corporate supporters (see my BuzzFlash Commentary "Who Does the GOP Serve?") are significantly damaged.

What does that leave? Why some crisis of which they could take advantage (sound familiar?), of course. And they are beginning to prepare for that possibility (and in some quarters may be preparing the crisis itself as well), even if only subconsciously so far. What better way, then, to prepare their potential civilian troops than the current battle over the very complex and highly personal, emotional issue of health care reform?

The German people had an excuse for letting a minority party, enabled by a splintered opposition, hell-bent on establishing a fascist dictatorship unlike anything the world had ever seen, succeed: the world had never seen anything like it.  In the United States, facing a splintered opposition, there is a minority party that certainly seems to be hell-bent on (eventually) doing the same thing.  If that event does come to pass, the US population will, however, have no similar excuse.  Oh yes, the advance title for the forthcoming book from that Hitler-in-heels with a smiley face, the ex-governor of Alaska?  "My Struggle," which translates into German as "Mein Kampf." 

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This column is based in part on a Commentary of mine that appeared on Buzzflash.com on August 14, 2009. A commentator on that article said: “Your assessment is extremely insightful. BUT, WHAT TO DO??? How much time do we have to respond? What should our response look like? How do we avoid the failures of 1930's "sane" Germans? Please, surely action is required of us. What? When? How? Who?” I will be addressing that central question over time in this space and on BuzzFlash, where my Commentaries appear for the most part three weeks of every four.

Senator Al Franken and the Significance of 60

Column No. 227

So Al Franken is Senator Al Franken. The GOP hates him (politically) because he is a reasonable liberal and even moreso because he is, as all readers of TPJmagazine know, Democratic Senator no. 60. 

Funnily enough, Al is no progressive, as a number of left-wing analysts are letting us know loud and clear, but the GOP hates him anyway. The Republican Scream Machine hates him (viscerally) because he would not have been in the Senate were it not for the success of his books “Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot” and “Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right,” which exposed that very same RSM for what they are. The personal attacks have been vitriolic and likely to get even moreso (that is if there are different levels of vitriol). They focus on Sen. Franken’s earlier career as a comedian and comic writer. 

Dipping to the level of the Republican Scream Machine, one really classy GOP Senator (it was either Kyl or Coburn, the latter of whom, by-the-by, seems to be caught up in the Ensign scandal, both far-Rightists in any case) called him a “clown” on the floor of the Senate. Not quite at the level of Cheney saying “f__k you” to Senator Pat Leahy of Vermont on the Senate floor a few years ago, but close.  When screaming about Franken, not one of these clowns includes any information of the facts that, for example, he a Harvard College Graduate (with honors) and that before he decided to run for the Senate he was a thoughtful liberal analyst on the first (and best) iteration of Air America Radio. But a Senator with a sense of humor, especially about politics and politicians, so many of whom take themselves so seriously, who can also actually think? How awful. So they just do riffs, not funny ones either, on the fact that he was also a professional comedian.

But let’s pause for a moment to look at entertainers in politics. Republicans do come to mind, mind you. First of course is the hero of the current generation of Republican “leadership,” Ronald Reagan. Graduating from being a sportscaster (Rush Limbaugh anyone?) he became a decent B movie actor. He was left-wing enough in his younger days to have been the President of the Screen Actors Guild. But he was a very happy cooperator (1947) with the House Un-American Activities Committee when its Hollywood Witch Hunt was beginning. In the 1950s he became a cigarette pitchman (a time when the tobacco industry, internal memos much later showed, already knew that cigarettes were deadly. There is no evidence that they shared this knowledge with Ronnie. But there is no evidence that they did not, either.) In the 1950s and 60s he was the principal public spokesman for General Electric, at a time when its labor relations were handled by one by Lemuel Boulware. “Boulwarism” was the name given to the man’s very vicious and very successful union-crushing strategy and tactics. 

And so with this as his background this former actor, former labor leader, former squealer, former pitchman for personal poisons, became first governor and then President. Experience in running anything? Well, no. Experience as a legislator? Well know. Any higher education in history or political science? Well, no. And then there was George Murphy, previously best-known as a tap dancer (not in a class with Jimmy Cagney, but a pretty good one), who became a one-term GOP Senator from California in 1964. And then of course there is Ahnold, who shows us that you can take steroids and still live a seemingly normal life.  But in government or its study any experience? Well, no. But the GOP now complains about Al Franken, Harvard grad., political analyst and author, and yes, comedian and comic writer.

But even worse for the GOP than who he is, is the fact that Sen. Franken is the 60th Democratic member of the Democratic Caucus (which includes the two independents, from the left, Sen. Sanders and from the right, Sen. Lieberman). Now according to the GOP minority leader, Mitch McConnell, this means that the “Democrat” Party will be able “to ride roughshod” and “get what they want.” Actually that is not at all the case. The majority party in the Senate has never needed 60 votes to pass legislation or confirm Presidential nominations for positions in the Administration, something many people seem not to understand. They simply need 60 votes to make sure that the item in question gets to the floor of the Senate for a vote. That is, the “cloture rule” is invoked, cutting off debate after a specific time and allowing the item to come to a vote. One would assume that Sen. McConnell does understand, but if he does, he ain’t tellin’. To do so would not serve his party politically, and for the GOP that’s often what it’s all about. 

What 60 votes means, then, is that democracy might actually become the rule of the day in the Senate. For when proposed legislation or votes on Presidential nominees are brought to the Senate floor for a vote, democracy can now rule. Just because a Democratic Senator votes for cloture does not mean that he/she would necessarily vote for the legislation or the nomination. But since the Democrats hold the Vice-Presidency and the Vice-President gets to vote in case of a tie, they can actually pass legislation with 50 votes, plus the big One.

Where democracy has not been in effect in the Senate is first in the “when proposed legislation is brought to the Senate floor for a vote” part. The power that McConnell has possibly lost is precisely that he has been able to prevent the democratic process from taking place in the Senate. “Filibusters” don’t defeat proposed legislation or nominations; they do prevent proposed legislation or nominations from being voted upon. If the Democratic caucus can stick together and if its two very sick members, Sens. Byrd and Kennedy, can get to the floor if needed, democracy will be able to rule in the Senate for the first time since President Obama was elected. 

“Sticking together” could be a big “if,” of course. There is the small posse of right-wing Democratic senators. Only one of them has to vote against bringing proposed legislation or a nomination to the floor for a vote and the item doesn’t get there.   But if the Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid gets some cojones, cloture might actually happen. And Senator Reid, not previously known for his militancy as a Democrat, may actually be growing a pair of the aforementioned appendages.  He has issued some fairly strong, actually anti-Republican statements of late, dontchaknow.

If Sen. Reid does get tough with his caucus, democracy can thus be brought to the Senate. Democrats always allowed it when they were in the minority but could have filibustered endless times had they had collectively what Sen. Reid seems to be possibly developing individually. But that of course means nothing to the GOP. It’s not that they “hope Obama fails,” a la Limbaugh. It’s that they are doing everything within their power to make sure that that happens. Part of that process is preventing proposed legislation from coming to the floor. Possibly more important in the still early days of the Obama Administration is that they have used the filibuster to tie up the confirmation process in knots. For example, the nomination of Dawn Johnsen, an outspoken opponent of the Cheneyite “Unitary Executive” (read “dictator”) theory of US government, has yet to be confirmed to be head of the Dept. of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel. Only when that position is filled can there be a real investigation of the depths to which the office was taken under Cheney/Bush/Gonzales/Mukasey/Yoo/Bybee. And that is a definite “we don’t want that” for Republicans.

So this is why the election of Senator Franken is so significant. Not because “the Democrats can ride roughshod,” but because so many matters for which the Senate GOP has prevented democracy from working, can now be subject to ---- the democratic process.

GOP Meddling In Iran

Column No. 226

So the Republican Scream Machine, this time both in Congress and on the airwaves, have been indeed screaming that President Obama should "do something about Iran,” or by now possibly “should have done something in Iran.”

He should be going (or should have gone) hammer and tongs on the issue of the obviously stolen election there.  Of course if President Obama had done that foolish thing and proclaimed long and loud about what is happening inside Iran, the Republicans would be yelling at him for doing that, claiming among other things that he is “just all talk and not action.” But that reality just reflects what the GOP is all about: “Just Saying ‘No’ to everything the President says ‘Yes’ to.” And yelling about it too. But you can't really blame them, can you? After all, they have nothing positive to offer.

So let's analyze what previous U.S. meddlings in Iranian affairs have produced, all but one of them the product of Republicans in office and, in all cases the product of Republican policies. Of course one does wonder why the GOPers are so upset with the present Iranian government. After all, I said in a BuzzFlash commentary some time ago, George Bush and Mahmoud Ahmedinejad have a lot in common.

For example: Both think they have a direct connection with God.  They both fit under Columbia University President Lee Bollinger’s characterization of Iran’s President Ahmedinejad as "a petty and cruel dictator." President Ahmedinejad is clearly the nominal head of state of a country that is actually a theocracy. Who is actually in charge in that country has been made plain for the world to see in the last three weeks.  A theocracy is just what the hard core of GOP support wants to establish in the U.S.  Ahmedinejad and the GOP both view women as second-class citizens. Bush and Ahmedinejad both had/have the power to lock up anyone they want to without charges, without any demonstrable evidence, and without any rights either to counsel or trial, and with the power to torture when, as, and if. Finally, homophobia is central to the policies of both Ahmedinejad and the GOP.

Despite this concordance of policy, Ahmedinejad has been on the GOP enemies list since his election. Just think, if McCain had been elected President (yes, my friends on the Left who are SOOO dissatisfied with President Obama, just think about that one a bit), the bombast would be coming out of Washington thick and fast. This is especially so since a McCain/Palin Administration (how about them apples?) would have had so many negative happenings occurring on its watch that they would be desperate to distract the country's attention from. So, within the limits of actually not being able to do anything like “Bomb, bomb, bomb Iran” because of a) the sorry state of the military they would have inherited and b) the sorry state of the relationships with allies they would have inherited, they would have meddling away to beat the band. In that light, let's see just what GOP governmental meddling in Iranian affairs has brought about in the past.  What a track record, but that wouldn’t stop the imaginary McCain/Palin Admin. from doing it or the real McCain from screaming for it.

The GOP overthrow of the moderate government of Prime Minister Mossadegh in 1953, mediated by Teddy Roosevelt's grandson Kermit Jr., is so well documented and so much considered a negative that even President Obama has referred to it as what not to do, several times. Once the Shah took back power, using increasingly violent repression over time to make sure he stayed in place, the CIA took an active role in training his terror-secret police, the SAVAK. One of these fellows' instruments of torture was to tie their victims to a set of red-hot bedsprings. (Might have been ordered for Gitmo by Cheney and approved by Bybee/Yoo as not-torture for all we know, just as long as the victims didn’t die from the event.) So for a variety of reasons (oil, “containment” of the Soviet Union) that support continued unabated under both Republican and Democratic administration for 25 years. 

As for a variety of reasons over time resistance to the Shah’s rule became more widespread, he became evermore repressive. In January 1979, with the military standing aside and the SAVAK presumably neutralized, he was eventually overthrown. His government was replaced by a moderate, bourgeois-democratic pro-Western one, lead by Prime Minister Shapour Bakhtiar. The Shah went into exile.

President Jimmy Carter was warned by the U.S. Embassy in Tehran not to include the U.S. on the Shah's visiting list. The embassy predicted that if that were to occur anti-U.S. violent protests would break out, threatening both U.S. interests there and the still shaky civil government.  Carter listened not to his embassy but to Republicans such as Henry Kissinger and David Rockefeller, and his own National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski (an avid Polish refugee Cold Warrior) and let the Shah in. U.S., GOP-lead, meddling, again. We all know what happened then. A budding, pro-Western moderate government was replaced by the repressive theocracy that has ruled Iran down to the present time.

Then, during the 1980 U.S. election it may well have been that the Reagan campaign negotiated directly with the newly-installed Muslim theocracy to get them not to make any deal for release of the hostages. This act, treason if it did actually occur, likely prolonged the captivity of Americans for GOP political gain and also helped the Khomeini regime to cement its place in power (by, in part, taking over the originally CIA-trained SAVAK pretty much unchanged). The next meddling was the secret sale of arms in the early 1980s to a now supposed U.S. enemy, theocratic Iran. This was the “Iran-Contra” affair. The proceeds supplied the money for the illegal support provided by the Reagan Administration to the right-wing rebels in Nicaragua. The GOP openly supported Saddam Hussein in the Iran-Iraq War that was going on at the time, but that secret arms deal actually was supporting both sides at the same time. This meddling was designed to achieve certain non-Middle Eastern foreign policy objectives that they otherwise could not have because US law at the time banned aid to the Nicaraguan Rightists. (Let’s hear for law and order, shall we?)

In our own time, under Bush-Cheney, the U.S. has apparently been supporting armed guerilla forces recruited from certain Iranian ethnic minorities fighting against the present government. They apparently use methods that if used against the U.S. would be labeled as "terrorism." This is direct meddling, of course, again with a political goal. In fact, since, if Seymour Hersh's reporting on this is correct, this effort was under Cheney's direct control, outside of the Pentagon's chain of command. (Who knows, if it is still going on, maybe he is still running it.) There is no way that such small scale efforts could lead to an overthrow of the existing government, but they sure can strengthen its resolve not to deal with the United States on anything. Thus this meddling totally served the domestic political interests of the Bush/Cheney regime, if nothing else: that is to keep the pot boiling overseas in as many places as possible.

So, no U.S./GOP efforts at meddling since 1953 have produced anything positive for the U.S., Iran, or the world, although some have had positive outcomes in terms of GOP domestic politics and policies. No wonder that they are once again screaming "meddle." Good on President Obama for turning a deaf ear to them.

There are a few prominent GOPers, like Sen. Richard Lugar and (mirabile dictu) John Bolton. (Bolton was, ironically, was one of the leaders of the assault threatened by GOP thugs on the Dade County election board in December, 2000, that prevented their recount from moving forward, an event that directly enabled the selection of Bush by the GOPers on the Supreme Court.) They have been saying quite properly that Pres. Obama is doing the proper thing. The reasoning is that should Ahmedinejad retain the Presidency (now all but certain), he is the person with whom Obama is going to have to negotiate over such issues as the Iranian nuclear development program. But the GOP is split over this and their non-Congressional leadership is going at it hammer and tongs. And so we must ask why?

Well, let’s see. Having any influence on the outcome of the stolen election, like having a recount or even a do-over, can’t be it. Even President Obama’s measured tones brought forth screams from the Iranian side (so much do they have in common with the GOP) about how it is he who has been entirely responsible for the demonstrations and the violence there. (How remarkably like GOP reasoning that sounds, doesn’t it? There could not possibly be any legitimate grievances among the Iranian electorate now, could there?) But what is the primary goal of the current GOP, as announced right after the election of President Obama? They want him to fail. And it has become everso apparent that they not only want him to fail, but that they will do what ever they can to assure that outcome.

A peaceful settlement of the Iranian situation, with Iran returning to the terms of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and pursing the peaceful use of nuclear energy under the watchful eyes of the International Atomic Energy Agency would be a major foreign policy triumph for Obama. Furthermore it would de-power to some extent the Israeli Right. This is that last thing that the GOP would want. So this is why they are once again meddling in Iran as hard as they can. And even before they could possibly be negatively influencing any Obama attempts at achieving a diplomatic settlement, they at least could be achieving a certain level of deligitimization of him here at home: “he’s just weak, weak, weak, like we always said he was.” So. Meddling in Iran they go and has almost always been the case since the original meddling for oil in 1953, it is done, everso cynically, for domestic political purposes.

                                       ---------------------------------

This column is based in part on one of the same name that appeared on BuzzFlash on June 19, 2009.

Winning the War on Drugs

Column No. 225

“Winning the War on Drugs?”  Is that you, Dr. Steve?  Isn’t that “War” just a construct designed to achieve political and economic aims, while oppressing with it one particular sector of the population?  How can it be “won?” 

This column considers that conundrum in almost telegraphic form.  I have written at length on it in the academic literature.  Interested readers are welcome to get in touch with me for references.  The “War on Drugs” has never been such a thing.  From its inauguration by Richard Nixon it has always been a War on Drug Users, for the most part minority drug users at that, although some non-minorities have occasionally been caught up in its tentacles.  The so-called War on Drugs was begun shortly after the invention of the race-based “Southern Strategy” that has controlled the fortunes of the GOP and unfortunately the country for most of the time since Nixon installed it. 

The correctly labeled “War on Drug Users” has primarily been a racist enterprise too.  It has been aimed at the users of one minor class of the Recreational Mood Altering Drugs (RMADs), those that are currently “illicit” (as alcohol was nationally between 1920 and 1933 and cigarettes were in 15 states at various times during the 19th century.  Although the ratios have declined a bit in the last few years, for most of its duration under the War on Drug Users, while approximately 75% of those in prison for drug-related offenses are non-white approximately 75% of illicit-drug users are white.  Further, the War on Drug Users has been race-based in terms of the neighborhoods in which it has been waged.  There was one major previous true War on Drugs, Prohibition.  It was for the most part actually aimed at the drug, ethyl alcohol, not at the users.

The commonly used RMADs are alcohol, nicotine in tobacco, the non-prescription use of prescription drugs, and the illicits, primarily marijuana, heroin, cocaine, and fairly recently, methamphetamine.  In terms of negative outcomes of RMAD use, for example, tobacco kills about 430,000 people per year, alcohol between 60,000 and 100,000, depending upon how one counts, and the illicits kill about 20,000, half that number as a result of drug-trade violence that would not exist absent the War on Drug Users and some of the other half due to forced unsterile use of the drugs.  Tobacco and alcohol are not only the major drug killers but they are the “starter drugs,” most often in childhood, for almost every problem-user of them in adult life and almost every user of the illicits, regardless of age.

Logic has not ended the War on Drug Users.  Neither has the mainstream drug policy reform movement which views RMAD use as the same false duality the Drug Warriors do.  Logic did not end Prohibition either.  Over-riding policy concerns did: rampant crime on the one hand and a major need for new tax revenues to deal with the Depression on the other.  Major funding for the final Repeal campaign of the early 1930s came from a John D. Rockefeller-lead group of financiers who wanted to prevent any increases in income tax levels that an incoming Democratic Administration might enact.

In dealing with the War on Drug Users the stars would seem to be aligned, that is if the unitary-RMAD understanding of reality were to be adopted.  There is a major series of problems that could be addressed by ending the War on Drug Users.  Legalizing the currently illicit would create a major new source of tax revenues.  Doing so would significantly reduce the prison population resulting in major reductions in Federal, state and local spending on incarceration.  Doing so would significantly unclog the courts, especially at the Federal level where they are so over-burdened with drug cases that the waits for trials on much more important matters, especially in the civil realm, can become interminable.  Obviously, there would be a significant reduction in the demands on the law enforcement sector of government, which could either save money or enable the diversion of resources to other important areas, such as financial fraud, that do not always receive the attention they deserve.  

The Taliban would be largely defunded.  That the heroin trade is a major source of their funding is the subject a new book that is currently featured on BuzzFlash.com: Seeds of Terror: How Heroin Is Bankrolling the Taliban and al Qaeda.  As well, of course, the true Drug Wars that are killing thousands of Latin Americans, especially in Mexico and Colombia, would be brought to a sudden, well-deserved end.  Finally, the recognition of the unitary nature of RMAD use would enable for the first time a comprehensive public health program to deal with all of the negative aspects of that use, especially among children for whom it is the major licit drugs which are the stepping stones both to later habitual, damaging use of them, and, currently, to the use of the illicits. 

As to the practical matter of how to implement the legalization of the illicits, it has been said that the tobacco companies have been prepared for marijuana legalization, up to and including the registration of trade names.  Heroin and cocaine could be sold by Federal or state-operated stores, similar to the “package stores” that dispense certain alcoholic beverages in such states as Vermont.  As for the synthetic RMADs, and the non-prescription use of the prescription drugs (the latter of which has been a much more serious problem than the use of heroin and cocaine combined), a variety of approaches could be explored.  This all would have be combined with a major public-health based anti- and safe-RMAD use program, combining tax policy, controls on advertising, packaging, and marketing, and effective education programs for both adults and children.  The result would be a much healthier nation.  Since finding sources of new government revenues in the face of ever-increasing deficits have become such a major concern and since certain major foreign policy aims could be achieved so easily, now is the time to end the War on Drug Users, once and for all.