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With mid-term elections approaching, Peace Action's Peace Voter 2006 campaign will bring the occupation of Iraq and other key foreign policy issues to the forefront of the electoral debate.

We will put our elected officials on record on critical peace and security issues and demand their commitment to a more responsible foreign policy for our country.

By making peace the top priority in 2006, you can make a big impact at the local level, helping to build a powerful movement of people willing to organize for peace on Election Day, and beyond. This November, let's hold Congress accountable to the rising tide of public opinion that's urging an end to the war in Iraq and a new direction for U.S. relations with the world.

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Not Your Soldier Action Camps bring together young people who are heavily targeted by military recruitment. At the camps, youth learn how to take action to fight military recruitment, the poverty draft, and the corporations that profit off of war.

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Today's News and Views

Rumsfeld subpoenaed over Abu Ghraib

PETER URBAN purban@ctpost.com
Connecticut Post Online

Article created: 07/02/2006 04:28:00 AM EDT

WASHINGTON — A Congressional committee subpoenaed Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on Friday at the request of U.S. Rep. Christopher Shays.

Shays, R-4, sought the subpoena after the Pentagon refused to answer questions regarding allegations that an Army whistleblower faced retaliation for discussing abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison.

Shays, chairman of the House Government Reform subcommittee on national security, is investigating allegations made by Army Spec. Samuel Provance that his attempts to provide information to investigators about prison abuses were rebuffed and that he then was retaliated against for providing unclassified information to the media.

"The bottom line is it's critical that our oversight inquiries be taken seriously by executive branch departments and that we get timely access to the information we need to do our job," Shays said.

"Today we are demanding that the Department of Defense provide information that is critical to our investigation."

In March, Shays and Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., the ranking Democrat on the committee, sent a letter to Rumsfeld seeking information related to testimony Provance provided the subcommittee a month earlier.

The letter went unanswered.

Government Reform Committee Chairman Tom Davis, R-Va., signed the subpoena on Shay's behalf.

"When the committee requests information from executive branch departments and agencies, we try to be reasonable and accommodate their legitimate concerns about the volume and the sensitivity of what we're asking for," he said. "But if the [Defense] Department won't even return a call, after three months, and begin that dialogue, we really have no choice but to subpoena the material and compel their attention to our request."

Davis, Shays and Waxman are seeking:

· Provance's unredacted testimony;

· All communications relating to the interrogation, treatment or detention at Abu Ghraib of Iraqi General Hamid Zabar, his son and any other relatives;

· Communications relating to any other cases in which family members of detainees or others held at Abu Ghraib were involved in any way in an interrogation;

· All drafts of the report on the investigation of Abu Ghraib;

· All communications relating to information provided by Provance about Abu Ghraib.

The subpoena requires Rumsfeld to produce the documents by July 14.

Pentagon spokesman Lt. Col. Mark Ballesteros said Friday he was unaware of the subpoena.

From the Los Angeles Times

Enron Founder Ken Lay, 64, Dead of Heart Attack

From Associated Press

7:33 AM PDT, July 5, 2006

HOUSTON — Kenneth Lay, founder and vilified former chairman of scandal-ridden Enron Corp., died of a heart attack this morning. He was 64.

Nicknamed "Kenny Boy" by President Bush, Lay led Enron's meteoric rise from a staid natural gas pipeline company formed by a 1985 merger to an energy and trading conglomerate that reached No. 7 on the Fortune 500 in 2000 and claimed $101 billion in annual revenues.

He was convicted in May 25 of defrauding investors and employees by repeatedly lying about Enron's financial strength in the months before the company plummeted into bankruptcy protection in December 2001.

heart attack my ass. this coward probably killed himself or Bush had him offed. what do you want to bet there will be no autospy or at least none that will be made public. -Harold, ed.

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Working for a Pittance
By Bob Herbert
The New York Times
Published: July 3, 2006

"We can no longer stand by and regularly give ourselves a pay increase while denying a minimum wage increase to the hardworking men and women across this nation." — Hillary Rodham Clinton, to her fellow senators.

The federal minimum wage, currently $5.15 an hour, was last raised in 1997. Since then, its purchasing power has deteriorated by 20 percent. Analysts at the Economic Policy Institute and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities jointly crunched the numbers and determined that, after adjusting for inflation, the value of the minimum wage is at its lowest level since 1955.

For those who don't remember, Eisenhower was president in 1955, the Dodgers were still in Brooklyn, and Barack Obama hadn't even been born.

If you're making the minimum wage, you're hurting. If Congress and the president don't raise the minimum wage by Dec. 2, it will have remained unchanged for the longest stretch since it was established in 1938. (The longest period previously was from January 1981 to April 1990 — a span that saw the entire Reagan administration come and go.)

Senate Republicans recently blocked a Democratic bill, sponsored by Senator Edward Kennedy, that would have raised the minimum wage to $7.25 an hour over the next two years. Jared Bernstein, a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, noted that while Republicans in Congress are standing like a stone wall against this modest increase in the poverty-level wage, "they are working as hard as they can to repeal the estate tax."

"That," he said, "is just vicious class warfare."

The most important pay increases for most members of Congress are their own, and they are diligent in that regard. Senator Clinton, in a floor speech supporting the minimum-wage hike, said, "During the past nine years, we've raised our own pay by $31,600."

Mrs. Clinton has introduced a bill that, in addition to raising the minimum wage to $7.25, would link Congressional pay raises to hikes in the minimum wage. Under the bill, the minimum wage would be increased automatically by the same percentage as any increase in Congressional pay.

Polls have shown that Americans overwhelmingly favor an increase in the minimum wage. But the low-income workers who would benefit from such an increase are not part of the natural G.O.P. constituency. Thus, the stonewall.

A separate study by the Economic Policy Institute found that in 2005, with the pay of top corporate executives up sharply, and with the minimum wage falling further and further behind inflation, "an average chief executive officer was paid 821 times as much as a minimum wage earner."

That C.E.O., according to the study, "earns more before lunchtime on the very first day of work in the year than a minimum wage worker earns all year."

"The reality," said Senator Clinton, "is that a full time job that pays the minimum wage just doesn't provide enough money to support a family today. We have to acknowledge that fact and do something about it. As a country, we cannot accept that a single mother with two children who works 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year earns $10,700 a year — let me say this again: $10,700 a year. That is almost $6,000 below the federal poverty line for a family of three."

During the 1950's and 60's, the minimum wage was roughly 50 percent of the average wage of nonsupervisory workers. It has now fallen to 31 percent — less than a third — of that average.

As the Economic Policy Institute and the Center on Budget pointed out in their study: "Each year that Congress fails to raise the wage floor, its purchasing power erodes. The fact that the minimum wage has remained the same for nearly nine years means that its real value has declined considerably over that period. As inflation has accelerated recently due to higher energy costs, the real value of the minimum wage has fallen faster."

There is no justification — none — for condemning the nation's lowest-paid workers to this continuing slide into ever deeper economic distress. "No one who works for a living should have to live in poverty," said Senator Kennedy.

It's very telling that in the most prosperous nation in the world, that kind of comment actually sounds radical. We have a very long way to go.

Paul Krugman is on vacation.

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Tuesday, July 04, 2006

The Republicans would rather we live in China?
by AJ in DC - 7/04/2006 11:02:00 AM

UPDATE: Today's NYT takes China to task for its new censorhip of the press - does this sound that different than the Bush administration?

The Soviet Union dealt with the problem with the infamous Article 70 of the penal code, which basically defined anything the state didn't want people to hear as "anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda." Now China proposes to take the art of censorship a step higher with a bill that would severely fine news media outlets if they report on "sudden incidents" without prior authorization.

"Sudden incidents" sounds awfully similar to what most of the world knows better as "breaking news," and in most countries it's considered a core function of the news media.

In light of the total insanity over the past several days regarding the NYT, Wall Street Journal, and LA Times articles about spying on terrorist finances, I think it's worthwhile to take a look at a country with the kind of media policies Republicans are apparently hoping for: China.

In China, police randomly fired into a crowd of demonstrators, reportedly resulting in the bloodiest government action since Tiananmen Square 17 years ago . . . and then the government completely covered it up. Because the state has control over virtually all domestic media, the story simply disappeared, and for most of the nation's 1.3 billion people, the event never occurred.

My first reaction to this is sadness and total disgust.

My secondary reactions are twofold. First, the Chinese government has apparently done a masterful job of whitewashing this incident. According to China (and the "press" there), this basically never happened. Now, what if China made a statement that these villagers were actually domestic terrorists, and to reveal information about operations against them would be a detriment to national security? Sounds pretty ridiculous, but not beyond the realm of possibility -- especially if no facts can get out. If China said that, would conservatives who support similarly limiting the freedom of the press in American accept and support such an explanation? In China, we can see the result of government control of information flow. Is that what the right wants here, too?

And second, where's the outrage? Where are the right wing groups lining up an invasion plan? Where are the conservative blogs advocating regime change? We have all the hallmarks of Invasion Time: a repressive government killing its own people, shadowy and untrustworthy leadership with connections to rogue states (North Korea being at the top of the list), and . . . wait for it . . . possession of weapons of mass destruction!

I wouldn't personally support a violent U.S. response, of course, I'm just asking for a little consistency from the right. If conservatives can't quite get up the energy to advocate attacking the evil Communist Chinese, how about some pressure on our own Dear Leader to help along democracy in the Far East as well as the Middle East?

One of the more irritating habits of right blogistan is the constant challenges to we lefties to denounce baddies. Well, here it is. China's behavior is disgraceful, so how about a little soft power? Remember, the kind that we used to assert ourselves with? And regarding the clamor against the free press, be careful what you wish for . . .

Congressman Attacks Liberal ‘Backbiters’ And ‘Naysayers’ For Criticizing Failed Missile Defense

The right wing has latched on to North Korea’s unsuccessful missile launch to renew its calls for increased funding for the Pentagon’s failed $92-billion missile defense system. Yesterday on Fox News, Rep. Dana Rohrbacher (R-CA) attacked Democratic “backbiters” and “naysayers” — including guest Rep. Bob Filner (D-CA) — for questioning the program. Watch it:

But despite Rohrbacher’s rhetoric, the U.S. missile defense system can’t — and probably never will — protect the nation against an attack. Some problems:

FreeVideoCoding.com

– The Pentagon’s Ground-based Midcourse Defense (GMD) system “hasn’t successfully intercepted a missile since October of 2002. … And the last two times it tried to hit an oncoming missile, the interceptor didn’t even leave the ground. Things have gotten so bad that the Missile Defense Agency’s independent review team concluded last year that more tests may only undermine the GMD’s value as a deterrent.”

– A recent Pentagon Inspector General report found that security vulnerabilities are so serious “that the agency and its contractor, Boeing, may not be able to prevent misuse of the system.”

– “A little-noticed study by the Government Accountability Office issued in March found that program officials were so concerned with potential flaws in the first nine interceptors now in operation that they considered taking them out of their silos and returning them to their manufacturer for ‘disassembly and remanufacture.’“

Full transcript here.

Filed under: North Korea

Posted by Amanda at 2:05 pm

Monday, July 03, 2006

Not only is Lieberman not a Democrat, he's also not democratic
by John in DC - 7/03/2006 03:34:00 PM

Lieberman is beginning to sound more and more like George Bush every day. To wit:

Lieberman said he will still be running as a Democrat even if he's not the party's nominee and plans to remain part of the Democratic caucus in the Senate if re-elected.

"I want the opportunity to put my case before all the people of Connecticut in November," Lieberman said.

Well, there are a few problems here. First off, you can't run as a Democrat if you think you have to run as an independent because not enough Democrats will vote for you. In a democracy, you get to be the Democratic candidate by winning the Democratic primary. If you have to short circuit the democratic process in order to win the office, you're not a Democrat (or a democrat either).

Secondly, Lieberman has answered the question we've long been asking. Is he a Democrat or has he become little more than a Republican in Democrat clothing? Well, if you can't win the Democratic primary, and have to run as an independent to win the general election, then that means you need lots of non-Democrat voters or you just can't win. That means you're not a Democrat, you're something else. Per se Lieberman has become too conservative for the Connecticut Democratic Party.

It seems that Lieberman has learned a lot from his mentor, George Bush. If you don't like the democratic process, if the voice of the people is against you, just circumvent the process and usurp the people. If Lieberman can't win the Democratic primary, he'll run as a Democrat anyway because he says so, to hell with the people, to hell with the election results come this August.

As Joe notes below, the Connecticut election, and I suspect many elections around the country this November, are referenda on George Bush. Lieberman is not a moderate Democrat, he's a politician who has made his bed with George Bush. Lieberman has repeatedly gone out of his way to provide aid and comfort to a failed Republican presidency even as the majority of the American people say otherwise. And rather than be voting his conscience, it's not clear what Lieberman is voting. He continues to believe the Iraq war is going well. That view isn't conservative, it isn't liberal, and it has nothing to do with the conscience of a rational man - it's out of touch and a little bit crazy.

Lieberman has the right to be out of touch with the majority of the Democratic party and the majority of Connecticut Democrats. He even has the right to be a little bit nutty. What Joe Lieberman does not have is the right to defy the will of the voters in an election that is becoming less and less about the issues, and more and more about Joe Lieberman's ego.

It's time to let it go, Joe. At some point, it's more humane to simply pull the plug.

Local Marine To Return Service Medal To Bush In Protest

3/25 Marine Calls War On Terrorism Medal 'Eye Candy' From Bush

POSTED: 12:41 pm EDT July 3, 2006

UPDATED: 1:08 pm EDT July 3, 2006

AKRON, Ohio -- A local Marine who service in Iraq earned several medals for serving his country, but he's giving back one of the medals to the White House as a form of protest.

Sgt. Matthew Bee is a decorated Akron Marine who spent seven months in Hadeetha, serving with the 3rd Battalion 25th Marines Weapons Company based in Brook Park.

Bee received six medals of commendation, but one of them he will give back to President George W. Bush, calling the medal political, NewsChannel5 reported.

The medal is the War on Terrorism service medal, and Bee calls it "eye candy" from Bush.

"So, he took something noble and honorable and made it kind of dirty. And I always thought that medal was the one he pinned on us and said, 'This is my war. This is my stamp in history,'" said Bee.

Bee said he is not anti-war, but rather pro-peace. He plans to travel to Washington, D.C., with a small group of Marines who feel the same way he does. They will all try to return their War on Terrorism medal to Bush personally or to members of Congress.

Bob Burnett

Iraq - What Would the Dems Do?

On June 15th and 16th there was a fractious debate in the House of Representatives on the subject of Iraq. When you cut through all the verbiage, the Republican’s Resolution 861 had two claims: the war in Iraq is integral to the global war on terror and “it is not in the national security interest of the United States to set an arbitrary date for the withdrawal or redeployment of United States Armed Forces from Iraq.” HR 861 passed 256 to 153, largely along partisan lines.

Anyone watching the debate might have wondered: if the Democrats were in control of the house, what would they actually do about Iraq?

President Bush characterized the split between the two parties as the difference between “resolve” and “retreat.” His political adviser, Karl Rove, attacked anti-war Democrats such as John Kerry and John Murtha, accused them of advocating, “cutting and running.” Rove, who has never been in the military, said of the two decorated veterans, “They may be with you for the first shots, but they're not going . . . to be with you for the tough battles." Republicans repeatedly characterized Dems as lacking the will to win, advocating “surrender.”

When we cut through this vituperation, what do Democrats actually stand for? More importantly, what does what they said during the debate suggest that they would do if they won control of the house?

On June 15th, Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi delivered a stinging indictment of Bush’s leadership. “Stay the course - I don't think so. It's time to face the facts. On every important aspect of the Iraq war, President Bush and his advisors have been wrong.” Pelosi noted that defense expert Anthony Cordesman recently observed, “the US-managed reconstruction efforts have been as failed as our response to Hurricane Katrina.” She continued, "The Bush Iraq policy has diverted resources and attention from what should be the focus of our effort against terrorism in places like Afghanistan.” “The war has not made our country safer, it has not made our military stronger, it has caused great damage to our reputation in the world, and it has hindered the fight against terrorism.” Pelosi concluded, "In the face of all of the incompetence and cost of this war, the President urges us to stay the course. 'Stay the course,' Mr. President, is not a strategy, it's a slogan.”

149 Democrats, roughly 75 percent of those Dems who voted, were against House Resolution 861. They joined with Murtha and Pelosi who said, “Democrats are calling for a new direction in Iraq. Our new direction would say to the Iraqi people: we will not be in your country indefinitely, we will not construct permanent bases, and we will not control the flow of your oil. We will work with you and your neighbors diplomatically to ensure that the reconstruction of Iraq is successful. We will do as Mr. Murtha advocates: we will 'redeploy and be ready.” (On November 17the, Representative Murtha specified his plan for the withdrawal of US forces from Iraq.)

From Nancy Pelosi’s statements one would expect that if Democrats gained control of the House they would hold a series of hearings. One would be on the errors made by the Bush Administration, particularly the wasted reconstruction funds. A recent survey of foreign-policy experts found that 84 percent believe the US is not winning the war on terror. Democrats would likely follow up on this, ask what America should be doing to win the war on terror. Of course, the key questions remain: Is Iraq integral to the war on terror? And, if it is, are we pursuing the right strategy there? A Democratic majority should promote a real debate on these issues.

A logical place for a Democratic majority to begin would be a realistic assessment of where we are in Iraq. In The State of Iraq: An Update in the June 16th New York Times painted a grim picture. In comparison with May 2005, the number of US troops is down slightly, to 132 thousand, and the number of trained Iraqi security forces is up by 40 thousand. Nonetheless, violence has increased: Iraqi civilian deaths, Iraqis kidnapped, daily attacks by Insurgents and incidents of sectarian violence are up. According to The Times the percent of “Iraqis optimistic about future” decreased from sixty to thirty percent. Meanwhile oil production, household fuel supplies and average electric power remain below pre-war levels.

The key action for Democratic majority would be to hold hearings about the torrent of lies told by the Bush Administration. The American public must be made aware that every step taken by the President in Iraq has been based upon a lie: the justification for the invasion, the cost and length of the conflict, the plan for the occupation, the response to the insurgency, and the connection to the war on terror. Republicans have deceived us and the public needs to be told the truth. They won’t get this until Democrats control Congress.

David Yassky, second from left, campaigns in the predominantly black Crown Heights section of Brooklyn for a seat in the U.S. House. "You talk to voters about what's important," said Yassky, a member of the New York City Council.
Photo Credit: By Julienne Schaer

Candidacy Fosters A Debate On Race
White Democrat Finds Resistance From Black Voters

By Shailagh Murray
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, July 6, 2006; A01

David Yassky has a solid résumé, lots of campaign cash and plenty of ideas for improving the slice of Brooklyn he wants to represent in Congress. In another Democratic stronghold, he might be the runaway favorite.

But in New York's 11th District, Yassky's candidacy has touched off a controversy about race and turned a sleepy primary contest into an emotionally charged debate over minority political representation. The 11th District is one of the dozens of majority-black seats created in the aftermath of the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act. And Yassky, unlike his three primary opponents, is white.

The City Council member's bid has not been well received by the district's black establishment. Rep. Major R. Owens (D), the retiring 12-term incumbent, labeled Yassky a "colonizer." Local black leaders have staged events to pressure the 42-year-old Brooklyn Democrat out of the race. A Web site was launched. Al Sharpton is calling on prominent white politicians, including Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.), to take a stand against Yassky.

In the past 3 1/2 decades, the number of black-held House seats has increased fourfold, from 10 in 1970 to 40 today, a byproduct of the Voting Rights Act's intent to improve black participation in politics. Black House members hold senior status on committees including the tax-writing Ways and Means, the Judiciary and the Homeland Security committees. And the Congressional Black Caucus is an influential force within the Democratic Party.

But some Democrats have come to recognize the downside of these majority-black districts. For instance, they can spark racially polarized politics, pitting blacks against other minorities and whites, particularly as the districts become more gentrified and ethnically mixed.

In a black district of Memphis, a white candidate who is among 15 Democrats vying for the seat being vacated by Rep. Harold E. Ford Jr. (D-Tenn.) has encountered racial hostility similar to that experienced by Yassky. Stephen I. Cohen, a Tennessee state senator, said in an interview with a Jewish newspaper, the Forward, that he is entitled to the same treatment Ford, who is black, has sought as he campaigns statewide for the Senate. "Don't judge me by my race but by my record," Cohen said.

Elsewhere, the "majority-minority" phenomenon has increased Republican strength by packing the Democrats' most loyal constituency inside fewer districts, allowing surrounding districts to become more white and Republican.

When Virginia's Republican-dominated legislature redrew its congressional boundaries in 2001, blacks were shifted from GOP Rep. J. Randy Forbes's Chesapeake area district to Democratic Rep. Robert C. "Bobby" Scott's majority-black district, which follows the James River from the Norfolk area to suburban Richmond.

In a 2001 special election before redistricting, Forbes narrowly defeated a black state senator, L. Louise Lucas, 52 percent to 48 percent. In 2002, after the boundaries were redrawn, Forbes won his seat with 98 percent of the vote. This year, when Democrats are positioned to possibly take back control of the House, Forbes is running unopposed.

Provisions of the Voting Rights Act, including a section related to legislative districts, are due to expire and are being debated in Congress. Some Southern lawmakers have protested extending special safeguards that apply to their states, but civil rights advocates assert that allowing the provisions to expire would be highly risky in light of recent cases of voting rights violations.

In fact, some want more protections for minority communities. In a February speech, Owens endorsed an idea called "power sharing," which recognizes "the necessity of minority participation in the decision making process," a step beyond the current laws that protect minority rights.

But some Democratic strategists have begun to question whether strict adherence to a 40-year-old model of minority-dominated districts could be hurting the party in the long term. Rep. Rahm Emanuel (Ill.), chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said that at one time it made sense for the courts and state legislatures to carve out majority-black districts to break racially discriminatory practices, primarily in the South.

Looking at the map of congressional districts today, Emanuel asked: "Are we at the point in the political process where you don't need a 70 percent district, but a 50 to 45 district, with the political capacity to be more competitive in surrounding areas, so that more Democrats can win?"

The rapid transformation of urban areas could force Democratic and civil rights leaders to rethink minority districts, voting rights experts say. A combination of gentrification, immigration, intermarriage and a migrating black middle class "means that race just doesn't have the power that it once did, in these kinds of settings," said Edward Blum, a fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute who has written extensively about minority districts.

Just over half of the 40 black House members represent majority-black districts, while three of the four California black members represent larger Hispanic populations, said David A. Bositis, a senior research associate at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a think tank that focuses on minority issues.

But they are all serving in the Democratic minority. "Remember, the [Voting Rights Act] is about black voters, not black elected officials," Bositis said. "And black voters are not having their interests represented, although there are more black members of Congress."

That is the point Yassky made recently as he greeted voters on a corner of Eastern Parkway at the edge of Brooklyn's predominantly black Crown Heights neighborhood. Some people looked away when he approached, but others paused to shake his hand and express concerns about affordable housing, President Bush and the war in Iraq.

"You talk to voters about what's important," Yassky said. "You run your race. Voters are pretty thoughtful and will listen to the arguments. They want to see someone effective in Congress, and I think I have a really good case to make."

The 11th District was drawn in 1968 as a result of a Voting Rights Act lawsuit and was first occupied by Shirley Chisholm, who gained national prominence as an advocate of women and minority rights, and who ran for president in 1972. She was succeeded by Owens, a former librarian and state senator with liberal views and a penchant for passionate floor speeches, often delivered in rap style.

The district has evolved in recent years into a demographic melange, blending long-standing African American and Caribbean American populations with newer arrivals, including Arab, Asian and Hispanic immigrants and affluent white voters. The four candidates in the race to succeed Owens represent this new demographic reality: Yassky lives in wealthy Brooklyn Heights; City Council Member Yvette D. Clarke is of Caribbean descent; state Sen. Carl Andrews is an African American from Crown Heights; and Owens's son, Chris Owens, is biracial, having a white Jewish mother.

Attending an elementary school graduation last week, Yassky recalled that, not long ago, most of the students there were of Italian heritage.

Then he pointed to the program for this year's ceremony. Among the graduates' surnames were Wu, Ramos, Imran and Zapolsky, with one DeBenedetto and one Salerno.

Perhaps more dramatic has been the change in the district's income levels, which have skyrocketed along with property values. The imbalance is reflected in the candidates' campaign accounts. As of March 31, the end of the most recent campaign reporting period, Yassky had $750,000 cash on hand, compared with $450,000 combined for his three competitors.

"It's class, class, class," said Chris Owens, a Harvard and Princeton graduate who has managed his father's campaigns for 12 years. "Class is defining the face of Brooklyn. And as it defines Brooklyn, it will define its political representation."

One feature that has not changed is the district's deeply liberal bent. Regardless of class or color, Yassky and Owens said, voters are overwhelmingly opposed to the war in Iraq and want better schools and better health coverage. Anna Acosta, 21 and black, stopped to chat with Yassky along Eastern Parkway. Acosta said she is looking for a candidate who is willing to aggressively stand up to Republicans.

"It shouldn't be like that," she said of the racially motivated campaign against Yassky. "All that matters is that you're doing your job."

Posted 07/03/2006 @ 7:43pm

A July Fourth Declaration

It is clear that the American Constitution is in grave danger. It is time to make the defense of the Constitution a national theme for all candidates in this year's electoral contests.

The threat to the Constitution from President Bush, his administration, and an accomplice Republican Congress is all too obvious. In clear violation of established law and centuries-old political precedent, they have wiretapped American citizens; imprisoned citizens without warrants, charges, or means of redress; sanctioned and abetted the torture of foreign nationals; ignored clear Congressional legislative intent with the likes of 750 signing statements; disabled Congressional oversight of their actions; undertaken an assault on the press' right to publish the truth; and suppressed dissent and public-minded information disclosure within the Executive branch itself.

This abuse and overreach of Presidential power directly challenges the "checks and balances" at the core of our constitutional design. It proposes a government fundamentally different from that declared by the Founding Fathers.

The administration aggressively defends its actions on the grounds of national security and "unitary" executive power. It argues that we are in a state of war, of indefinite duration, which gives the Commander in Chief extraordinary autonomous powers. It argues, too, that the President has final control over all employees of the Executive branch – including those with no military function – and extending to the control of information they are permitted to provide to the public. As the Decider, President Bush decides what the public can or cannot know.

Simply put, to accept these arguments would be to accept the end of our democracy.

Central to the defense of this nation is defense of its constitutional values as well as its physical security. To sacrifice the Constitution in the name of "national defense" would be a grave mistake, for it destroys the very nation worthy of defense in the first place. This country has faced perils no less than today's – including those vanquished in a Civil War and World War II – without abandoning that conviction. To abandon it now would disgrace us before those who fought and sacrificed and gave us the gift of this nation.

Nor does prudence recommend this course. As we have relearned in recent years -- in instances as diverse as the Iraq War, the response to Hurricane Katrina, and Medicare reform -- a President who can suppress "unwanted" information breeds dangerous incompetence, and a government that acts on bad information becomes a bad government.

The actions of the Executive branch have a real and powerful impact on our lives. We simply cannot afford a "unitary executive" who silences independent voices, lets politics determine science, threatens our first amendment rights, withholds critical information from even enforcement personnel, and elevates personal loyalty to him above the duty to inform the public.

The American people's most powerful weapon in defending the Constitution is their vote in Presidential elections. But we cannot afford to wait until 2008. The danger to our Constitution is clear and present. Hence our call to all patriots to put the issue before the public in this November's elections and ask of all candidates, "Do you accept or condemn the President's assault on our Constitution?"

Some will object that using an election to defend the Constitution threatens to debase it to an instrument of partisan politics. The objection is misplaced. In fact, an electoral contest over Constitutional first principles will not debase those principles, but elevate the discourse, meaning, and substance of the contests themselves. There is no better use of parties, elections, and our votes.

Some will shrink from defending the Constitution out of fear that the public is not interested in such a discussion or lacks a real commitment to constitutional government--that it's a losing issue. They should have more faith in the American people. Given a clear choice, Americans will choose defenders of the Constitution over those who would destroy it. But the choice must be put clearly before them.

Declare our current crisis, and invite those who would serve as our elected representatives to defend the Constitution against our current President and an accomplice Republican Party.

Tomgram: Playing the Destabilization Card at Home and Abroad

The Destabilization Game

By Tom Engelhardt

One of these days, some scholar will do a little history of the odd moments when microphones or recording systems were turned on or left on, whether on purpose or not, and so gave us a bit of history in the raw. We have plenty of American examples of this phenomenon, ranging from the secret White House recordings of President John F. Kennedy's meetings with his advisers during the Cuban Missile Crisis (so voluminous as to become multi-volume publications) and Richard Nixon's secret tapes (minus those infamous 18½ minutes), voluminous enough so that you could spend the next 84 days nonstop listening to what's been made publicly available, to the moment in 1984 when a campaigning President Ronald_Reagan quipped on the radio during a microphone check (supposedly unaware that it was on): "My fellow Americans, I'm pleased to tell you today that I've signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes."

Just last week, a lovely little example of this sort of thing came our way and, twenty-two years after Ronald Reagan threatened to atomize the "evil empire," Russia was still the subject. Last Thursday, at a private lunch of G-8 foreign ministers in Moscow, an audio link to the media was left on, allowing reporters to listen in on a running series of arguments (or as the Washington Post's Glenn Kessler put it, "several long and testy exchanges") between U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov over a collective document no one would remember thenceforth

The whole event was a grim, if minor, comedy of the absurd. According to the Post account, "Reporters traveling with Rice transcribed the tape of the private luncheon but did not tell Rice aides about it until after a senior State Department official, briefing reporters on condition of anonymity as usual, assured them that ‘there was absolutely no friction whatsoever' between the two senior diplomats." (What better reminder do we need that so much anonymous sourcing granted by newspapers turns out to be a mix of unreliable spin and outright lies readers would be better off without?) In, as Kessler wrote, "a time of rising tension in U.S.-Russian relations," the recording even caught "the clinking of ice in glasses and the scratch of cutlery on plates," not to speak of the intense irritation of both parties.

"Sometimes the tone smacked of the playground" is the way a British report summed the encounter up, but decide for yourself. Here's a sample of what "lunch" sounded like -- the context of the discussion was Iraq (especially outrage over the kidnapping and murder of four employees of the Russian embassy in Baghdad):

"Rice said she worried [Lavrov] was suggesting greater international involvement in Iraq's affairs.

"'I did not suggest this,' Lavrov said. ‘What I did say was not involvement in the political process but the involvement of the international community in support of the political process.'

"'What does that mean?' Rice asked.

"There was a long pause. ‘I think you understand,' he said.

"'No, I don't,' Rice said.

"Lavrov tried to explain, but Rice said she was disappointed. ‘I just want to register that I think it's a pity that we can't endorse something that's been endorsed by the Iraqis and the U.N.,' she said, adding tartly: ‘But if that's how Russia sees it, that's fine.'"

Behind Rice's irritation certainly lay a bad few Russia weeks for the administration. Not only had the Russians been flexing their energy muscles of late, consorting with the Chinese and various of the Soviet Union's former Soviet Socialist Republics in Central Asia, which the Bush administration covets for their energy resources; but, as the ministers were meeting, Russian President Vladimir Putin -- you remember, another one of those world leaders George Bush "looked in the eyes" and found to be "trustworthy" (but that was so long ago) -- made it frustratingly clear that he would not back U.S. moves against neighboring Iran and its putative nuclear program at the UN. "'We do not intend to join any sort of ultimatum, which only pushes the situation into a dead end, striking a blow against the authority of the UN Security Council,' Putin told Russian diplomats in Moscow in the presence of journalists. ‘I am convinced that dialogue and not isolation of one or another state is what leads to resolution of crises.'"

Destabilizing Russia

There is, however, a larger, far more perilous context within which to view the "testy" relationship between the two former Cold War superpowers and, for once, someone has managed to lay it out brilliantly, connecting the dots for the rest of us. In The New American Cold War, the cover story of the most recent Nation magazine, Russia specialist Stephen F. Cohen finally catches the essence of that ever degrading relationship. What Cohen points out is that, after the USSR unraveled, the Cold War never actually ended, not on the American side anyway, and today it not only continues at nearly full blast, but the Russians have finally reentered the game.

To offer a little context: In the early years of the Cold War, when the A-bomb and then the H-bomb were briefly American monopolies, there were, among American hardliners, those who, in the phrase of the time, wanted to "rollback" the Soviet Union in whatever fashion necessary. At an extreme, as early as 1950, the Strategic Air Command's Gen. Curtis LeMay urged the implementation of SAC Emergency War Plan I-49, which involved delivering a first strike of "the entire stockpile of atomic bombs… in a single massive attack," some 133 A-bombs on 70 Soviet cities in 30 days. However, it was another policy, "containment" (first suggested by diplomat George Kennan in his famous "long telegram" from Moscow and then in his 1947 essay, "The Sources of Soviet Conduct," written under the pseudonym "Mr. X" in Foreign Affairs magazine), that took hold. Increasingly, as the years went by, as superpower nuclear arsenals came ever closer to parity, the U.S. and the USSR settled into the equivalent of family life together, bickering (at the cost of untold numbers of dead) only on the borderlands of their respective empires. In the later 1960s, containment became détente.

When Ronald Reagan won the presidency in 1980 and relaunched the Cold War against the "evil empire," matters threatened to change, but in the end -- despite a massive rearmament campaign (that began in the Carter years) and the launching of Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative ("Star Wars"), meant to militarize space, détente hung in there; finally, to the surprise of all American strategists, the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Empire in Eastern Europe quickly unraveled without opposition from the remarkable Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev (a rare instance of the head of an imperial order not turning to force as it was dismantled). After a moment's hesitation, America's cold warriors, including the massively funded intelligence community which had never so much as suspected the weakened state of the Soviet Union, declared global victory. Much of the rest of the story (the lack of a "peace dividend," the rise of the U.S. as the globe's supposed sole "hyperpower," the way the neoconservatives and others fell in love with American military might and its potential ability to alter the world in directions they passionately desired is now reasonably well known – except for the very large piece of the puzzle Cohen contributed last week.

In his essay, Cohen points out that Russia, despite recent gains, is still in "an unprecedented state of peacetime demodernization and depopulation," suffering "wartime death and birth rates" in a time of relative peace; while its unstable political system rests on the popularity of one man, Vladimir Putin. What was left of the USSR having almost imploded in the 1990s, he writes, even today we cannot be sure what the collapse of a power armed with every imaginable weapon of mass destruction might "mean for the rest of the world."

How, he asks, has every U.S. administration reacted to this globally perilous situation?

"Since the early 1990s Washington has simultaneously conducted, under Democrats and Republicans, two fundamentally different policies toward post-Soviet Russia -- one decorative and outwardly reassuring, the other real and exceedingly reckless. The decorative policy, which has been taken at face value in the United States, at least until recently, professes to have replaced America's previous cold war intentions with a generous relationship of ‘strategic partnership and friendship'… The real US policy has been very different -- a relentless, winner-take-all exploitation of Russia's post-1991 weakness. Accompanied by broken American promises, condescending lectures and demands for unilateral concessions, it has been even more aggressive and uncompromising than was Washington's approach to Soviet Communist Russia… [This policy includes a] growing military encirclement of Russia, on and near its borders, by US and NATO bases, which are already ensconced or being planned in at least half the fourteen other former Soviet republics, from the Baltics and Ukraine to Georgia, Azerbaijan and the new states of Central Asia. The result is a US-built reverse iron curtain and the remilitarization of American-Russian relations."

Destabilizing Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, and the United States

This is the new, American-driven cold war -- a striking feature of our landscape, almost utterly ignored by the mainstream media -- that Cohen lays out at length and in compelling detail. Since 2000, these new cold war policies have only taken a turn for the disastrous. From its first moments in office, the Bush administration, made up almost solely of rabid former cold warriors, has been focused with an unprecedented passion and intensity on what can only be called a "rollback" policy. Defined a little more precisely, what they have pursued, as Cohen makes clear, is a policy of Russian "destabilization" with every means at their command -- and, until recently, with some success.

Their view was simple enough. In the wake of the collapse of the Soviet empire, the United States was the sole military power of significance left standing. It had, as they saw it, enough excess power to ensure a Pax Americana into the distant future, in part by ensuring that no future or resurgent superpower or bloc of powers would, in any foreseeable future, arise to challenge the United States. As the President put it in an address at West Point in 2002, "America has, and intends to keep, military strengths beyond challenge." The administration's new National Security Strategy of that year seconded the point, adding that the country must be "strong enough to dissuade potential adversaries from pursuing a military build-up in hopes of surpassing, or equaling, the power of the United States."

This was to be accomplished by:

*ensuring that the former challenging superpower, once rolled back to something like its pre-imperial boundaries, would never arise in any significant new form from the rubble of its failed empire.

*ensuring that no new superpower would arise in economically resurgent Asia; in this regard, the Chinese would be essentially hemmed in, if not encircled, by American (and Japanese) power; a potentially independent Taiwan supported; and the Japanese and Chinese set at each others throats.

*ensuring that the oil heartlands of the planet in what was by then being called an "arc of instability" running from the Central Asian borderlands of Russia and China through the Middle East, North Africa (later, much of the rest of Africa), all the way to Latin America would be dotted with American military bases, anchored in the Middle East by an emboldened Israel and new more pro-American and subservient regimes in formerly enemy states like Iraq, Iran, and Syria, and that the planet's oil flows (hence the fate of the industrialized and industrializing parts of the planet) would remain under American control.

The administration's destabilization strategy, as convincingly laid out by Cohen, was not, however, limited to Russia. The ambitions of top administration officials and their supporters, after all, were world-spanning. (It wasn't for nothing that the neocons and allied pundits began talking about us as the planet's New Rome back in 2002, while we were tearing up treaties, setting up secret prisons, and preparing to launch our first "preventive" war.) In retrospect, it seems clear that destabilization was their modus operandi. Despite what some have argued in relation to Iraq (and elsewhere in the Middle East), they were undoubtedly not voting for chaos per se. What they were eager to do was put the strategically most significant and contested regions of the planet "in play," using the destabilization card, always assuming in every destabilization situation that the chips would fall on their side of the gaming table, and that, if worse came to worse, even chaos would turn out to be to their benefit.

In that spirit, they began working to destabilize Russia, hoping that even if "regime change" weren't possible, all sorts of energy resources and other political and economic fruits would fall their way from the rotting tree of the former Soviet Union. As we know, they didn't hesitate to do the same in Afghanistan, claiming that they were simply taking out al-Qaeda and its Taliban hosts (with whom they had, not so long before, been in pipeline negotiations). What they actually did, however, was settle in to that country for the long haul, setting up their normal run of bases and prisons, and in the process not fretting enormously about what destabilization was actually doing there -- creating a narco-warlord-Taliban failed state that now, of course, befuddles them.

Then, as we all know, they invaded Iraq, claiming they were pursuing Saddam Hussein's nonexistent WMD program via "decapitation" shock-and-awe attacks on his regime, the disbanding of his military, the dissolution of the Baath Party, the disbarment of many of its former members from office or jobs, and the dismantling of the state-organized and run economy -- a program of destabilization so sweeping as to take one's breath away and meant to launch a far more sweeping destabilization (and hence remaking) of the Middle East. The results of this project, still in progress, are by now well known -- including the fostering of a complex, bloodthirsty, sectarian bloodletting in Iraq which now threatens to spill across borders into neighboring lands (along with terrorism and oil sabotage).

Their most recent target is Iran -- or rather, ostensibly, Iran's nuclear energy program. In his latest report on the administration's Iranian policy, New Yorker journalist Seymour Hersh quotes a "high-ranking general" this way: "[T]he military's experience in Iraq, where intelligence on weapons of mass destruction was deeply flawed, has affected its approach to Iran. ‘We built this big monster with Iraq, and there was nothing there. This is son of Iraq.'" In fact, as Hersh has previously reported, administration strategists have long been trying to destabilize Iran in a variety of ways, while threatening future military assaults on that country's nuclear establishment. If, at some future point, they were to follow through on this, the results for the global economy would undoubtedly prove both staggering and destabilizing in ways it's quite possible no one could handle.

In the meantime, they have been willing to destabilize the world by essentially growing terror in the pursuit of other ends. Despite the centrality of the "global war on terror" to their plans, it's obvious that the taking out of hostile terrorist groups has not been the only, or even perhaps the primary item on their agenda -- after all, they curtailed the hunt for Osama bin Laden in order to whack Iraq. Rhetoric aside, they seem, in fact, to be quite willing to live with the global phenomenon of ever proliferating, ever more homegrown terrorist organizations.

Though it's been little noted, their program in the United States has been hardly less based on playing the destabilization card. As their minions in occupied Iraq were intent on radically "privatizing" -- that is, destabilizing -- the Iraqi government and economy, so they have been intent on radically privatizing (and destabilizing) the American government and economy. Recently, Frank Rich of the New York Times wrote a striking column, The Road from K Street to Yusufiya, on exactly this, pointing out that "nearly 40 cents of every dollar in federal discretionary spending now goes to private companies." It hardly mattered to them that they were essentially emptying civil government of its can-do powers; that they were replacing those hated bureaucrats in Washington with even less competent bureaucrats linked to private, crony corporations of their choice. As Rich put the matter:

"[T]he Bush brand of competitive sourcing, with its get-rich-quick schemes and do-little jobs for administration pals, spread like a cancer throughout the executive branch. It explains why tens of thousands of displaced victims of Katrina are still living in trailer shantytowns all these months later. It explains why New York City and Washington just lost 40 percent of their counterterrorism funds. It helps explain why American troops are more likely to be slaughtered than greeted with flowers more than three years after the American invasion of Iraq.

"The Department of Homeland Security, in keeping with the Bush administration's original opposition to it, isn't really a government agency at all so much as an empty shell, a networking boot camp for future private contractors dreaming of big paydays…"

Caesar's Palace

The top officials of this administration are remarkable gamblers and optimists. They have also proven remarkably single-minded in playing the destabilization game. If they are in the Roman-Empire business, don't think Augustus, think Caesar's Palace. Like so many gambling addicts, they've never run across a situation in which they're unwilling to roll the dice, no matter the odds. They just give those dice that special little rub and offer a prayer for good luck, always knowing that this just has to be their day.

Medicare, roll the dice. Social security, roll the dice. Tax the poor and middle class by untaxing the rich, no problem. Wipe out what's left of the checks and balances of the American system in favor of a theory of an all-encompassing "commander-in-chief" government, roll those dice. Launch endless, Swift-Boat-style, bare-knuckle campaigns of fear, lies, and fantasy (accompanied by gerrymandering and vote-suppression schemes) meant to install Republicans in power for decades to come, no matter the cost to the political system -- don't wait, toss ‘em now!

This is, essentially, a full-scale a program for the destabilization (as well as plundering) of this country, one that fits snugly with their operations potentially destabilizing the planet. And through it all, like the good cold warriors they are, they've never let up on that rollback campaign against Russia. Perhaps, as in the previous century, if all that needed to be compared was the relative powers of two superpowers, their acts, however fierce or cruel, might not have seemed so strategically wrongheaded. Having taken advantage of the weaknesses of their opposite number, administration officials might now be standing tall; while the Russians, crimped, impoverished, embittered, might indeed have been licking their wounds, while complaining angrily but impotently.

Such is not the case. The twenty-first century is already turning out to be far more than a hyperpower, or even a two superpower, world. Before the eyes of much of humanity, between November 2001 and March 2003, the Bush administration decided to demonstrate its singular strength by playing its destabilization trump card and setting in motion the vaunted military power of the United States. To the amazement of almost all, that military, destructive as it proved to be, was stopped in its tracks by two of the less militarily impressive "powers" on this planet -- Afghanistan and Iraq.

Before all eyes, including those of George, Dick, Don, Paul, Stephen, Condi, and their comrades, we visibly grew weaker. While the Bush administration was coveting what the Russians called their "near abroad" -- all those former SSRs around its rim -- and were eagerly peeling them away with "orange," "rose," and "tulip" revolutions, its own "near abroad" (what we used to like to call our Latin "backyard") was peeling away of its own accord, without the aid of a hostile superpower. This would once have been inconceivable, as would another reality -- up-and-coming economic powers like China and India traveling to that same "backyard" looking for energy deals. And yet a destabilized planet invariably means a planet of opportunity for someone.

In fact, Iraq proved such a black hole, so destabilizing for the Bush administration itself that its officials managed to look the other way while China emerged as an organizing power and economic magnet in Asia (a process from which the U.S. was increasingly excluded) and Russian energy reserves gave Putin and pals a new lease on life. Now, administration officials find themselves stunned by the results, which are not likely to be ameliorated by floating a bunch of aircraft-carrier task forces menacingly in the western Pacific.

In one of his recent commentaries, historian Immanuel Wallerstein pointed out that the "American Century," proclaimed by Time and Life Magazine owner Henry Luce in 1943, lasted far less than the expected hundred years. Now, the question -- and except for a few "declinist" scholars like Wallerstein, it would have been an unimaginable one as recently as 2003 -- is: "Whose century is the twenty-first century?" His grim answer: It will be the century of "multi-polar anarchy and wild economic fluctuations."

If you think about it, the single greatest destabilizing gamble this administration has taken has also been the least commented upon. A couple of years back "global warming" was largely a back-page story about tribal peoples having their habitats melted in the far north or finding their islands in danger of flooding somewhere in the distant Pacific. It was all ice all the time and if you didn't live near a glacier or somewhere in the tundra, it didn't have much to do with you -- and certainly nothing whatsoever to do with those nasty hurricanes that seemed to be increasing in strength in the Atlantic as were typhoons in the Pacific.

Now, global warming is front-page stuff and you don't have to go far to find it. Alaska isn't just melting any more, we are. Lately, a plethora of major stories and prime-time TV news reports have regularly talked not about the north, but about the planet "running a slight fever from greenhouse gases," or undergoing unexpectedly "abrupt" climate change, or of the U.S. itself having its warmest years in its history -- something reflected even in local headlines (For N. Texas, it's warmest year on record). And yet in our media the Bush administration still largely gets a free pass on the subject. No major cover stories are yet taking on the ultimate destabilization gamble of this administration, the fact that they are playing not just with the fate of this or that superpower or set of minor powers, but with that of the human race itself.

The willingness of the President and his officials to bet the store on the possibility that global warming doesn't exist, or won't hit as ferociously as expected, or soon enough to affect them, or will be solved by some future quick-fix still isn't thought of as real front-page news. In other words, their maddest gamble of all, next to which the destabilization of Iran or Russia dwindles to nothing, receives little attention. And yet, based on their track record, we know just what they are going to do -- throw those dice again.

For George W. Bush and his top officials, taking the long-term heat on this probably isn't really an issue. They have the mentality not just of gamblers but of looters and in a couple of years, if worse comes to worse, they can head for Crawford or Wyoming or estates and ranches elsewhere to hunt fowl and drink mai tais. It's the rest of us, and especially our children and grandchildren, who will still be here on this destabilized, energy-hungry planet without an air conditioner in sight.

Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com ("a regular antidote to the mainstream media"), is the co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of American triumphalism in the Cold War. His novel, The Last Days of Publishing, is now out in paperback.

posted July 5, 2006 at 7:59 am

Joe Lieberman's Ultimate Act of Betrayal

By Bob Geiger

Created 2006-07-05 08:41

By Bob Geiger

If there's one thing I've realized in my time covering the United States Senate it's that general cynicism with the landscape inside the Beltway can mask the tangible differences between the major political parties and the dissimilar ways those parties affect the lives of the American people. When viewed through the real prism of each vote and floor debate and every piece of arcane maneuvering done by the majority and minority leadership, it's easy to see that there is a distinct difference between Republicans and Democrats and the cost of being the minority party can be quite heavy