We will never know what would have happened if Lyndon Johnson had said no to more war. We know what happened because he said yes. -Bill Moyers

Forgive me for bringing it up, or even talking about it, but I would like to address the issue  of bringing accused terrorists to trial in the city of New York, or in any other federal courthouse in America, a place where, until quite recently, anyone accused of a federal crime would be put on trial.

I have heard it said that terrorists should not be tried in federal courts because they are war criminals.  War criminals?  Oh, you mean soldiers involved in The War on Terror for the other side, those we have captured and intend to punish (now that keeping them in prison forever without charging them with a crime and slowly torturing them for more information is out) for their role in The War on Terror. 

It is inarguably important to bring these people to some sort of justice, and I cannot think of a better place for that to happen than in a federal court house where they can be presumed innocent of the charges against them and it is up to the state and its prosecutor to prove they are guilty. 

For me, that lets a little bit of the ring of freedom sound loudly and clearly to those who would destroy (and they were handsomely being helped by the Bush/Cheney clique that briefly gained control of our government and set out to turn our Constitution inside out) one of the world's greatest symbols of freedom and justice, my own country.  Should we be afraid of bringing these people to justice?  No, we should be afraid of not doing so.

It is amazing to me that we should even find the idea of these trials controversial, since in the not-so-distant past, they would have been routine.  Which is to say, what we do with those who choose to live outside the law and commit crimes against humanity, whatever their justification, be it voices in their heads or visions of turning the world back to a time when those who ruled , ruled in the name of one god not the same as another.  Talk of infidels was not much of a motivator, so far as I know, in a world that stood capable of destroying itself at any moment with  the use of nuclear weapons, a reality which hung quite clearly over every child's head for quite some time during the Cold War.

But then the Cold War ended.  The Soviet Union decided it was crazy to try and compete with the West in building newer and more powerful ways of destroying its neighbors and, by extension, given the nature of the weapons, itself.  The Berlin Wall came down, and there was dancing in the street.  Everyone let out a huge sigh of relief, and those who dreamed of peace, dreamed of a Peace Dividend that would bring happiness and prosperity to everyone on both sides of the now defunct Iron Curtain.  What happened to that?  It disappeared like so much smoke rising into a clear blue sky.

One very wealthy man decided to put his wealth to work funding a great criminal act.  He would bring down the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City on a lovely fall day in America.  He's never been brought to justice, but he did manage to give those who could not abide a world without war a new war to declare and become overtly fond of.  This was, of course, The War on Terror, brought about most conveniently by one very wealthy man, who could not abide a world without war anymore than the Cold Warriors in America could learn to live with it.

They both got what they wanted and, for a while, seemed to work hand in hand to dismantle America's freedom and its sense of itself as a basically decent country that respected human rights, did not go to war for any reason other than to protect itself and its people, and stood, as I think I've mentioned, as a beacon of freedom in a sometimes very, very dark and confusing world.

Chris Hedges, among others, has said, "War itself is a crime against humanity", something every sane person knows to be true, although  many want to believe it is not.  For this reason, if for no other, I think it is time to give up the fantasy that we are involved in a War on Terror.  What we are involved in is a war on crime, crime committed against America and its people.

This chimera called The War on Terror brought us to a place where we hunted a wanted man, but we did not find him and It is time to get out of Afghanistan as an occupying power, just as we are getting out of Iraq, where we never had any business being.  It is time to put those resources we find readily at hand to finance our war machine to work building the economy of America and helping the tens of millions of Americans who do not work on Wall Street and cannot find a job, because there are no jobs, on Main Street.

 We are a great nation who needs to stop squandering its wealth on one man's war and the greed of those on Wall Street who seem to lack the ability, the will, or the imagination to invest in the people of this country who are crying out for jobs, healthcare and security in a country that once had an abundance  of wealth equally shared among all its people by what was known as a progressive income tax, yet one more item that we have lost sight of in what appears to be an endless quest for new ways of screwing the American people.

I'm not worried about where we try terrorists.  Criminals are criminals.  I'm worried about what putting our focus on a chimera is doing to our country.

"It's time for Mr. Obama to go on the offensive. Above all, he must not shy away from pointing out that those who stand in the way of his plan, in the name of a discredited economic philosophy, are putting the nation's future at risk. The American economy is on the edge of catastrophe, and much of the Republican Party is trying to push it over that edge." -Paul Krugman, 2/6/09

I have a picture on my office wall pulled off of the web during the heyday of the Republican ascension, when they controlled Congress and the White House.  It shows a group of people holding up a hand-made banner about the size of half a bed sheet that reads:  "AMERICA, Nation of Sheep, Owned by Pigs, Ruled by Wolves".  The banner just about sums up American governance in the last eight to ten years.  It was a nation systematically raped by men and women with no better value system than that of greed, a nation taken out behind the woodshed and left to expire like a wounded animal.

We elected Barack Obama to put a stop to that sort of behavior, to reign in those only concerned with "getting theirs" and leaving a wasted world behind them, for their children or their grandchildren to clean up and try to heal.

With Obama's election, we want and expect an end to the politics of greed, complacency, and the status quo, once and forever.  The Republicans, however, remaining in Congress, like their brethren remaining in the boardrooms and at the helm of Corporate America, seem to want only one thing, a world in which those on top can stay there (with the help of the United States Treasury, if that is what it takes to keep them in power and allow them to continue to live like the oligarchs they have become) and change nothing.  America is supposed to bail out Wall Street, inept Bank Managers and Stock Holders while doing nothing to put American men and women back to work at a decent wage and with healthcare that enables them to live without the stress of paying astronomical fees for the healing medications and care they may need.   Main Street, where most Americans live, is to get nothing, even if that means astronomical numbers of citizens are unemployed and reduced to standing in line for charitable handouts of food, clothing, and shelter.  For Republicans, spending government funds to put the men and women living on and around Main Street back to work Is anathema (although it's okay to spend millions of dollars to prop up those who brought America to this pass).

Well, okay.  If that is what it takes, bring on anathema.  President Obama has reached across the aisle, as they say, looking for bipartisan support for a bill designed to stimulate the American economy at a time when no other tools are available to stimulate it.  Private investors are not investing, bankers are not lending, and our economy is starting to shrink like a slowly drying chamois.  If anathema is what the Republicans are going to have to live with, let them live with it.  Not one Republican voted in the House of Representatives to support the bailout of Main Street.  Not one.  President Obama need no longer try to govern with the help of those who always put their party first, their nation second.

Paul Krugman has written that conventional ways of doing and thinking about the economy no longer apply.  I believe he knows what he is talking about, and I trust him.  He worries it may already be too late to save this nation and its people from an economic meltdown not seen since the 1930's.  I'd make his worry my own and encourage President Obama, and the Democratic Party he leads, to forget about bi-partisan support and move forward as quickly as possible to try and save this nation from the pigs who own it and the wolves who rule it.  Their values are not mine, nor are they America's.

I live in Massachusetts.  Every day I read another story about state cuts in funding that hit the people in this state who need those cut funds the most.  We are talking about people who need help and the people who help them.  Those who need help are joined on the street by those who the state once paid to help them.  As the result of the state's solution to budget shortfalls, the problem of unemployment begins to grow exponentially.   At some point, the solution becomes the problem.  We seem to have reached that point in the nation.  Right now, cutting funds is about as useful an exercise as cutting taxes.  Without jobs, there are no taxes to be paid, no taxes to collect.  It is one sure way to destroy a nation once and for all.

Paul Krugman's latest blog post, under the headline, "Do we need the middle class" went down my gullet like some very bad food.  In the post, he writes

"Kevin Drum writes that

One way or another, there's really no way for the economy to grow strongly and consistently unless middle-class consumers spend more, and they can't spend more unless they make more.

"This is a widely held view, and I'm as much in favor of a strong middle class as anyone. Nonetheless, I'd say that in terms of strict economics it's wrong. There's no obvious reason why consumer demand can't be sustained by the spending of the upper class -- $200 dinners and luxury hotels create jobs, the same way that fast food dinners and Motel 6s do. In fact, the prosperity of New York City in the last decade -- largely supported off of super-salaried Wall Street types -- is a demonstration that you can have an economy sustained by the big spending of the few rather than the modest spending of large numbers of people."

You can have an "economy", sure, but what sort of economy is it?  It is the same type of economy we have now; one that Paul Krugman might compare to the economy of many a third-world nation.  It is the economy of the oligarch, a sort of modern day return to the medieval world in which you have the royalty sitting at the top of the pyramid--the misnamed "upper class"--and everyone else, fending for survival below.  It is an economy, all right, but a rather brutal Hobbsian place in which to live and grow.  It is not a place, in fact, in which the "pursuit of happiness" plays a large part.  Most of the people in such a nation are not pursuing happiness, they are pursuing survival, which is a very different thing indeed.

As we await the arrival of Obama in Washington, most of society is hoping it is his and his teams' intention to change the society we now live in into something more like the society we lived in before the Republicans managed to turn what we thought was a free and equal society into a medievalesque oligarchy in which approximately one percent of the people managed to garner 95 percent of the wealth of the nation into their own greedy hands and everyone else was supposed to be grateful and as happy as tithed serfs on the overlord's manor.  It is a strange world the Republicans have managed to construct and keep most of the people of the nation in, all the while saying this way of life is as natural as the changing of the seasons, so what's to complain about?

What's to complain about?  Well, let's not go there.  We know what is wrong.  We know those with power--in America, Power and Money are the same thing--will never freely go back to a world in which we have a progressive tax system designed to spread the wealth of the nation equally across its vast population.  Those whose transport of choice is a corporate jet or private helicopter, will not think there is anything enlightened about the re-building and strengthening of roads and bridges, public transportation or the rail system, good public schools and affordable universities and colleges.  They will certainly have no use for unions, as the Republicans still left in the Senate showed us last week when, rather than actually try to stave off the collapse of America's native-born auto industry, chose to instead try and gut the American auto unions.

There is a lot to change, and the country I was born into, while it no longer looks like a nation in which all men are actually created equal, can become that nation again if it chooses to, and if the leadership waiting in the wings wants it to.  I am counting on its wanting.  I am also counting on Paul Krugman to help us get there, realizing that everything he says does not have to agree with my gullet, especially if it helps me remember what I want or, in this case, don't want.

 

When I step into the voting booth tomorrow, I will be voting for Barack Obama, grateful for having the opportunity to help elect a person I have enormous respect for.  For me, it will be like elevating Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King at the same time to the highest office in America.  In other words, I am placing huge expectations on one man's shoulders, but, you know what, I think he can handle it.

When my boss's boss, the President of the Board of Directors, said recently, "I'm voting for Obama.  I know they say he is very inexperienced, but we need a change in this country," he was stating for the record that though he'd been a Republican all of his life, enough was enough.  He'd seen enough of the cronyism, corruption, and shere meanness of his Republican bretheren to know it could not go on.  It was bad for him, bad for business, and certainly very bad for the country, which was (and is) an economic shambles.  The only people who really are not hurting in this country are those who have gained the most by producing the least, that 1% or so who in the last 10 years have managed to garner 95% of the wealth in this nation into their own greedy hands, while urging the citizenry of the nation to cut taxes so they could continue to amass their own wealth without care or regard for the nation's remaining citizens who saw their real income shrink, their own debt baloon, and the nation as a whole rolled toward the brink of bankruptcy.

Values got turned on their heads thanks to the Republican propaganda that kept telling the working man not to worry, keep cutting taxes, and you will see the wealth trickle down to you in the form of more and more high paying jobs and better and better schools for your children.  Instead, for most Americans, it became harder and harder to feed themselves and their children, harder and harder to keep a roof over their heads, harder and harder to pay for the medical care they needed.  And the kids?  The kids were reduced to going out on the streets begging their fellow citizens to donate to them so they could have a sports or arts program in their school system.  Some people would call this a character building exercise.  I call it a degrading way to treat children or their parants.

I hope Obama is elected by such an overwhelming landslide that absolutely no one will doubt the extent of his appeal, and the faith people have placed, not in him, but in his ability to handle the many messes he is going to inherit from our boy president, who, if he had any sense at all (and I do not believe he does), would have resigned from office long ago, or never run for office in the first place.

People question Obama's ability.  No one seems to have looked very carefully at what he has accomplished in a very short time.  He did not get where he is today all by himself, but he himself had to have some wonderful organizing skills to pull off this great upset of conventional wisdom that will soon result in his becoming the president of the United States.  He had to work at it, believe in it, find the right people to help him, and then go out and accomplish all that he intended.  And he did it by being himself, by not looking for the lowest means of characterizing his opponent, by walking with his head up and staying on the high road where he began his quest.  He refused to lower himself, or his supporters, all citizens of this nation, into the mud and slime of Rovian puke that has for too long been the nature of Americn electoral politics.  We hope that tomorrow will put an end to a practice that won a few electoral votes but all but ruined a nation.

Thank you, Obama.  We appreciate the chance to go to the polls smelling sweet.  May your election bring real change to this nation.

Back in August, reading my daily edition of the Boston Globe, I saw an article by David Paul Kuhn under the headline, "Obama's problem with white male voters".  I cannot say I read it completely or even particularly closely, but my impression of what David Paul was saying is that Obama really had a problem with old white men, who tended to favor John McCain over Obama.  I immediately got an idea and decided to have a button custom made that read "Old White Men for Obama", thinking it might help make it okay for old white men to get behind Obama.  In other words, I'd start a movement.

 

I went to Obama's web site, selected some art work, found AffordableButtons.com on the web, and placed an order for ten buttons.  They arrived about a week later.  I gave out one or two to friends willing to wear them and offered them to anyone who would take, and wear, one.  I did not have a lot of takers, mostly because men, of any age say past 40, are too vain to wear them.  The most common remark I would get after offering someone a button was, "I'm not old."  That was not the point, and I always wanted to say, "No, but you are not 21 anymore either."  Most of the time, though, I did not say anything.

 

I've had some strange reactions to the button.  While I was in a drugstore, one young black man, about to wait on me, pointed at it, and asked "What's that?" with a look of concern, if not fear, in his eyes.  I said, "That's a button.  I'm an old white man, and it means I support Barack Obama for president."  "What about Sarah Palin?" he asked (this was shortly after John McCain had picked her as his running mate), "Everybody likes her."  "I like lots of people," I said, "but that doesn't mean I think they are qualified to be the vice president of the United States."  He relaxed, and I was happy to see it.  He seemed to think John McCain had just trumped Barack Obama, and Obama was going to lose the election.

 

I keep the button on my bag, which I carry back and forth from work every day, as I take public transportation to my job in Boston.  First the train to Harvard Square, then the bus to Symphony Hall, then another train to work.  One day, going up the escalator out of the Harvard Square T stop, a woman behind me said, "Where did you get that button?  I love it.  I want to get one for my husband to wear."  I explained to her that I had had it custom made and reached into my bag for an extra one, handing it to her.  "Can I pay you for it?"  "No," I said, "Make a donation to Obama's campaign.  This is mine."  She walked off happily.

 

Creating and wearing the button has, of course, made me more aware of the buttons other people wear.  And it was not until yesterday, I swear, that I saw anyone wearing a button with any political message.  I saw a woman on the train, a couple of seats down from me, with an Obama button on her lapel.  A first.  The sheer lack of buttons, not to mention signs in yards or windows (a few here and there) and/or bumper stickers (again, a few here and there, mostly for Obama, although I did see one sign recently in a window for McCain/Palin), makes me think there is a stealth campaign for president of the United States going on in the country. 

 

Looking around a crowded train or bus, you'd never know one of the most important elections in this history of this country is about to take place.  No one seems to want to show their cards, as if there is some danger in doing so.  Perhaps it is just another sign of how cowed we, as a nation, have become since 9/11, when we forgot we were a free, fearless people who ought to be able to trust our own government to do the right thing.  Watching it do the wrong thing for eight long tortured years has certainly taken its toll.  We'll be a long time undoing all the damage that has been done to the world and our own peace of mind, if the lack of buttons is any measure of what is happening on the streets.

Talking with a friend today, a man named Russell Gilfoy, about the upcomong election for President, Russell said there was only one choice since John McCain "pulled a palin".  He said John had added a new word to the language.  Instead of saying someone was "grasping at straws", just say he was "pulling a palin".  Who knows?  He may be right.  A "palin" may be just the word we need to describe unwise, intemperate, and/or foolish choices or actions. 

Trying to watch TPM videos on my Firefox browser, for some reason unbeknownst to me, became impossible in the last few days, so I downloaded the latest version of the Opera browser, installed it, and launched it. It opened with a bunch of tabs I'd been browsing in months ago, when I was trying out Opera. One of those tabs was a web site I'd forgotten about. It was Barbara Ehrenreich's blog.  

Of the many people who blog, and who I'd always read faithfully, was this woman, someone I began to appreciate after I'd read Nickle & Dimed (to death). She is not Molly Ivins, but like Molly, she writes with a kind of furious, funny outrage about the world in which we live. She reminds one of, in her own daring way, of what we've put up with, become, despaired of changing. In a blog about the 160th birthday of the Communist Manifesto (you forgot, did you? To put this on your calendar?) she writes:

"All that talk about "production," for example: Did they actually make things in those days? Did the proletariat really slave away in factories instead of call centers? But on one point Marx and Engels proved right: Within capitalist societies, or at least the kind of wildly unregulated capitalism America has had, the rich got richer, the workers got poorer, and the erstwhile middle class has been sliding toward ruin. The last two outcomes are what Marx called "immiseration," which, in translation, is the process you're undergoing when you have cancer and no health insurance or a mortgage payment due and no paycheck coming in.

"Marx predicted that capitalism would fall in a spirited, pro-active, fashion: The workers, fed up with immiseration, would revolt, seize the "means of production," and insist on running the show themselves, that being the original, pre-Soviet, notion of socialism. The revolution didn't happen, of course, at least not here. For the last several years, American workers have sweetly acquiesced to declining wages, rising prices, speed-ups at work, disappearing pensions, and increasingly threadbare health insurance. While CEO pay escalated to the 8-figure range and above, so-called ordinary Americans took on second jobs and crowded into multi-generational households with uncomfortably long waits for the bathroom."

Immiseration is not going to become part of anyone's every day vocabulary, but it is good to be reminded that there is a word that encompasses a lot of what is wrong in this nation today, where getting sick is not just an uncomfortable bodily state of affairs but also a gateway to poverty and that homeless hell we have all been taught to fear more than life itself (every think about how the homeless do it? Get up and put one foot in front of another every single day instead of simply jumping off a local bridge and letting their bodies float home to mother ocean?).

Barbara thinks about those things, and I'm happy to know she is still out there and still finding amusing and interesting ways to write about them.

Back in August, reading my daily edition of the Boston Globe, I saw an article by David Paul Kuhn under the headline, "Obama's problem with white male voters".  I cannot say I read it completely or even particularly closely, but my impression of what David Paul was saying is that Obama really had a problem with old white men, who tended to favor John McCain over Obama.  I immediately got an idea and decided to have a button custom made that read "Old White Men for Obama", thinking it might help make it okay for old white men to get behind Obama.  In other words, I'd start a movement.

 

I went to Obama's web site, selected some art work, found AffordableButtons.com on the web, and placed an order for ten buttons.  They arrived about a week later.  I gave out one or two to friends willing to wear them and offered them to anyone who would take, and wear, one.  I did not have a lot of takers, mostly because men, of any age say past 40, are too vain to wear them.  The most common remark I would get after offering someone a button was, "I'm not old."  That was not the point, and I always wanted to say, "No, but you are not 21 anymore either."  Most of the time, though, I did not say anything.

 

I've had some strange reactions to the button.  While I was in a drugstore, one young black man, about to wait on me, pointed at it, and asked "What's that?" with a look of concern, if not fear, in his eyes.  I said, "That's a button.  I'm an old white man, and it means I support Barack Obama for president."  "What about Sarah Palin?" he asked (this was shortly after John McCain had picked her as his running mate), "Everybody likes her."  "I like lots of people," I said, "but that doesn't mean I think they are qualified to be the vice president of the United States."  He relaxed, and I was happy to see it.  He seemed to think John McCain had just trumped Barack Obama, and Obama was going to lose the election.

 

I keep the button on my bag, which I carry back and forth from work every day, as I take public transportation to my job in Boston.  First the train to Harvard Square, then the bus to Symphony Hall, then another train to work.  One day, going up the escalator out of the Harvard Square T stop, a woman behind me said, "Where did you get that button?  I love it.  I want to get one for my husband to wear."  I explained to her that I had had it custom made and reached into my bag for an extra one, handing it to her.  "Can I pay you for it?"  "No," I said, "Make a donation to Obama's campaign.  This is mine."  She walked off happily.

 

Creating and wearing the button has, of course, made me more aware of the buttons other people wear.  And it was not until yesterday, I swear, that I saw anyone wearing a button with any political message.  I saw a woman on the train, a couple of seats down from me, with an Obama button on her lapel.  A first.  The sheer lack of buttons, not to mention signs in yards or windows (a few here and there) and/or bumper stickers (again, a few here and there, mostly for Obama, although I did see one sign recently in a window for McCain/Palin), makes me think there is a stealth campaign for president of the United States going on in the country. 

 

Looking around a crowded train or bus, you'd never know one of the most important elections in this history of this country is about to take place.  No one seems to want to show their cards, as if there is some danger in doing so.  Perhaps it is just another sign of how cowed we, as a nation, have become since 9/11, when we forgot we were a free, fearless people who ought to be able to trust our own government to do the right thing.  Watching it do the wrong thing for eight long tortured years has certainly taken its toll.  We'll be a long time undoing all the damage that has been done to the world and our own peace of mind, if the lack of buttons is any measure of what is happening on the streets.

Talking with a friend today, a man named Russell Gilfoy, about the upcomong election for President, Russell said there was only one choice since John McCain "pulled a palin".  He said John had added a new word to the language.  Instead of saying someone was "grasping at straws", just say he was "pulling a palin".  Who knows?  He may be right.  A "palin" may be just the word we need to describe unwise, intemperate, and/or foolish choices or actions. 

Trying to watch TPM videos on my Firefox browser, for some reason unbeknownst to me, became impossible in the last few days, so I downloaded the latest version of the Opera browser, installed it, and launched it. It opened with a bunch of tabs I'd been browsing in months ago, when I was trying out Opera. One of those tabs was a web site I'd forgotten about. It was Barbara Ehrenreich's blog.  

Of the many people who blog, and who I'd always read faithfully, was this woman, someone I began to appreciate after I'd read Nickle & Dimed (to death). She is not Molly Ivins, but like Molly, she writes with a kind of furious, funny outrage about the world in which we live. She reminds one of, in her own daring way, of what we've put up with, become, despaired of changing. In a blog about the 160th birthday of the Communist Manifesto (you forgot, did you? To put this on your calendar?) she writes:

"All that talk about "production," for example: Did they actually make things in those days? Did the proletariat really slave away in factories instead of call centers? But on one point Marx and Engels proved right: Within capitalist societies, or at least the kind of wildly unregulated capitalism America has had, the rich got richer, the workers got poorer, and the erstwhile middle class has been sliding toward ruin. The last two outcomes are what Marx called "immiseration," which, in translation, is the process you're undergoing when you have cancer and no health insurance or a mortgage payment due and no paycheck coming in.

"Marx predicted that capitalism would fall in a spirited, pro-active, fashion: The workers, fed up with immiseration, would revolt, seize the "means of production," and insist on running the show themselves, that being the original, pre-Soviet, notion of socialism. The revolution didn't happen, of course, at least not here. For the last several years, American workers have sweetly acquiesced to declining wages, rising prices, speed-ups at work, disappearing pensions, and increasingly threadbare health insurance. While CEO pay escalated to the 8-figure range and above, so-called ordinary Americans took on second jobs and crowded into multi-generational households with uncomfortably long waits for the bathroom."

Immiseration is not going to become part of anyone's every day vocabulary, but it is good to be reminded that there is a word that encompasses a lot of what is wrong in this nation today, where getting sick is not just an uncomfortable bodily state of affairs but also a gateway to poverty and that homeless hell we have all been taught to fear more than life itself (every think about how the homeless do it? Get up and put one foot in front of another every single day instead of simply jumping off a local bridge and letting their bodies float home to mother ocean?).

Barbara thinks about those things, and I'm happy to know she is still out there and still finding amusing and interesting ways to write about them.