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
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
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.
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
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
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.
]]>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
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
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.
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