Over the last several years as more people, organizations and governments began to take the prospect of global warming and human influenced climate change more seriously there has arisen a kind of 60 cycle background hum over the potential dangers of social unrest, disease, famine and mass movements of populations resulting from such change.

A few days ago while randomly browsing on the web I read an article at the Kansas City Star that sent a quick chill through my bloodstream: "Intelligence director: Worldwide economic crisis top U.S. security threat.

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My parents and grandparents were all Democrats; most of the time. In spite of that fact they had their reactionary moments, my grandmother, for instance, never forgave Roosevelt for sending Dad off to "fight a foreign war" and Dad himself, voted for Reagan for which I will never forgive him.

As a seven year old second grader at Ruskin school in Dayton I wore an "I like Ike" button (given to me by my Grandmother) to school. I had no idea who "Ike" was or why I liked him but wearing the button pleased Grandma and kept the cookies flowing so I wore the button. This, I believe, is how lobbyists and other political whores are born.

I wish I still had that button; it's probably worth a case of good rum on eBay.

That was my last flirtation with Republicanism and I hope that I may be forgiven for it. I still bear the shame of that scarlet "R."

In general, I don't like Republicans, their politics, their world view, the way they support capital at the expense of labor. I don't like their policies whether economic, domestic or foreign, their hypocritical embracing of "family values," their careful coddling of "Christian" extremists and the upper tiers of our society to whom they lend their allegiance, none of it.

In my life I have seen 36 years of Republican presidencies and 28 years and 1 month of Democratic leadership. I vastly prefer the latter. I hope for more of it.

The battle over the "stimulus bill" and the oft expressed desire of our new president and many on the left of the aisle to be non, or bi, or post-partisan is something that I find disturbing, worse, I find it somewhat cowardly.

Tens, hundreds of thousands of people worked and fought, spoke and scraped up funds for Democratic victory through all the horrible years of the Bush debacle and they deserve Democratic leadership.

They did not sign on to hear "if you give us a few more tuna sandwiches for the poor we'll give you more tax deductions for the wealthy and federal subsidies for Foie gras and second homes."

I understand, as well as anyone can who is out of the loop, living, as I do, in a flyover state, the ugly machinations of American politics and the unfortunate need for occasional "compromise" with interests that are antithetical to one's personal principals, but, there are times when lines must be drawn, make that etched, in the sand and not crossed.

This is such a time.

There can be no reasonable compromise with a party that has frequently embraced those who have loudly and consistently declared war on government and there can be no expectation that such a party can reasonably be expected to have any ability to govern.

The proof has been, as they say, in the pudding and this particular pudding is the vast, overwhelming, sticky morass of capitalist dreck in which we now find ourselves almost hopelessly mired.

The last eight years of Republican foreign policy was a disaster, by most accounts the worst foreign policy nightmare in our history. They went on to achieve the same caliber of results domestically with stagnant or retrograding wages and skyrocketing fuel and food prices and a financial industry that bore more resemblance to an off track betting parlor than something the sane would invest their savings in.

They managed to shred the Constitution and Bill of Rights in an attempt to send American Democracy back to the "Gilded Age," wreck our economy and along the way, created a climate of fear in which the only winners were the chosen, the "A list" of politically connected war profiteers.

They were repudiated by a sizable majority of the American people in the recent election and now want, and expect to share power, to dictate the terms, to define the solution to extract us from the swamp they led us into. This is where I really need a laugh track.

So, fellow Dems, let's quit pandering to those whose political philosophy is a proven threat to our country, our way of life and our rights and freedoms; as Jim Hightower says, "Ain't nothing in the middle of the road but yellow stripes and dead armadillos."

Bob Higgins
Worldwide Sawdust

Related story Roll Over the Republicans

In a piece in this morning's Washington Post titled Torture? Prosecute Us, Too Richard Cohen leads with this:

"The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there." So goes an aphorism that needs to be applied to the current debate over whether those who authorized and used torture should be prosecuted. In the very different country called Sept. 11, 2001, the answer would be a resounding no.

Contrary to what has become the accepted noise, "the world" did not "change" on 9/11. Our laws, our treaties and international agreements as well as our values remained. We did not become a "very different country" on September 12, 2001 despite Mr. Cohen's (and others) claim.

In many ways it is our body of law that binds the past, present and future. The rule of law gives constancy to our "values." Laws may change but the process of change is, and should be reasoned and deliberate, not an impassioned reaction to the events of the day. That kind of reaction to the passions of the moment is the path of the lynch mob.

If, as is said in legal circles, "big cases make for bad law," the events of 9/11 and the rapid changes in our laws and public policy that resulted from the reaction to those events gives us the mother of all examples of the aphorism.  An extremely big case led to a series of terrible revisions of our laws.

Among the legion of egregious errors committed by the last Republican administration was the naming of the war that it proposed to fight following the criminal destruction of the World Trade Center, the attack on the Pentagon and the downing of a fourth commercial airliner in a Pennsylvania pasture.

As has been pointed out numerous times "War on Terror" is an unfortunate term which calls for a war on a tactic: terror. You can no more fight a war against "terror" than you can fight a war against "covering fire," "encirclement" "camouflage" or "surprise."

Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney and the Goebbelian PR squad in the White House basement used the term "terror" more for its perceived effectiveness in arousing the public than for any accuracy in describing their strategy, or as Bush put it, "strategery." It was in the Bush White House that the ad boys gave the word a capital "T" and used it as their "brand" for instilling public fear and acquiescence in nearly any act that they chose to carry out over the ensuing seven years.

The attacks on September 11, 2001 involved specific criminal acts, all of which are spelled out in federal and state law and punishable by lengthy prison terms up to and including life in prison. Under federal law, death penalty statutes would apply for the murder of the thousands of victims of the crimes.

When the World trade center was bombed the first time in 1993 the crime was investigated by the NYPD, the ATF and the FBI with the help, no doubt, of other agencies both here and abroad. A thorough investigation by law enforcement professionals resulted in the arrest, conviction and life sentences for the criminals involved.

The Marines were not sent in, nor were the Army and Navy deployed in force and the country did not go to war. Rather than launching a full scale campaign of "shock and awe," the Clinton administration, in its wisdom, effectively, sent in "Columbo."

Following the crimes of 9/11 the mindset of our "leadership" was very different; actually, it now seems that the minds were made up before the event, made up in fact even before the 2000 election.

An investigation quickly confirmed the involvement of Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda and it was quickly decided to take on the Taliban and al Qaeda, Afghanistan was never intended to be the main thrust, nor was bin Laden to be the main target.

The public was, quite rightly, afraid after the attacks; I was. (I watched it on TV too) It was a time of fear and uncertainty that called for calm leadership and thoughtful action.

That is not what we got. We got a strutting cowboy alternately threatening the world, boasting of American might, and daring potential adversaries to "bring it on." He sounded like a drunken Saturday night drugstore cowpoke, cranked up on Jack Daniels, inviting any and all to a session of parking lot gravel dancing. "Mano a mano?"

Afghanistan and the Taliban were bottled up quickly, bin Laden isolated and rendered ineffective (at least temporarily) and the public roared its approval. (Cohen cites Bush's 92% approval ratings)

But our leadership kept feeding the collective fear and fanning the flames of public passion with manufactured intelligence, imagined alliances, an "axis of evil" cut from whole cloth and mythical "weapons of mass destruction."

Afghanistan and bin Laden was not enough, it would not serve as the entree to the Middle East that our "leadership" required, and in fact, his capture or death would retard the main goal of this posse. Saddam Hussein was to be the quarry, Iraqi oil the tool, American hegemony in the Middle East the ultimate prize.

Proof, (at least the appearance of proof) was needed to bind Iraq and Hussein with al Qaeda and bin Laden. Proof was needed to tie bin Laden's ability to acquire WMD to Hussein, to Iran, to anywhere they wanted to make a move.

They spread cash all over Afghanistan, all over Pakistan and all over the Middle East. Wads of hundred dollar bills, five grand here, ten there, were offered for information about al Qaeda members in some of the world's most impoverished countries, places where the annual per capita income is less than I spend on rum, and they got results.

People turned in cab drivers, personal rivals, enemies, tourists, their wife's divorce lawyer, you get the picture. Lots of suspects, never mind that they were often told by locals, by advisers, by interpreters that they were collaring the wrong guys, that many of these people were just hapless bystanders who had wandered into the net. It didn't matter.

It didn't matter because they weren't looking for facts; they were looking for "information." "Information" was necessary to tie Saddam to the "war on terror," so electrodes were attached, thumbs were screwed, genitals mistreated, people were "extraordinarily hydrated," and they got lots of "information."

Hook me up to the Toquemada machine and I'll confess to anything, any crime, any degradation to make the pain stop, and so will you. In a few days any of us will confess to being responsible for original sin, to make the pain stop.

Did they get facts, sure, cast a net that wide and you're bound to catch something edible, but I expect that the ratio of facts to "information" is, as they say, "highly classified."

At what cost did they gather these facts? We'll probably never know how many average Joes were destroyed, how many families ruined, how many people were murdered as a result of these "enhanced interrogation techniques," or how many minds were destroyed in the process.

And that is why we cannot "look forward," we cannot ignore these terrible, willful crimes, these war crimes, these crimes against humanity.

We must answer as a society for the criminality of our leadership by prosecuting them for what they purported to do in our name.

Cohen adds this:

At the same time, we have to be respectful of those who were in that Sept. 11 frame of mind, who thought they were saving lives -- and maybe were -- and who, in any case, were doing what the nation and its leaders wanted. It is imperative that our intelligence agents not have to fear that a sincere effort will result in their being hauled before some congressional committee or a grand jury. We want the finest people in these jobs -- not time-stampers who take no chances.

Is the cop on the street who beats a false confession out of a teenage suspect making a "sincere effort" to enforce the law? Is he saving lives?

Are the "finest people" those who can be persuaded to violate all norms of human decency?

Are those who resist power and insist on following the rule of law, now to be called "time stampers," "who take no chances?"

Cohen writes:

The best suggestion for how to proceed comes from David Cole of Georgetown Law School. Writing in the Jan. 15 New York Review of Books, he proposed that either the president or Congress appoint a blue-ribbon commission, arm it with subpoena power, and turn it loose to find out what went wrong, what (if anything) went right and to report not only to Congress but to us. We were the ones, remember, who just wanted to be kept safe. So, it is important, as well as fair, not to punish those who did what we wanted done -- back when we lived, scared to death, in a place called the Past.

I suggest that blue ribbon commissions are usually hired when whitewashing is felt to be the solution. I think that this is a job for the Justice department and perhaps a special prosecutor.

We don't need to find out what went wrong, there is a world full of opprobrium focused on our country as a result of these crimes, there is a sea of blood and body parts to attest to what went wrong. There is a universe filled with screams of torment to testify to what went wrong; it is time to find out whom, to what degree and to punish accordingly.

Yes we were scared, I too wanted to be secure but I have never been willing to give up my rights or the human rights of others for my personal safety; so don't, Mr. Cohen, try to blame this on me or the American people. We didn't sign on for crimes against humanity.

I'll leave you with this; I am a Marine veteran of Vietnam; twice a year (as I remember) we were instructed in the Military "Code of Conduct."

Here is a relevant excerpt:

"It is a violation of the Geneva Convention to place a prisoner under physical or mental duress, torture or any other form of coercion in an effort to secure information."
US Military Code of Conduct

Fact: Torture is illegal under US and international law.

Fact: We hung German officers and civilians for ordering others to commit war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Fact: We executed Japanese soldiers in WW2 for water boarding allied prisoners.

Fact: We punished our troops in Vietnam for the same offenses.

Leadership must be prosecuted for issuing unlawful orders to their troops which require them to violate our laws, treaties and conventions and the troops they lead are required to differentiate between lawful and unlawful orders whether from superior officers, from a frightened populace or... from a lynch mob.

Bob Higgins
Worldwide Sawdust

Last week was exhilarating for Democrats and, judging by the international media, for people all over the planet who have suffered for nearly a decade from the misguided and often criminal policies of George Bush and his terribly inept administration.

The swearing in of Barack Obama and the departure of the Connecticut Cowboy from our public affairs was something long anticipated, and, after our long dark winter, as welcome as the return of springtime and birdsong, at least in these quarters.

The Republican smear machine however, wasted no time in cranking up to its full powers of bloviation. Their program of attacking nearly every move Obama made and every statement he uttered, began seconds after his swearing in and I'm sure will continue unabated in the immediate future. Here's hoping that they are afforded every opportunity to quibble and obstruct, to grouse and whine, as a minority party for decades to come.

The moaning and squawking over the slightly bobbled recitation of the oath of office, a gaffe that was meaningless and easily ignored by people who have something other than chowder between their ears, was, in Republican circles, fanned into a twenty four hour cause celebre by the fulminating heads of Fox Noise and soon picked up on the other "open all night," "all the news that fits," networks.

The storm so roiled the calm in our national teapot that Obama's advisers encouraged him to retake the oath, which he did in a private and sparsely attended ceremony in the White House a day later.

All seemed well with the republic until Glen Beck pointed out that Obama had not sworn the oath with his hand on a Bible," I checked" Beck chirped, "We have never had a president sworn into office without a Bible,"

Beck's research into the matter was apparently less than skin deep. Ali Frick at Think Progress quickly countered with this:

"Beck is simply wrong. As Slate recently reported, official records kept by the Architect of the Capitol show that Teddy Roosevelt did not use a Bible in 1901; and Lyndon Johnson is rumored to have used "a Catholic missal aboard Air Force One after Kennedy's assassination." According to his own letters, John Quincy Adams placed his hand on a constitutional law book rather than the Bible."

Beck's investigations didn't include the "actual Constitution" which clearly states that no religious test for public office shall be required, thereby making the Bible, or any other religious text, token, amulet or magic charm unnecessary. It seems that the "Constitution" so often quoted in Beck's parallel universe simply doesn't contain an Article six.

The constitution and strict adherence to the rule of law seemed much on the minds of Republicans this past week, a surprising fact after eight years of their support of a President who famously referred to the document as "just a goddamn piece of paper" and spent much of his two sad terms trampling it underfoot with nearly unanimous republican complicity.

The party that hocked the future of our great grand children to the Chinese, set the world aflame and proved itself completely incapable of anything resembling competent governance during its twelve years of majority now seeks to instruct the new president, who hasn't yet had time to sort out his new key ring, exactly how things ought to be run.

John Boehner in the House and his counterpart, Mitch McConnell, the replacement for Ted Stevens as the face of irascibility in the Senate, quickly assembled on deck a dozen or so other loose cannon to obstruct the disbursal of the next round of TARP funds and fight against Obama's stimulus package. Forget the fact that they tripped all over themselves to approve the bailout of banks and brokers under the recent stewardship of jolly King George.

Following their obscene treatment of American automakers and labor they are now delaying the approval of Hilda Solis as Labor Secretary because of her support for American Labor and, worse, her support of the "Employee Free Choice Act," which corporate America is spending vast fortunes to defeat and I assume  Republicans are opposed to out of something more tangible than conservative principle.

They are the same old Republican Party, prowling the mall like jackals or perched buzzard like on the fences waiting for any opportunity to transfer public wealth to the ruling class, any chance to create greater disadvantage for the working class.

The landscape that Republicans envision when they speak of "America" is one far different than that seen by the average Democrat. I for instance see no beauty in long lines of the unemployed waiting for a job at minimum wage or less. To a Republican that is an idyllic image, warming to the heart.

Harry Truman once said:

The Republicans believe that the power of government should be used first of all to help the rich and the privileged in the country. With them, property, wealth, comes first. The Democrats believe that the power of government should be used to give the common man more protection and a chance to make a living. With us the people come first.

In my opinion Obama would be wise to ride his mandate, to maintain the strong cyber link to the body politic and use it to pressure the Democratic majority in the direction it would travel naturally were it not for the corrupting influence of corporate money. I would urge our new President to lose some of his zeal for the grail of "bipartisanship" and simply take his case to the people, and, like an old fashioned Democrat, govern in their name.

Harry also said this:

"I don't like bipartisans. Whenever a fellow tells me he's bipartisan, I know that he's going to vote against me."

Fifty years ago today I was halfway through my sophomore year at WE Stebbins High, an almost completely segregated school in the almost completely segregated city of Dayton, Ohio, a town said at the time to be a southern city that happened to be north of the Mason Dixon line.

The school was "almost completely" segregated because it was located within a good Hail Mary pass of Wright Patterson AFB. I don't remember exactly the reasons but we were told that because the school received federal funds for students who were military dependents that it had to be integrated.

"Integration" was accomplished by the admission of two young Black kids, The boy was named Sam. I remember because we became friends for awhile until the transparent racist displeasure of my little Quaker Grandmother became thick enough to keep him from dropping by. She wasn't ready for a black president.

The girl's name is beyond my atrophied powers of recall. I can see their faces though; both were exceptionally attractive, beautiful in fact, bright, "A" students (National Honor Society), and the son and daughter of Air Force Officers. They weren't related, although they might have passed for brother and sister (to my eyes) and they knew each other from the Air Base (the Air Force at the time wasn't a lot more integrated than my high school).

Their presence among the lower and middle class adolescent white children of factory workers, shopkeepers and lower level bean counting managerial types caused no great stir. There were no serious problems (to my eyes) other than an occasional racist taunt, or snub. Civility towards them was rigorously enforced. The powers that be paddled freely and often back then and the sting of that paddle and its humiliation was seldom sought.

I'm sure that Sam and what's her name saw their experience of being the only "colored kids" among fifteen hundred white kids quite differently than I did but they seemed to smile through it. Again, "to my eyes."

Dwight Eisenhower was the President at the time, Kennedy, (who would become my boyhood idol, surpassing Chuck Berry) wouldn't announce his candidacy for another year. Elections in those days were still conducted with a degree of merciful brevity.

"Brown v Board of Education" was only five years in the past; the Civil Rights Act of 1964 five years in the future and Dayton was divided by a river. Black faces were seldom seen east of the river unless on the bus or wielding a rake and although I rode buses frequently I had little contact with and I think, no animosity towards them. In fact, in my budding "beatnik liberal," barely formed, pre Malcolm and James Baldwin consciousness, I confess to finding them exotic if not damned "quaint". Please forgive, if you will, my youth and ignorance (and that of my country).

Three years later I would be in the Marines, stationed in North Carolina which was definitely south of the Mason Dixon. I remember distinctly the first time I saw a "Whites only" sign. I remember it taped to the inside of a glass door at a cheap eatery near the base in Havelock. I had heard and read of such things so I was "aware" of them in the abstract but I still cringe today with the horror and embarrassment I felt at the overwhelming "reality" of that sign.

Having sighted the first of these crayoned territorial imperatives I soon became aware of them everywhere. Whites only, colored drinking fountains, walk up windows in the sides of cafes posted with "colored" signs; commerce it seemed was integrated, money changed hands across the racial divide but there was a wall to prevent any mixing at breakfast or lunch of actual people. We weren't ready.

There was no "river," no physical boundary, as in Dayton, yet the boundaries were everywhere, carried it seemed, in the minds and hearts of everyone, constantly instilled and amplified by reminders, abrasive edicts scrawled on cardboard or plywood, a ubiquitous ugliness.

A year passed; on November 22 1963 I was driving a jeep transporting a Captain from Camp Lejeune to a chopper base at New River. As we left Lejuene through a back gate we were stopped by MP's and told to report immediately to our unit, that we were on alert status as the President had just been shot.

In the barracks afterward, watching the news reports from Dallas and the reactions from various regional factions among my fellow Marines I was to discover the depth of the shared ugliness that permeated us all and to get a whiff, a fleeting taste of the ugliness on our shared horizon.

Vietnam followed, in less than a year and a half I found myself along with thousands of others thrust into a racist war in a tiny and largely impoverished third world country where the signs were scrawled not on doors but on the sides of bombs and rockets, racism and empire were promoted and enforced with air dropped leaflets followed by fire and lead. We still weren't ready.

Bad news, all this blood and death, the foul stench of hatred, of racial, religious and ideological detestation, all the baggage that we carried with us to the domino war, followed us home.

Home, to a maelstrom of protest, home to a country divided, a division as sure as a river but wide as a sea, home to flags waved and flags burned by two vastly different kinds of "patriots."

Martin Luther King was murdered in Memphis and the country blazed with a fire that had smoldered beneath the forest of tinder for a century, for two centuries.

If there were any hearts left unbroken by the murders of Jack and Martin they were demolished wholesale by the sight of Bobby Kennedy bleeding out his life on that grimy kitchen floor in Los Angeles.

That June evening I came out of the woods in northern California following a two week backpack in the Trinity Alps. The unimaginable silence and tranquility of those woods was rudely broken by the sound of my old truck and shattered forever when I reached the highway, turned on the radio and heard the news of Bobby's murder. Welcome back to America.

We still weren't ready.

Fast forward through the eighties, rebuffed in our resource war in SE Asia we cast about in Central and South America and finding no low hanging fruit with which to gorge the appetite of our ruling class, we turned our eyes eastward again settling on the world's oil patch as the key to wealth, empire and power.

A series of business friendly, electorate immune presidents and two decades of corporate control finally brought about a perfect storm of conditions that were ripe for the election of the worst president and the construction of the worst government in the history of the republic.

War and more war ensued, with a single crime as excuse for an eight year pillaging of the public treasury and the greatest transfer of wealth from those who need it to those who already have it in anyone's memory.

Deeply embroiled in two wars to the tune of a trillion dollars and thousands upon thousands of dead and wounded, incomprehensible numbers of homeless and destroyed, after having transformed large numbers of the population of the Middle East into reeling, traumatized vacant eyed refugees, who are probably reconsidering their initial reticence to sign up as suicide bombers, America, at last, set a record for the longest delayed reaction in history.

We, you and I, an impressive percentage of us, tossed out the representatives of the failed and ruinous ideas and policies of the reactionary conservative past and elected a different man, a black man no less, to be our president. Are we ready now?

I was impressed with us on election day as I was with him, but I ask again are we ready to follow this man? Are we ready to do more than follow, but to demand, to pressure, to push and prod him as well as the rest of government at every level and the opposition party to do all that will be necessary to move us away from the corrupt practices and sordid criminal behavior that led us to this nadir in our history?

I hope so. I've waited a long time to have something to believe in again, to have an America to take pride in again.

This is my 12th president, I'm not going to get too many more and I hope to hell we got this one right. For the record, I think we're finally ready.

Oh yeah, for Sam and the lovely "what's her name," I hope you enjoy this inauguration as much as I will and I'm sorry about Grandma, she just wasn't ready.

Bob Higgins
Worldwide Sawdust