The specter of another day of voting is rapidly approaching, and the rhetoric has become particularly vile. Even our great "Uniter" George W. Bush came out less than a month after telling the country that we must work together "to meet the test that history has given us," and intimated that anyone who disagrees with his policies or doubts his wisdom is a traitor of the highest order. Of course, that includes anyone who is not fully invested in perpetual military folly.
The Republicans have been in charge for nearly six years, and despite all the scary rhetoric coming from the Republican National Committee, there is no threat to security if non-Republicans somehow wrestle a branch of government away this November. On the contrary, if the Democrats somehow win the House there may still be hope to turn the ship of state around, even if that hope only exists in the Republican-lite 21st century version of the Democratic party.
Republican political strategists are lying when they say that Democrats are soft on national security. After 9/11, no one will ever be soft on national security again, even if it means destroying our democracy out of a paranoid sense of fear.
Our government-led by Democrats and Republicans-has turned our tax dollars into a slush fund for the Department of Defense, and the Military Industrial Complex that Dwight Eisenhower warned against in 1961 as he handed the presidency over to John F. Kennedy.
"We yet realize that America's leadership and prestige depend, not merely upon our unmatched material progress, riches and military strength, but on how we use our power in the interests of world peace and human betterment," Ike said.
Our folly in Iraq is but the latest example of the way in which we have wasted our material progress on vague foreign military adventures that serve merely to redistribute the wealth of the nation into the coffers of the über-rich. War profiteers and Bush administration corporate cronies have used the war as a vehicle for theft, leaving generations of American children with the butcher's bill and the debt payment.There is no interest in world peace or human betterment, only empty patriotic rhetoric and fear of vague and shadowy threats to our stuff.
Under the "leadership" of the Republican Party in the past five years, our national debt has ballooned to $8.5 trillion dollars-that's trillion, with a "T"-and every man, woman, and child in this country owes $28,531.74 as of Oct. 15. Military spending has ballooned from $296.8 billion to $401 billion since the Bush cabal took over in 2001, and that doesn't even include the $300 billion that has evaporated in Iraq. The lion's share of that rise in defense costs has not gone to "supporting the troops," but to Research and Development which means defense contractors such as Lockheed Martin or Halliburton. To all the young Republicans out there who fear that there may not be enough debt and death if the Democrats somehow manage to take a sliver of power away from the corrupt and bloated GOP, fear not. There will be plenty to go around for you, your children, and your grandchildren. It is unfortunate that the rest of us will have to pay as well.
It will be easy for those who disagree with me to reduce my argument to partisan hackery, but the constitutional crisis we face today is no longer a partisan issue.
Please, spare me the letters about how it's all Clinton's fault or, "Time of war…etc." Terrorism may be real, but the "war on terr'" is a political strategist's creation used to divide this nation and justify the incremental theft of our civil rights, as the treasury is plundered in the name of national security.
The Constitution is under attack and the Executive Branch has made an unprecedented power grab that is threatening our stability as a nation. If we continue on our present course, we will become as fiscally impoverished as we have become morally bankrupt under a single-party system.
To paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, we are stuck with our existing political parties, comprised of moneyed elites who ultimately only care about reelection. It seems as if the only reason the Democratic Party is in existence anymore is to preserve the power of the Republicans and to provide an additional bogeyman to the dual threat of terrorism.
"As we peer into society's future, we-you and I, and our government-must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering, for our own ease and convenience, the precious resources of tomorrow," Ike continued on that long-ago January day.
"We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow."
It is long past the time for the adults to take back our government. I wonder if there are any left anywhere who may be able to save us.
Thursday, October 19, 2006
Monday, October 16, 2006
Corporate hubris, BALCO, and the repeal of Magna Carta
Funny how things seem to come together every week to give me fodder for another column. Thus far, in my columned tenure, topics have been exclusive to the CSU system-but this week I'm on to bigger, better, more global issues. I'm sure that a lot of people will be happy to hear that I'm thinking more "globally."
One of the big stories going on in the Bay Area press is the fiasco that is eating up the administration of Hewlett-Packard. It seems as if former chairwoman Patricia Dunn and the rest of the HP leadership are in a bit of trouble after an internal investigation into boardroom leaks went awry and turned into a scandal that has thrown the organization into chaos.
The leaders of HP hired investigators who used techniques such as spying on directors, planting monitoring software in e-mail correspondences with journalists, and even a bizarre plan to infiltrate Silicon Valley newsrooms disguised as cleaners in order to justify rifling through garbage.
They also used a technique called "pretexting"-a colloquialism for "lying"-in order to get private records from phone companies.
So far, four executives have been ousted-including Dunn and HP general council Ann Baskins-and at least 10 witnesses have plead the fifth rather than testify in front of a House of Representatives commerce committee.
The matter is under investigation by the California Attorney General's office and is a fine example of a modern corporate boardroom acting as if it is above and beyond the law.
Dunn does not accept responsibility for a situation that, in the words of Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.), looks like "a plumbers' operation that would make Richard Nixon blush."
In a rather amusing side development, Dunn recently received a "hall of fame" leadership award from a regional business lobbying and networking group known as the Bay Area Council, after she was forced to resign.
It's almost funny how shameless and unintentionally ironic modern business leaders can be. It brought to mind the Barry Munitz saga, but that's not really what I'm writing about this week.
The thing that struck me about this sick comedy is the way in which HP's leaders thought that it was okay to break the law in order to stop leaks to the press.
As I have followed the HP story over the course of the past two weeks, I can't help but think of the parallels to the BALCO story, in which two San Francisco Chronicle reporters have been sentenced to 18 months in jail for refusing to divulge the source of their information for a series of articles on the baseball/steroids issue.
The reporters-Lance Williams and Mark Fainaru-Wada-refused to give the names of their sources from a grand jury testimony leak and will sit in jail unless they agree to divulge the information. As they pay an unacceptable toll for doing their jobs well, scummy hacks like Bob Novak-a real threat to national security-walk amongst us, free to spew the corporate line.
Both of these stories represent a very real and looming threat to public access to information. In the HP case, corporate leaders felt comfortable enough in the current political climate to break the law in order to stop the leak of information. BALCO has shown us that the imprisonment of journalists has become an all too acceptable practice in the post-9/11 world.
For those of us with a scorecard, this should be a very troubling turn of events. Real journalists reporting news from around the world are being jailed, censored, and/or murdered for reporting uncomfortable or dangerous truths, while the flacks of the powerful continue to spread lies and misinformation unencumbered by accountability to the people.
Access to vital information about the way in which members of the business elite or elected officials behave is becoming increasingly difficult to obtain. Whistleblower protections are eroding, and if we are not careful, soon the only information available to us will be happy press releases written by PR flunkies who assure us that everything is okay, and every decision is the right one.
That type of "reporting" has become a hallmark of modern information dissemination. Statistics that back happy claims, written by minor bureaucrats are presented as fact, even though events on the ground belie the pretty numbers. What used to be called "fuzzy math," now goes by the names of "justification for war," or "growth projections," or even "necessary capital project."
While the bean counters walk around trying to convince everyone that things are all right, people continue to die, tax dollars are funneled into crony coffers, or the massive growth in the economy goes to the top 1 percent of the population while the taxpayers get stuck paying for missed projections.
The targeting of journalists and whistleblowers has become even more disturbing in light of the recent actions by the Bush administration, particularly in regards to detainee rights in the "war on terr'r."
Over the course of the past week, our government has passed legislation that flouts the Geneva Conventions as well as the tenets of the Magna Carta, all in one fell swoop. There is now a vehicle in place to deny American citizens the right to defend themselves in a court of law.
Our government is now free to unaccountably engage in torture-which will surely come back to haunt our men and women in uniform-and the rights of human beings now exist at the whim of the president of the United States.
Add to that $800 million worth of "detention centers" that Halliburton has been contracted to build, and the shiny new "fence" that is going up on the Mexican border, and we suddenly have what looks like a great big prison where a once-mighty nation stood. If you are not with us, don't bother trying to escape.
Hang on to your free speech zone, people. We're in for a long and scary ride to the lowest common denominator of humanity, thanks to the corporate failures that run our government.
I think that next week I'm going to return to covering CSU happenings. Thinking "globally" gives me the willies.
Published October 4, 1006, SSU Star
One of the big stories going on in the Bay Area press is the fiasco that is eating up the administration of Hewlett-Packard. It seems as if former chairwoman Patricia Dunn and the rest of the HP leadership are in a bit of trouble after an internal investigation into boardroom leaks went awry and turned into a scandal that has thrown the organization into chaos.
The leaders of HP hired investigators who used techniques such as spying on directors, planting monitoring software in e-mail correspondences with journalists, and even a bizarre plan to infiltrate Silicon Valley newsrooms disguised as cleaners in order to justify rifling through garbage.
They also used a technique called "pretexting"-a colloquialism for "lying"-in order to get private records from phone companies.
So far, four executives have been ousted-including Dunn and HP general council Ann Baskins-and at least 10 witnesses have plead the fifth rather than testify in front of a House of Representatives commerce committee.
The matter is under investigation by the California Attorney General's office and is a fine example of a modern corporate boardroom acting as if it is above and beyond the law.
Dunn does not accept responsibility for a situation that, in the words of Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.), looks like "a plumbers' operation that would make Richard Nixon blush."
In a rather amusing side development, Dunn recently received a "hall of fame" leadership award from a regional business lobbying and networking group known as the Bay Area Council, after she was forced to resign.
It's almost funny how shameless and unintentionally ironic modern business leaders can be. It brought to mind the Barry Munitz saga, but that's not really what I'm writing about this week.
The thing that struck me about this sick comedy is the way in which HP's leaders thought that it was okay to break the law in order to stop leaks to the press.
As I have followed the HP story over the course of the past two weeks, I can't help but think of the parallels to the BALCO story, in which two San Francisco Chronicle reporters have been sentenced to 18 months in jail for refusing to divulge the source of their information for a series of articles on the baseball/steroids issue.
The reporters-Lance Williams and Mark Fainaru-Wada-refused to give the names of their sources from a grand jury testimony leak and will sit in jail unless they agree to divulge the information. As they pay an unacceptable toll for doing their jobs well, scummy hacks like Bob Novak-a real threat to national security-walk amongst us, free to spew the corporate line.
Both of these stories represent a very real and looming threat to public access to information. In the HP case, corporate leaders felt comfortable enough in the current political climate to break the law in order to stop the leak of information. BALCO has shown us that the imprisonment of journalists has become an all too acceptable practice in the post-9/11 world.
For those of us with a scorecard, this should be a very troubling turn of events. Real journalists reporting news from around the world are being jailed, censored, and/or murdered for reporting uncomfortable or dangerous truths, while the flacks of the powerful continue to spread lies and misinformation unencumbered by accountability to the people.
Access to vital information about the way in which members of the business elite or elected officials behave is becoming increasingly difficult to obtain. Whistleblower protections are eroding, and if we are not careful, soon the only information available to us will be happy press releases written by PR flunkies who assure us that everything is okay, and every decision is the right one.
That type of "reporting" has become a hallmark of modern information dissemination. Statistics that back happy claims, written by minor bureaucrats are presented as fact, even though events on the ground belie the pretty numbers. What used to be called "fuzzy math," now goes by the names of "justification for war," or "growth projections," or even "necessary capital project."
While the bean counters walk around trying to convince everyone that things are all right, people continue to die, tax dollars are funneled into crony coffers, or the massive growth in the economy goes to the top 1 percent of the population while the taxpayers get stuck paying for missed projections.
The targeting of journalists and whistleblowers has become even more disturbing in light of the recent actions by the Bush administration, particularly in regards to detainee rights in the "war on terr'r."
Over the course of the past week, our government has passed legislation that flouts the Geneva Conventions as well as the tenets of the Magna Carta, all in one fell swoop. There is now a vehicle in place to deny American citizens the right to defend themselves in a court of law.
Our government is now free to unaccountably engage in torture-which will surely come back to haunt our men and women in uniform-and the rights of human beings now exist at the whim of the president of the United States.
Add to that $800 million worth of "detention centers" that Halliburton has been contracted to build, and the shiny new "fence" that is going up on the Mexican border, and we suddenly have what looks like a great big prison where a once-mighty nation stood. If you are not with us, don't bother trying to escape.
Hang on to your free speech zone, people. We're in for a long and scary ride to the lowest common denominator of humanity, thanks to the corporate failures that run our government.
I think that next week I'm going to return to covering CSU happenings. Thinking "globally" gives me the willies.
Published October 4, 1006, SSU Star
A tale of two perverts: Fiddling (with children) while the world burns
I am going to post my editorials from the archives of the SSU Star. I'm the Editor in Chief, so I can do that, right?
For fans of the trials, tribulations and public humiliation of sexual predators, last week represented something of a bellwether in the world of pedophilia. Between the story of a sad, middle-aged Republican House member's attempted peccadilloes with hot young pages, and the release of John Mark Karr - the man who did not murder Jon Benet Ramsey - there was a little something for everyone, both on the national and local stages.
The dominant story in the mainstream press last week was that of Representative Mark Foley, R-Fla., and his alleged taste for the tender flesh of underage males.
It appears that the man appointed as chairman of the House Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children - who introduced H.R. 3132, the Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act of 2005, intended to crack down on Internet stalking and made into law as the Adam Walsh Child Protection Act of 2006 - was using the Internet and his access to nubile young congressional employees to satisfy his predilections for teenage boys.
Foley's participation on the committee follows the logic of Bush administration appointments, as a pedophile was put in charge of the office charged with cracking down on pedophiles. The story brought to mind oil companies in charge of energy policy, or drug manufacturers creating a Medicare drug plan that has siphoned billions of taxpayer dollars into their own coffers. This might be a good place for a gag about "insider's knowledge," but I'll refrain out of a sense of propriety.
A series of e-mail and instant messages between the Foley and some of the boys became public last week, and were plastered all over the newspapers and teevee news shows. There was even a dryly amusing, if disturbing, reading of a few of them on ABC news by Brian Ross, who would be well-advised to stick with reading the news, as he would never make it as a phone sex operator. (Thank you John Stewert).
House Speaker Dennis Hastert and other top Republican leaders spent the week scurrying around pointing fingers and playing the "blame game" in an attempt to deflect criticism to the pages, the Democrats, or anywhere else but the pedophilic Republican, or his prevaricating enablers. I'll forego the sordid details here, as I'm sure that unless my reading audience has been holed up in a cave in Afghanistan or detained somewhere without a warrant, we are all familiar with them in repulsive detail.
In a story that's closer to home here in Sonoma County, the dismissal of child pornography charges against the man who did not murder Jon Benet filled the empty space left over from reportage of the Foley circus.
As we all should know by now, Karr was arrested in Colorado on Aug. 17 for allegedly murdering the little girl the day after Christmas in 1996. There were many questions about the veracity of his guilt, and massive holes in the case against him, but the story took over the front pages of every newspaper in the Western Hemisphere.
Karr's embarrassing debacle made the Sonoma County District Attorney's office look incompetent when it became clear that he was not involved in the Ramsey murder, and the evidence for the child pornography case turned out to be highly suspect, if not nonexistent.
The bigger story, though, was not what was trumpeted on the front pages during the course of the week, but what was not. The same week the Foley story blew up to epic proportions, a new National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) informed us we are losing the war on terr'.
The NIE lays out the case that Iraq has become a training ground - and the Iraq war a recruiting tool - for a fresh-faced batch new-generation Jihadists. The Foley scandal also helped obscure the fact that the situation on the ground in Iraq is deteriorating by the day.
The Bush administration's new torture policy - which reinterprets the Geneva Conventions - and the rollback of habeas corpus for anyone deemed an "enemy combatant" by the president, were stories of equal if not more import.
Additionally, the Karr arrest made the headlines on the same day that a federal judge in Detroit ruled the NSA wiretap program unconstitutional and illegal.
Much like Orange Alerts, or the "number two man in Al Qaida," Karr and Foley appear to have served to obscure the fact that the trillions of dollars we've spent fighting terr'rists have for the most part been wasted.
I'm not saying that it's unimportant for pedophilic leaders of the Republican Party to be held accountable for their actions, or that these stories aren't really news. The point is, there's a lot of obfuscation going on in the halls of our government, and Karr and Foley were offered up as sacrificial lambs on the altar of misinformation.
For fans of the trials, tribulations and public humiliation of sexual predators, last week represented something of a bellwether in the world of pedophilia. Between the story of a sad, middle-aged Republican House member's attempted peccadilloes with hot young pages, and the release of John Mark Karr - the man who did not murder Jon Benet Ramsey - there was a little something for everyone, both on the national and local stages.
The dominant story in the mainstream press last week was that of Representative Mark Foley, R-Fla., and his alleged taste for the tender flesh of underage males.
It appears that the man appointed as chairman of the House Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children - who introduced H.R. 3132, the Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act of 2005, intended to crack down on Internet stalking and made into law as the Adam Walsh Child Protection Act of 2006 - was using the Internet and his access to nubile young congressional employees to satisfy his predilections for teenage boys.
Foley's participation on the committee follows the logic of Bush administration appointments, as a pedophile was put in charge of the office charged with cracking down on pedophiles. The story brought to mind oil companies in charge of energy policy, or drug manufacturers creating a Medicare drug plan that has siphoned billions of taxpayer dollars into their own coffers. This might be a good place for a gag about "insider's knowledge," but I'll refrain out of a sense of propriety.
A series of e-mail and instant messages between the Foley and some of the boys became public last week, and were plastered all over the newspapers and teevee news shows. There was even a dryly amusing, if disturbing, reading of a few of them on ABC news by Brian Ross, who would be well-advised to stick with reading the news, as he would never make it as a phone sex operator. (Thank you John Stewert).
House Speaker Dennis Hastert and other top Republican leaders spent the week scurrying around pointing fingers and playing the "blame game" in an attempt to deflect criticism to the pages, the Democrats, or anywhere else but the pedophilic Republican, or his prevaricating enablers. I'll forego the sordid details here, as I'm sure that unless my reading audience has been holed up in a cave in Afghanistan or detained somewhere without a warrant, we are all familiar with them in repulsive detail.
In a story that's closer to home here in Sonoma County, the dismissal of child pornography charges against the man who did not murder Jon Benet filled the empty space left over from reportage of the Foley circus.
As we all should know by now, Karr was arrested in Colorado on Aug. 17 for allegedly murdering the little girl the day after Christmas in 1996. There were many questions about the veracity of his guilt, and massive holes in the case against him, but the story took over the front pages of every newspaper in the Western Hemisphere.
Karr's embarrassing debacle made the Sonoma County District Attorney's office look incompetent when it became clear that he was not involved in the Ramsey murder, and the evidence for the child pornography case turned out to be highly suspect, if not nonexistent.
The bigger story, though, was not what was trumpeted on the front pages during the course of the week, but what was not. The same week the Foley story blew up to epic proportions, a new National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) informed us we are losing the war on terr'.
The NIE lays out the case that Iraq has become a training ground - and the Iraq war a recruiting tool - for a fresh-faced batch new-generation Jihadists. The Foley scandal also helped obscure the fact that the situation on the ground in Iraq is deteriorating by the day.
The Bush administration's new torture policy - which reinterprets the Geneva Conventions - and the rollback of habeas corpus for anyone deemed an "enemy combatant" by the president, were stories of equal if not more import.
Additionally, the Karr arrest made the headlines on the same day that a federal judge in Detroit ruled the NSA wiretap program unconstitutional and illegal.
Much like Orange Alerts, or the "number two man in Al Qaida," Karr and Foley appear to have served to obscure the fact that the trillions of dollars we've spent fighting terr'rists have for the most part been wasted.
I'm not saying that it's unimportant for pedophilic leaders of the Republican Party to be held accountable for their actions, or that these stories aren't really news. The point is, there's a lot of obfuscation going on in the halls of our government, and Karr and Foley were offered up as sacrificial lambs on the altar of misinformation.
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