Mob Politics vs. Political Movements Obama as the Bernie Madoff of the Democratic Party By SAM SMITH

For the next year and a half you will be subjected to the latest developments in the great contemporary American fairy tale: a presidential campaign.

True, we will get to pick who we want to be Goldilocks and who the big bad bears, but citizen participation in a fantasy doesn't make it any more real.

There has been over the past few decades a steady deterioration of the political difference between national Democratic and Republican politics, most notably with Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Today it is hard to define that difference given the strong bipartisan support for several illegal wars, the unconstitutional Patriot Act, and a bottomless desire to bail out Wall Street, and a stunning indifference to the financial problems of everyone else. On some days it seems like the only thing that stand between Obama and the Republican Party is his voter registration card. Even on his better days he is just – to borrow a favorite term of his White House a "distraction from the real issues."

In fact, the political metaphor hardly works anymore. It's more sensible to regard the two major parties as Mafia mobs fighting for control of a region known as the United States.

This isn't to say that there isn't a difference between them. But it's about survival, however, not politics. The Demos tend to do less damage to our lives than the Repubs. Both mobs may beat the shit out your father, but the Demos are less likely to harm your children or your grandmother.

The importance of this distinction between politics and survival is important because, for one thing, it spares us of the totally false myth that got Obama into office in the first place. Obama turned out to be the Bernie Madoff of the Democratic Party. He conned millions into giving him their hope and change and then ripped them off.

This doesn't mean that one doesn't vote for a Demo thug as president or some lower position, but it means that one does so recognizing that the selection of the least dangerous mob in town is a far different matter than backing a political cause.

Once one has made that important distinction the whole nature of politics changes. It is no longer about icons, but about issues. It's not about elections but about what happens before and after elections. It is no longer about identifying with a party but with a movement.

We are in desperate need of an anti-war movement, an anti-Wall Street movement, an anti-foreclosure movement, and anti-corporate bribery movement, and a new labor movement just to name a few.

Yes, there are wonderful folk attempting to build such movements, but it doesn't help when liberals and their media constantly lower their goals to Obama's uncertain, misguided, misleading and unimaginative solutions or when public interest groups adopt the same narrow objectives and insider trading style typical of corporate lobbyists.

If America is to be saved, it will because of movements outside the mainstream political game. It's always been like that and will continue to be so.

So enjoy the fairy tale that is bubbling up around us. Vote for the bastards who will be do us the least harm. But if you want to be part of the story – and you are whether you desire it or not – then that only thing that will really matter is what you do outside the voting booth.

For in the end, there's nobody who can make a better difference but us.

Sam Smith edits the Progressive Review.

40 Years of the Drug War Breaking the Taboo By ANTHONY PAPA

"If you can't control drugs in a maximum security prison, then how can you control drugs in a free society"? Those are my words that close Breaking the Taboo, a poignant new film about the global drug war.

On May 31st I was invited to attend its world premier in Sao Paulo, by its filmmaker Fernando Grostein Andrade. I met Fernando when he was in New York City filming and he asked if he could interview me about my experience serving a 15-to-life sentence for a non-violent drug crime. I agreed and was thrilled to take part in it.

Breaking the Taboo is a stark and honest portrayal of the global war on drugs and its failure to resolve the many issues that derive from prohibition. The main character of the film is the former President of Brazil Fernando Henrique Cardoso. Other former world leaders and dignitaries appear beside him, like Presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton.

A few days after my return from Brazil I attended the Global Commission on Drug Policy's press conference in NYC, where the film was shown as former world leaders declared that the global war on drugs has failed. The commission released a report that called for frank dialogue that encouraged governments to experiment with the regulation of drugs, especially marijuana.

The 19-member global commission includes former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan and former U.S. Secretary of State George P. Schultz, who held cabinet posts under U.S. Presidents Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon. Others include former U.S. Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker, the former presidents of Mexico, Brazil, Colombia and Switzerland, writers Carlos Fuentes and Mario Vargas Llosa, U.K. business mogul Richard Branson, and the current prime minister of Greece.

Fernando Andrade told me that the main purpose of Breaking the Taboo is to encourage a deep and well-informed debate on the complex drug issue in Brazil and abroad. The film intends to bring youth, families, teachers, physicians and society as a whole together for a long and honest conversation to reduce prejudice, help prevent drug use and spread scientific information on the issue.

The documentary was filmed in eight countries, in fifty-eight days of shooting (thirty-one in Brazil and twenty-seven abroad), totaling 400 hours of footage, and 176 people interviewed: Brazil, United States, Portugal, Holland, Colombia, Switzerland, France and Argentina; and in cities such as Geneva, Amsterdam, Washington, Los Angeles, São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Bogotá, among others.

One of the main points in the film is that forty years ago on June 17, President Richard Nixon declared a war on drugs, in a crusade for a drug-free world. But this war has been proven to be a dismal failure which has perpetuated the damages caused by drugs to people and to society as a whole. Abuses, inaccurate information, epidemics, violence and the strengthening of crime networks are the results of a war lost on a global scale.

Breaking the Taboo pursues solutions, principles and conclusions among the many voices coming from different realities worldwide, in a mosaic assembled by former Brazilian President Fernando Henrique Cardoso. Former world leaders and Chiefs of State of countries such as Colombia, Mexico and Switzerland reveal the reasons why they changed their opinions on the issue of the war on drugs must be discussed and clarified. From lessons learned by people whose lives were scarred by the drug war, to the celebrities such as world-renowned writer Paulo Coelho and actor Gael Garcia Bernal, Breaking the Taboo is an invitation for all to debate the drug issue.

See the trailer : "Breaking the Taboo"

Events are taking place in the United States to commemorate the failed drug war http://nomoredrugwar.org/take-action#events

Anthony Papa is the author of 15 Years to Life: How I Painted My Way to Freedom and Communications Specialist for Drug Policy Alliance. He can be reached at: anthonypapa123@yahoo.com

679 There is a blog you ALL have to check out: MarkGanzersDefendTheConstitution.Blogspot.Com

MarkGanzersDefendTheConstitution.Blogspot.com

If you have some free 'net surfin' time, just holler!

678 For Whom the Mission Creeps in Libya June 7, 2011 By Jeff Huber

Tuesday, June 07, 2011


“Nobody wants to sit on the bench.”

-- Los Angeles Angels pitcher Bobby Wilson

One of the big Sunday stories was about how British and French attack helicopters deployed on amphibious ships have joined the fight in Libya. Unnamed information warriors told Simon Denyer of the Washington Post to tell us that the helicopters give “NATO he ability to strike military targets in built-up areas with more precision than fast-moving, high-flying warplanes.”

Attack helicopters:
Libyan chicks dig 'em.
That may be true in some cases. Say, for example, you want to hover over a street for hours and blow off any human head that happens to stick out a door or window. Helicopters do that pretty well, as we’ve seen so graphically in Iraq. In their first few days of Libyan operations, however, the Brit Apaches and French Tigers and Gazelles (adorable nicknames, huh?) targeted military vehicles, military command buildings, a radar installation and a checkpoint, all targets that can be struck with precision by laser and Satellite guided bombs dropped from fixed-wing aircraft flying well above the maximum altitudes of the sorts of tactical anti-aircraft weapons that typically chew helicopters into bite-sized morsels.

So why are the helicopters involved?

Warriors, like athletes, don't like sitting on the bench come game day. Like it or not, that’s a desirable and even admirable trait for military personnel to have. We don’t want a big, expensive force of Sgt. Bilkos who, once a war breaks out, will move heaven and earth and their floating crap game to stay out of it. There’s even a legitimate goal in utilizing an armed conflict, however minor, to “blood” as much of your force as you can get in on the action. It is, when you get right down to it, a waste of perfectly good mayhem if you don't. This is especially true of naval and air forces that, given the paucity of credible navies or air defenses among the have-nots we like to go to war with, offer little risk of suffering embarrassing levels of unsightly friendly casualties.

But England and France didn’t send their amphibious helicopters to war because the helicopter crews and sailors wanted to fight. The Euros need a justification to keep spending outrageous amounts of money on their naval air forces. And if they don’t use their naval air strike forces in a war that just happens to be happening in the Mediterranean Sea where all the NATO members’ naval forces can get to, and that happens to involve doing air strikes on a country with a big coast along the Med, then why do they have naval air strike forces in the first place? Come to think of it, why is there still a NATO two decades after the Evil Empire it was formed to oppose did a Humpty Dumpty off the Berlin Wall?

Our lose-lose Libya lunacy is about preserving the Long War for as long as possible. Yeah, there's a keep Russia's mitts off Libya's oil factor and a certain amount of doing the Bush family Saudi pals' bidding, but our play war in Africa has so little to do with national security that nobody behind the wheel of this brakeless bus is bothering to pretend that it does. Worse is that the passengers seem oblivious to the cliff’s edge their leaders are in the process of driving them over. (In the middle of an extended recession and during an era when we have no military peer on the horizon, our on-the-books defense budget is the highest it has been since World War II and plausible estimates peg our actual defense spending at $1.22 trillion, roughly a third of our total 2012 budget.)

What started as UN Ambassador and liberal warmonger Suzan Rice’s wafer-thin no-fly zone for the purpose of protecting the freedom-loving peoples of Libya from Muamar Kadhafi’s Our Gang air force has become a strategic bombing campaign aimed at regime change. The best purpose we have for wanting regime change comes from Bombardier Barry himself, whose present position is that regime change is the only way to protect the freedom loving peoples of Libya, as opposed his position in March that said regime change wasn’t necessary to protect the freedom loving peoples of Libya.

What unmasked poppycock. The second we signed on for the no-fly zone we signed on for regime change, and boy, as war aims go, hasn’t that one worked out swell for us in the past decade? We have yet to extract ourselves from the two countries we puppet rigged on young Mr. Bush’s botched watch, and Mr. Obama’s promised withdrawal timelines have proven to be pure “disassembly.”

Five U.S. troops were killed in a June 6 rocket attack on an Iraqi base in eastern Baghdad. I’m sure those troops parents slash spouses slash children will find great comfort in knowing that Obama ended their deceased parents’ slash spouses’ slash children’s combat mission almost a year ago.

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) is author of the critically lauded novel Bathtub Admirals, a lampoon on America’s rise to global dominance.

677 Must Reads, Politics, Tech, Top Stories Why Google Earth Can't Show You Israel - Hector Milla/Flickr — By Hamed Aleaziz

40 Comments | Post Comment
Fri Jun. 10, 2011 10:16 AM PDT

Since Google launched its Google Earth feature in 2005, the company has become a worldwide leader in providing high-resolution satellite imagery. In 2010, Google Earth allowed the world to see the extent of the destruction in post-earthquake Haiti. This year, Google released similar images after Japan's deadly tsunami and earthquake. With just one click, Google can bring the world—and a better understanding of far-away events—to your computer.

There is one entire country, however, that Google Earth won't show you: Israel.

That's because, in 1997, Congress passed the National Defense Authorization Act, one section of which is titled, "Prohibition on collection and release of detailed satellite imagery relating to Israel." The amendment, known as the Kyl-Bingaman Amendment, calls for a federal agency, the NOAA's Commercial Remote Sensing Regulatory Affairs, to regulate the dissemination of zoomed-in images of Israel.
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When asked about the regulation, a Google spokeswoman said to Mother Jones, "The images in Google Earth are sourced from a wide range of both commercial and public sources. We source our satellite imagery from US-based companies who are subject to US law, including the Kyl-Bingaman Amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act of 1997, which limits the resolution of imagery of Israel that may be commercially distributed."

And it's not just Israel. The regulation also applies to the occupied territories. It's why Human Rights Watch can't provide detailed imagery of the Gaza Strip in its reports. Of course, this regulation cuts both ways; one also cannot see the destruction in Sderot resulting from rockets sent out of Gaza.

But, the impact of the regulation might be dwindling; after all, the US can only regulate the actions of American corporations. Turkey recently announced that its GokTurk satellite will provide high-resolution imagery of Israel when it becomes operational in 2013. Israel is unhappy with this possibility: An Israeli official told Al-Arabiya, "We try to ensure that we are not photographed at high resolutions, and most (countries) accommodate us." The official adds: "Should we request this of the Turks? We won't ask for it. There is no one to talk to."

Hamed Aleaziz is an editorial intern at Mother Jones. For more of his stories, click here.

676 The Root of Puritan Panic On the "Issue of Character" and Empire By PHIL ROCKSTROH

Late last month, poet, musician, and self-termed "bluesologist," Gil Scott-Heron exited the hologram and returned to the source…to begin chanting, eternity will not be televised.

In an earlier era, Stephen Spender feted the following tribute to those who fell resisting Francisco Franco's fascist forces during the Spanish Civil War. His lines of verse serve as an apt epitaph to all those souls who devoted their art and labor to the ceaseless struggle against the perennially risen, death-besotted forces of coercive power: "The names of those who in their lives fought for life,/ Who wore at their hearts the fire's center./ Born of the sun, they traveled a short while towards the sun,/ And left the vivid air signed with their honor."

At present, in contrast, the dismal air is signed with the scandalous tweets of a congressman's undergarments and the concomitant, predictable howling from the hectoring ghosts of U.S. Puritanism, conjured from their graves by the contrived spectacle and its promise of anonymous arousal intermingled with the blood sport of public shaming.

By finger wagging and sneering, carnal desires can be lived out vicariously in the Puritan/Calvinist imagination. In this way, petty moralists can ogle what they claim to condemn.

To Puritans, all the problems of life can be traced to the genitals...true, but only their own problems.

How many times do the prigs, ninnies, and scolds of the U.S. have to repeat this sort of inanity before they grow up and realize that human beings have strong libidos? Libido propels both creativity and contretemps, and it is wise to aver that "the issue of character" should best be evoked and debated, as a general rule, when the situation involves hypocrisy.

Moreover, those claiming that their own sexual desires have never rendered them vulnerable to silly misjudgments evince a more noxious form of hypocrisy. Yet, if, in fact, their lives have been absent such propitious misfortune, then one should withhold the scorn reserved for hypocrites, and, instead, grant these poor souls pity, for they have been afflicted with the awful circumstance of having passed through their lives without ever being seduced by life.

A more profound "character issue" here would seem to involve that of the representatives of mass media news gathering organizations, in particular -- their greed for ratings. And what is one to make of the character of the individuals who comprise the general public and their seemingly endless avidity for these stories -- their insatiable craving to revel in the tawdry -- but remain engaged in the delusional worship of their own toxic innocence?

Although, it is futile to struggle against the symptoms not the source. As banal as the dreams of witless bullies, the architecture and artifice of U.S. militarist/corporate imperium not only surrounds us but has colonized our thoughts and desires. Ergo, the elite of the corporate media and the U.S. public remain untroubled by Bradley Manning's forced nudity, yet a couple a snaps of a congressmen's crotch sends their imagination reeling.

Since U.S. Empire is maintained by militarism -- a de facto strong-arm racket shaking down the people of the world to sustain the endless cupidity of its elite and proffer just enough bribes to keep its populace overweight, arrogant, and oblivious -- what "character issues" come into play involving an individual's complicity in the maintenance of blood-fueled imperium? Perhaps as a reminder, fleets of U.S. aircraft carriers should be christened with names such as, the USS Entitlement, the USS Displaced Resentment and the USS Willful Ignorance -- all armed and ready to patrol the oceans of the world, poised to attack and subdue those who would deny us our birthright to consume the world like a bag of Cheetos.

Because facing folly is difficult, both powerful and pawn have embraced the most airless of aspirations…that greed run riot is a viable means to move in the world, even the sole means of establishing a social order.

As was the case with any imperium throughout history, the present order is maintained by state-sanctified homicide. To exist in empire, one is induced to deaden ones heart. The act of having internalized (albeit inadvertently) the propaganda of the militaristic/corporate state and thereby cling to its provisional comforts…is to clutch a handful of dust. And what is the mode of being to which so many cling:

Shuffling the floors of some suburban turdbox…within a gated "community" where one rarely sees, much less speaks to one's neighbors; spending hours at a time, anxious and irritated (if not outright enraged) in soul-grinding commuter traffic, listening to the observations and pronouncements of inspired souls such as Morning Zoo Crews and deep thinkers like Rush Limbaugh and other right-wing talk-radio, hate merchants; then languishing all day in a cubicle...just to turn around and do it all again.

Is it any wonder so many in the U.S. consider "our way of life" non-negotiable? What kind of a miserable, bitter malcontent would wish to challenge and change such a life-enhancing, soul-vivifying mode of being? There is just no pleasing some people.

A loss of empathetic imagination is endemic to the consumerist mindset of the mechanized era. This form of pathology began, years ago, when our ancestors offered up their life's blood to the early corporatists of the Industrial Age.

"I attack all those persons/ who know nothing of the other half,/ the half who cannot be saved,/ who raise their cement mountains/ in which the hearts of the small/ animals no ones thinks of are beating." -- Federico García Lorca,
excerpt: New York (Office and Attack)

Henry Ford and the rest of the Industrial Age's klavern of gray ghouls measured our flesh, muscle and bone with a productivity-measuring stopwatch. Cunning practitioners of the dark art of convincing human beings they were mere cogs in a soulless machine, it was only a short trudge from that blood-bartering viewpoint of existence through history's slaughterhouse to Adolf Eichmann's cold, corpse-rendering, mathematical constructs.

Insulated, as he was, within his fortified tower of mortared casuistry, Eichmann proved adept at emotionally shielding himself from the horrific implications of the system of mechanized extermination he helped devised. From individual alienation to planet-wide ecocide, Hannah Arendt's insights, regarding Eichmann's psyche in her seminal work, Eichmann in Jerusalem, applies to our present condition: "The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else."

Accordingly, to lose the green fuse of transformation, implicit in interpersonal relationships, is to be driven by dehumanizing engines of annihilation.

In regard to the consumerist-colonized psyches of the populace of the U.S., an inner architecture is in place -- an internalized shopping mall (complete with sub-cretinous security crews trained to shut down political speechifying and pamphleteering -- but who seem unwilling or unable to subdue the impulse to buy, on credit, unnecessary items).

Conversely, for a culture to thrive, a vital agora and public square is required. Given the agora has been replaced by mall and social media's weightless pixels of narrowed apprehension (an almost all-encompassing, amateur improvisational theatre for those with short attentions spans) can there be any chance of an awaking, even an uprising, against such life-negating forces?

Using any metric, the present system, based upon a zombie-like proliferation of exponential growth is unsustainable. By the destruction leveled on nature and public space, in combination with, the usurpation of time and identity (individual and collective) -- the very structure of the present system creates alienation and anomie.

Moreover, the root of Puritan panic (including the constant upwelling of sexually related scandal) is caused by its compulsion to winnow down the human psyche and its attendant drives, actions, and enterprises to only what is deemed pure and practical; hence, panic ensues when the musk and fury of the larger world (even one's own thoughts and desires) rudely breaches the life-denuded contours of its cordon sanitaire.

The anecdote: Don't tiptoe through your life like a ninny nor become a finger-wagging scold, so mortified by your appetites and desires you would scour the messiness of the world into a sterile prison of self-deprivation. Like Emerson, we must insist: we have a life to live -- not a perpetual apology.

Poetry and music can awaken imagination and induce empathy, therefore are potent provisions that sustain one while carrying the darkness. However, first one must engage the struggle, to face the everyday monster whose name is, "That is just the way it is and must remain" -- even to risk having one's concept of self devoured by the task. To paraphrase Lorca: to know oneself by drawing near to the beating heart of the monster of the world.

"But the Duende--where is the Duende? Through the empty arch enters a mental air blowing insistently over the heads of the dead, seeking new landscapes and unfamiliar accents; an air bearing the odor of child's spittle, crushed grass, and the veil of Medusa announcing the unending baptism of all newly-created things." --Federico García Lorca, excerpt: The Duende: Theory and Divertissement (1930)

One cannot kill nor banish personal demons but one can give them supervised work to do (that way one can keep an eye on them).

(Knowing one's demons also provides insight when dealing with adversaries and can prevent one from being drawn into the self-serving ploys of mass media vampires of mind and spirit who retail sexually related scandals that bring glee to the bloodless.)

Personally, it could trouble me less if the sky shook, thick as seething locust, with a pixel-borne pestilence of suggestive photos of political sorts. Funny, the same crowd of fundamentalist, petty moralists who believe that global warming is the result of natural forces insist the heat of human libido is what will bring on man's doom i.e., greenhouse gasses aren't melting the polar regions; instead, Climate Change is caused by the hot breath of Satan himself tweeting pictures of his lust-scorched undergarments.

In times such as these, one is advised to embrace both mystery and logic -- both élan vital and logos. Be both apprehensive and comforted by the unknowable, ineffable quality of existence; thereby, one comes to be moved by a poetic approach to mystery, and the realization arrives…that one is vividly alive even amid dismal, alienating circumstance, and, as a result, that the ennui engendered by the illusion of atomization is, to a degree, mitigated.

Although one's suffering is uniquely one's own, one remains part and parcel of the implicate order of a living planet. This is how Wallace Stevens delivers, in verse, the case for acquiring and maintaining a view of the world by means of empathetic imagination (that can serve as a panacea to the preening narcissism inherit in toxic innocence). I'll give him the final word:

We feel the obscurity of an order, a whole,
A knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous.

Within its vital boundary, in the mind.
We say God and the imagination are one ...
How high that highest candle lights the dark.

Out of this same light, out of the central mind,
We make a dwelling in the evening air,
In which being there together is enough.

--Excerpt: Final Soliloquy Of The Interior Paramour

Phil Rockstroh is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City. He may be contacted at: phil@philrockstroh.com . Visit Phil's website http://philrockstroh.com / And at FaceBook: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100

676

The Media Distract the Public From War
Americans Are Not Being Leveled With

By SHELDON RICHMAN

If one is to judge by the tone of the television commentators, America must be deep in a crisis. Long stretches of cable time are devoted to the breaking news. Each detail is presented as more grave and consequential for the republic than the last. The fate of the country surely hangs in the balance.

What is it? War? Fiscal crisis? Mass unemployment? A double-dip recession?

No. A congressman was caught sending lewd photographs of himself to women over the Internet.

This is what now consumes so much of the news media's attention. This is what outranks in news value continuing occupations of foreign countries, three overt and an undetermined number of covert wars, and a looming fiscal crisis. As America's imperial elite seeks to hold on to and extend its global power in defiance of economic reality, the spectacle of a congressman, Anthony Weiner of New York, appparently sharing pictures of his private parts with female strangers has taken center stage.

This betrays an odd set of priorities, to say the least. It's not that the Weiner story lacks news value. When a so-called representative demonstrates low character (lying to his wife and others) and poor judgment (leaving himself open to blackmail), his constituents are entitled to know. But that does not justify the news media's preoccupation — indeed obsession — with the story. The United States will be little different whether or not Anthony Weiner resigns his congressional seat.

During the more than weeklong scandal, some indisputably more important things have been going on. For example, just a few days ago five U.S. military personnel were killed in Iraq. Remember Iraq? That's the country the U.S. government invaded in 2003 on the basis of cynical lies about weapons of mass destruction and al Qaeda collusion, and has occupied ever since. Last year President Obama triumphantly announced to the American people that the war there was over as he withdrew all but about 47,000 troops. (As though that is an insignificant force.) MSNBC's Obama cheerleading section was on the scene to record the historic event. Wikipedia gives opening and closing dates for the war: March 20, 2003 – August 31, 2010. So it must be over, right?

Tell it to the families of the five soldiers. They were killed in a rocket attack from Shiite-controlled east Baghdad. That sounds like combat. That sounds like war. The American people are not being leveled with.

Under the Status of Forces Agreement between the Bush administration and the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, the U.S. military is to leave Iraq by the end of the year. Iraq's Iran-backed government and the most powerful figure outside the government, Muqtada al Sadr, have said they want U.S. forces out. But despite President Obama's reassurances, American military leaders aren't so certain it's time to leave. As the Christian Science Monitor reported, "[T]he attack could provide a new impetus for the Pentagon to push for an extension of the US military presence in the country." It quotes the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen: "[T]here is still much work to be done and still plenty of extremists aided by states and organizations who are bent on pulling Iraq back into violence." Defense Secretary Robert Gates said last month that staying on would send "a powerful signal to the region that we're not leaving, that we will continue to play a part. I think it would not be reassuring to Iran, and that's a good thing."

Gate's soon-to-be-successor, Leon Panetta, says the Iraqi government will probably ask that some American troops stay on after the deadline. If so, "that ought to be seriously considered by the president," Panetta says. But on this matter, Gates has conceded, "[W]hether we like it or not, we're not very popular there."

So the "non-war" rages on and may continue past the promised termination point. Of course Iraq is not the only serious matter being overshadowed. Afghanistan, Libya, and Yemen are still deadly playgrounds for the ruling elite, and an attack on Iran cannot be ruled out. But Rep. Weiner's online sexual activities outrank all of this. Perhaps keeping the American people distracted is the mainstream media's idea of serving the country.

Sheldon Richman is senior fellow at The Future of Freedom Foundation and and editor of The Freeman magazine.

675 Border Control vs. Cleaning Up Wall Street Illegal Immigration and Other Criminality By STEVE BREYMAN

Governor Cuomo's recent decision to withdraw New York from the federal Secure Communities program—which sent the fingerprints of all jailed suspects to Homeland Security--got me thinking again about this country's never-ending struggle with illegal immigration. Upon reflection, the worst thing about illegal immigration is that it's, well, illegal.

I'm sympathetic to the plight of undocumented workers. I came of age playing high school soccer in Southern California with some of their children; no one works harder than these people. But as a strong believer in the rule of law, it's hard to get beyond the basic fact that crossing borders without passports and visas is against the law. Here in the US, and everywhere else.

It doesn't matter that undocumented workers provide far more to the US economy, welfare state and Social Security than they take from it.

Or does it? Doesn't that count for something? Given that we'll never be able to fully choke off the arrival of the undocumented--even with an alligator-filled moat--it's fair to do a little comparative analysis of American law-breaking, routine and otherwise.

Is the rule of law under greater threat from paperless immigrants or from bankers on Wall Street and the Obama administration in Libya? How many bankers, mortgage brokers, and the rest of the well-renumerated hooligans who brought the economy to its knees have been investigated or prosecuted for what appears to be some highly questionable activities? Very few.

How many Bush administration officials have been investigated and tried for the long list of crimes committed during the Global War on Terror? Answer again: very few. Hardly any, in fact. Far fewer than deserve serious, sustained scrutiny.

Yet we deport tens of thousands of undocumented immigrants every year.

The aim of law enforcement is, of course, to serve justice and provide deterrence against copycats. Failing to investigate what looks like blatant criminality leaves us with neither. Thus, bankers and government officials continue on their merry (sometimes illegal) ways. Look at the continued shenanigans on 'self-regulating' Wall Street (ever hear of Raj Rajaratnam?) and the refusal of the Obama administration to abide by the War Powers Act in Libya.

Who commits the more serious crime? What are the stakes? An honest financial system, a country that abides by its own Constitution, and an immigration system that has failed to keep out millions who toil to feed and clean up after us. Not much of a contest.

You complain that you're neither a banker, nor approve of presidential failure to respect the separation of powers. My examples apply to too few of us. You pay your taxes, stay out of trouble, and otherwise contribute to society. So do the vast majority of undocumented workers.

Do you ever exceed the maximum speed limit in your car? Speeding contributes to thousands of deaths every year on America's roads and highways. Ever cheat on your taxes? Ever jaywalk? Ever get in your car and drive after one too many? Ever make a rolling stop before turning right at a red light? Always wear a seatbelt? Ever talk on your handheld phone while driving? Ever knowingly overcharge a customer? Ever claimed more from an insurance company than was fair? Insurance fraud costs us tens of billions dollars per year, and contributes to higher premiums. Always pay your child support on time? Ever smoked marijuana?

Are these less serious crimes--in social terms rather than in terms of the penal code--than overstaying a visa or sneaking across a border?

Have you ever left a restaurant because you thought there were illegal aliens in the kitchen? Have you stopped buying or eating lettuce or other produce? Chances are that your salad fixings were picked by an undocumented farm worker. Ever refused to stay in a hotel because you suspected the housekeepers had fake papers? Ever failed to enjoy yourself at the horse track because some of the stable help may be here illegally?

The point is not to justify illegal immigration. It's only to put it in the proper social context. As law-breaking goes, it's the sort that actually enriches all of us, not just a powerful few. Think how we could clean up Wall Street if we devoted even a fraction of the resources to it that we expend on border control. Think how we might rein in official lawlessness if we spent even a fraction of the time and energy debating it that we do with illegal immigration. I'll take an undocumented busboy over a native-born criminal banker or government official any day.

Steve Breyman is Associate Professor of Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Reach him at breyms@rpi.edu

674 A Historic Day in West Virginia The March on Blair Mountain By CAROL POLSGROVE

Mountains are sacred the world over, and when about a thousand of us gathered at the foot of Blair Mountain June 11, you could feel the spirit rising. For five days, several hundred people had walked single file down roads from Charleston, West Virginia's capital. Now, joined by several hundred more, they staked a claim to the historic site of the Battle of Blair Mountain 90 years ago when a face-off between United Mine Workers and coal companies reached such a peak that federal forces came in to quell the conflict.

So pivotal was that fight that in 2009 Blair Mountain was listed on the National Register of Historic Places, a move that would have protected it from surface mining if coal companies had not succeeded in getting it promptly delisted. We had gathered at the mountain on this hot June day to call for honoring the past by protecting Blair Mountain from mountaintop removal, but we had also gathered to march for the future—a future, we hoped, when all mountaintops would be safe.

I had arrived in Logan, West Virginia, the night before the Saturday rally, and already, sitting on the floor of a van shuttle from the parking lot to the state park camp in Logan, I saw what a far-flung lot we were: from Oregon, Washington, Kentucky, Florida, Indiana, West Virginia. The next day in the field at the base of the mountain I saw more from near and far—a diverse array of tattooed young medics, oldsters under big umbrellas, college students trained as legal observers in case conflicts should erupt. Before the rally started, I talked with Quakers and opponents of natural gas extraction by "fracking" and a veteran of the Appalachian mountaintop removal movement.

I also listened to retired mineworker Joe Stanley, born and raised in nearby Mingo County, who explained to me why the United Mine Workers of America was not opposing mountaintop removal (although one union local voted to support the march and sent signs along for marchers to carry). A former UMWA official, Stanley said the union is divided between surface miners and deep miners—a state of affairs he thinks the companies have encouraged. For coal companies, surface mining is more profitable; for miners, it's easier than mining underground.

"Surface mining is heavy equipment operation," he said, and though he respects surface miners for making a living for their families, "we did not need and cannot endure the damage that mountain top removal mining is causing. We will never recover. That's Blair Mountain right there," he said, pointing to the steep slopes above us. "Once it's gone, it's gone, and it will leach heavy metals for 300 years."

That was just one conversation I had, and there were others: it was a richly educational day, with lessons to be learned even from the police cars parked on the road above us, the line of not very friendly people watching from the road, or the motorcyclists who gunned their motorcycles to interrupt the speeches, at one point, nearly drowning out Robert Kennedy Jr., who heaped righteous wrath on a coal industry that would destroy this sacred place.

It was, Kennedy said, an illegal industry, which admitted it could not make a profit without breaking laws. The year before he had confronted Masssey Energy CEO Don Blankenship with the company's record of breaking environmental, health, and mining laws thousands of times in just a few years. "And I said to him," Kennedy said, "'Is it possible for your industry to make a profit wihout violating the law?' And he said, 'No, no because we've got a lot of silly laws.' What he was admitting to me," Kennedy said, "was that he was operating a criminal enterprise, and their business plan is that they're going to violate the law, and then they're going to dismantle democracy, and they're going to muzzle the press so that they can get away with it."

In West Virginia, democracy has been subverted, Kennedy said. "If you are a property owner in this state, you have no property rights…. If they want to drop a 5-ton boulder on your property, you can't do anything about it. If they want to rain toxic dust down on your property and your children, you can't do anything about it. If you did that in New York state, we'd sue you, we'd take your money, we'd make you clean up every bit of silicon dust, but you can't do that in West Virginia….

"By every poll, two-thirds of the people of the state of West Virginia oppose mountaintop removal mining and want to see it shut down immediately—but there's not a single elected politician of the state who will say that publicly. This is not democracy. That is something else, and I'll tell you what it is. Domination of business by government is called communism. Domination of government by business is called fascism."

What has already happened in West Virginia may be in store for the rest of us, Kennedy said. "Our democracy is under attack, and it's under attack by the United States Supreme Court that made the worst decision in United States history"—the Citizens United decision that overturned a law preventing corporations from spending money to advocate for or against candidates in elections. That decision has unleashed a "tsunami of corporate dollars into the American political process," Kennedy said.

"The same thing is happening nationally as is happening in West Virginia. Human beings are being turned into commodities, and when human beings are turned into commodities, the environment and landscape are turned into commodities. And that is going to happen across America unless you turn back this ascendancy of corporate power, and this battle is beginning now."

Kennedy was followed by a host of speakers and musicians, among them West Virginia's singer Kathy Mattea, novelist Denise Giardina, and Larry Gibson, patriarch of the anti-mountaintop removal movement. But if this was a day of words, it was also to be a day of action. In early afternoon with the sun beating down, marchers headed up the hill. Two of us older protestors, defeated by the heat, stayed behind, making our long way back to town in the vintage BMW of one of the musicians and seeing, on the way, police cars hurtling toward the mountain. We were worried that whatever was happening, it was not good.

Not until the marchers were shuttled back that evening to the parking lot at the state park did I hear what had happened there. All day rain had threatened without falling but now, at the end of the day, it fell gently as a young marcher, Brady Bradshaw, a student in Wilmington, North Carolina, told me how on the way up the mountain, about 150 of the nearly 1,000 had broken away to go the area designated as the 1921 battlefield. Skirting a security car that halfheartedly blocked their path, they marched on for a mile or so.

"When we reached our peak," he said, "the cops had come up around us and gotten in front and were starting to say the magic words, 'You're trespassing – you're now trespassing, everybody needs to move down the mountain now.' And the organizers were saying, 'Plant your flags now'—our flags that said, "Save Blair Mountain." so people started planting those. It was really awesome. They were lining the pathway." Having done that, they felt they had accomplished their goal, and, as a group, went on down the mountain.

"Do you feel good?" I asked.

He grinned. "I feel great."

Later that evening in the dining room of the state park lodge, I talked with historian Barbara Rasmussen, president of Friends of Blair Mountain and a leader in the effort to place Blair Mountain on the National Register. A retired history professor, she drafted the successful National Register nomination, which was then undermined by a legal challenge by the coal industry. Now Friends of Blair Mountain, the Sierra Club, and others have filed an appeal of the de-listing and await a decision by a federal court.

"The case was assigned to a federal judge in Washington (DC), not in West Virginia for which we are very grateful." Does she have any idea when the decision will come? "We have none. We know if that it had been filed in a West Virginia court it would be over. Or in the Richmond federal court it would have been over—that's where Massey is."

And what did she think would be impact of the Blair Mountain march? "If anything comes of the demonstration today, it will come through local governments. Perhaps today we were able to empower a county commissioner to ask questions, or a state representative to say, 'Wait a minute….'"

My hope is that it will do that and more. In the March on Blair Mountain, the network of groups that came together as Appalachia Rising reminded us of the possibilities for creative political action under difficult circumstances. Three times, marchers along the way were turned away from the camping places they had been promised and had to return to their starting point. While many people along the way thanked marchers for what they were doing, others heckled them. Yet through it all demonstrators had remained—as an organizer told them the final day— "strong, determined, dignified." State Police had done their jobs and demonstrators had thanked them. There was only one arrest, on the battlefield, and release came within hours.

The March on Blair Mountain, as organizer Brandon Nida told me, was a "complicated action," and it was put together in Appalachian style, with people talking things out and deciding what to do. It was a creative action, reaching back across nearly a century to find in the past inspiration for the present. Using the full array of electronic media to get the word out, organizers scattered across the Appalachian states brought together a crowd and turned them into a movement. In more ways than one, it was, as I overheard one marcher say, "a historic day."

Carol Polsgrove, author of Divided Minds: Intellectuals and the Civil Rights Movement, has written on environmental and energy issues for Sierra and other magazines. She is professor emerita at the Indiana University School of Journalism. She explores the varied lives of writers on her website, http://carolpolsgrove.com.

673 A Permanent Jobs Program Revamping the WPA By MIKE WHITNEY

When the recovery began 2 years ago, the rate of unemployment was 9.5 percent. Today it's 9.1 percent. Think about that for a minute. Doesn't that prove that the market isn't really self-correcting after all? I mean, if the market was self-correcting then unemployment would have gone down by now, right? But, it hasn't. Why?

There's a long answer for that, and a short answer. The short answer is that unemployment can stay high forever if the wrong policies are in place. If you don't believe that, then vote Republican in 2012 and watch what happens when they start hacking away at public spending. Unemployment will soar to 15 or 20 percent in the blink of an eye.

So, it's the policy that matters not the market. And when the wrong policies are implemented, then demand weakens, people get laid off, and the economy goes into a funk. The good news is that we know how to fix the problem and get the economy revved up again. But the bad news is the politicians are not interested in doing what it takes to put people back to work. In fact, unemployment isn't even on their radar. Maybe that's because some of their bigshot constituents aren't bothered by high unemployment; in fact, they kind of like it. It crushes big labor and puts pressure on wages. Maybe that's why they haven't been griping.

Look, the economy is just a reflection of the ideas of the people in power, right? That's why economics can't be separated from politics, because it is politics. And, it's totally agenda driven. There's no economic theory that's not agenda driven.

There's no reason why a recession has to drag on year after year. Everyone knows what needs to be done; it's just a matter of doing it. But, of course, that's not possible because "what needs to be done" conflicts with the objectives of the people who run the system. So the slump goes on and on and people get madder and madder until, finally, something snaps and the crowds pour out onto the streets and and start burning stuff down. That's how it works, isn't it? Have you checked out Athens, lately? How about Madrid, Lisbon, Dublin, or Reykjavik? People are pissed. And they're not pissed about the recession. They're pissed because they're getting reamed and they know it. They're pissed about the policy.

So, is that where America is headed; massive public demonstrations and street violence?

Could be. It's hard to tell. If the politicians stick with the same policies that created the recession and high unemployment, then we're headed for trouble. But if they make a course correction and fix the situation, then things will improve. It's up to them.

Think back to when Barack Obama first took office. The administration quickly slapped together an $800 billion stimulus package and rushed it through congress. What does that tell you?

It tells you that policymakers aren't really dopes, after all. It tells you that when the lights are blinking red they know what they need to do and they do it fast. The Obama stimulus stopped the bleeding (The economy was shedding 750,000 jobs per month when Bush left office) and gradually turned the economy around. It took a long time, but the patient finally started showing signs of life.

At the time, no one talked about the budget deficits because they knew that avoiding another Great Depression was more important than a little more red ink. And, no one suggested that we forgo fiscal stimulus and try to stop the downward spiral by purchasing trillions of dollars of government bonds (QE) in an experiment that may or may not work. No one said anything like that, because they already KNEW that the traditional tried-and-true Keynesian methods of reversing the plunge would work. And they did work.

So what does that prove?

It proves that the people in power actually know what to do, but they pretend otherwise so they can pursue their own agenda. All this deficit hawkery and QE2 is just agenda-driven gibberish. It has nothing to do with fixing the economy or putting people back to work.

So what should we be doing to reduce unemployment and get the economy back on track?

Well, we should do what we did in the '50s, 60's and 70s when the economy was growing and the middle class was at its apex. We should implement the policies that focus on job creation and wage growth. Here's an excerpt from "The Crisis of Capitalism: Keynes Versus Marx" by Robert Skidelsky which sums it up perfectly:

"Keynesianism dominated the political economy of developed economies from the 1950s through to the mid 1970s. As Thomas Palley argues, 'economic policy was designed to achieve full employment, and the economy was characterized by a system in which wages grew with productivity. This configuration created a virtuous circle of growth. Rising wages meant robust aggregate demand, which contributed to full employment. Full employment in turn provided an incentive to invest, which raised productivity, therefore supporting higher wages'." ("The Crisis of Capitalism: Keynes Versus Marx", Robert Skidelsky)

British economist John Maynard Keynes knew that capitalist economies perform best at full employment because the additional spending leads to widespread prosperity and stronger growth. But, as Skidelksy points out, the government has a role to play in sustaining employment to ensure the economy operates at maximum capacity. Here's more from the same article:

"Public Investment & Full Employment

Keynes's answer ... is for the state to ensure enough investment and/or consumption in the economy to maintain continuous full employment.....The key to any restoration of a Keynesian political economy is thus the rehabilitation of the state as an instrument of the public interest...."

So the government should be directly involved in maintaining full employment. That means that fiscal stimulus has to be provided at various points in the business cycle to keep things running smoothly. But, as Professor Alan Nasser points out in a recent article in CounterPunch, there are two kinds of fiscal stimulus; one that works, and one that doesn't. It's an important distinction that needs to be clarified. Here's an excerpt from Nasser's article:

"...Closing the employment gap requires a specifically targeted stimulus, intended to stimulate not merely aggregate demand, but "effective demand". This was the kind of stimulus Keynes had in mind as his remedy for chronic unemployment. Aggregate demand stimulation is not authentically Keynesian. Keynes was explicit that the goal of macroeconomic stabilization policy is "a closer approximation of full employment as nearly as is practicable." (The General Theory, p. 378-379) He was unambiguous as to the principal effective means of accomplishing this goal: direct government job creation through public works projects....

If boosting effective demand is the explicit goal of fiscal policy, then work projects and the jobs they require must be provided directly by government. A resurrected Works Progress Administration is what will do the trick." ("Putting People to Work; The Kind of Stimulus We Need", Alan Nasser, Counterpunch)

Bravo, Professor Nasser. That's exactly what we need, "direct government job creation through public works projects". Another W.P.A.

Full employment is not a pipedream. In fact, it's an easily achievable goal if we're willing to use state resources. The problem is that big business opposes public works programs because they encroach on a potential source of profits for private industry. So, the corporate bosses usually mount expensive public relations campaigns lambasting WPA-type programs as "inefficient" or wasteful "make work" projects in an effort to sway public opinion. The propaganda has had a damaging effect on people's perception of government workers and the vital services they provide.

Still, there have been times when progressives have made real headway on the issue of full employment, like in 1978 when The Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment and Balanced Growth Act was finally passed. Here's an excerpt from an article by Nancy E. Rose in the Monthly Review:

"Support for a permanent jobs program resurfaced again in the 1970s with the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment and Balanced Growth Act. The original bill promised to "establish and guarantee the rights of all adult Americans able and willing to work to equal opportunities for useful paid employment at fair rates of compensation.".....Its centerpiece was a countercyclical public service employment program. The government would serve as employer of last resort for people unable to find jobs through the labor market, establishing a program that would go into effect when the unemployment rate rose above 3 percent. Wages would be set at "fair rates of compensation," the highest of prevailing local wage rates, the minimum wage, or wages specified in existing collective bargaining agreements." ("Lessons from the New Deal Public Employment Programs", Nancy E. Rose, Monthly Review)

If the government is expected to be the "buyer of last resort" for all manner of dodgy mortgage-backed assets (owned by the banks), then why can't the government be the "employer of last resort" for the millions of people who--through no fault of their own--can't find a job?

Humphrey-Hawkins doesn't encroach on the potential profit centers for big business, (The bill explicitly states that the government should rely on private enterprise whenever possible.) but it does give the government the ability to create a "reservoir of public employment" if the private sector can't keep enough people working.

Isn't that what progressives really want; a "permanent jobs program" that spares people the indignity and desperation of being unemployed?

It's all there in Humphrey-Hawkins. It just needs a little dusting off and a mobilized left that's willing to do the heavy lifting.

Mike Whitney lives in Washington state. He can be reached at fergiewhitney@msn.com

672 Special report: Life in the tribal belt! PART 1—SACRED SCRIPTURE (permalink): Progressives should be very busy at this point in time.

For one thing, progressives should be insisting that major newspapers cover the increasingly ludicrous GOP budget plans in substantial detail. When someone like Tim Pawlenty presents a delusional budget plan, that should qualify as major front-page news. That said, your big newspapers won’t want to go there. Progressives should be pushing such newspapers hard, even if that might jeopardize someone’s future employment.

Even if it might jeopardize some career liberal’s party invites! Even if it makes for awkward chatter at the club!

A second obvious task: Progressives should be brain-storming, every day, looking for ways to speak to average voters. In this morning’s New York Times, Paul Krugman lays out very important facts about the nature of Medicare. But most average voters won’t read that column. Progressives should be looking for ways to bring this sort news to the public. Progressives should be inventing forums average voters will hear about. In conducting these forums, they should be using spokespeople voters will trust.

On Saturday, we saw no sign that major progressives or major career liberals were actually doing such things. At Salon, liberals were instead being encouraged to paw through Sarah Palin’s e-mails in search of some holy grail. In this sad and pathetic report, the “SALON STAFF” reported on the great hunt. Here’s how the foolishness started, ridiculous headlines included:

SALON STAFF (6/11/11): Revelations from the Sarah Palin emails

Highlights from this afternoon's coverage of today's 24,199-page release

At 9 a.m. Juneau time—that's 1 p.m. ET—a small cadre of journalists camped out in Juneau, Alaska, started to open boxes full of previously unpublished emails sent by Sarah Palin while she was governor of Alaska. Here are the highlights of what they've discovered so far.

“Here are the highlights of what they’ve discovered,” these pitiful losers wrote.

(The “SALON STAFF” didn’t sign their names. We can’t say that we blame them.)

What “highlights” had Salon’s pseudo-journalists spotted? In the pitiful mind of today’s career liberal, “revelations” like the following met that test. In each case, the time the revelation came to light is noted:

SALON STAFF: 1:20: The Daily Beast's Shushannah Walshe tweets: "The first e mail I took out of the box. A poem sent to a group including the gov of Alaska.

[…]

2:30: Over at the Mother Jones liveblog, Tim Murphy notes: "Even in professional correspondence, Palin had a propensity for the folksy expressions that have become her hallmark." E.g. "Unflippinbelievable."

[…]

2:40: ABC News's liveblog, updated by Michael Falcone and Shushannah Walshe in Juneau, notes that Palin may have "had her eye on" the VP slot "months" before she was nominated. Falcone and Walshe cite several emails from the summer of 2008, in which supporters encouraged Palin to join the race—all of which were forwarded on by Palin to her aides.

[…]

3:00: [T]he LA Times writes that Sarah Palin and her team were "swamped" (that's Palin's word) with media requests in the weeks following her addition to the McCain ticket. Palin responded to an email in which her communications director listed several of the questions he'd received like this:

"Arghhhh! I am so sorry that the office is swamped like this! Dinosaurs even?! I'll try to run through some of these in my head before responding. And the old, used tanning bed that my girls have used a handful of times in Juneau? Yes, we paid for it ourselves. I, too, will continue to be dismayed at the media and am thankful you and Sharon are not part of the stange [sic] goings-on in the media world of today."

[…]

4:20: At the New York Times, Michael Shear points out an email from early August, 2008, in which Palin complimented a speech given by then-candidate Obama."[Obama] gave a great speech this morn in Michigan," Palin told her aides—before moving on to accuse her soon-to-be-rival of "[stealing] our Energy Rebate $1000 check idea [and] our TC-Alaska gasoline talking points." Her conclusion: "He did say 'yay' to our gasoline. Pretty cool. Wrong candidate."

Among the “highlights” of the day’s “revelations:”

Palin used the term "unflippinbelievable." Some unnamed person once sent her a poem. Palin was swamped with media requests after becoming McCain’s running-mate. And she mistyped “strange” in an e-mail! (That “sic” was included by the eagle-eyed SALON STAFF.)

By the way: Everyone has always known that Palin was being promoted for the VP slot by some supporters in the summer of 2008, even by a few major players. There’s no “revelation” in that. And by the way:

That “TC-Alaska gasoline” was actually the TC-Alaska gasline. Did Shear perhaps introduce a mistake into the text of these emails?

We don’t know. No sane person would check.

Heroically, some Salon commenters complained, quite bitterly, about the utter stupidity of this breathless report. But then, the brainlessness of the modern “liberal” enterprise has rarely been quite so clear. Your nation is in enormous peril. There are many serious actions liberals and progressives ought to be taking, actions in which we might start to make up for decades of “liberal” passivity. But within the modern liberal world, a silly tribal mindset reigns. This is especially true where career liberals sell their wares to us unsuspecting rubes, thereby increasing their publications’ popularity and profits.

Or the profits of their cable channel.

Many ranking liberals encourage you to adopt this silly mind-set. Some of them are simply hustlers; they make money off the gullibility of their tribe, much like Rush and Sean before them. But many are full-blown tribal believers; to them, correction of Sarah Palin’s mistakes carries the full force of scripture. They live in a thoroughly tribal world—you might even say, in the tribal belt. For these shrunken minds, politics consists of one thing: Showing that our tribe includes the good/smart people, while their tribe is very bad/stupid.

Sacred scripture takes many forms. Some people believe in the literal word of the Bible. Others take this same cast of mind to their love for the tribe. On Saturday, some tribal believers at Salon encouraged us to be very dumb. But then, a whole lot of that tribal dumbness has been on display in the past few weeks.

We’re good and we’re smart; they’re bad and they’re stupid. They are the hypocrites; we never are. If you live in the tribal belt, people around you believe this way.

Progressive interests can’t be advanced in this self-pleasuring manner.

Tomorrow: Wouldn’t take yes for an answer

671 Bob Somersby keeps it in perspective

SACRED SCRIPTURE! Salon’s staff pored through Palin’s e-mails from deep in the tribal belt:
MONDAY, JUNE 13, 2011

The man who sent Bush to the White House: Jack Welch has been one of the most consequential players in the American journalism of the past thirty years. Almost surely, he’s the biggest media fish the liberal world has agreed not to notice or fry.

As CEO of General Electric, Welch assembled the NBC news team of the Clinton/Gore and Bush years. He recruited Tim Russert into the news business. He then made Russert a multimillionaire; he did the same for Brian Williams (largely) and Chris Matthews (totally). During the 1990s, he assembled NBC’s weirdly ethnic news division—a team of East Coast Irish Catholic home boys, a team built in Welch’s own image.

These players made their multiple millions due to Jack Welch’s largesse. Russert and Matthews even bought multimillionaire-dollar summer homes on Nantucket so they could huddle at the right cheek of their maker. Joining them there was Robert Wright, the (East Coast Irish Catholic) president and CEO of NBC. See THE DAILY HOWLER, 11/24/04.

The liberal world completely ignored this ridiculous corporate cavorting even as it took careful note of everything Rupert Murdoch thought, did and said.

We thought you might want to review the political beliefs of Welch, the man who assembled the NBC team which worked to bring down President Clinton, then savaged Candidate Gore.

Last Wednesday, Welch did the full hour with Piers Morgan, perhaps the biggest toady ever unloosed on American television. (Morgan has replaced Larry King in CNN’s 9 PM time slot.) As usual, Morgan was fawning mightily at the start of his session with Welch. “I can't think of a better person to ask about the economy, the financial crisis,” he told his guest. “To many people, for many decades, you personified America PLC.”

Welch also personified the journalistic wars which sent George W. Bush to the White House, although career liberals have agreed that they must never tell.

Eventually, Morgan stopped his brown-nosing long enough to ask Welch who he likes in the race for the White House. (To read the full transcript, click this.) Welch said he wouldn’t support Sarah Palin—but then, he rendered the judgment which follows. Gaze on the man who assembled the team which worked to send Bush to the White House:

MORGAN (6/8/11): Do you see anybody emerging on the Republican side who is the kind of leader that you're looking for?

WELCH: You know, Piers, this is a great question, because if you asked me that a month ago, I would have said, well, Mitt Romney might be best guy, etc.—the most obvious guy.

But everything I see Tim Pawlenty say in the last month appeals to me.

Now, he's not the jazziest guy in town. He's not the most exciting. But if you look at what he says and his vision for America and that plan he put out in the last 48 hours—every time I see him, whether it would be your show or somebody else, the guy makes sense.

“He definitely does,” Morgan said, toadying like a true expert.

There may be a summer home on Nantucket in Piers Morgan’s future! But consider what Welch said about Pawlenty and his new budget plan.

Last week, Pawlenty presented one of the craziest budget plans ever advanced by a supposedly serious White House candidate. Yes, we know: Genuine, unvarnished budget lunacy is now a requirement on the GOP side. When we say these budget plans are insane, it’s no longer clear that we are speaking metaphorically or hyperbolically. Here’s the shape of Pawlenty’s plan, as sussed out by Ruth Marcus:

MARCUS (6/10/11): His economic policy runs the gamut from delusional to reckless.

The delusional part is obvious. "Let's grow the economy by 5 percent—instead of the anemic 2 percent currently envisioned," he urges. "Such a national economic growth target will set our sights on a positive future."

But why think so small? Why not 7 percent? Why not 10? If we can send a man to the moon . . .

[…]

Which gets to the reckless part. The centerpiece of Pawlenty's plan—the magic wand he waves to produce this growth—is massive new tax cuts. The corporate tax would be slashed from 35 percent to 15 percent. Capital gains taxes, taxes on dividends and interest, the estate tax—all would disappear. Families would pay a 10 percent tax rate on the first $100,000 of income, 25 percent on everything above that.

If you're thinking—oh good, flatter, fairer tax system, think again. Pawlenty is lowering individual income tax rates and keeping the existing hodgepodge of deductions and credits. This is the worst of all possible worlds (lower revenue and a complex tax code).

And at what cost? The Pawlenty campaign told me that—even assuming his outlandish 5 percent growth projections come true—the tax cut would bring in $2 trillion less in revenue over 10 years than currently projected. If growth remains at the expected level and does not soar in the wake of the Pawlenty tax cut, the cost would be a whopping $5.8 trillion. The nonpartisan Tax Policy Center puts the number even higher: at $11.6 trillion compared to current law, as the Pawlenty campaign also assumes. The top 1 percent of taxpayers would receive an average annual tax cut of $261,000…

The way to understand the craziness of the Pawlenty plan is to compare it to the Paul Ryan budget that passed the House. Ryan proposes lowering individual income tax rates—but only along with broadening the tax base (in other words, eliminating deductions) so that the same amount of revenue is generated. Ryan makes clear that he would do what is necessary to keep taxes in the 18 percent of GDP range. Pawlenty's tax plan is all dessert, no spinach.

Marcus is much too kind to Ryan when she suggests that his plan won’t lower projected revenues. But even Marcus uses these terms for Pawlenty’s budget plan: Delusional, reckless and crazy.

To Jack Welch, Pawlenty’s plan seems to make perfect sense! On Morgan’s show, the lunacy, and the sponge bath, continued:

MORGAN: When you look at somebody like Tim Pawlenty, I think he's a smart guy. I've enjoyed having him on the show. He makes all the sense that you say. I can see the temptation. But in your heart, do you think he can beat someone like Obama?

WELCH: I'm going to find out over the next 15 months—hopefully, the next six to nine months because they're going to pick somebody in the primary. But, I mean, I just have found him—

You know, I was at the gym this week talking to some guys who never would have thought this. And I said what I just told you: This guy's starting to intrigue the hell out of me, and then he came up with his plan. And I talked to some guy, he said, “I'm going to have a fundraiser for him.” I almost dropped dead. This guy would never support Tim Pawlenty in his life. He's a Democrat. He's going to do a fundraiser for him.

MORGAN: Why do you think he's doing that?

WELCH: He likes what he says. He likes what he says. There's some buyer's remorse on the Wall Street crowd over the Obama selection, whether you want to buy that or not. There is some buyer's remorse.

Welch may be completely sincere in what he said to Morgan. He may believe that Pawlenty’s plan would do great things for the nation. But if we make this assumption, we’re saying that the man who assembled the NBC team is a raving lunatic on such budget matters. And this is the man who invented Russert’s career—the man who made Matthews so wealthy.

Jack Welch is crazy out of his head—and he invented Russert and Matthews! Do these facts have any connection to Russert’s endless pimping of right-wing talking-points concerning Social Security? Does this help explain the vicious work Matthews performed in 1999 and 2000 as he savaged Candidate Gore? Did Welch help the boys assemble their views as they took the breeze with him on Nantucket—perhaps in one of their summer cottages, or maybe down at the club?

(Matthews’ paid $4.4 million for his cottage. Today, he pretends to be very upset by all the money Newt Gingrich spent for his jewels!)

Russert, Matthews and Wright all huddled with King Welch on a multimillionaires’ spindrift island! But so what? The career liberal world has let this comical (and remarkable) story go, from 1999 right through to the present. Why have your heroes looked away?

It’s good to appear on Meet the Press. It’s a very good thing to play Hardball.

Coming Wednesday: The return of political history! And our second annual fund drive, delayed from January.