Media Rhetoric Heating Up

It happens repeatedly, then cools down, so what to make of the latest Iran-bashing. Nothing maybe, but who can know. So it's tea leaves reading time again to pick up clues about potential impending action. Without question, the administration wants regime change, and right wing media keep selling it - Iranian leaders are bad; removing them is good, and what better way than by "shock and awe."

Take Fouad Ajami for example from his May 5 Wall Street Journal op-ed. It's headlined - "Iran Must Finally Pay A Price." He's a Lebanese-born US academic specializing in Middle East issues. He's also a well-paid flack for hard right policies, including their belligerency. He shows up often in the Wall Street Journal (and on TV, too) and always to spew hate and lies - his real specialty.

His latest piece is typical. Here's a sampling that's indicative of lots else coming out now:

-- "three decades of playing cat-and-mouse with American power have emboldened Iran's rulers;

-- why are the mullahs allowed to kill our soldiers with impunity;"

-- in Iraq, "Iranians played arsonists and firemen at the same time; (it's) part of a larger pattern;

-- Tehran has wreaked havoc on regional order and peace over the last three decades;"

-- earlier, George HW Bush offered an olive branch to Iran's rulers;

-- "Madeleine Albright (apologized) for America's role in the (1953) coup;"

-- all the while, "the clerics have had no interest in any bargain;" their oil wealth gives them great latitude;

-- "they have harassed Arab rulers while posing as status quo players at peace with the order of the region;"

-- they use regional proxies like "Hezbollah in Lebanon, warlords and militias in Iraq, purveyors of terror for the hire;

-- the (earlier) hope....that Iran would refrain from (interfering) in Iran (was) wishful thinking;" now there's Iran's nuclear "ambitions" to consider; the "Persian menace" has to "be shown that there is a price for their transgressions."

Sum it up, and it spells vicious agitprop by an expert at spewing it. He's not alone. Disputing one of his assertions, a May 5 AFP report quotes Iraq government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh saying no "hard evidence" shows Iran is backing Shiite militiamen or inciting violence in the country.

Consider the Arab street as well. It's unconcerned about Iran but outraged over US adverturism. Recall also that on March 2 Iranian President Ahmadinejad became the first Iranian head of state to visit Iraq in three decades. Prime Minister al-Maliki and President Talabani invited him and welcomed him warmly as a friend.

That doesn't deter The New York Times Michael Gordon. He's taken up where Judith Miller left off, and his May 5 piece is typical. It's headlined "Hezbollah Trains Iraqis in Iran, Officials Say." The key words, of course, are "Officials Say" to sell the idea that their saying it makes it so. No dissent allowed to debunk them or other administrative-supportive comments.

This one cites supposed information from "four Shiite militia members who were captured in Iraq late last year and questioned separately." For Gordon and "Officials (who) Say," it's incriminating evidence for what Washington has long charged - "that the Iranians (are) training Iraqi militia fighters in Iran," and Hezbollah is involved. The Pentagon calls them "special groups."

Gordon goes on to report that Iran has gotten "less obtrusive (by) bringing small groups of Iraqi Shiite militants to camps in Iran, where they are taught how to do their own training, 'American officials say.' "

Once trained, "the militants then return to Iraq to teach their comrades how to fire rockets and mortars, fight as snipers or assemble explosively formed penetrators, a particularly lethal type of roadside bomb....according to American officials."

As usual, the "officials" are anonymous and their "information has not been released publicly." Gordon continues with more of the same, but sum it up and he sounds like Ajami, Judith Miller, and growing numbers of others like them.

On March 17, Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) put out an Action Alert headlined "No Antiwar Voices in NYT 'Debate.' " It referred to The Times March 16 "Week in Review" section on the war's fifth anniversary featuring nine so-called experts - all chosen for their hawkish credentials. Included were familiar names like Richard Perle, Fred Kagan, Anthony Cordesman, Kenneth Pollack and even Paul Bremer. On May 4, The Times reconvened the same lineup for a repeat performance that would make any state-controlled media proud.

No need to explain their assessment either time, but NYT op-ed page editor said this on July 31, 2005: The op-ed page (where the above review was published) is "a venue for people with a wide range of perspectives, experiences and talents (to provide) a lively page of clashing opinions, one where as many people as possible have the opportunity to make the best arguments they can." As long as they don't conflict with official state policy, offend Times advertisers or potential ones, acknowledge Iran's decisive role in ending the recent Basra fighting, or mention the (latest) 2007 (US) National Intelligence Estimate that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 - even though it's likely one never existed and doesn't now.

With Iraq still raging and hawkishness over Iran heating up, it's disquieting to think what's coming, and it's got Middle East leaders uneasy. Not about Iran, about a rogue administration with over eight months left to incinerate the region in a mushroom-shaped cloud and no hesitation about doing it.

Enter the Generalissimo - Initials DP, Ambitions Outsized

Fallon is out, and, in late April, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said David Petraeus is being nominated to replace him as Centcom commander. General Raymond Odierno (his former deputy) will replace his former boss as Iraq chief. New York Times reporter Thom Shanker said these "two commanders (are) most closely associated with President Bush's current strategy in Iraq," so are on board to pursue it and maybe up the stakes.

Besides being a Latin American expert, James Petras writes extensively on the Middle East and how the Israeli Lobby influences US policy. His 2006 book, "The Power of Israel in the United States," is must reading to understand it. Petras has a new article on Petraeus. It's incisive, scary, and unsparing in exposing the generalissimo's true character, failings, and ambitions.

Competence didn't make him Iraq commander last year. It came the same way he got each star. In the words of some of his peers - by brown-nosing his way to the top. It made him more than a general. He's a "brand," and it got him Time Magazine's 2007 runner-up slot for Person of the Year.

The media now shower him with praise for his stellar performance in an otherwise dismal war. So do politicians. McCain calls him "one of (our) greatest (ever) generals." Clinton says he's "an extraordinary leader and a wonderful advocate for our military." Obama was less effusive but said he supports his nomination as Centcom chief and added: "I think Petraeus has done a good tactical job in Iraq....It would be stupid of me to ignore what he has to say." It would also hurt his presidential hopes as the right wing media would bash him mercilessly if he disparaged America's new war hero with very outsized ambitions and no shyness in pursuing them.

He got off to a flying start after being appointed to the top Iraq job last year. The White House spin machine took over and didn't let facts interfere with its praise. It described him as aggressive in nature, an innovative thinker on counterinsurgency warfare, a talisman, a white knight, a do-or-die competitive legend, and a man able to turn defeat into victory.

Others like Admiral Fallon had a different assessment, and Petras noted it in his article. Before his removal, he was openly contemptuous of a man who shamelessly supported Israel "in northern Iraq and the Bush 'Know Nothings' in charge of Iraq and Iran policy planning." It got him his April 16 promotion, and his week earlier Senate testimony sealed it. He was strikingly bellicose in blaming Iran for US troop deaths. That makes points any time on Capitol Hill, especially in an election year when rhetoric sells and whatever supports war and Israel does it best.

Petras adds that Petraeus had few competitors for the Centcom job because other top candidates won't stoop the way he does - shamelessly flacking for Israel, the bellicose Bush agenda, and what Petras calls "his slavish adherence to....confrontation with Iran. Blaming Iran for his failed military policies served a double purpose - it covered up his incompetence and it secured the support of" the Senate's most hawkish (independent) Democrat, Joe Lieberman.

It also served his outsized ambitions that may include a future run for the White House. His calculus seems to be - lie to Congress, hide his failures, blame Iran, support Israel and the Bush agenda unflinchingly, claim he turned Iraq around, say he'll do it in the region, and make him president and he'll fix everything.

He (nor the media) won't report how bad things are in Iraq or the toll on its people. They won't explain the "surge's" failure to make any progress on the ground. They won't reveal the weekly US troop death and injury count that's far higher than reported numbers. By one estimate, (including weekly Pentagon wounded updates), it tops 85,000 when the following categories are included:

-- "hostile" and "non-hostile" deaths, including from accidents and illness;

-- total numbers wounded; and

-- many thousands of later discovered casualties, mainly brain traumas from explosions.

Left out of the above figures are future illnesses and deaths from exposure to toxic substances like depleted uranium. It now saturates large areas of Iraq in the soil, air and drinking water. Also omitted is the vast psychological toll. For many, it causes permanent damage, and whole families become victims.

Consider civilian contractor casualties as well. They may be in the thousands. A February Houston Post report noted 1123 US civilian contractor deaths. It left out numbers of wounded or any information about foreign workers. They may have been affected most.

Several other reports are played down. One is from the VA about 18 known daily suicides. The true number may be higher. Another comes from Bloomberg.com on May 5 but unreported on TV news. It cited Thomas Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health on an April 2008 Rand Corporation study. It found about "18.5% of returning (Iraq and Afghan) US soldiers (afflicted with) post-traumatic stress disorder or depression (PTSD), and only half of them receive treatment."

Much of it shows up later, and many of its victims never recover. A smaller psychiatric association study put the PTSD number at about 32%, and a January 2006 Journal of the American Medical Association put it even higher - 35% of Iraq vets seeking help for mental health problems. A still earlier 2003 New England Journal of Medicine Study reported an astonishing 60% of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans showing PTSD "symptoms." Most victims said their duty caused it, but over half of them never sought treatment fearing damage to their careers.

The same Rand study said another 19% have possible traumatic brain injuries ranging from concussions to severe head wounds. About 7% of vets suffer a double hit - both brain injury and PTSD or depression. It's a wonder numbers aren't higher as most active duty and National Guard forces serve multiple tours - some as many as six or more in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. Surviving that ordeal in one piece is no small achievement.

Patraeus' calculus omits these victims and all other war costs abroad and at home. They're consigned to an over-stuffed memory hole for whatever outs the facts on the ground or his PR-enhanced image.

Petras strips it away and calls him "a disastrous failure" whose record is so poor it takes media magic to remake it. This man will now direct administration Middle East policy. He supports its aims, and if neocon wishes are adopted it means continued war and occupation of Iraq, stepped up efforts in Afghanistan, and making a hopeless enterprise worse by attacking Iran. No problem for Petraeus if it helps his ambitions. They, of course demand success, or at least the appearance, the way Petraeus so far has framed it. It remains to be seen what's ahead, and how long defeat can be called victory.

And one more thing as well. Congress will soon vote on more Iraq-Afghanistan supplemental funding. Bush wants another $108 billion for FY 2008. In hopes a Democrat will be elected president, Congress may add another $70 billion through early FY 2009 for a total $178 billion new war spending (plus the usual pork add-ons) on top of an already bloated Pentagon budget programmed to increase.

It's got economist Joseph Stiglitz alarmed and has for some time. In his judgment, the Iraq war alone (conservatively) will cost trillions of dollars, far more than his earlier estimates. That's counting all war-related costs:

-- from annual defense spending plus huge supplemental add-ons;

-- outsized expenses treating injured and disabled veterans - for the government and families that must bear the burden;

-- high energy costs; they're affected by war but mostly result from blatant market manipulation; it's not a supply/demand issue; there's plenty of oil around, but not if you listen to industry flacks citing shortages and other false reasons why prices shot up so high;

-- destructive budget and current account deficits; in the short run, they're stimulative, but sooner or later they matter; they're consuming the nation, and analysts like Stiglitz and Chalmers Johnson believe they'll bankrupt us; others do as well like Independent Institute Senior Fellow Robert Higgs who last year outed the nation's trillion dollar defense budget; in a recent May 7 article, he wrote: "As the US government taxes, spends, borrows, regulates, mismanages, and wastes resources on a scale never before witnessed in the history of mankind, it is digging its own grave;" others believe we're past the tipping point and it's too late;

-- debts must be serviced; the higher they mount, the
greater the cost; they crowd out essential public and private investment; need growing billions for interest payments; damage the dollar; neglect human capital; and harm the country's stature as an economic leader; the more we eat our seed corn, the greater the long-term damage;

-- debts also reduce our manoeuvring room in times of national crisis; limitless money-creation and reckless spending can't go on forever before inflation debases the currency; that's a major unreported threat at a time monetary and fiscal stimulus shifted financial markets around, and touts now predict we're out of the woods; they don't say for how long, what may follow, or how they'll explain it if they're wrong;

-- add up all quantifiable war costs, and Stiglitz now estimates (conservatively) a $4 - 5 trillion total for America alone; watch for higher figures later; both wars have legs; another may be coming; leading presidential candidates assure are on board and have no objection to out-of-control militarism;

-- Stiglitz will be back; his estimate is low; before this ends, look for one of several outcomes - trillions more spent, bankruptcy finally ends it, or the worst of all possible scenarios: an unthinkable nuclear holocaust that (expert Helen Caldicott explains) "could end life on earth as we know it" unless sanity ends the madness.

The generalissimo is unconcerned. He's planning his future. He envisions the White House, and imagine what then. Like the current occupant and whomever follows, look for more destructive wars to serve his political ambitions and theirs. They fall right in line with the defense establishment, Wall Street, and the Israeli Lobby.

Decades back, could anyone have thought things would come to this. Hopefully, good sense will gain currency and stop this madness before it consumes us.

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Stephen Lendman [send him email] lives in Chicago, and maintains a blog at http://sjlendman.blogspot.com. He hosts "The Steve Lendman News and Information Hour" online at www.themicroeffect.com, and is the author of The Iraq Quagmire: The Price of Imperial Arrogance.

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Will the report inspire serious reflection on the US's detrimental foreign policy and its role in the current situation?

Let's look at some of the data. To start with, take Pakistan. Al-Qaeda or Al-Qaeda-inspired attacks in the country more than doubled (from 375 to 877) between 2006 and 2007. These attacks have claimed the lives of 1,335 people, compared to 335 in a previous report. That is a jump of almost 300 per cent.

Then there's Afghanistan, which was supposedly "liberated" shortly after 11 September 2001. The number of attacks reported there increased a sharp 16 per cent in 2007. Some 1,127 violent incidents killing 1,966 people represent a significant surge in violence compared to 2006's 1,257 deaths.

There have also been many other violent incidents around the world, including but not limited to North Africa, the terrorist bombings in Algeria in particular.

But this is barely half the story -- or 40 per cent of it, if we want to be as specific as the terrorism report. Iraq accounted for 60 per cent of worldwide terrorism fatalities.

Considering the fact that the horrifying violence currently witnessed in Iraq was unheard of prior to the US invasion of 2003, will the Bush administration take a moment to connect the dots? Even a third grader could figure this one out: the US occupation was a major, if not sole factor, in Iraq's relentless bloodbath. In order to right the wrong in Iraq, the US military should clearly just withdraw, and Bush -- or whoever next claims the White House -- should stop fabricating pretexts to justify a prolonged mission.

On 1 May 2003, President Bush declared the end of major combat operations in Iraq. As he stood on the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln a huge banner behind him bore the words "Mission Accomplished". The New York Times then wrote, "the Bush administration is planning to withdraw most United States combat forces from Iraq over the next several months and wants to shrink the American military presence to less than two divisions by the fall."

Instead, more than five years after Bush's speech, the administration seems determined to maintain a military surge, having added 20,000 soldiers. Making no apologies for the war's contribution to an increase in terrorist activities, Bush's officials continue to rationalise the surge as a commonsense response to ongoing violence, conveniently omitting the US's own part in this violence. The State Department report doesn't classify any of the thousands of innocent victims killed by US or coalition forces as victims of terrorism.

Russ Travers, deputy director of the Counterterrorism Centre, stated on the day the report was published, "It's a fair statement that around the globe people are getting increasingly efficient at killing other people." While Travers' assertion is undoubtedly true, there seems to be no intention of providing any context, no connection drawn to the US's direct invasions, or indirect but equally devastating role in campaigns of violence, whether in Iraq, Afghanistan or Pakistan.

But what the State Department's terrorism report didn't fail to do was once again identify Iran as the world's "most active" state sponsor of terrorism. As reported in the Associated Press on 1 May, Iran was responsible for "supporting Palestinian extremists and insurgents in Afghanistan and Iraq, whereÉ elements of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps continued to give militants weapons, training and funding."

The irony is that the report further contributes to the US's long-touted case for war against Iran; ironic because the report's findings, if viewed responsibly, substantiate the claim that the Bush administration's policies have only made the world more unsafe. Wouldn't a war against Iran hike up the number of violent or terrorist incidents?

It also remains unclear how powerful Al-Qaeda really is, and how much of its capabilities were hyped in order to enable the Bush administration to continue its mission. Consider the two occasions Al-Qaeda was back in the news recently.

News media cited official Afghani reports attributing the recent assassination attempt on US-ally Afghani President Hamid Karzai to Al-Qaeda. In other reports, the US rationalised its own assassination of a leading Somali militia leader Aden Hashi Eyrow on 1 May as targeting a key Al-Qaeda member. It's not the logic of the assassination that is key here, but rather the fact that while Al- Qaeda has reached a position of strength that can penetrate several layers of defences in Afghanistan, the US is getting itself involved in a regional feud in Somalia. Why would the Bush administration be chasing Al-Qaeda in Somalia, as in Iraq, if the group is reportedly in the most powerful position in Afghanistan?

Moreover, if Al-Qaeda indeed exists on such a large and influential scale in so many countries, isn't it time to question the logic used by the Bush administration's "war on terror" that was meant to weaken and destroy Al- Qaeda in the first place?

It may be, of course, that Al-Qaeda's power and outreach is inflated for political reasons, where every conflict the US is involved in becomes immediately reduced to those who support, shield or host Al-Qaeda or Al- Qaeda inspired groups, thus justifying US military intervention anywhere.

Instead of dealing with the obvious truths that the terrorism report highlights, the authors of the report have resorted to another logic that places blame squarely on external circumstance, never holding the US government accountable for its actions.

Finally, is there really a need for lengthy reports that cost large sums of money and thousands of work hours if the lessons gleaned are always the wrong ones, leading to more blunders that prompt more violence, and more terrorism reports?

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Ramzy Baroud [send him email] is an author and editor of PalestineChronicle.com. His latest book is The Second Palestinian Intifada: A Chronicle of a People's Struggle (Pluto Press, London). Visit his website at www.ramzybaroud.net.

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Now that the bubble has burst, the losses are staggering.

However, many in Washington fail to realize it was government intervention that brought on the current economic malaise in the first place.  The Federal Reserve's artificially low interest rates created the loose, easy credit that ignited a voracious appetite in the banks for borrowers.  People made these lending and buying decisions based on market conditions that were wildly manipulated by government. 

But part of sound financial management should be recognizing untenable or falsified economic conditions and adjusting risk accordingly.  Many banks failed to do that and are now looking to taxpayers to pick up the pieces.  This is wrong-headed and unfair, but Congress is attempting to do it anyway.

These housing bills address the crisis in exactly the wrong way, by seeking to hide the problem with more disastrous government bail-outs and interventions.  One measure, HR 5830 the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) Housing Stabilization and Homeowner Retention Act would allow the FHA to guarantee as much as $300 billion worth of refinanced home loans for those facing threat of foreclosure. 

HR 5818 the Neighborhood Stabilization Act, would provide $15 billion in loans and grants to localities to purchase and renovate foreclosed homes with the object of then selling or renting out those homes.  Thankfully, President Bush has vowed to veto both of these bills.  It is neither morally right nor fiscally wise to socialize private losses in this way.

The solution is for government to stop micromanaging the economy and let the market adjust, as painful as that will be for some.  We should not force taxpayers, including renters and more frugal homeowners, to switch places with the speculators and take on those same risks that bankrupted them. 

It is a terrible idea to spread the financial crisis any wider or deeper than it already is, and to prolong the agony years into the future.  Socializing the losses now will only create more unintended consequences that will give new excuses for further government interventions in the future. This is how government grows - by claiming to correct the mistakes it earlier created, all the while constantly shaking down the taxpayer. 

The market needs a chance to correct itself, and Congress needs to avoid making the situation worse by pretending to ride to the rescue.

Ron Paul is a republican member of Congress from Texas

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The editors of National Review Online, in an editorial posted April 29, evaluated matters thus:

The decision in Crawford . underscores the importance of nominating conservative justices who understand the importance of judicial restraint. More than half of the states have passed laws requiring the presentation of some form of identification in order to vote. It is easy to imagine a more activist court overturning those democratically enacted laws based on a few liberal groups' spurious claims of democracy denied.

While they were right to approve of Crawford, the editors of conservatism's flagship publication displayed notable confusion about the issues at stake in today's judicial culture.

"Judicial restraint," in and of itself, is not a virtue. The idea of judicial restraint first gained currency in legal academia in the first third of the twentieth century. Then, it was the slogan of such as Felix Frankfurter, an Ivy League law professor and high ACLU mucky-muck who wanted conservative activists to cease imposing their laissez-faire vision on America.

The laissez-faire Supreme Court, in particular, was partly in the right and partly in the wrong. In a series of cases, the Court of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century disallowed wage and labor legislation passed by both state and federal legislatures. The Court was right to do this in regard to the congressional statutes, because, as the justices said, the Tenth Amendment represented the constitutional principle of federalism - that control of those matters had been reserved to the states.

Frankfurter and other devotes of "judicial restraint" in this context argued that democratic majorities generally deserved to have their way; in other words, they wanted both state and federal laws regulating the economy to be validated by the federal courts, despite the fact that the federal ones were clearly unconstitutional.

With the so-called "Revolution of 1937" (which, as Edward White has shown, was actually far more complicated than that), "judicial restraint" had its day. In other words, the Court got out of the business of keeping the Congress from grabbing at power that had been reserved to the states.

The Revolution of 1937 did not mark the first occasion on which the Supreme Court omitted to enforce the line between state and federal legislative authority. Rather, in the 1819 case of McCulloch v. Maryland, the Court allowed to stand a federal law incorporating the second Bank of the United States. James Madison, one of the Constitution's chief draftsmen, wrote in response that if the people had known in 1787-88 that the Court would read the Constitution as it had in McCulloch, they would never have ratified the Constitution.

One of National Review Online's legal bloggers has written at great length in celebration of Chief Justice John Marshall's performance in McCulloch. Although his academic writings are obscure, his perch at NRO gives him great potential influence. Alas, it seems that his anti-Madisonian endorsement of "judicial restraint" may sway unsuspecting conservatives away from originalism and toward support of the the position on this question that has always been favored, from John Marshall through Felix Frankfurter to the present, by devotes of unfettered congressional majorities.

The NRO blogger is not alone. Some conservative commentators have been led by the federal courts' career of judicial legislation these past 70+ years to the forthright conclusion that democratic majorities should always have their way. What they favor is not constitutional government, however, but the absence of constitutional restraint. Proponents of constitutionalism hold that federal courts should not be bound by the notion of "judicial restraint," but should instead be in the business of doing what federal judges swear to do: uphold the Constitution. If that means they must be active strikers-down of unconstitutional statutes, so be it. Judicial activism is only lamentable when the judges actively ignore the Constitution.

Kevin R. C. Gutzman, J.D., Ph.D. Associate Professor of History at Western Connecticut State University, is the author of Virginia's American Revolution: From Dominion to Republic, 1776-1840 and The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Constitution. He is also the co-author, with Thomas E. Woods, Jr., of Who Killed the Constitution? The Fate of American Liberty from World War I to George W. Bush (forthcoming from Crown Forum on July 8, 2008).

Copyright © 2008 LewRockwell.com

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To add insult to injury, attorneys like John Yoo and Douglas Feith are now professors at prestigious universities. These men, Sands asserts, were instrumental, each by his own admission, in giving the Bush crew the green light to use the harshest and most extreme (using 'parlor talk' ) interrogation techniques.

We all now know of the photographs and the testimonies, taken and given by the US soldiers themselves, of what was done to detainees in US custody. Books have been written, affidavits taken, on just how far our government has gone to rip to shreds the Geneva Accords on treatment of prisoners. The sad fact is that many in positions of power, right up to Supreme Court Justice Scalia, have downplayed the use of torture.

How many in your own communities could not care less about it?

Question to be asked is simple: What if? What if it were your son or daughter, husband or wife, mother or father, who was submitted to such cruel and inhuman treatment? To be stripped naked and have their genitals used as a toy? To be held down and masked, and then have water forced into their mouths until they realized imminent death by drowning? To have loud, terrifying sounds piped into their cells for God knows how long, with no chance of sleep.

Sands believes that the orders to allow such atrocities came from the very highest offices of this government.

What will it take for Americans to wake up? Those who run this country, along with a compliant and subservient press corps, conducted an illegal and immoral invasion and occupation of a sovereign nation. Where are the Hearings of Inquiry into the run- up? These actions would constitute impeachable offenses and international war crimes!

We have $ 500 or $ 600 billion dollars of our tax dollars already wasted on this disgrace in Iraq. Over 130 million of our citizens have either no health coverage or mediocre coverage at best. Mom and Pop retailers across America are going out of business, as boxstores dominate the consumer landscape. The super rich (1% of our population) control around 50% of our wealth. Schools are closing, libraries and other government run services may soon become privatized..... need I go on?

Yet, where is the outrage?

Are most out there simply awaiting a new President Obama or President McCain or President Clinton to save the day? Get real folks!  In Europe, the major democratic nations would have already seen massive street demonstrations to protest any of the aforementioned issues. Hundreds of thousands of our South American neighbors would also be out on the streets in protest. Yet, here at home....... virtual silence! Lucky to attract 5 or 10 true patriotic neighbors for a one hour a week protest.

Frederick Douglass put it succinctly: "Power concedes nothing without demand. It never has. It never will."

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Philip A Farruggio [send him email] is a free lance columnist, small businessman and activist. Since the 2000 elections, he has written over 80 op ed columns- few if any get published or posted. to review some which have been shown, just google his name.

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The book, Out of the Night, was written - under the pseudonym "Jan Valtin" - by a German who lived through the chaos of the collapse of the Weimar Republic and the rise of Nazism. Broken by Gestapo torture, he ended up being pursued by both the Nazi and the communist manhunters and killers.

Murders by these two forms of socialism are measured in the millions during the 20th century. That alone should warn all people off any form of collectivism, because all of those millions, in the minds of their killers, were sacrificed "for the greater good." They - flesh-and-blood individual human beings - were all murdered in the name of an abstraction, a stupid theory of how society should be organized. I doubt if the head thugs on both sides actually believed the theories. What they really believed in was power over their fellow man.

If you look at the French Revolution and the Bolshevik Revolution, the message is clear: Intellectuals and the common people can produce a blood bath. Latching on to some "ism" for justification, their greed for power and desire for revenge can run amok. Butchering women and children because they were born into the "wrong" class is surely insane.

In our time, when people are saying we must sacrifice liberty for security, that scrapping the Constitution is necessary to win the "war" against terrorism, I would suggest that you take your choice of genocides in the past 100 years and remind yourself what happens when people buy into the false proposition that the end justifies the means. People who preach that are always more interested in the means than in any end.

The only safe environment for a human being is under a weak government with very restricted powers. Normal people don't need much to be happy - food, shelter, dignity and freedom from marauders. They need a rule of law that applies to everyone equally and at all times and in all circumstances. In established societies, legislators should meet rarely - perhaps once every two or three years - because a continuing cascade of new laws will eventually drown freedom.

The Founding Fathers, whether through luck, wisdom or divine guidance, gave us an almost perfect form of government, and we've been busy ever since trying to take it apart. Human beings are dangerous predators and cannot be trusted with power over their fellows. Many Americans have forgotten that the power of government comes out of the barrel of a gun. Governments coerce; they don't persuade.

There are people living among us at this very moment capable of the cruelty so evident in the Holocaust. All they are waiting for is the opportunity. No greater opportunity exists than when a government enlists such people and says whatever you do is now justified for the sake of the "greater good."

Who would have guessed that George W. Bush, who seemed to be a genial good old boy, would turn out to be a tyrant, launching wars of aggression, arresting and confining people without charges or access to a lawyer, condoning torture and lying to the American people? A government that can without trial destroy you by simply putting on a list your name or the name of an organization with which you are associated is a tyranny. A government that invades other countries and that feels free to murder people in any country it chooses is a tyranny.

Americans are on the edge of a long night. We had better wake up and step back before it's too late.

Charley Reese has been a journalist for 49 years.

© 2008 by King Features Syndicate, Inc

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If you enjoyed this post, please make a donation to help keep this website active:

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Stephen Lendman [send him email] lives in Chicago, and maintains a blog at http://sjlendman.blogspot.com. He hosts "The Steve Lendman News and Information Hour" online at www.themicroeffect.com, and is the author of The Iraq Quagmire: The Price of Imperial Arrogance.

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As that version would have it, the United States was formed by a single American people in the aggregate and is not and never was a compact among sovereign states. The states are necessarily subordinate in their relationship with the federal government, never having enjoyed independent existences of their own. They possess no corporate mechanism by which to resist federal usurpation, and they are bound to accept the federal government's monopoly on constitutional interpretation.

Gutzman begins his story in the 1760s, as the controversy with the mother country is growing more and more intense. Richard Bland, who served in the House of Burgesses, began his 1766 pamphlet An Inquiry into the Rights of the British Colonies by revisiting his colony's early history. In coming to these shores, he said, Virginia's settlers had availed themselves of the natural right to emigrate. They had come to a new land at their own expense, and were no longer subject to English law, having fallen under the "Law of Nature" instead.

That meant Virginians had been in a position to enter, of their own free will, into a mutually binding relationship with the Crown, which they subsequently did. They expected future kings to abide by James I's promise that Virginia's form of government would never be altered. Virginia could be taxed only by its representatives, and possessed "such Freedoms and Privileges as belong to the Free People of England." The Crown had repeated this guarantee numerous times, said Bland, in its commissions to Virginia's royal governors.

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Thomas Jefferson lent his own support to this narrative in his Summary View of the Rights of British America, but as Gutzman observes, there is "virtually nothing in Jefferson's Summary View that Mason, Bland, Carter, or the Burgesses had not said before."

The preamble to Virginia's republican constitution of 1776 spelled out Virginia's understanding of its legal status before the world, as it had been explicated by Bland and Jefferson. Virginia had the exclusive authority to govern for Virginia. The king, meanwhile, had unjustly refused to accept a position as head of a great commonwealth of dominions tied together by a common loyalty to his dynasty.

The grievances listed in the preamble revolve almost entirely around the issue of self-government - economics barely appears; religion, not at all. That self-government was later reaffirmed in the Articles of Confederation, Article II of which described the states as having maintained their "sovereignty, freedom, and independence." Virginians were persuaded to adopt the federal Constitution in 1788 on the grounds that that sovereignty would hardly be affected by the proposed confederation.

With all the emphasis that is normally placed on the Constitution's Framers, we are apt to neglect the importance of the ratifiers, for it is they whose interpretation of the Constitution - and in particular, the precise nature of what they believed they were getting into - is of ultimate importance. And here is the heart of Gutzman's argument.

At Virginia's ratifying convention, the concern was raised that phrases like "general welfare" could be cited by ambitious politicians who wanted to exercise powers beyond those outlined in Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution. Federalist Edmund Randolph, who had been Virginia's attorney general for the past decade, assured everyone that his fears were unfounded, for all rights were declared in the Constitution to be "completely vested in the people, unless expressly given away. Can there be a more pointed or positive reservation?"

In other words, this was a strictly limited and federal government.

George Nicholas, who would become Kentucky's first attorney general, explained:

If thirteen individuals are about to make a contract, and one agrees to it, but at the same time declares that he understands its meaning, signification and intent, to be, what the words of the contract plainly and obviously denote; that it is not to be construed so as to impose any supplementary condition upon him, and that he is to be exonerated from it, whensoever any such imposition shall be attempted - I ask whether in this case, these conditions on which he assented to it, would not be binding on the other twelve? In like manner these conditions will be binding on Congress. They can exercise no power that is not expressly granted them.

Randolph and Nicholas belonged to the five-man committee that was to draw up Virginia's ratification instrument. They were in a unique position to articulate the understanding that would govern Virginia's ratification.

Virginians kept this limited view of the Constitution and the federal Union very much in mind into the 1790s. Disturbed by Alexander Hamilton's financial program, particularly the federal assumption of state debts, Patrick Henry drafted a resolution for the Virginia legislature in which he borrowed from the language of the assurances of Randolph and Nicholas that the federal government would have only those powers expressly delegated to it. The House passed it that day, the Senate six weeks later.

Shortly after Henry drafted his resolution, a General Assembly committee issued a report about the Washington Administration's policies, which it found alarming. It declared (borrowing from Randolph and Nicholas) that the states were "contracting parties" whose rights were "sacred." It insisted, echoing Randolph, that "every power not granted [to the federal government] was retained" by Virginia.

What this means, Gutzman explains, is that

Nicholas and Randolph's explanation of the Constitution, and thus of the significance of Virginia's ratification, had come to be seen as completely authoritative by the overwhelming majority of Virginia's political leadership. As in the Imperial Crisis and the Confederation period, Virginians conceived of their interstate union as precisely a federal union, a union among parties that were somehow on an equal footing (as Nicholas had put it, thirteen contracting parties). Virginia, not America, remained the primary political unit, the United States Government a convenience.

Virginians continued to draw out the implications of these views over the course of the 1790s. According to John Taylor of Caroline, the great Virginian political pamphleteer, "The confederation is not a compact of individuals; it is a compact of states." It was therefore the responsibility of the state legislatures to monitor the federal government and, if necessary, to prevent the enforcement of laws that violated the Constitution.

Constitutions are violated, Taylor said, and it would be absurd to expect the federal government to enforce the Constitution against itself. If the very federal judges the Constitution was partly intended to restrain were the ones exclusively charged with enforcing it, then "America possesses only the effigy of a Constitution." The states, the very constituents of the Union, had to do the enforcing.

So by the time of the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798, whose doctrines of interposition and nullification held that the states could refuse to enforce any federal law they considered unconstitutional, there was nothing new or unusual about such a view. It was merely the logical implication of assurances by Federalists at the ratifying convention, assurances that had dominated Virginia's constitutional thought in the ensuing decade.

Those resolutions, in other words, "floated like leaves on the stream of the Virginia constitutional tradition of Jefferson's A Summary View of the Rights of British America, Richard Bland's An Inquiry into the Rights of the British Colonies, John Taylor's pamphlets of the 1790s, and the Richmond Convention's instrument of ratification (as explicated by George Nicholas and Edmund Randolph)." In form and content they belonged to the tradition of Patrick Henry's Stamp Act Resolves and his General Assembly Resolution of 1790.

Historians had sometimes claimed that Jefferson, the anonymous author of the Kentucky Resolutions, hastily devised nullification as an ad hoc response to the Alien and Sedition Acts' assaults on civil liberties. But as Gutzman shows, nullification, Jefferson's proposed remedy, was in fact the culmination of a decade's worth of Virginian political thought traceable to the ratifying convention. There was nothing ad hoc about it.

The principle of local self-government and against interference from distant central authorities was central to Virginian political thought both before and after the War for Independence. This is a key point of continuity between late colonial Virginia and the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798. "As during the Imperial Crisis, so after the enactment of the federal Constitution, Virginians put their state first and the distant authority they had erected for their state's convenience - formerly in Great Britain, now in the federal capital - somewhere down the list."

Now if someone were to try to use this history as an argument in support of states' rights today, or more generally on behalf of the compact theory of the Union, one can imagine a predictable response: Virginia was only one state, and its ratification debates do not authoritatively bind others in their own interpretations of the Constitution and the nature of the Union.

Gutzman has anticipated this reply, and has elsewhere answered it - persuasively, to my mind. Since Article II of the Articles of Confederation declared the states (including Virginia) to be sovereign, and since the delegates to Virginia's ratifying convention explained to the people of Virginia that their state was one of thirteen parties to a compact from which they would be exonerated if it exceeded its delegated powers, then how could other states lack such a status themselves? If we accept the co-equality of the states as a constitutional principle - that is, some states cannot have more or different rights than others - then no other conclusion seems to follow, even if other states may have understood the nature of the Union differently at the time they entered.

In light of all this, one can imagine Gutzman's opinion of the centralizing John Marshall, but Marshall figures little in this book, which focuses primarily on Virginia's experience rather than on the Union as a whole. For Gutzman on Marshall, see his excellent book The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Constitution.

In short, Virginia's American Revolution is not only an invaluable contribution to the scholarly literature, but it is also a treasure trove for those who would recapture the original American republic.

Thomas E. Woods, Jr. is senior fellow in American history at the Ludwig von Mises Institute and the author, most recently, of Sacred Then and Sacred Now: The Return of the Old Latin Mass and 33 Questions About American History You're Not Supposed to Ask. His other books include How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization (get a free chapter here), The Church and the Market: A Catholic Defense of the Free Economy (first-place winner in the 2006 Templeton Enterprise Awards), and the New York Times bestseller The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History.

Copyright © 2008 LewRockwell.com

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What Will History Say About Today's America?
by Brian Trent

US District Judges Victor Marrero of New York and Ann Aiken of Oregon, are two friends of the Constitution. They've recently struck down as unconstitutional provisions of the Patriot Act.

On 06 September 2007, Judge Marrero ruled that the FBI's use of the infamous "National Security Letters" violates 1st Amendment rights (primarily because of the secrecy involved) and the separation of powers (by giving judical functions to the FBI, an executive-branch agency).

Those are blatant violations of the Constitution. What the hell was Congress thinking? That no one would notice?

And it's not like Congress blundered into those blatant violations accidently. This is the second ruling Judge Marrero has issued, finding NSL use unconstitutional. The two rulings are very similar, as are the provisions struck down.

The first ruling was in 2004, in Doe v Gonzales. The judge's ruling was appealed to the 2nd Circuit by the mostly-criminal DOJ, who wouldn't know a blatant Constitutional violation from a baseball bat swat to the mouth. Refusing to take the judge's chastising lying down, our criminal Congress swept in behind the 2004 ruling, tweaking the NSL unconstitutionalities. The 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals ordered Judge Marrero to review Congress' re-work for constitutionality.

Second review. Second slap-down.

On 26 September 2007, Judge Aiken ruled on Mayfield v. USA. She found that sections 1804 and 1823 of the FISA (amendments installed by the Patriot Act) violated the Fourth Amendment's probable cause requirement and its guarantees against unreasonable searches and seizures.

The judge affirmed that no part of the Bill of Rights can be suspended for the convenience of the national government -- no mattter what Usurper Bush or any other part of the 3-branch fascist despotism says, including especially Congress.

Judge Aiken, along with millions of Americans, did not like the Patriot Act's blurring of foreign intelligence-gathering with criminal investigations of US citizens. She observed, "Now, for the first time in our Nation's history, the government can conduct surveillance to gather evidence for use in a criminal case without a traditional warrant, as long as it presents a non-reviewable assertion that it also has a significant interest in the targeted person for foreign intelligence purposes".

Well -- not after Judge Aiken wrapped up her ruling. She branded the two Patriot Act contributions to Bush-brand, Congressional-driven totalitarianism as unconstitutional. Their use is now forever banned.

Well -- until the fascist despotism can get her ruling into the hands of the SCOTUS thugs.

It's just a matter of time. We've had nearly seven years to see that the anti-Constitutional pushers of Bush-brand fascist power rule here, not friends of the Constitution.

Judge Aiken's ruling is huge. It reaches beyond the Patriot Act's gutting of FISA and slaps down both the warrantless wiretapping of the Protect America Act and Congress' passing of the PAA. Clearly, warrantless wiretapping violates the Fourth Amendment's probable cause requirement and its guarantees against unreasonable searches and seizures -- just as does the Patriot Act's end-run around FISA judicial oversight.

These are blatant unconstitutionalities -- on a par with the 2006 MCA's ex post facto immunity for torturerers. What the hell were the Congressional bozos thinking? That no one would notice?

Where do we find the ethical morons for Congress? Well sure, there are the zero-conscience psychopathic personalities promoted by elites since WW2 throughout business, government, the military, and the political parties. (See Hervey Milton Cleckley's book, The Mask of Sanity, the essential analysis of the well-masked psychopath, who doesn't give a tinker's damn how much he/she hurts you.)

Why don't we make moves to unhinge our criminal Congress from its many corruption machines? Hey. It can be done. We the people are the sovereign here.

All we have to do is to put reality above our belief-systems-controlled cognative dissonance, chew our way out of our socially engineered cocoons, find common ground across the hundred or so divisive issues socially engineered by the predator elites to keep us divided among ourselves -- so that we don't mess with them -- and then learn how to fight outside the box of our pure representative government, because the predators have everything inside the box, from Diebold elections to demonstrations, to anti-Constitutional governance, under control.

See? No problem.

There are unconstitutional laws on our books that date far into our past, giving the corruption machines life. See the 1913 origins of the treasonous Federal Reserve and its money pump for its private owners, the anti-Constitutional personal income tax. See especially, Aaron Russo's 2006 film on those origins, "America--Freedom To Fascism"

Why do we tolerate the continued unconstitutional use and the cover given to such hoary anti-law regimes masquerading as laws? Why do we tolerate their coverup, whitewash, and stonewalling by the fascist thugs of the federal bench? Well, sure there's our societial-wide anti-intellectualism, historical ignorance, and near-zero political sophistication.

(For candid remarks by Constitutional enemy US District Judge James Fox on anti-Constitutional law, see the section, "Reverse Propaganda--16th Amendment" in the essay, "Russo's 'Freedom To Fascism' ".)

Enemies of the Constitution

If you participated in the Bush usurpation of the presidency, then you are an enemy of the Constitution. That felony conspiracy usurpation, begun by five of the SCOTUS judges in the 12 December 1999 ruling in Bush v Gore, violated 18 USC 241 by violating the rights of all Americans to have a president elected in accord with the Constitution. That felony conspiracy includes, at a minimum, then-president Clinton and his DOJ hierarchy, as well as GW Bush, Dick Cheney, and their DOJ hierarchy. Felony forfeits all immunities. All of the co-conspirators are felons-in-waiting. We need to criminally prosecute, convict, and imprison all of them. Their only proper place is in federal prison.

The only proper thing to do with the Bush Usurpation is to rule all of its actions taken under color of law as null and void -- from 20 January 2000 to date. It's an ancient constitutional principle that usurpations are null and void from inception, regardless of when the usurpation becomes legally recognized.

Null and void findings, of course, do not obliterate criminal acts. The 3-branch felony conspiracy to violate the rights of our soldiers -- the right to be sent to war only at the expressed order of Congress -- means that every soldier's death in Iraq is a felony murder, per 18 USC 241. (See especially, "Criminal Conspiracy and the Laws of War--Iraq".)

The penalties given in 18 USC 241 for a death due to a rights violation conspiracy include life imprisonment or death. The penalties define the death as felony murder. There's no statute of limitations on felony murder.

This felony conspiracy begins with the 373 members and senators in Congress who voted to give Bush his very own war powers, violating the Constitution's separation of powers and the 1935 SCOTUS decision in Schechter Poultry, 295 US 495. The number of co-conspirators goes up from there.

A long period of null and void, pseudo-lawmaking has happened before. In ancient Rome, Pompey defeated Sulla in a civil war and then, with help from the Senate, ripped a decade of Sulla's despotic, anti-republic laws out of the Roman legal fabric, returning Rome to the republic that it had been for nearly 400 years.

If the American people can learn how to fight their fascist government, the null and void ruling will be a natural. Then the criminal prosecutions for the catalog of felony conspiracy rights violations can proceed. Then the ripping out of anti-Constitutional Bush law, and law benefiting only the superrich and their corporate predators, can proceed.

An all-too-large number of federal judges are enemies of the Constitution. Presidential usurper Bush is an enemy of the Constitution, as are most members of his Regime. Every neocon on the planet is an enemy of the Constitution. The vast majority of elected office holders in Congress are enemies of the Constitution. Many, perhaps most, of the state legislators are enemies of the Constitution. And the vast majority, perhaps all, of the Business Roundtable CEOs are enemies of the Constitution.

Clearly, we cannot go on giving away our responsibility for political matters to lying politicians. Well -- we can, but then they'll have to kill us.

We can't fight corrupt and criminal government by electing some few better representatives. The corruption machines inside the box are too strong and will overwhelm any few newbies.

We can't fight corrupt and criminal government with demonstrations, even if we run in a million-person march every week. The power realities and zero accountability of our fascist despotism are, as in Hitler's day, far too strong to bend to public opinion.

We need to get outside the box of pure representative government. We need massive, crippling boycotts of the worst corporations. We need a nationally organized system of jury nullification to keep state and federal judges from making up the law as they go along -- favoring money-power. We need to instill The Fear in all elected and appointed office holders by reducing state legislatures from partisan bicamerals to non-partisan unicamerals, on the still-successful 1934 Nebraska model.

In addition to Nebraska, there are seventeen other states in which citizens have the constitutional amendment initiative petition process. The CAI is citizen power that's able to reduce bicameral legislatures to unicamerals. (See especially, "History of the Nebraska Unicameral", on the Unicameral's site.)

(1) All legislators are fired, in preparation for the nonpartisan elections that will vote in about one-third the number for the unicameral. If the citizens of ten states go to nonpartisan unicamerals, it will mean that about 1500 to 2500 politicians will be outside looking in, with only about 500 to 850 new jobs to be filled. (2) The smaller number of legislators means astounding cost savings combined with more efficient lawmaking. (3) No conference committee to "compromise" between House and Senate requirements behind closed doors means sharply reduced corruption. (4) No omnibus bills -- instead, bills having only a single, votable topic -- mean easy decisions for the civil society whether to veto the Unicameral's bill with a citizen referendum. (5) Constitutionally defined state senatorial districts and equal numbers of reps across the districts -- to keep small districts safe from large districts -- means zero gerrymandering for Congressional purposes. (6) Clean-money requirements for the nonpartisan elections will mean that corporations and the superrich have sharply reduced corruption leverage.

As the Nebraska experience has shown, the nonpartisan unicameral is a winner for civil society.

As a political fight tactic, reduction of the corrupt partisan bicamerals will instill The Fear in all corrupt politicians. They will understand that we are coming for them, one way or another.

Because of the citizen lawmaking that exists in all CAI states, the people can be the unicameral legislature's second house when needed -- speaking for themselves, instead of being spoken for by charlatans and liars.

We need to reform the details of our national governance and alter the Constitution in significant ways. We need to make members of all three branches much more accountable for their malfeasance, misfeasance, and nonfeasance. We need to take away their dual-system politics -- the out-front, busy facade of fictions backed by divisive policies and behind-the-s