Republican Strategy Explained

Have you noticed that the only consistent theme in Republican position statements appears to be opposition to whatever it is that President Obama proposes? Time and time again, whether the topic is healthcare, foreign policy, budget deficits, or unemployment, we see Republicans in Congress make their proposals, after which President Obama endorses some elements of those proposals (to the chagrin of many Democrats), only to see the Republicans reverse their positions and back away from their own proposals, for no apparent reason other than to distance themselves from the President.

This scene from the 1932 Marx Brothers movie "Horsefeathers" pretty well sums up this sophisticated Republican strategy, and may well have been its original inspiration:

Troy Davis, Rest In Peace

Troy Davis (October 9, 1968 - September 21, 2011)

The state of Georgia proceeded with the execution of Troy Davis tonight; official time of death was declared to be 11:08 p.m. Eastern time. Death was by lethal injection.

The execution had been scheduled for 7:00, but was postponed while the U.S. Supreme Court reviewed a request for a stay of execution. At 10:43, according to Richard Kim's live blogging at The Nation, the Supreme Court issued a one-line statement denying the request to stop the execution. It was also reported that there were no dissents - not a single one of our nine Supreme Court justices chose to intervene in this case.

Joining the Supreme Court in its unwillingness to stop the execution of a potentially innocent person was President Barack Obama; his Press Secretary Jay Carney said "it is not appropriate" for the President to "weigh in on specific cases like this one", according to ABC.

I watched online as Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! reported live from outside the prison in Jackson, Georgia, interviewing NAACP President Benjamin Jealous as they both received news of the execution and of Davis' death.

Many people, in this country and around the world, tried to stop this madness. There are many compelling reasons to believe that Troy Davis was innocent of the crime for which he was just executed, which would mean not only that we just killed an innocent person but also that the real killer of off-duty police officer Mark MacPhail is still at large. Beyond the question of guilt or innocence, though, is the barbarity of this state-sponsored killing. Killing a murderer does not bring the murder victim back, and certainly does not demonstrate to the rest of us that killing people is wrong; it only increases the number of people being killed.

Sadly, there appear to be many people in this country who are immune to these arguments against the death penalty. Last year, when Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison ran unsuccessfully against Texas Governor Rick Perry in the Republican primary, her campaign considered making Perry's zeal for executions an issue to use against him. However, as reported by Salon, when her campaign asked a focus group of likely Republican primary voters about the possibility that Perry had ordered the execution of innocent people who were wrongfully convicted, they found that it didn't bother them at all. "It takes balls to execute an innocent man", said one registered Republican.

If that's our new national slogan, forgive me if I don't join people like that in chants of "USA!" tonight.

Ten Years of Living in a "Homeland"

"Videogames of the tower's fall

Homeland Security could kill us all"

- Green Day, "21st Century Breakdown"

For the last ten years, we've been told by government officials and the media that we're living in a "homeland". We're constantly reminded that the horrific attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon buildings on September 11, 2001 were attacks on our "homeland", and that our Homeland Security officials are working vigilantly to protect us from further attacks.

Before 2001, however, "homeland" was a term that was rarely, if ever, used to describe the US. We spoke of living in a country, nation, or republic, not a homeland. The US Constitution states that our goals are to "form a more perfect Union", "insure domestic Tranquility", and "provide for the common defense"; there's nothing in there about "securing the homeland". In fact, for many of us, the term "homeland" sounds uncomfortably similar to "fatherland" ("Vaterland" in German), a term that stirs up images of violent militaristic nationalism and fascism from the first and second World Wars.

So how did the United States of America become a Homeland?

One of the first official uses of the term, which received little public notice at the time, appeared in a series of reports by a bipartisan governmental commission. The US Commission on National Security/21st Century was created in 1998 under Democratic President Bill Clinton to perform a review of national security policies and strategies as we entered the 21st century. The commission was co-chaired by former Democratic Senator Gary Hart and former Republican Senator Warren Rudman, and included former Republican House Speaker (and 2012 Presidential candidate) Newt Gingrich, former CEO of Lockheed Martin (and its predecessor Martin Marietta) Norm Augustine, and Leslie Gelb, head of the Defense Department study group on the history of US involvement in Vietnam whose report became known as the "Pentagon Papers" after being leaked to newspapers by Daniel Ellsberg. The Hart-Rudman Commission's final report, released in February 2001 (seven months before the 9/11 attacks) was full of references to our "homeland"; the first major section was titled "Securing the National Homeland", there were warnings that attacks upon our homeland were becoming increasingly likely, and its recommendations called for several changes in governmental organization, including creation of an Assistant Secretary of Defense for Homeland Security as well as a National Homeland Security Agency.

The report seemed to languish under the just-inaugurated Republican administration of President George W. Bush, until the 9/11 attacks seemed to make the report more relevant. Within days, President Bush announced the creation of a new Office of Homeland Security, and use of this new term spread rapidly in the media. A little over a year later, in November 2002, Congress created a new Cabinet-level Department of Homeland Security, transferring existing organizations such as the Coast Guard, INS, Secret Service, TSA, and FEMA from other Executive Branch departments.

All of this begs the question: if the creation of a new Department of Homeland Security was necessary for the defense of the United States against attacks, then what is the purpose of the Department of Defense? Shouldn't an organization called "Department of Defense" be responsible for the defense of the homeland?

Unfortunately, that department's activities are probably better described by its former name, the War Department, as it was known from 1789 through 1947. After the end of World War II in 1945, the US public was weary of being at war, and so eliminating our Department of War and replacing it with a benign-sounding Department of Defense probably seemed like a popular move. The new name was also in line with the developing Cold War mindset, in which the Soviet Union was cast in the role of a belligerent warmonger while the United States was portrayed as only using its military for defense. In reality, the history of US military actions since World War II seem to have more to do with a projection of power, and protection of US business interests, beyond our borders than with an actual defense of those borders. Our "Defense" department invaded the Dominican Republic in 1965, Cambodia in 1970, Grenada in 1983, Panama in 1989, Afghanistan in 2001, and Iraq in 2003, in addition to sending ground troops, bombers, or both to Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Lebanon, the former Yugoslavia, Haiti, and Libya, among other places.

Given the Defense Department's preoccupation with military adventurism abroad, perhaps there was a need for a new department to focus on defending the United States, but please, let's use a different name. "Homeland" seems to have been deliberately picked to stoke the public's feelings of nationalism, hatred of foreigners, and willingness to do almost anything in order to defend our "home". Use of the term "Homeland" has probably made it easier for the government to chip away at our civil liberties, increasing the scope of activities such as wiretapping and electronic eavesdropping (signals intelligence, or SIGINT), intrusive body searches and other invasions of privacy, and indefinite detainment without being charged. In short, the more we talk about securing a homeland, the more we move towards living in a national security state rather than a free and open democracy. As Benjamin Franklin wrote, "those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."

After ten years of talking about securing a "homeland", let's drop the hyperbolic language and get back to just providing "for the common defense", as it says in the Constitution. While we're at it, why not set up a new Department of Domestic Tranquility?

Capital Goes On Strike

For the first time in history, the creditworthiness of the United States Treasury was downgraded yesterday. Standard & Poor's dropped its AAA rating of US debt down a notch, to AA+.

During the last few weeks' arguments over negotiating a deal to increase the debt limit, both the Obama administration and members of Congress warned that a bill needed to be passed before hitting the debt ceiling on August 2 in order to avoid a credit downgrade. Well, they got a deal, it was signed into law on August 2, but our credit has been downgraded anyway.

Far from being an unprecedented or unexplainable move by a jittery rating agency, this instead seems to be part of a pattern of actions by finance capital to sabotage the US economy.

Corporations have large amounts of cash reserves - nearly $2 trillion, according to some estimates - but rather than using that cash to hire more employees, they're either using it to buy back their own stock (to pump up the price) or just sitting on it. Similarly, banks have nearly $1 trillion in cash, but they're reluctant to actually lend it to potential home buyers or startup businesses.

Just as workers use the withholding of their labor (a labor strike) to change unfavorable conditions, the financial industry is withholding its capital to change what they perceive as unfavorable conditions. We appear to be in the grip of a capital strike.

U.S. corporations have engaged in this sort of behavior before, sometimes with the cooperation of the U.S. government, to undermine social democratic governments in other countries. During the 1970s, Chile under President Salvador Allende and Jamaica under Prime Minister Michael Manley were both victims of capital strikes by U.S. companies as well as local businesses. Allende was overthrown in 1973 by a U.S.-backed military coup, while Manley's party was merely voted out of office in 1980, but in both cases capital began to flow freely once again under new conservative governments.

Not that President Barack Obama should be mistaken for a social democrat; Obama's policies pale in comparison to the wide-ranging reforms of Allende and Manley. Moreover, Obama did nothing to stop the overthrow of elected President Manuel Zelaya in Honduras, where business interests welcomed the coup. Nevertheless, it appears that even the possibility of an occasional finger-wagging or public shaming from a Democratic President is more than our financial industry is willing to tolerate.

President Obama needs to stop worrying about being accused of "fomenting class warfare" if he targets wealthy individuals or corporations. The class war is already underway, instigated by the wealthy against the rest of us; yesterday's credit downgrade should be seen as a declaration of war. It's time for President Obama to be clear about what's happening, and stop trying to appease the markets, because that's clearly not working.

The United States can either return to the democratic rule of one person, one vote, or we can continue on the current path towards an oligarchy of one dollar, one vote.

Which side are you on?

"Battle In Seattle" Governor Approved As Ambassador To China

The nightly news has given us the impression that Congress has been unable to accomplish anything for weeks as they argue over whether or not to raise the debt ceiling before August 2. But yesterday, July 27, the Senate confirmed Commerce Secretary Gary Locke to be the next U.S. Ambassador to China.

Gary Locke, a Democrat, was Governor of Washington when Seattle hosted the 1999 World Trade Organization (WTO) conference, which famously drew tens of thousands of protesters opposed to the WTO's corporate agenda. As dramatized in the 2007 film Battle In Seattle, Governor Locke called out the National Guard to help the Seattle police clear protesters off the streets of Seattle so as not to tarnish his pro-business image.

It's bad enough that President Obama picked Locke to be his Secretary of Commerce, but now he's being sent to represent U.S. interests in China. Presumably his responsibilities will include keeping the shelves of our Wal-Mart stores stocked with products made by Chinese sweatshop labor, as well as convincing the Chinese government to continue funding our federal debt - assuming, of course, that Congress agrees to authorize more of that debt.

In honor of Locke's promotion, here's the classic 10cc song "Rubber Bullets" from 1973, set to video of protests at a G20 meeting. Hey, maybe Ambassador Locke can advise the Chinese government on crowd control methods!

Republicans To US: If You Don't Cut Social Security & Medicare, We'll Kill This Dog

Well, actually, what they're threatening to do is refuse to increase the debt ceiling, essentially forcing the federal government to shut down, which is about as insane as shooting a dog (thanks to National Lampoon for this classic magazine cover).

I'm not really a government economist, and I don't play one on TV, but let me see if I understand the sequence of events that has led us to the brink of this abyss.

By the end of the administration of President Bill Clinton (D), the federal budget actually had a surplus. Then President George W. Bush (R) took over, and federal budgets started running deficits again. First came tax cuts for the rich, which reduced the amount of money coming in. Then came invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, resulting in increased spending. The Medicare prescription drug plan, which obligates the federal government to pay whatever prices are set by pharmaceutical companies for seniors' prescriptions, has also increased spending.

Now, however, that there's a Democratic President, the Republicans in Congress have suddenly declared that deficit spending must be stopped immediately. The logical approach would be to undo the Bush-era policies that contributed to the national debt, right? Raise tax rates on wealthy individuals and corporations to where they were ten years ago, bring the troops home from Afghanistan and Iraq, and allow Medicare to negotiate lower prices on prescription drugs as is done in most other countries. That would be the logical approach.

Logic, however, seems to be in short supply in DC these days. Instead, Republicans in Congress are demanding deep cuts, or even a dismantling, of Social Security and Medicare. Somehow, they want us to pay for ten years of corporate tax breaks, military operations, and subsidies to for-profit drug companies by cutting back on our parents' and grandparents' income and making it more expensive for them to go to the doctor or hospital.

Never mind killing the dog in the above photo; the Republicans are trying to kill Grandma.

Bobby Kennedy's Inspiring Vision

Last summer, during a vacation drive through New England, I convinced my family to make a stop at the JFK Presidential Library in Boston. While browsing through the museum shop, I came across a pile of paperback copies of a fascinating book by JFK's brother Bobby. These were not newly published versions of the book, but leftover copies printed during his 1968 Presidential campaign (in fact, the library's website still has copies available for sale). I bought a copy, initially as a collector's item, but having now read it several times, I'm impressed by its high-minded vision as well as its continuing relevance today.

"To Seek A Newer World" was not intended to be a campaign book. When it was first published in November 1967, Bobby Kennedy was not a Presidential contender, only a United States Senator from New York, where I lived at the time. The book is essentially a series of essays and excerpts from speeches covering his Senate term, to which he had been elected in 1964. Although some of his positions, particularly on the U.S. war in Vietnam, put him at odds with President Lyndon Johnson, everyone expected Johnson to seek re-election in 1968, and Bobby was at first unwilling to challenge his fellow Democrat in the primaries. It took another Democratic Senator, Gene McCarthy of Minnesota, to mount a campaign and demonstrate Johnson's vulnerability in the early primaries. By March of 1968, Bobby changed his mind and declared his own candidacy for the Presidency. On March 31, President Johnson announced on TV that he was dropping out of the election, suddenly making it a very real possibility that Senator Kennedy might be the Democratic candidate in the November general election. "To Seek A Newer World" was quickly updated with some more recent Kennedy statements on Vietnam, as well as the text of his campaign announcement, and rushed out as a "Special Campaign Edition" discount paperback. Sadly, that campaign was cut short less than three months after it began. On June 4, 1968 (43 years ago today), Kennedy won the California and South Dakota Democratic primaries. Moments after finishing his victory speech in Los Angeles, he was hit by gunfire, fell into a coma, and died on June 6. Vice President Hubert Humphrey became the Democratic candidate at the party's August convention, but his earlier reputation as a champion of civil rights and desegregation had by then been irreparably tarnished by his unquestioning support of Johnson's Vietnam War policies, and he was defeated in November by Republican Richard Nixon.

Reading "To Seek A Newer World" today provides some insight into how the course of history, and of the world, might have been different had Bobby lived to contest the election with Nixon.

The chapter on America's cities contains some frank discussion of past mistakes in the areas of public housing and urban renewal. "We rarely asked", wrote Kennedy, "those whose homes we leveled whether they liked the plan, and we thought too little about what would become of them after their homes were gone." Kennedy pointed to his own efforts in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood in Brooklyn, NYC as an alternative approach, where residents of the community held seats on the boards of the organizations making development decisions.

Bobby also devoted a chapter to the Alliance for Progress, the comprehensive program for Latin America that was a high point of his brother John's Presidency. After JFK's 1963 assassination, his successor Johnson did not give the Alliance a high priority, and Johnson's covert support of the Brazilian military's overthrow of the democratically elected Goulart administration in 1964, as well as the overt invasion by the U.S. Marines of the Dominican Republic in 1965, seemed to run counter to the Alliance's aims. RFK, however, displayed admirable insight into the root causes of the region's situation. Kennedy wrote empathetically of Latin Americans' "feeling with regard to foreign owners in the extractive industries - oil, minerals, metals - which are also criticized as depleting resources essential to their future. Few Latin Americans can fail to be sensitive to their history, to the centuries in which their mineral wealth was taken by a small privileged minority, to be sent abroad to the coffers of Spanish kings and then to the banks of Europe." This is precisely the theme of Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano's Open Veins of Latin America, the book which Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez gave to U.S. President Barack Obama in April 2009 in order to help Obama understand the region. Galeano first published his book in 1971, yet here was a U.S. Senator making some of the same points three years earlier.

Kennedy also stressed that the Alliance for Progress had always been underfunded. In a footnote, he pointed out that even if the current annual Alliance spending for all of Latin America were to be doubled, that total amount of money would be equal to the cost of what the U.S. was then spending for only two weeks' worth of the Vietnam war. Think about that - an amount of money that could have been spent for constructive purposes for all of Latin America for a year was instead being squandered in only two weeks for bombing, burning, and strafing a single country in Southeast Asia. Even when writing about Latin America, Bobby couldn't help bringing the subject back to the disastrous war being waged in Vietnam.

At several points in this book, Bobby complained about stubbornness and a lack of leadership: "there is no courage or discipline involved in following failure down the road to disaster"; "the courage to admit a mistake and retreat is not a universal characteristic of national leaders". He probably had then-President Johnson in mind when he wrote these words, but they could equally be applied to many of our Presidents since then.

Kennedy even reached back to a Shakespeare play to point out that governments frequently use wars to distract the people from problems at home. He quotes a line from Henry IV in which the king advises his son to "busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels". Wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya seem to be doing a great job of "busying giddy minds" these days, leaving less time for serious debate about our domestic economy.

The book ends with a more hopeful and upbeat Postscript, containing perhaps one of Bobby's most quoted lines: "Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance."

Bullets may have stopped Senator Kennedy's quest for the Presidency, as well as his too-short life, but they could not stop the "ripples of hope" he set into motion. Go back, as I did, and revisit Robert F. Kennedy's remarkable writings; you'll find yourself inspired by his vision of hope for the future, and moved by his ripples.