In the face of a Democratic administration coming into office with a Democrat-controlled congress, the antiabortion activists must be feeling anxious and desperate. It seems they are considering turning to Plan B or even Plan C, since the prospects for Plan A, outlawing the practice entirely, now appear so dim. What surprises me is how far out there Plans B and C truly are.

Frustrated by the failure to overturn Roe v. Wade, a growing number of antiabortion pastors, conservative academics and activists are setting aside efforts to outlaw abortion and instead are focusing on building social programs and developing other assistance for pregnant women to reduce the number of abortions.

Some of the activists are actually working with abortion rights advocates to push for legislation in Congress that would provide pregnant women with health care, child care and money for education — services that could encourage them to continue their pregnancies.

These revolutionary ideas will alienate much of the far right wing. Placing the needs of women ahead of the needs of fetuses is a dangerous idea; who knows how far it will go, and how much damage all these insidious “social programs” will do to the fabric of American society.

You think I am being sarcastic, but that is the argument.

The new effort is causing a fissure in the antiabortion movement, with traditional groups viewing the activists as traitors to their cause. Leaders worry that the approach could gain traction with a more liberal Congress and president, although they do not expect it to weaken hard-core opposition.

“It’s a sellout, as far as we are concerned,” said Joe Scheidler, founder of the Pro-Life Action League. “We don't think it's really genuine. You don’t have to have a lot of social programs to cut down on abortions.”

Full article at The Washington Post.

And this June essay in the New York Times by Waldo Fielding, a doctor who recalls treating victims of botched illegal abortions before Roe v. Wade, reminds us of one crucial fact:

The worst case I saw, and one I hope no one else will ever have to face, was that of a nurse who was admitted with what looked like a partly delivered umbilical cord. Yet as soon as we examined her, we realized that what we thought was the cord was in fact part of her intestine, which had been hooked and torn by whatever implement had been used in the abortion. It took six hours of surgery to remove the infected uterus and ovaries and repair the part of the bowel that was still functional.

It is important to remember that Roe v. Wade did not mean that abortions could be performed. They have always been done, dating from ancient Greek days.

What Roe said was that ending a pregnancy could be carried out by medical personnel, in a medically accepted setting, thus conferring on women, finally, the full rights of first-class citizens — and freeing their doctors to treat them as such.

If you have not watched the 60 Minutes interview of the Obamas from this past Sunday, you should. Entertaining and informative.

YouTube links:

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
• Part 4

I have not watched a single one of Bush’s State of the Union addresses, or any other of his speeches since the inaugural War on Terra speech from Sept 13, 2001. I stopped listening because I could not stand to listen to the man talk, in that pseudo-everyman drawl with the horrible grammar and the one-clause sentences that don’t even follow from each other. Every sentence depends on so many unspoken assumptions that you can’t disagree with a single claim without spending several paragraphs debunking the assumptions behind it. It was just too painful. I’m not complaining about the way the man talks; I’m lamenting that the way he talks betrays the way he operates and makes decisions.

It’s really refreshing to that we’ll soon have a president again who can speak candidly and intelligently in enumerated lists that weigh several sides of the issue. The way an opinion is expressed usually demonstrates that he’s thought thoroughly about the subtleties of many sides of the issue and tried to find an optimal approach given the constraints. Not in that boring, pedantic put-you-to-sleep way that Kerry speaks, and so much better than “my way or the highway” and “with us or against us.” So much better.

I know Bush has claimed to consult his heart rather than his mind, and perhaps the heart does tend to speak in all-or-nothing, irrational terms. But the heart is inscrutable, Bush’s even more so, and I strongly prefer someone who can articulate rational reasons for holding certain opinions rather than simply dismissing the question by explaining that his heart, or God, or inspiration told him so. It’s difficult to hold a constructive argument against such non-logic, and on occasions when it’s later proved wrong, it’s impossible to revisit the logic to determine which part was faulty.

I particularly like the bit where Obama talks about implenting good ideas, wherever they come from, whether it be FDR or Reagan, because the effective idea should be the focus, not who thought of it. Stringfellow Barr, one of the founders of the discussion-based program at my alma mater, St. John’s College, expressed the notion thusly (in 1968):

There is a pathos in television dialogue: the rapid exchange of monologues that fail to find the issue, like ships passing in the night; the reiterated preface, “I think that . . . ,” as if it mattered who held which opinion rather than which opinion is worth holding; the impressive personal vanity that prevents each “discussant” from really listening to another speaker and that compels him to use this God-given pause to compose his own next monologue; the further vanity, or instinctive caution, that leads him to choose very long words, whose true meaning he has never grasped, rather than short words that he understands but that would leave the emptiness of his point of view naked and exposed to a mass public. There is pathos in the meaningless gestures: the extended chopping hands, fingers rigidly held parallel and together, the rigid wayward thumb pointing to heaven. A knowledgeable theatrical director would cringe at these gestures and would perhaps faint when the extended palms, one held in front of the other, are made to revolve rapidly around each other, thereby imitating and emphasizing the convolutions of a mind that races like a motor not in gear. And Mrs. Malaprop herself would cringe at those long, wayward words, so much at cross purpose with the intent of the speakers. Or at the academic speaker’s strings of adjacent nouns, where all but the last noun modify adjectivally either the last noun or the nearest noun — it is anybody’s guess. We are all suffocating intellectually, not from the ungrammatical language of Cassius Clay, which is gutsy, forceful and eloquent. We are suffocating from a fausse élégance that scorns the honest, clear, four-letter word. And quite aside from the obscene ones, hundreds of splendid four-letter words are waiting to work for us. Is it possible that we discussants are oppressed by a subconscious suspicion that we are really saying precisely nothing, and that this nothing will stand up as conversation only if we say it elaborately? Is it this suspicion that forces us to speak in what our learned jargon recently christened “jargonese?” “Yoono Chinese, Japanese; well I am now speaking, yoono, jargonese.” Our failure at dialogue is building a Tower of, yoono, Babel.

Nevertheless, back of this tormenting, and tormented, babble is a ghost we cannot lay, the ghost of dialogue. We yearn, not always consciously, to commune with other persons, to learn with them by joint search. This joint labor to understand would be even more exciting than the multiplication of our gross national product or the improvement of our national defense or even than the elimination of war from the face of the earth. For we can never live wholly human lives without a genuine converse between men.

Barr’s whole essay is here.

“Frankly, I’m embarrassed. I’m embarrassed for our party and I’m embarrassed for those who did not come, because there’s long been a divide in this country and it doesn’t get better when we don’t show up.”

—former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee

He was speaking at a GOP debate at historically black Morgan State University in Maryland, commenting on the fact that McCain, Romney, Giuliani, and Thompson decided not to attend, citing “scheduling conflicts.”

Full article here. I don’t feel like I have to add a thing.

Have you ever been caught telling a story at a party as though it happened to you, but really you read it on a blog or saw it on TV? That can be really embarrassing when someone calls you on it. “Naw, dude, that didn’t happen to you. That was on Wonkette last month.” Well, it appears that we’ve caught our president recycling someone else’s sound bites. Only ‘recycling’ doesn’t quite capture it. Regardless of whether you agree with the assessment of Ambassador Ryan Crocker, who last week testified about the military’s progress in Iraq before a joint session of the House armed services and foreign affairs committees, you have to admit that the statement was crafted with some attempt at eloquence:

Evaluating where Iraqis are today only makes sense in the context of where they have been. Any Iraqi under 40 years old—and that is the overwhelming majority of the population—would have known nothing but the rule of the Ba’ath party before liberation four and a half years ago. Those 35 years were filled with crimes against humanity on every scale. Saddam Hussein ruled without any mercy, not hesitating to use lethal force and torture against even those in his inner circle. His genocidal campaign against the Kirds and savagery toward southern Shi’a are well known. But he also used violence and intimidation as tools in the complete deconstruction of Iraqi society. No organization or institution survived that was not linked in some way to regime protection. He created a pervasive climate of fear in which even family members were afraid to talk to one another.

That is the legacy that Iraqis had as their history when Saddam’s statue came down on April 9, 2003. No Nelson Mandela existed to emerge on the national political scene; anyone with his leadership talents would not have survived.

Our president liked that idea. He thought it had some merit. So today he decided to try his hand at it. However, from the mouth of the leader of the free world, it comes out sounding like this:

Referring to former South African president Nelson Mandela, who led the fight against apartheid to become a symbol of reconciliation and hope, Bush said of Iraq: “I heard somebody say, ‘Now where’s Mandela?’”

“Well, Mandela is dead. Because Saddam Hussein killed all the Mandelas.”

“No Nelson Mandela existed to emerge on the national political scene, anyone with his leadership talents would not have survived,” he said.

The next question, of course, is whether someone had to tell him who Mandela was, or whether he already knew. “Now hold on a minute, Dick. You want me to say Saddam Hussein killed Josef Mengele. You mean that Nazi doctor? Why’d he do that? Did he hate Nazis?”

UPDATE: 9/23/2007 9:50 AM

Thanks to wizbangblue, I’ve become aware of a couple of other interesting facts about the Mandela reference. The first is that Condoleezza Rice also tried it out between Crocker’s speech and Bush’s.

I think the Iraqis are trying to pull it together. Look, what they’re doing is very hard. Saddam Hussein destroyed the fabric of that society. Someone asked me, “Why is there no Nelson Mandela that, you know, a general, a huge figure who’s appeared to unify Iraq?” Well, the truth of the matter is that Saddam Hussein killed people, a lot of the leadership of Iraq.

Who is this person who keeps asking everyone in the administration about Mandela?

The second is that Dick Cheney, when he served in Congress, repeatedly called Nelson Mandela a terrorist and a communist, and in fact in 1986 voted against a non-binding resolution that called for the apartheid government of South Africa to release Nelson Mandela from prison and negotiate with the African National Congress, on the grounds that Mandela and his organization were terrorists who would establish a Communist dictatorship. But now Mandela’s a hero. How quickly we can change our minds when it suits us to do so.

Nelson Mandela can speak from personal experience on the matter. On Larry King:

KING: When did—were you a—you were a revolutionary. Were you a terrorist? Did you ever commit acts of aggression, violence?
MANDELA: Well, terrorism depends on...
KING: ... who wins.
MANDELA: That's right. I was called a terrorist yesterday, but when I came out of jail, many people embraced me, including my enemies, and that is what I normally tell other people who say those who are struggling for liberation in their country are terrorists. I tell them that I was also a terrorist yesterday, but, today, I am admired by the very people who said I was one.

For five years, everyone who has dared to opine that the Iraq war is largely about oil has been dismissed as a liberal nut job, if not a traitor or worse. The truth, said the administration (and talk radio, and the network news, and the cable news) is that the war was about the imminent threat that Saddam Hussein would use weapons of mass destruction to launch an attack on the United States. Then, after that proved to be false, it was in the name of liberating the Iraqis from living under the oppression of a ruthless dictator. Then it was about stopping the terrorists, who later became insurgents. Then it was about ending the sectarian strife. Now it’s about trying to contain the civil war. Here we are, li’l Dutch boy, finger in the dyke.

The story has been changing all along. Some of us (a pretty lonely minority for a while) suspected, from the first bellicose speeches in 2002, that it was about oil, or oil combined with the desire to project a major American military presence into the Middle East for decades to come. But that’s really only a priority because there’s so much oil there, right? For example, Robert Mugabe is a ruthless dictator who has practically broken his country. Inflation in Zimbabwe is over 10,000%, and something like 3 out of every 4 adult males has left the country because there are no jobs there. People push wheelbarrows full of cash to the store to buy cooking oil, when they can find it. But no one’s proposing to launch a war to free the poor Zimbabweans from their vile oppressor. Zimbabwe has very little oil, so we are busy elsewhere. (For details on Zimbabwe, see this article in the Economist.)

So along comes Alan Greenspan, who apparently included one inflammatory sentence in his new book: “I'm saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows—the Iraq war is largely about oil,” and all of a sudden the media is ablaze with speculation. “Was it really? All this is about oil? Couldn’t be. Why are we just hearing about this now? Everyone knows it? We thought it was about freedom!”

Alan Greenspan is a very smart man. His adroit spinning of the interest rate knob did, after all, avert a potential financial disaster after the dot-com bubble. And hey, if you played it right, you cashed out a small fortune in equity when your house tripled in value. (You did cash out, didn’t you?) However, back then it was primarily investors who would have borne the brunt of the disaster. Well, I suppose that means pension funds, many states, your 401(k), and a lot of other parties. But now that everyone’s leveraged to the hilt with home equity loans left over from those heady days, the risk has been spread across the 60-odd percent of us who own homes. We’ll see what a tidy solution it really was to let all that froth foam over from equities to housing. I suspect that, in the end, it will be less than tidy. So does Mr. Greenspan. As the Financial Times reported today,

Mr Greenspan said he would expect “as a minimum, large single-digit” percentage declines in US house prices from peak to trough and added that he would not be surprised if the fall was “in double digits”.

That’s the nationwide average, by the way. By some measures, property values in California and Florida are already down 10% or more from their peaks and probably have more to go. For the nationwide average to fall by 10%, the coasts are going to fall by a much larger number.

The FT article also said (and this is my favorite part):

As Fed chairman, Mr Greenspan had talked about “froth” in the housing sector, but never said there was a bubble in the market as a whole. His successor Ben Bernanke has also avoided the word “bubble”.

But Mr Greenspan told the FT that froth “was a euphemism for a bubble”.

He said he still thought froth—a collection of bubbles—was a better description, because of the variation in house price appreciation in different local housing markets. But he said “all the froth bubbles add up to an aggregate bubble”.

Now he tells us. All that froth does add up to a bubble. I knew it! And that gets me back to my point: Why are you telling us only now, Mr. Greenspan, that there’s a housing bubble, now that you’re retired and can float around being an insanely well-paid pundit? It’s patently obvious now anyway. We don’t need your penetrating insights to see it now.

And why are you telling us only now that the invasion of Iraq was about oil, now that it’s way too late to do anything about it? Where were you, and all the other people in positions of power, who knew back in 2003 that Bush was making all this shit up? We needed you. 92% of people, or something almost as ridiculous, thought Saddam Hussein had been involved in the 9-11 plot. The Republican house and senate were all in lockstep. The network and cable news outlets, and the Rush Limbaughs and the Fox Newses were all banging their drums and flashing their infographics and animated “War on Terror ’02: Invadistan” logos. And then there were the rest of us, all five of us or so, looking at each other incredulously, asking “What the hell is going on here, and why is no one asking any real questions?” We could have used your penetrating insights back then, Maestro.

Hindsight is always 20/20, as the cliché goes. Fine and good. But what about foresight? Not everyone has it. We can’t fault our past selves for not being omniscient. But sometimes, intelligent people who have the capacity for foresight decide to remain silent, when one might argue that it’s their responsibility to edify the rest of us. Or at least to contribute to the conversation and make a thoughtful point of view more widely understood. We certainly could have used it then.

This chart from the August 2007 National Geographic is telling. Perhaps the ardent champions of family values who ran congress for 12 years overlooked this state of affairs. Opposing gay marriage can easily fill your calendar, after all. Though I’d be surprised if the current occupants did much better.

Not often does all of sub-Saharan Africa (except Liberia) have us beat on any measure worth emulating.

There’s not much I need to say about the Libby thing that hasn’t been said. Outraged? Not really. Deeply offended? Yes. But we should have expected it, shouldn't we? After all, as the adage goes, fool me once, shame on me . . . you. Fool me twice, shame on . . . wait. Fool me . . . aw, hell.

But you know what I mean. Why should we have expected anything else? This follows a tried and true pattern for this administration. Everyone in the inner circle, publicly and privately, is exempt from the rules. If necessary, they’ll take the time to change the rules (sometimes publicly, often secretly) or draft up memos explaining why the rules don’t apply in this particular case. But in a pinch they’ll just ignore the rules, knowing that they can cover it up or get around the outcry and the consequences later.

On one hand, I do have a lot of sympathy for Libby. What else is he but a fall guy? If we follow the naive assumption that the person responsible for a given act is the one who should receive the credit, blame, or punishment for it, then he should face the consequences of lying to the FBI and to the special counsel. But bound up in his 30 month sentence was a grander lie about the war and the reasons for going to war in the first place. While he was, to some extent, an architect of that lie as well, the real blame for it goes to his superiors. And many of us who were raised to do the right thing even when no one is looking think they should have served that much jail time (or more) for their roles. But everyone knew better than to hope for that. Libby really only deserved to spend 30 months in jail if Cheney, Bush, Rumsfeld, Perle, Wolfowitz, and the rest were there with him. Justice should be applied fairly and uniformly, or not at all. Because if not fair and uniform, it’s a charade. That’s gist of the national outcry.

The front page of yesterday’s New York Times had a nice historical comparative quote series from Bush to remind us where we’ve been. The first was from back in September 2003, when he said, “If there is a leak out of my administration, I want to know who it is. And if the person has violated the law, the person will be taken care of.” I wonder if commutation is what he meant?

Also in the NYT (online edition), was this letter to the editor that eloquently explains the part of the Libby thing that does actually outrage me.

To the Editor:

When George W. Bush was governor of Texas, he presided over more than 150 executions. In more than one-third of the cases — 57 in all — lawyers representing condemned inmates asked then-Governor Bush for a commutation of sentence, so that the inmates would serve life in prison rather than face execution.

Some of these inmates had been represented by lawyers who slept during trials. Some were mentally retarded. Some were juveniles at the time they committed the crime for which they were sentenced to death.

In all these cases, Governor Bush refused to commute their sentences, saying that the inmates had had full access to the judicial system.

I. Lewis Libby Jr. had the best lawyers money can buy. His crime cannot be attributed to youth or retardation. He has expressed no remorse whatsoever for lying to a grand jury or participating in the administration’s effort to mislead the American people about the war in Iraq. President Bush’s commutation of Mr. Libby’s sentence is certainly legal, but it just as surely offends the fundamental constitutional value of equality.

Because President Bush signed a commutation, a rich and powerful man will spend not a day in prison, while 57 poor and poorly connected human beings died because Governor Bush refused to lift a pen for them.

David R. Dow

Houston, July 3, 2007

The writer is a professor at the University of Houston Law Center who represents death row inmates, including several who sought commutation from then-Governor Bush.

It’s an X-Files moment. Or an alternate take on “Children of Men.” It would be such cool science fiction: All the honeybees on Earth disappear, or at least a good chunk of them disappear fairly rapidly over the course of a few months. Gone without a trace. All those teeming swarms you rarely stop to think about, gone. Silenced. Who’s going to make all that honey for my Crispy Honey Toasty Oat Os? Who’s going to pollenate the fruit trees and all that other agricultural crap?

But more importantly, where did they go? Back to their colony on the dark side of the moon, to feed and nurture the giant Space Queen who’s going to launch the invasion to retake the Earth after millenia of waiting? Back to their underwater lair for the thousand-year Transformation? Has the Hymenoptera Pied Piper set up camp in the backwoods of Idaho and begun calling his horde home? Where oh where hef dem goed?

But the scary part is that it’s really happening, and happening quickly, and no one knows why! If you haven’t heard news reports about it yet, you will soon.

My own feelings about this extinction (if it comes to that) are complex, because I have a complex relationship with all striped black and yellow flying things.

On one hand, there’s the burning hatred, instinctive and deep, stretching back to childhood. I’m deathly allergic to them. The last time I was stung I spent two days in the hospital covered in red puffy welts and white blisters, pumped full of antihistamines and adrenalin by IV. Whenever one starts to hover near me, I freeze and become frantically panicked at the same time. As soon as the thing lingers or lands, I kill it. I take great joy in killing it. I can’t help it. Granted, I get much more joy from killing wasps, because something about those long dangly legs seems obscene and makes them much more evil. Well, malicious and taunting anyway, and less useful in the sort of communal, symbiotic sense that gives some people the warm and fuzzy feeling about bees.

On the other hand, there’s my love of bee pollen as a nutritional supplement. Sure it’s good for you, boosts yer pep and whatnot. But the coolest thing about it is that you’re eating pure information rendered into material form. 'Cuz what else is pollen but plant DNA, and what else is DNA besides pure information? I’m not going to get into the pros and cons of eating animal DNA in this forum, though the subject has been broached in The Straight Dope and many other places. Plant DNA doesn’t carry the same connotations, so I feel much more free to talk about it.

Unfortunately, that’s as far as thought goes: eating pure information is cool. The fact that there's an insect that gathers it up and presents it to the person or machine who packages it and ships it so I can buy it fresh at Whole Foods? That’s pretty cool too.

And then there’s the hypernatural unexplained way that bees navigate and communicate and function as individual nodes in an enormous network, with that wacky little “This Way to the Honey” dance they do, and all the rest. That’s pretty cool too.

But what’s not cool at all is this: (1) that they’re dying; and (2) all the crackpot head-up-the-arse cockamamie notions that people are coming up with to try to explain the disappearance. My Space Queen idea isn’t really all that outlandish when you consider some of what I’ve been seeing.

From craigslist:

In case you haven't heard, Cell phones are killing us.

They are fucking up the bees. The bees are getting fucked up by the radiation from the phones and coming out the hives retarded.

They are NOT pollenating!

If they don't do that = WE ALL DIE

IT IS TIME TO KILL THE CELL PHONE AND GO STAND IN LINE WAITING ON A PAY PHONE

That actually sounds uncannily like an ex-girlfriend of mine.

This theory is treated as a possibility by actual sources as well (well, actual British sources): The Independent.

And then there’s the guy who’s figured out how to profit from it. My favorite quote from his write-up: “Of course, it's not just an issue of losing blueberries and broccoli. Farmers stand to lose a lot of money.” (Because that’s by far the hugest consequence of a bee extinction.) And to be fair, further on down he does admit that the nearly 100 crop species in the U.S. that rely on honeybees for pollination constitute about 1/3 of our diet. But that pales in comparison to the farmers’ loss. We can always just eat more beef, I suppose.

Penny prefers oboes to strings. She finds the tones more soothing, she said.

From the New York times:

After more than an hour of fierce and emotional debate, the senators rejected pleas to add exceptions for incest or rape or for the health of the pregnant woman and instead voted, 23 to 12, to outlaw all abortions, except those to save the woman's life.

More here (registration required).

This is a clever piece of writing from The Washington Post about a Minuteman fanatic who’s just come to DC for a Capitol Hill rally. It caught my eye this morning and almost had me spitting out my Grapenuts by the end. Though of course this woman probably had more to say than what’s quoted here, the article reminds us that anti-immigration fanaticism can be a pathology. Some people fear germs or pollen and wear surgical masks around town; others fear immigrants and the rampant sex slave trade plaguing our country. You have to read all the way to the end to get it.

Guardian of the Green Card
Warrior Against Illegal Immigration Sees Signs of Trouble All Around Her
By Carol Morello, Ernesto Londoo and Allison Klein
Wednesday, February 8, 2006; Page B01

As she breezed off the plane from Salt Lake City, the woman who had come to protest illegal immigration crossed paths with a man who first set foot here as an illegal immigrant. Carmen Mercer bustled into Baltimore-Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport wearing a big red and white sticker on her jacket that said, "Secure America Now! No to Amnesty."

It was amnesty, granted a few years after he entered the country illegally from El Salvador, that allowed Cadelario Reyes to build a landscaping business in Gaithersburg. As Mercer's flight landed, Reyes's 24-year-old son was about to depart for duty in the Navy, and the two men embraced near the security gate. Mercer, 51, a petite grandmother, had come to Washington for today's Capitol Hill rally by the Minuteman Project, an activist group that wants to seal the nation's borders against illegal immigration and torpedo President Bush's proposed guest-worker program for illegals. Locally, a Minuteman chapter has tracked immigrants at a site where day laborers gather in Herndon.

Though she runs a diner barely 30 miles north of the Mexican border in Tombstone, Ariz., Mercer said she once was oblivious to the tide of immigration.

"For years, I never was aware of it," Mercer said as she headed toward the baggage carousel, near the newsstand where Gilda, from Guatemala, and Maria, from Mexico, chatted amiably in Spanish in between ringing up purchases. "Now I see it everywhere."

In the Washington region, where an estimated one in six residents is foreign-born, she would see a thousand faces of immigration during her visit.

Her eyes were opened to them by the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. As she was becoming more vigilant, Arizona had an influx of people after crackdowns along the Mexican border in California and Texas.

"I can guarantee terrorists have come across the border," she said. "I don't want 9/11 to happen again. It's a national security thing."

Mercer walked toward the rental car shuttle, past cabdrivers from Russia, Africa and Asia waiting by the curb, and by Olawoyin Dauda, a Nigerian who moved to the United States after his computer business tanked. He now stood beside his blue Super Shuttle van.

For now, the buffalo burgers in her Tombstone diner are being served by her 13 employees, freeing Mercer for what she considers her patriotic duty.

Many nights, she has headed into the Arizona desert in her Chevrolet pickup, on patrol with another woman. Locals call them the Granny Brigade.

They sit on lawn chairs perched on hilltops or in the brush, armed with night-vision goggles, walkie-talkies and guns. Mercer's is a .45-caliber Colt. She holsters it in a custom gun belt with leather loops to hold bullets, like a bandoleer.

But it has become harder to find time for patrolling. Mercer is vice president, chief fundraiser and national recruiter for Minuteman, as well as director of the Tucson chapter. The group started less than a year ago with 400 members. Now, she estimated, they have signed up 8,000.

She said that part of the solution would be a tall, concrete wall erected along the entire 2,000-mile Mexican border between California and Texas.

"All they have to do is secure the borders," she said. "We won't have fear of terrorists coming across. We won't have fear of the sex-slave trade. We won't have criminals crossing."

Noticing a young man in an Army uniform struggling under a pile of green bags in the rental car terminal, she dashed to hold open the door for him.

"He's going to Iraq," she said, returning to her seat. "I love soldiers. They're our protection. They should be on our border."

At the Holiday Inn in Alexandria, a man with a Jamaican accent helped check in Mercer, who has a slight accent of her own. Outside, where taxis lined up four and five deep, the accents of the drivers were those of the Middle East and Africa.

"It is very hard to survive here if you want to live in a proper place," said cabby Khalil Siddiqui, 48, who has a master's degree from a university in Pakistan and is a naturalized U.S. citizen.

The corner gas station three blocks away was staffed by a man from Pakistan and two women, one from Ethiopia and the other from India.

"Foreign people are hard workers," said Tahir Younis, 28, the mechanic. "You go to McDonald's, and who works there? Foreigners. If there were not foreigners, what would you do?"

At a nearby fast-food restaurant, a 21-year-old woman mopped the floor. She chatted openly in Spanish, until the topic of a green card was raised. Then she lowered her head, hushed her voice to barely a whisper and said she could no longer speak because she had to return to her work. When Mercer last visited Washington in May, she said, she and another Minuteman asked the drivers of all the cabs they took whether they were citizens. If they said they were not, Mercer and her colleague asked for their green cards. Mercer said they wanted to prove a point and did not report anyone to immigration authorities.

Recently, Mercer's landlord paid for a new roof on the building housing her diner. She fed every member of the crew, except for two who stayed in the trailer. She later learned that they did not have green cards. "If I'd have seen them, I would have reported them," she said. Benefits for Both

In a dimly lit alley behind a row of restaurants in Alexandria, workers slipped out of back doors to smoke or haul heavy trash bins to a dumpster. The alley was slick with fetid puddles and dirty with discarded cigarette butts. The only light shone through the bars of an adjacent parking garage.

Nelson Posada emerged from a restaurant door into the alley dragging a garbage can. Originally from Honduras, he crossed the border illegally, traversing the Arizona desert in 1994. He left behind a 6-month-old boy who knows his father only from phone conversations and the money he wires home. Posada, who works two full-time jobs six days a week, has relatives who talk of following him here. He tells them the border is not what it used to be when he crossed by paying smugglers $2,000.

Now, immigrants face a beefed-up U.S. Border Patrol and private citizens scouring the desert, on the lookout for undocumented foreigners. "I'd like for the United States to give us papers," he said. "We come to work, and that benefits us both."

Seated at a table in a seafood restaurant just off the alley, Mercer ordered her dinner from a menu that featured on the back the photographs and names of a half-dozen employees with Latino names and their years of service.

It is a rare dinner out for Mercer, who on principle has cut back on patronizing restaurants.

"I stopped, because wherever you go, you constantly find people are working there illegally," she said. "I'm not saying that's the case here. But if 80 percent of the kitchen staff is from another country, you wonder."

After a breakfast omelet served yesterday by a waiter from Pakistan, Mercer went sightseeing at the Jefferson Memorial. Near the end of a biographical film on Jefferson, the movie showed the Statue of Liberty and Jefferson's words, "Shall oppressed humanity find no asylum on this globe?"

Mercer purchased two pamphlets, one on the U.S. Constitution and one on the Founding Fathers, from a Filipina cashier in the gift shop.

At a construction site near the memorial, a work crew was directed with orders shouted in Spanish over the noise of heavy machinery. On the crew was Ernesto Valdez, 36, a native of the Mexican state of Guerrero. He came to the country illegally but received amnesty in the mid-1980s. The immigration documents allowed him to be hired on a project on federal property; without documents, he would have been excluded.

But requirements for regular construction sites are more lax, he noted. Despite tougher immigration laws, the lure of dollars remains strong.

"People keep crossing," said Valdez, wearing stained jeans, a white hard hat and a green vest. "It's a big problem." On that point, Mercer would agree. And she is determined to do her part to stop it.

"You can't have a country if you don't have borders," she said. "If we don't do something now, we might not have another chance."

Mercer moved to Tombstone in 1992 after a divorce from a soldier ended the migration from base to base—Florida, North Carolina, New Mexico, Germany and Arizona—so common to military life.

They'd met when he was stationed in Germany, where Mercer was born and raised in a small town near Cologne.

She might never have become a U.S. citizen had she not been kicked off a local planning and zoning committee in Arizona when it was discovered she was not. In 1999, almost a quarter-century after coming to the United States, she was naturalized.

She remembers being one of about 500 people naturalized that day. "Two of us were from Germany, one was Russian, one was Japanese and two were from Korea," said Mercer, who speaks with only the slightest hint of a German accent and thinks and dreams in English. "The rest, about 480 of them, were from Mexico."

Finally, someone has stood up and drawn a detailed schematic of democracy’s decay, with a little “You are here” dot for those who came in late. That someone is Al Gore, so I can only assume that Limbaugh and Krauthammer and the rest are up late tonight putting the polishing touches on their playground bully schtick for tomorrow morning’s shows. Now, granted, you had to be awake in history class to catch some of Gore’s references, and some of his sentences contain more than two clauses, so this speech is likely only to be summarized for us by the networks who understand that we would rather have more time to watch Simpson’s reruns or the OC.

For example, it contains such whoppers as this: “It is often the case that an Executive Branch beguiled by the pursuit of unchecked power responds to its own mistakes by reflexively proposing that it be given still more power. Often, the request itself it used to mask accountability for mistakes in the use of power it already has.” That’ll never make it onto Fox News. Thus the speech, which is the most circumspect and forthright analysis to date of the Emperor’s curious new taste in fashion, is quoted in its entirety below. Some of us have been asking these questions since 2001, and others of us are just starting to wonder. If you’re not asking questions yet, you won’t bother listening to the answers anyway.

Congressman Barr and I have disagreed many times over the years, but we have joined together today with thousands of our fellow citizens—Democrats and Republicans alike—to express our shared concern that America's Constitution is in grave danger.

In spite of our differences over ideology and politics, we are in strong agreement that the American values we hold most dear have been placed at serious risk by the unprecedented claims of the Administration to a truly breathtaking expansion of executive power.

As we begin this new year, the Executive Branch of our government has been caught eavesdropping on huge numbers of American citizens and has brazenly declared that it has the unilateral right to continue without regard to the established law enacted by Congress to prevent such abuses.

It is imperative that respect for the rule of law be restored.

So, many of us have come here to Constitution Hall to sound an alarm and call upon our fellow citizens to put aside partisan differences and join with us in demanding that our Constitution be defended and preserved.

It is appropriate that we make this appeal on the day our nation has set aside to honor the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who challenged America to breathe new life into our oldest values by extending its promise to all our people.

On this particular Martin Luther King Day, it is especially important to recall that for the last several years of his life, Dr. King was illegally wiretapped—one of hundreds of thousands of Americans whose private communications were intercepted by the U.S. government during this period.

The FBI privately called King the “most dangerous and effective negro leader in the country” and vowed to “take him off his pedestal.” The government even attempted to destroy his marriage and blackmail him into committing suicide.

This campaign continued until Dr. King's murder. The discovery that the FBI conducted a long-running and extensive campaign of secret electronic surveillance designed to infiltrate the inner workings of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and to learn the most intimate details of Dr. King's life, helped to convince Congress to enact restrictions on wiretapping.

The result was the Foreign Intelligence and Surveillance Act (FISA), which was enacted expressly to ensure that foreign intelligence surveillance would be presented to an impartial judge to verify that there is a sufficient cause for the surveillance. I voted for that law during my first term in Congress and for almost thirty years the system has proven a workable and valued means of according a level of protection for private citizens, while permitting foreign surveillance to continue.

Yet, just one month ago, Americans awoke to the shocking news that in spite of this long settled law, the Executive Branch has been secretly spying on large numbers of Americans for the last four years and eavesdropping on “large volumes of telephone calls, e-mail messages, and other Internet traffic inside the United States.” The New York Times reported that the President decided to launch this massive eavesdropping program “without search warrants or any new laws that would permit such domestic intelligence collection.”

During the period when this eavesdropping was still secret, the President went out of his way to reassure the American people on more than one occasion that, of course, judicial permission is required for any government spying on American citizens and that, of course, these constitutional safeguards were still in place.

But surprisingly, the President's soothing statements turned out to be false. Moreover, as soon as this massive domestic spying program was uncovered by the press, the President not only confirmed that the story was true, but also declared that he has no intention of bringing these wholesale invasions of privacy to an end.

At present, we still have much to learn about the NSA's domestic surveillance. What we do know about this pervasive wiretapping virtually compels the conclusion that the President of the United States has been breaking the law repeatedly and persistently.

A president who breaks the law is a threat to the very structure of our government. Our Founding Fathers were adamant that they had established a government of laws and not men. Indeed, they recognized that the structure of government they had enshrined in our Constitution—our system of checks and balances—was designed with a central purpose of ensuring that it would govern through the rule of law. As John Adams said: “The executive shall never exercise the legislative and judicial powers, or either of them, to the end that it may be a government of laws and not of men.”

An executive who arrogates to himself the power to ignore the legitimate legislative directives of the Congress or to act free of the check of the judiciary becomes the central threat that the Founders sought to nullify in the Constitution—an all-powerful executive too reminiscent of the King from whom they had broken free. In the words of James Madison, “the accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”

Thomas Paine, whose pamphlet, “On Common Sense” ignited the American Revolution, succinctly described America's alternative. Here, he said, we intended to make certain that “the law is king.”

Vigilant adherence to the rule of law strengthens our democracy and strengthens America. It ensures that those who govern us operate within our constitutional structure, which means that our democratic institutions play their indispensable role in shaping policy and determining the direction of our nation. It means that the people of this nation ultimately determine its course and not executive officials operating in secret without constraint.

The rule of law makes us stronger by ensuring that decisions will be tested, studied, reviewed and examined through the processes of government that are designed to improve policy. And the knowledge that they will be reviewed prevents over-reaching and checks the accretion of power.

A commitment to openness, truthfulness and accountability also helps our country avoid many serious mistakes. Recently, for example, we learned from recently classified declassified documents that the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which authorized the tragic Vietnam war, was actually based on false information. We now know that the decision by Congress to authorize the Iraq War, 38 years later, was also based on false information. America would have been better off knowing the truth and avoiding both of these colossal mistakes in our history. Following the rule of law makes us safer, not more vulnerable.

The President and I agree on one thing. The threat from terrorism is all too real. There is simply no question that we continue to face new challenges in the wake of the attack on September 11th and that we must be ever-vigilant in protecting our citizens from harm.

Where we disagree is that we have to break the law or sacrifice our system of government to protect Americans from terrorism. In fact, doing so makes us weaker and more vulnerable.

Once violated, the rule of law is in danger. Unless stopped, lawlessness grows. The greater the power of the executive grows, the more difficult it becomes for the other branches to perform their constitutional roles. As the executive acts outside its constitutionally prescribed role and is able to control access to information that would expose its actions, it becomes increasingly difficult for the other branches to police it. Once that ability is lost, democracy itself is threatened and we become a government of men and not laws.

The President's men have minced words about America's laws. The Attorney General openly conceded that the “kind of surveillance” we now know they have been conducting requires a court order unless authorized by statute. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act self-evidently does not authorize what the NSA has been doing, and no one inside or outside the Administration claims that it does. Incredibly, the Administration claims instead that the surveillance was implicitly authorized when Congress voted to use force against those who attacked us on September 11th.

This argument just does not hold any water. Without getting into the legal intricacies, it faces a number of embarrassing facts. First, another admission by the Attorney General: he concedes that the Administration knew that the NSA project was prohibited by existing law and that they consulted with some members of Congress about changing the statute. Gonzalez says that they were told this probably would not be possible. So how can they now argue that the Authorization for the Use of Military Force somehow implicitly authorized it all along? Second, when the Authorization was being debated, the Administration did in fact seek to have language inserted in it that would have authorized them to use military force domestically—and the Congress did not agree. Senator Ted Stevens and Representative Jim McGovern, among others, made statements during the Authorization debate clearly restating that that Authorization did not operate domestically.

When President Bush failed to convince Congress to give him all the power he wanted when they passed the AUMF, he secretly assumed that power anyway, as if congressional authorization was a useless bother. But as Justice Frankfurter once wrote: “To find authority so explicitly withheld is not merely to disregard in a particular instance the clear will of Congress. It is to disrespect the whole legislative process and the constitutional division of authority between President and Congress.”

This is precisely the “disrespect” for the law that the Supreme Court struck down in the steel seizure case.

It is this same disrespect for America's Constitution which has now brought our republic to the brink of a dangerous breach in the fabric of the Constitution. And the disrespect embodied in these apparent mass violations of the law is part of a larger pattern of seeming indifference to the Constitution that is deeply troubling to millions of Americans in both political parties.

For example, the President has also declared that he has a heretofore unrecognized inherent power to seize and imprison any American citizen that he alone determines to be a threat to our nation, and that, notwithstanding his American citizenship, the person imprisoned has no right to talk with a lawyer—even to argue that the President or his appointees have made a mistake and imprisoned the wrong person.

The President claims that he can imprison American citizens indefinitely for the rest of their lives without an arrest warrant, without notifying them about what charges have been filed against them, and without informing their families that they have been imprisoned.

At the same time, the Executive Branch has claimed a previously unrecognized authority to mistreat prisoners in its custody in ways that plainly constitute torture in a pattern that has now been documented in U.S. facilities located in several countries around the world.

Over 100 of these captives have reportedly died while being tortured by Executive Branch interrogators and many more have been broken and humiliated. In the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, investigators who documented the pattern of torture estimated that more than 90 percent of the victims were innocent of any charges.

This shameful exercise of power overturns a set of principles that our nation has observed since General Washington first enunciated them during our Revolutionary War and has been observed by every president since then—until now. These practices violate the Geneva Conventions and the International Convention Against Torture, not to mention our own laws against torture.

The President has also claimed that he has the authority to kidnap individuals in foreign countries and deliver them for imprisonment and interrogation on our behalf by autocratic regimes in nations that are infamous for the cruelty of their techniques for torture.

Some of our traditional allies have been shocked by these new practices on the part of our nation. The British Ambassador to Uzbekistan—one of those nations with the worst reputations for torture in its prisons—registered a complaint to his home office about the senselessness and cruelty of the new U.S. practice: “This material is useless—we are selling our souls for dross. It is in fact positively harmful.”

Can it be true that any president really has such powers under our Constitution? If the answer is “yes” then under the theory by which these acts are committed, are there any acts that can on their face be prohibited? If the President has the inherent authority to eavesdrop, imprison citizens on his own declaration, kidnap and torture, then what can't he do?

The Dean of Yale Law School, Harold Koh, said after analyzing the Executive Branch's claims of these previously unrecognized powers: “If the President has commander-in-chief power to commit torture, he has the power to commit genocide, to sanction slavery, to promote apartheid, to license summary execution.”

The fact that our normal safeguards have thus far failed to contain this unprecedented expansion of executive power is deeply troubling. This failure is due in part to the fact that the Executive Branch has followed a determined strategy of obfuscating, delaying, withholding information, appearing to yield but then refusing to do so and dissembling in order to frustrate the efforts of the legislative and judicial branches to restore our constitutional balance.

For example, after appearing to support legislation sponsored by John McCain to stop the continuation of torture, the President declared in the act of signing the bill that he reserved the right not to comply with it.

Similarly, the Executive Branch claimed that it could unilaterally imprison American citizens without giving them access to review by any tribunal. The Supreme Court disagreed, but the President engaged in legal maneuvers designed to prevent the Court from providing meaningful content to the rights of its citizens.

A conservative jurist on the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals wrote that the Executive Branch's handling of one such case seemed to involve the sudden abandonment of principle “at substantial cost to the government's credibility before the courts.”

As a result of its unprecedented claim of new unilateral power, the Executive Branch has now put our constitutional design at grave risk. The stakes for America's representative democracy are far higher than has been generally recognized.

These claims must be rejected and a healthy balance of power restored to our Republic. Otherwise, the fundamental nature of our democracy may well undergo a radical transformation.

For more than two centuries, America's freedoms have been preserved in part by our founders' wise decision to separate the aggregate power of our government into three co-equal branches, each of which serves to check and balance the power of the other two.

On more than a few occasions, the dynamic interaction among all three branches has resulted in collisions and temporary impasses that create what are invariably labeled “constitutional crises.” These crises have often been dangerous and uncertain times for our Republic. But in each such case so far, we have found a resolution of the crisis by renewing our common agreement to live under the rule of law.

The principle alternative to democracy throughout history has been the consolidation of virtually all state power in the hands of a single strongman or small group who together exercise that power without the informed consent of the governed.

It was in revolt against just such a regime, after all, that America was founded. When Lincoln declared at the time of our greatest crisis that the ultimate question being decided in the Civil War was “whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure,” he was not only saving our union but also was recognizing the fact that democracies are rare in history. And when they fail, as did Athens and the Roman Republic upon whose designs our founders drew heavily, what emerges in their place is another strongman regime.

There have of course been other periods of American history when the Executive Branch claimed new powers that were later seen as excessive and mistaken. Our second president, John Adams, passed the infamous Alien and Sedition Acts and sought to silence and imprison critics and political opponents.

When his successor, Thomas Jefferson, eliminated the abuses he said: “[The essential principles of our Government] form the bright constellation which has gone before us and guided our steps through an age of revolution and reformation... [S]hould we wander from them in moments of error or of alarm, let us hasten to retrace our steps and to regain the road which alone leads to peace, liberty and safety.”

Our greatest President, Abraham Lincoln, suspended habeas corpus during the Civil War. Some of the worst abuses prior to those of the current administration were committed by President Wilson during and after WWI with the notorious Red Scare and Palmer Raids. The internment of Japanese Americans during WWII marked a low point for the respect of individual rights at the hands of the executive. And, during the Vietnam War, the notorious COINTELPRO program was part and parcel of the abuses experienced by Dr. King and thousands of others.

But in each of these cases, when the conflict and turmoil subsided, the country recovered its equilibrium and absorbed the lessons learned in a recurring cycle of excess and regret.

There are reasons for concern this time around that conditions may be changing and that the cycle may not repeat itself. For one thing, we have for decades been witnessing the slow and steady accumulation of presidential power. In a global environment of nuclear weapons and cold war tensions, Congress and the American people accepted ever enlarging spheres of presidential initiative to conduct intelligence and counter intelligence activities and to allocate our military forces on the global stage. When military force has been used as an instrument of foreign policy or in response to humanitarian demands, it has almost always been as the result of presidential initiative and leadership. As Justice Frankfurter wrote in the Steel Seizure Case, “The accretion of dangerous power does not come in a day. It does come, however slowly, from the generative force of unchecked disregard of the restrictions that fence in even the most disinterested assertion of authority.”

A second reason to believe we may be experiencing something new is that we are told by the Administration that the war footing upon which he has tried to place the country is going to “last for the rest of our lives.” So we are told that the conditions of national threat that have been used by other Presidents to justify arrogations of power will persist in near perpetuity.

Third, we need to be aware of the advances in eavesdropping and surveillance technologies with their capacity to sweep up and analyze enormous quantities of information and to mine it for intelligence. This adds significant vulnerability to the privacy and freedom of enormous numbers of innocent people at the same time as the potential power of those technologies. These techologies have the potential for shifting the balance of power between the apparatus of the state and the freedom of the individual in ways both subtle and profound.

Don't misunderstand me: the threat of additional terror strikes is all too real and their concerted efforts to acquire weapons of mass destruction does create a real imperative to exercise the powers of the Executive Branch with swiftness and agility. Moreover, there is in fact an inherent power that is conferred by the Constitution to the President to take unilateral action to protect the nation from a sudden and immediate threat, but it is simply not possible to precisely define in legalistic terms exactly when that power is appropriate and when it is not.

But the existence of that inherent power cannot be used to justify a gross and excessive power grab lasting for years that produces a serious imbalance in the relationship between the executive and the other two branches of government.

There is a final reason to worry that we may be experiencing something more than just another cycle of overreach and regret. This Administration has come to power in the thrall of a legal theory that aims to convince us that this excessive concentration of presidential authority is exactly what our Constitution intended.

This legal theory, which its proponents call the theory of the unitary executive but which is more accurately described as the unilateral executive, threatens to expand the president's powers until the contours of the constitution that the Framers actually gave us become obliterated beyond all recognition. Under this theory, the President's authority when acting as Commander-in-Chief or when making foreign policy cannot be reviewed by the judiciary or checked by Congress. President Bush has pushed the implications of this idea to its maximum by continually stressing his role as Commander-in-Chief, invoking it has frequently as he can, conflating it with his other roles, domestic and foreign. When added to the idea that we have entered a perpetual state of war, the implications of this theory stretch quite literally as far into the future as we can imagine.

This effort to rework America's carefully balanced constitutional design into a lopsided structure dominated by an all powerful Executive Branch with a subservient Congress and judiciary is—ironically—accompanied by an effort by the same administration to rework America's foreign policy from one that is based primarily on U.S. moral authority into one that is based on a misguided and self-defeating effort to establish dominance in the world.

The common denominator seems to be based on an instinct to intimidate and control.

This same pattern has characterized the effort to silence dissenting views within the Executive Branch, to censor information that may be inconsistent with its stated ideological goals, and to demand conformity from all Executive Branch employees.

For example, CIA analysts who strongly disagreed with the White House assertion that Osama bin Laden was linked to Saddam Hussein found themselves under pressure at work and became fearful of losing promotions and salary increases.

Ironically, that is exactly what happened to FBI officials in the 1960s who disagreed with J. Edgar Hoover's view that Dr. King was closely connected to Communists. The head of the FBI's domestic intelligence division said that his effort to tell the truth about King's innocence of the charge resulted in he and his colleagues becoming isolated and pressured. “It was evident that we had to change our ways or we would all be out on the street.... The men and I discussed how to get out of trouble. To be in trouble with Mr. Hoover was a serious matter. These men were trying to buy homes, mortgages on homes, children in school. They lived in fear of getting transferred, losing money on their homes, as they usually did. ... so they wanted another memorandum written to get us out of the trouble that we were in.”

The Constitution's framers understood this dilemma as well, as Alexander Hamilton put it, “a power over a man's support is a power over his will.” (Federalist No. 73)

Soon, there was no more difference of opinion within the FBI. The false accusation became the unanimous view. In exactly the same way, George Tenet's CIA eventually joined in endorsing a manifestly false view that there was a linkage between al Qaeda and the government of Iraq.

In the words of George Orwell: “We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.”

Whenever power is unchecked and unaccountable it almost inevitably leads to mistakes and abuses. In the absence of rigorous accountability, incompetence flourishes. Dishonesty is encouraged and rewarded.

Last week, for example, Vice President Cheney attempted to defend the Administration's eavesdropping on American citizens by saying that if it had conducted this program prior to 9/11, they would have found out the names of some of the hijackers.

Tragically, he apparently still doesn't know that the Administration did in fact have the names of at least 2 of the hijackers well before 9/11 and had available to them information that could have easily led to the identification of most of the other hijackers. And yet, because of incompetence in the handling of this information, it was never used to protect the American people.

It is often the case that an Executive Branch beguiled by the pursuit of unchecked power responds to its own mistakes by reflexively proposing that it be given still more power. Often, the request itself it used to mask accountability for mistakes in the use of power it already has.

Moreover, if the pattern of practice begun by this Administration is not challenged, it may well become a permanent part of the American system. Many conservatives have pointed out that granting unchecked power to this President means that the next President will have unchecked power as well. And the next President may be someone whose values and belief you do not trust. And this is why Republicans as well as Democrats should be concerned with what this President has done. If this President's attempt to dramatically expand executive power goes unquestioned, our constitutional design of checks and balances will be lost. And the next President or some future President will be able, in the name of national security, to restrict our liberties in a way the framers never would have thought possible.

The same instinct to expand its power and to establish dominance characterizes the relationship between this Administration and the courts and the Congress.

In a properly functioning system, the Judicial Branch would serve as the constitutional umpire to ensure that the branches of government observed their proper spheres of authority, observed civil liberties and adhered to the rule of law. Unfortunately, the unilateral executive has tried hard to thwart the ability of the judiciary to call balls and strikes by keeping controversies out of its hands—notably those challenging its ability to detain individuals without legal process—by appointing judges who will be deferential to its exercise of power and by its support of assaults on the independence of the third branch.

The President's decision to ignore FISA was a direct assault on the power of the judges who sit on that court. Congress established the FISA court precisely to be a check on executive power to wiretap. Yet, to ensure that the court could not function as a check on executive power, the President simply did not take matters to it and did not let the court know that it was being bypassed.

The President's judicial appointments are clearly designed to ensure that the courts will not serve as an effective check on executive power. As we have all learned, Judge Alito is a longtime supporter of a powerful executive—a supporter of the so-called unitary executive, which is more properly called the unilateral executive. Whether you support his confirmation or not—and I do not—we must all agree that he will not vote as an effective check on the expansion of executive power. Likewise, Chief Justice Roberts has made plain his deference to the expansion of executive power through his support of judicial deference to executive agency rulemaking.

And the Administration has supported the assault on judicial independence that has been conducted largely in Congress. That assault includes a threat by the Republican majority in the Senate to permanently change the rules to eliminate the right of the minority to engage in extended debate of the President's judicial nominees. The assault has extended to legislative efforts to curtail the jurisdiction of courts in matters ranging from habeas corpus to the pledge of allegiance. In short, the Administration has demonstrated its contempt for the judicial role and sought to evade judicial review of its actions at every turn.

But the most serious damage has been done to the legislative branch. The sharp decline of congressional power and autonomy in recent years has been almost as shocking as the efforts by the Executive Branch to attain a massive expansion of its power.

I was elected to Congress in 1976 and served eight years in the house, 8 years in the Senate and presided over the Senate for 8 years as Vice President. As a young man, I saw the Congress first hand as the son of a Senator. My father was elected to Congress in 1938, 10 years before I was born, and left the Senate in 1971.

The Congress we have today is unrecognizable compared to the one in which my father served. There are many distinguished Senators and Congressmen serving today. I am honored that some of them are here in this hall. But the legislative branch of government under its current leadership now operates as if it is entirely subservient to the Executive Branch.

Moreover, too many Members of the House and Senate now feel compelled to spend a majority of their time not in thoughtful debate of the issues, but raising money to purchase 30 second TV commercials.

There have now been two or three generations of congressmen who don't really know what an oversight hearing is. In the 70's and 80's, the oversight hearings in which my colleagues and I participated held the feet of the Executive Branch to the fire—no matter which party was in power. Yet oversight is almost unknown in the Congress today.

The role of authorization committees has declined into insignificance. The 13 annual appropriation bills are hardly ever actually passed anymore. Everything is lumped into a single giant measure that is not even available for Members of Congress to read before they vote on it.

Members of the minority party are now routinely excluded from conference committees, and amendments are routinely not allowed during floor consideration of legislation.

In the United States Senate, which used to pride itself on being the “greatest deliberative body in the world,” meaningful debate is now a rarity. Even on the eve of the fateful vote to authorize the invasion of Iraq, Senator Robert Byrd famously asked: “Why is this chamber empty?”

In the House of Representatives, the number who face a genuinely competitive election contest every two years is typically less than a dozen out of 435.

And too many incumbents have come to believe that the key to continued access to the money for re-election is to stay on the good side of those who have the money to give; and, in the case of the majority party, the whole process is largely controlled by the incumbent president and his political organization.

So the willingness of Congress to challenge the Administration is further limited when the same party controls both Congress and the Executive Branch.

The Executive Branch, time and again, has co-opted Congress' role, and often Congress has been a willing accomplice in the surrender of its own power.

Look for example at the Congressional role in “overseeing” this massive four year eavesdropping campaign that on its face seemed so clearly to violate the Bill of Rights. The President says he informed Congress, but what he really means is that he talked with the chairman and ranking member of the House and Senate intelligence committees and the top leaders of the House and Senate. This small group, in turn, claimed that they were not given the full facts, though at least one of the intelligence committee leaders handwrote a letter of concern to VP Cheney and placed a copy in his own safe.

Though I sympathize with the awkward position in which these men and women were placed, I cannot disagree with the Liberty Coalition when it says that Democrats as well as Republicans in the Congress must share the blame for not taking action to protest and seek to prevent what they consider a grossly unconstitutional program.

Moreover, in the Congress as a whole—both House and Senate—the enhanced role of money in the re-election process, coupled with the sharply diminished role for reasoned deliberation and debate, has produced an atmosphere conducive to pervasive institutionalized corruption.

The Abramoff scandal is but the tip of a giant iceberg that threatens the integrity of the entire legislative branch of government.

It is the pitiful state of our legislative branch which primarily explains the failure of our vaunted checks and balances to prevent the dangerous overreach by our Executive Branch which now threatens a radical transformation of the American system.

I call upon Democratic and Republican members of Congress today to uphold your oath of office and defend the Constitution. Stop going along to get along. Start acting like the independent and co-equal branch of government you're supposed to be.

But there is yet another Constitutional player whose pulse must be taken and whose role must be examined in order to understand the dangerous imbalance that has emerged with the efforts by the Executive Branch to dominate our constitutional system.

We the people are—collectively—still the key to the survival of America's democracy. We—as Lincoln put it, “[e]ven we here”—must examine our own role as citizens in allowing and not preventing the shocking decay and degradation of our democracy.

Thomas Jefferson said: “An informed citizenry is the only true repository of the public will.”

The revolutionary departure on which the idea of America was based was the audacious belief that people can govern themselves and responsibly exercise the ultimate authority in self-government. This insight proceeded inevitably from the bedrock principle articulated by the Enlightenment philosopher John Locke: “All just power is derived from the consent of the governed.”

The intricate and carefully balanced constitutional system that is now in such danger was created with the full and widespread participation of the population as a whole. The Federalist Papers were, back in the day, widely-read newspaper essays, and they represented only one of twenty-four series of essays that crowded the vibrant marketplace of ideas in which farmers and shopkeepers recapitulated the debates that played out so fruitfully in Philadelphia.

Indeed, when the Convention had done its best, it was the people—in their various States—that refused to confirm the result until, at their insistence, the Bill of Rights was made integral to the document sent forward for ratification.

And it is “We the people” who must now find once again the ability we once had to play an integral role in saving our Constitution.

And here there is cause for both concern and great hope. The age of printed pamphlets and political essays has long since been replaced by television—a distracting and absorbing medium which sees determined to entertain and sell more than it informs and educates.

Lincoln's memorable call during the Civil War is applicable in a new way to our dilemma today: “We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.”

Forty years have passed since the majority of Americans adopted television as their principal source of information. Its dominance has become so extensive that virtually all significant political communication now takes place within the confines of flickering 30-second television advertisements.

And the political economy supported by these short but expensive television ads is as different from the vibrant politics of America's first century as those politics were different from the feudalism which thrived on the ignorance of the masses of people in the Dark Ages.

The constricted role of ideas in the American political system today has encouraged efforts by the Executive Branch to control the flow of information as a means of controlling the outcome of important decisions that still lie in the hands of the people.

The Administration vigorously asserts its power to maintain the secrecy of its operations. After all, the other branches can't check an abuse of power if they don't know it is happening.

For example, when the Administration was attempting to persuade Congress to enact the Medicare prescription drug benefit, many in the House and Senate raised concerns about the cost and design of the program. But, rather than engaging in open debate on the basis of factual data, the Administration withheld facts and prevented the Congress from hearing testimony that it sought from the principal administration expert who had compiled information showing in advance of the vote that indeed the true cost estimates were far higher than the numbers given to Congress by the President.

Deprived of that information, and believing the false numbers given to it instead, the Congress approved the program. Tragically, the entire initiative is now collapsing—all over the country—with the Administration making an appeal just this weekend to major insurance companies to volunteer to bail it out.

To take another example, scientific warnings about the catastrophic consequences of unchecked global warming were censored by a political appointee in the White House who had no scientific training. And today one of the leading scientific experts on global warming in NASA has been ordered not to talk to members of the press and to keep a careful log of everyone he meets with so that the Executive Branch can monitor and control his discussions of global warming.

One of the other ways the Administration has tried to control the flow of information is by consistently resorting to the language and politics of fear in order to short-circuit the debate and drive its agenda forward without regard to the evidence or the public interest. As President Eisenhower said, “Any who act as if freedom's defenses are to be found in suppression and suspicion and fear confess a doctrine that is alien to America.”

Fear drives out reason. Fear suppresses the politics of discourse and opens the door to the politics of destruction. Justice Brandeis once wrote: “Men feared witches and burnt women.”

The founders of our country faced dire threats. If they failed in their endeavors, they would have been hung as traitors. The very existence of our country was at risk.

Yet, in the teeth of those dangers, they insisted on establishing the Bill of Rights.

Is our Congress today in more danger than were their predecessors when the British army was marching on the Capitol? Is the world more dangerous than when we faced an ideological enemy with tens of thousands of missiles poised to be launched against us and annihilate our country at a moment's notice? Is America in more danger now than when we faced worldwide fascism on the march—when our fathers fought and won two World Wars simultaneously?

It is simply an insult to those who came before us and sacrificed so much on our behalf to imply that we have more to be fearful of than they. Yet they faithfully protected our freedoms and now it is up to us to do the same.

We have a duty as Americans to defend our citizens' right not only to life but also to liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It is therefore vital in our current circumstances that immediate steps be taken to safeguard our Constitution against the present danger posed by the intrusive overreaching on the part of the Executive Branch and the President's apparent belief that he need not live under the rule of law.

I endorse the words of Bob Barr, when he said, “The President has dared the American people to do something about it. For the sake of the Constitution, I hope they will.”

A special counsel should immediately be appointed by the Attorney General to remedy the obvious conflict of interest that prevents him from investigating what many believe are serious violations of law by the President. We have had a fresh demonstration of how an independent investigation by a special counsel with integrity can rebuild confidence in our system of justice. Patrick Fitzgerald has, by all accounts, shown neither fear nor favor in pursuing allegations that the Executive Branch has violated other laws.

Republican as well as Democratic members of Congress should support the bipartisan call of the Liberty Coalition for the appointment of a special counsel to pursue the criminal issues raised by warrantless wiretapping of Americans by the President.

Second, new whistleblower protections should immediately be established for members of the Executive Branch who report evidence of wrongdoing—especially where it involves the abuse of Executive Branch authority in the sensitive areas of national security.

Third, both Houses of Congress should hold comprehensive—and not just superficial—hearings into these serious allegations of criminal behavior on the part of the President. And, they should follow the evidence wherever it leads.

Fourth, the extensive new powers requested by the Executive Branch in its proposal to extend and enlarge the Patriot Act should, under no circumstances be granted, unless and until there are adequate and enforceable safeguards to protect the Constitution and the rights of the American people against the kinds of abuses that have so recently been revealed.

Fifth, any telecommunications company that has provided the government with access to private information concerning the communications of Americans without a proper warrant should immediately cease and desist their complicity in this apparently illegal invasion of the privacy of American citizens.

Freedom of communication is an essential prerequisite for the restoration of the health of our democracy.

It is particularly important that the freedom of the Internet be protected against either the encroachment of government or the efforts at control by large media conglomerates. The future of our democracy depends on it.

I mentioned that along with cause for concern, there is reason for hope. As I stand here today, I am filled with optimism that America is on the eve of a golden age in which the vitality of our democracy will be re-established and will flourish more vibrantly than ever. Indeed I can feel it in this hall.

As Dr. King once said, “Perhaps a new spirit is rising among us. If it is, let us trace its movements and pray that our own inner being may be sensitive to its guidance, for we are deeply in need of a new way beyond the darkness that seems so close around us.”

From yesterday’s Washington Post, a well-reasoned argument why the U.S. should not delve into creative interrogative methods, from someone who should know:

By Vladimir Bukovsky
Sunday, December 18, 2005
CAMBRIDGE, England

One nasty morning Comrade Stalin discovered that his favorite pipe was missing. Naturally, he called in his henchman, Lavrenti Beria, and instructed him to find the pipe. A few hours later, Stalin found it in his desk and called off the search. “But, Comrade Stalin,” stammered Beria, “five suspects have already confessed to stealing it.”

This joke, whispered among those who trusted each other when I was a kid in Moscow in the 1950s, is perhaps the best contribution I can make to the current argument in Washington about legislation banning torture and inhumane treatment of suspected terrorists captured abroad. Now that President Bush has made a public show of endorsing Sen. John McCain’s amendment, it would seem that the debate is ending. But that the debate occurred at all, and that prominent figures are willing to entertain the idea, is perplexing and alarming to me. I have seen what happens to a society that becomes enamored of such methods in its quest for greater security; it takes more than words and political compromise to beat back the impulse.

This is a new debate for Americans, but there is no need for you to reinvent the wheel. Most nations can provide you with volumes on the subject. Indeed, with the exception of the Black Death, torture is the oldest scourge on our planet (hence there are so many conventions against it). Every Russian czar after Peter the Great solemnly abolished torture upon being enthroned, and every time his successor had to abolish it all over again. These czars were hardly bleeding-heart liberals, but long experience in the use of these “interrogation” practices in Russia had taught them that once condoned, torture will destroy their security apparatus. They understood that torture is the professional disease of any investigative machinery.

Apart from sheer frustration and other adrenaline-related emotions, investigators and detectives in hot pursuit have enormous temptation to use force to break the will of their prey because they believe that, metaphorically speaking, they have a “ticking bomb” case on their hands. But, much as a good hunter trains his hounds to bring the game to him rather than eating it, a good ruler has to restrain his henchmen from devouring the prey lest he be left empty-handed. Investigation is a subtle process, requiring patience and fine analytical ability, as well as a skill in cultivating one’s sources. When torture is condoned, these rare talented people leave the service, having been outstripped by less gifted colleagues with their quick-fix methods, and the service itself degenerates into a playground for sadists. Thus, in its heyday, Joseph Stalin’s notorious NKVD (the Soviet secret police) became nothing more than an army of butchers terrorizing the whole country but incapable of solving the simplest of crimes. And once the NKVD went into high gear, not even Stalin could stop it at will. He finally succeeded only by turning the fury of the NKVD against itself; he ordered his chief NKVD henchman, Nikolai Yezhov (Beria’s predecessor), to be arrested together with his closest aides.

So, why would democratically elected leaders of the United States ever want to legalize what a succession of Russian monarchs strove to abolish? Why run the risk of unleashing a fury that even Stalin had problems controlling? Why would anyone try to "improve intelligence-gathering capability” by destroying what was left of it? Frustration? Ineptitude? Ignorance? Or, has their friendship with a certain former KGB lieutenant colonel, V. Putin, rubbed off on the American leaders? I have no answer to these questions, but I do know that if Vice President Cheney is right and that some "cruel, inhumane or degrading” (CID) treatment of captives is a necessary tool for winning the war on terrorism, then the war is lost already.

Even talking about the possibility of using CID treatment sends wrong signals and encourages base instincts in those who should be consistently delivered from temptation by their superiors. As someone who has been on the receiving end of the "treatment" under discussion, let me tell you that trying to make a distinction between torture and CID techniques is ridiculous. Long gone are the days when a torturer needed the nasty-looking tools displayed in the Tower of London. A simple prison bed is deadly if you remove the mattress and force a prisoner to sleep on the iron frame night after night after night. Or how about the "Chekist’s handshake" so widely practiced under Stalin— a firm squeeze of the victim’s palm with a simple pencil inserted between his fingers? Very convenient, very simple. And how would you define leaving 2,000 inmates of a labor camp without dental service for months on end? Is it CID not to treat an excruciatingly painful toothache, or is it torture?

Now it appears that sleep deprivation is "only" CID and used on Guantanamo Bay captives. Well, congratulations, comrades! It was exactly this method that the NKVD used to produce those spectacular confessions in Stalin’s "show trials" of the 1930s. The henchmen called it "conveyer," when a prisoner was interrogated nonstop for a week or 10 days without a wink of sleep. At the end, the victim would sign any confession without even understanding what he had signed.

I know from my own experience that interrogation is an intensely personal confrontation, a duel of wills. It is not about revealing some secrets or making confessions, it is about self-respect and human dignity. If I break, I will not be able to look into a mirror. But if I don’t, my interrogator will suffer equally. Just try to control your emotions in the heat of that battle. This is precisely why torture occurs even when it is explicitly forbidden. Now, who is going to guarantee that even the most exact definition of CID is observed under such circumstances?

But if we cannot guarantee this, then how can you force your officers and your young people in the CIA to commit acts that will scar them forever? For scarred they will be, take my word for it.

In 1971, while in Lefortovo prison in Moscow (the central KGB interrogation jail), I went on a hunger strike demanding a defense lawyer of my choice (the KGB wanted its trusted lawyer to be assigned instead). The moment was most inconvenient for my captors because my case was due in court, and they had no time to spare. So, to break me down, they started force-feeding me in a very unusual manner— through my nostrils. About a dozen guards led me from my cell to the medical unit. There they straitjacketed me, tied me to a bed, and sat on my legs so that I would not jerk. The others held my shoulders and my head while a doctor was pushing the feeding tube into my nostril.

The feeding pipe was thick, thicker than my nostril, and would not go in. Blood came gushing out of my nose and tears down my cheeks, but they kept pushing until the cartilages cracked. I guess I would have screamed if I could, but I could not with the pipe in my throat. I could breathe neither in nor out at first; I wheezed like a drowning man— my lungs felt ready to burst. The doctor also seemed ready to burst into tears, but she kept shoving the pipe farther and farther down. Only when it reached my stomach could I resume breathing, carefully. Then she poured some slop through a funnel into the pipe that would choke me if it came back up. They held me down for another half-hour so that the liquid was absorbed by my stomach and could not be vomited back, and then began to pull the pipe out bit by bit. . . . Grrrr. There had just been time for everything to start healing during the night when they came back in the morning and did it all over again, for 10 days, when the guards could stand it no longer. As it happened, it was a Sunday and no bosses were around. They surrounded the doctor: "Hey, listen, let him drink it straight from the bowl, let him sip it. It’ll be quicker for you, too, you silly old fool." The doctor was in tears: "Do you think I want to go to jail because of you lot? No, I can’t do that. . . . ” And so they stood over my body, cursing each other, with bloody bubbles coming out of my nose. On the 12th day, the authorities surrendered; they had run out of time. I had gotten my lawyer, but neither the doctor nor those guards could ever look me in the eye again.

Today, when the White House lawyers seem preoccupied with contriving a way to stem the flow of possible lawsuits from former detainees, I strongly recommend that they think about another flood of suits, from the men and women in your armed services or the CIA agents who have been or will be engaged in CID practices. Our rich experience in Russia has shown that many will become alcoholics or drug addicts, violent criminals or, at the very least, despotic and abusive fathers and mothers.

If America’s leaders want to hunt terrorists while transforming dictatorships into democracies, they must recognize that torture, which includes CID, has historically been an instrument of oppression— not an instrument of investigation or of intelligence gathering. No country needs to invent how to “legalize" torture; the problem is rather how to stop it from happening. If it isn’t stopped, torture will destroy your nation’s important strategy to develop democracy in the Middle East. And if you cynically outsource torture to contractors and foreign agents, how can you possibly be surprised if an 18-year-old in the Middle East casts a jaundiced eye toward your reform efforts there?

Finally, think what effect your attitude has on the rest of the world, particularly in the countries where torture is still common, such as Russia, and where its citizens are still trying to combat it. Mr. Putin will be the first to say: “You see, even your vaunted American democracy cannot defend itself without resorting to torture. . . . ”

Off we go, back to the caves.

Vladimir Bukovsky, who spent nearly 12 years in Soviet prisons, labor camps and psychiatric hospitals for nonviolent human rights activities, is the author of several books, including “To Build a Castle” and “Judgment in Moscow.” Now 63, he has lived primarily in Cambridge, England, since 1976.

There’s very little time to spare because I have a plane to catch, but one of my roommates left the Post splayed out on the kitchen table this morning, and this headline (Shortage of Immigrant Workers Alarms Growers in West) caught my eye as I walked past. I believe it underscores my previous point about the extent to which the smooth running of the world economy hangs on a ready supply of cheap labor. So while you’re stuffing your face with turkey tomorrow, just remember who picked it for you. Happy thanksgiving to all.

Here's a little evidence that economic incentives can move mountains in a hurry: Sales of the largest SUVs dropped by over half in September, compared to a year before. And sales of the Prius (Toyota's hybrid) is up by 90%. Makes you wonder why the tax code actually gives tax breaks for SUV purchases. And makes you wonder what would happen if it were the opposite. More hurricanes! More! Let's have just a couple of environmental pseudo-disasters to wake us up before the real ones start.

“I'm asking Congress, please investigate this now. Take whatever idiot they have at the top of whatever agency and give me a better idiot.”

                                      —Aaron Broussard, President of Jefferson Parish, LA

Myself, I would like a better idiot also. Yesterday’s list of recent quotes and photo op faux pas from the Washington Post makes me think that W has decided to try his hand at a Will Ferrell impression (he’s not bad!).

Bush had raised eyebrows on his first trip by, among other things, picking Sen. Trent Lott, R-Miss.—instead of the thousands of mostly poor and black storm victims—as an example of loss. “Out of the rubbles of Trent Lott’s house—he’s lost his entire house—there’s going to be a fantastic house. And I’m looking forward to sitting on the porch,” Bush said with a laugh from an airplane hangar in Mobile, Ala.

Later in Biloxi, Miss., Bush tried to comfort two stunned women wandering their neighborhood clutching Hefty bags, looking in vain for something to salvage from the rubble of their home. He kept insisting they could find help at a Salvation Army center down the street, even after another bystander had informed him it had been destroyed.

And at his last stop that day, at the airport outside of New Orleans, Bush lauded the increasingly desperate city as a great town because he used go there and “enjoy myself—occasionally too much.”

Unlike his galvanizing appearance in the rubble of the World Trade Center just days after the 2001 attacks, Bush has stayed far from the epicenter of New Orleans’ suffering. His only foray into the city was to its edges to watch crews plugging one of the breached levees on Friday.

On Monday, he skipped the hardest-hit coastal areas entirely, choosing instead to visit Baton Rouge, the state capital about 80 miles northwest of New Orleans, which sustained no damage. He also went to Poplarville, Miss., to walk the streets of a middle-class neighborhood that seemed to suffer little more than snapped trees, a couple off-kilter carport roofs and a downed power line or two.

Apparently it’s difficult to fill a photo-op with homeless, fed-up black people to act as smiley-faced cheerleaders for the right. Do they not look all-American enough? Are they not telegenic with their garbage bags and milk crates? Maybe, if the spirit of human compassion still truly lives, a few hundred of the displaced will get together and build Trent Lott a new house. Call Habitat for Humanity.

Go, Pat!

Believe it or not, I still go to the gym. Admittedly, it’s dropped from five times a week down to slightly less than three (on average), but I’m still there after work more often than not, sweating away on some machine, listening to the same five albums on my iPod, and watching Fox News with the closed captioning on.

I don’t choose the Fox. It’s what’s on. But having nothing to do with my eyes for an hour a day while I run on the goofy pseudo-mountain-mimicking machine reconfirms my old suspicions that it’s nothing but a propaganda mouthpiece for the far right. It really hurts to watch it and realize that a huge swath of this country thinks it’s news. Tonight, for instance, I noticed that the right-wingest of right-wing nut jobs, Sean Hannity and Charles Krauthammer are regular commentators. I haven’t seen any amid the sweat dripping into my eyes, but I’m assuming that the liberals they put on stage to pretend at an unbiased presentation sound pretty middle of road. If they showed us the rainbow from green to ultraviolet, we’d be happy to affirm that the whole spectrum’s there, give or take the lunatic fringe.

My favorite sequence tonight segued within ten seconds from a story about Al-Zarqawi’s aide’s confirmation of intent to pull off attacks on U.S. soil (did that come as a surprise? the last one got such a rise out of us) to a couple of apocalyptic quotes about how terrorists could plant a bomb anywhere if they put their minds to it (e.g., movie theaters, malls, schools, your freedom-loving blonde-haired son’s lunchbox), to a story about our wide-open and unsecured border with Mexico where, wouldn’t you know it, over one million illegal aliens are caught ever year trying to sneak across! And an estimated three to five million more get through! Omigod! We’ve got to shut that border with Mexico!

Last September, Time magazine gave a similarly dramatic pronouncement: “The number of illegal aliens flooding into the US this year will total three million.” Time, bastion of rigorous analysis that they are, reached this figure by figuring that for every illegal immigrant caught, “at least three make it into the country safely." Now that’s science. I expect my journalists to use more than the fingers of one hand to do their figgerin’. Do you?

I might have believed those figures, too, had I not been reading this very morning on the bus to work in, you guessed it, The Economist, that

. . . the immigrants caught by the Border Patrol are often repeat offenders. They are returned to Mexico and then promptly try again. In other words, a million arrests do not equal a million different people.

What would be a more plausible figure for the growth in illegal immigration? The INS once calculated that around 40% of undocumented residents entered America legally, but then overstayed their visas. At the same time, many illegal residents have managed to legalise themselves.

Apart from the official amnesties (some 2.7m took advantage of the blanket amnesty in 1986 and another 3m or so have benefited from six targeted bills passed by Congress between 1994 and 2000), at least 100,000 unauthorised residents become legal every year, either by “adjusting their status” (it helps if you marry an American citizen) or by leaving the country and returning with a visa. The numbers are confused guesswork, but it is perfectly possible to believe that some 1m migrants might enter the country illegally this year.

If their numbers are in doubt, their destinations are not. Many will join the 1m or more undocumented immigrants (out of a total agricultural workforce of 1.6m) who are at back-bending work in the nation’s fields, particularly in California.

The last figure got me thinking. Almost two-thirds of the total agricultural workforce in this country consists of illegal immigrants? So what would happen if we were, in a hypothetical world, successful in rounding up every last undocumented worker and shipping him or her back to Mexico or Paraguay, and sealing up the border for good? Would we find a million Americans who are willing to toil in the sun picking strawberries and oranges for $4 to $6 an hour? It’s possible, but I suspect not. I suspect that even if we could find a million Americans (or legal immigrants, but i guess they’re Americans too) who were willing to do the work, they’d demand a hell of a lot more than minimum wage to do it. That would drive up produce prices, making American produce more expensive on the world market and (ouch!) in the grocery store. It might put a dent in our ability to get asparagus for $2.99 a bunch in the middle of January in Chicago. Would consumers stand for that for long?

That got me thinking about the minimum wage, an increase in which was recently discussed briefly in Congress and shot down. It’s been $5.15 for eight years now, so I can only assume that the road to our glorious and shiny new ownership society is paved with fives. Now, I remember finding that it was difficult to own much of anything when I made minimum wage. I’d always go to the restaurant next to Tower Records and order a glass of water and a cup of soup for my lunch, because it came with a roll basket, and even then my lunch came to almost an hour’s pay. On that kind of pay, I’d love to divert a hefty chunk of my social security contributions into a personal savings account. Heck, I’d throw in $20 or more a year! Would that be enough to retire on? If the S&P 500 grew just 10,000% annually (on average), I’d be able to afford name-brand coffee to drink while I relax in the shade on what’s left of the concrete slab upon which used to set my grandpappy’s mobile home.

Even Rick Santorum (that’s Latin for "asshole") proposed a $1.10 increase, just barely half of Ted Kennedy’s $2.10 proposal, with an exemption for small businesses (which admittedly makes some sense). But both were rejected as amendments to the bankruptcy bill, which passed to the delight of credit card companies everywhere. Here’s what The Economist thinks of the law:

Is the system really abused? In fact, evidence suggests that the boom in personal bankruptcies has more to do with the piling on of consumer debt than with debtors playing the system. In the 1990s, revolving debt (mostly credit-card debt), grew by as much as 12% a year; from 1980 to 2004, it increased nearly 15 times. And the non-partisan American Bankruptcy Institute puts the number of bankruptcy filers who could afford to pay a good chunk of their debts at 3.6%: still a big number, but not nearly as much as the 10% or more claimed by creditor groups.

In any case, the bill’s means test (an average of the debtor’s past six months of income) should catch those who can clearly pay up. But opponents fear that the test, which they think too harsh and arbitrary, will drag those who rightly belong in Chapter 7 unfairly into court.

More troubling is the part of the legislation that makes it harder for poorer debtors, not likely to be the abusers of the system, to file for bankruptcy. Some 84% of all filers are too poor to qualify for the new law’s means test. But they will still be put through a great deal of rigmarole to get relief. For example, all debtors will have to get credit counselling before they file—a costly process, and one which does little to steer people out of bankruptcy. The bill also requires people to produce all sorts of paperwork, from payroll stubs to tax returns. Those who have not kept strict records will have to give up or pay for a lawyer to plead their case in court.

Other quirks of the legislation make one wonder why credit-industry groups are so keen on it. One loophole allows rich debtors to go on shielding assets in special trust accounts that are legal in a few states. And debtors’ fancy homes in Texas and Florida will still be off-limits to creditors. The bill’s backers say that fear of trampling on states’ rights stopped them closing such loopholes. But it smells rather pervasively like special treatment for the rich.

But here’s my point (by now you were wondering if I had one): Those who argue that people at the bottom of the income ladder deserve to be there—that they would simply find a better-paying job if they were responsible enough to handle one—always seem to miss the basic point. Someone has to do those jobs. Some of the foundations of the daily pleasantness of our American way of life depend upon people earning what many of us wouldn’t bother to pick up if it were blowing down a windy street.

Imagine if waitresses weren’t paid $2.10 an hour, and every restaurant bill suddenly shot up by 20% or more as their wages figured into the meal’s overt price tag. Imagine, immigrants gone, if Americans were picking all those grapes and avocados, and produce prices shot up by 30% or more. Imagine (gasp!) if we kept all these outsourced manufacturing jobs in America and you had to pay at least 50% percent more for everything you buy at Target or Walmart. Imagine what would happen to the cost of living if all the cleaning people, grocery store clerks, gas station attendants, window washers, furniture movers, and so on were suddenly paid enough to live on? It sounds like I’m arguing to drop the minimum wage even lower, but in fact I’m just trying to point out to what extent our comfort and easy living depends explicitly upon the low wages of the people who provide us with it. (And yes, I pulled those percentages right out of my santorum.)

Whatever the anti-immigrant views of the ordinary Joe on the factory floor, America’s bosses are well aware of their dependence on foreign workers. High-tech companies benefit from H-1B visas, created in 1990 to allow the entry of scientists and other skilled professionals for a maximum of six years. In theory there is an annual cap of 65,000 H-1B visas, but during the dotcom boom this was frequently relaxed. Immigration critics say there are now more than 1m H-1B visa holders, plus more than 325,000 holders of L-1 visas, which allow the intra-company transfer of workers from foreign subsidiaries. Doubtless one reason for the influx is that foreigners are cheaper, but the bosses argue that there is also a shortage of qualified Americans.

The same argument applies lower down the employment scale. The Essential Worker Immigration Coalition lobbies Congress and the White House on behalf of ill-paid sectors such as the hotel industry, fast-food, farming, nursing and animal-slaughtering; these could not survive without their immigrant workers, many of them undocumented. The argument is that immigrants take the nation’s dirty and dangerous jobs because Americans will not. The counter-argument is that Americans would if they were paid enough. But there is precious little evidence that Joe White, whatever the pay, is willing to toil alongside José Blanco picking fruit in California. Short of a big increase in legal immigration, illegal immigrants will continue to meet America’s needs.

If everyone in every crappy service-sector job in the country mustered up the motivation to enroll in community college this fall (provided they could afford tuition) and went out looking for that better job in 2007, would we be willing (1) to do without the services they provide? and (2) to provide them each with a better job? No to both, of course, because they perform necessary services, and there simply aren’t enough skilled jobs in the economy to accommodate all the people. Though it takes no real skill to perform them, the worst-paying jobs must still be performed by someone. And there’s no cosmic economics equation dictating a one-to-one correspondence between born losers and crappy service-sector jobs.

In fact, as more manufacturing jobs are shipped off to cheaper places, there are few options left to many people. Ask the guy I know in Polo, Illinois (population 2500) how far he’d have to travel to find a decent-paying manufacturing or trade job of any kind. Everyone for miles around now works at Walmart or Costco in the next big town over.

For many people, it amounts to getting stuck at the wrong end of the bell-curve in a class of overachievers. Even though you answered 80% of the questions right, the fact that half the class did better than you means you’ll be cleaning out toilets until you’re 70. Sorry, that’s just the way things work out. Here’s your plunger. The company supplies the first one. If you should lose or break it, the next will come out of your paycheck.

Excuse me, ma’am, I don’t mean to bother you or seem impertinent in any way, but I couldn’t help but notice all those magnetic ribbons on the back of your SUV. That’s quite a collection you’ve got. Now, I understand that you love America. How could anyone not love it? It’s almost as unimaginable as not loving freedom, or not hating terrorists. Jeez, I hate them. I used to hate communists, but there aren’t too many of them left anymore. Freedom beat the communists, and freedom can beat these terrorists too. Well, freedom and the world’s biggest army. Don’t get me wrong—I still hate Fidel Castro, and if I knew more about him I’d probably hate Alexander Lukashenko too, but really it doesn’t matter. I feel like I should hate Robert Mugabe, even though he’s not a communist or a terrorist, but I spend so much energy hating Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden that I just can’t muster up enough hate for all those who really deserve it. Some of them I can’t even keep track of. I used to love Ahmed Chalabi, but now I really don’t think much about him at all. And that al-Zarqawi guy? I hate him big time. All you have to do is ask yourself, “Who would Jesus hate?”

No, ma’am, I had to speak up because of some of your other ribbons. I notice that you support America, as I mentioned, and that you support our troops too. Jeez, I support them too, probably more than you even. I mean, I personally know a troop, and he loves freedom (and Jesus) more than just about anyone else I know. After all, you know, there they are, putting themselves in harm’s way for the greatest of all great causes, and they really do need our love and support to bring them home safely. This might sound a little, well, you know, radical, but what if we supported our troops so much that we gave them really good and timely veteran’s benefits? Now, of course, I know that with fighting two simultaneous wars in the name of freedom, while at the same time giving tax cuts to regular stiffs like you and me who work for our half mil a year, and especially with cutting the tax on dividends and the estate tax and the capital gains tax, someone has to pay the price. Freedom isn’t free, after all. I noticed you have that ribbon, too. I like that one. It reminds me that sometimes we have to increase military spending and defense spending, while also pumping billions into Homeland Security at the expense of all the domestic programs that benefit the middle class, the poor, the elderly, women, minorities, and the unfortunate. Hey, we all have to sacrifice for freedom. If the soldiers are doing it, the poor can do it too. When is the last time the poor had to give up anything, huh? Seems to me they’ve had it pretty good for an awfully long time.

So I think we agree about a lot of things. I really like your camouflaged “support our troops” ribbon, and your “God bless America” ribbon. I also really like that one “support our troops” ribbon that’s turned on its side like the Jesus fish, and that POW/MIA ribbon. What I wanted to tell you, and I don’t mean any disrespect by saying this, is that those two over there, the pink one about supporting a cure for you-know-what cancer and the one about supporting a cure for AIDS, are offending my children. Do you know what I mean? I mean, don’t you think it’s just a little bit inappropriate to use the B-word like that where curious little eyes can see it? And AIDS, well, what do I have to say about that, really? That’s the disease that kills homo-sexuals, and I think we all know who to thank for finally getting that mess cleaned up once and for all, don’t we? Starts with a “J,” ends with an “S”? Because if we live in a country where people can say whatever they want all over their SUVs and homosexuals can show their love in broad daylight, then the terrorists have already won.

A friend of mine sent me a link to one of those feel-good sites that warms your heart.

Photos That Will Never Make the News.

I counter with these. They don’t make you feel so good.

Under Mars 1
Under Mars 2
Under Mars 3
Under Mars 4

It’s not so much the photos that bother me. While they are disturbing, we’re pretty naively deceiving ourselves if we think people aren’t dying in gruesome ways every day over there. What really disturbs me are the captions. Tuckova is right. “Does this death make me look fat?’ Disgusting.

Update (2/21/2005 11:57 am): I finally tracked down some information about the website they’re posted on. The Australian first reported that the website is “being used by American soldiers to post grisly pictures of Iraqi war dead,” but that’s apparently not true. Glider says:

At present UnderMars is pushing out 26mb/s of data and climbing fast. To put that into context, that's approaching three hundred gig a day or nine terabytes a month of transfer. Expensive! I've cut the resolution and quality of the images slightly so they're about a third the size, which I hope will halve my bandwidth. If anyone has 100+ mb/s of bandwidth they are able to donate for this (about $5k a month), please contact me. I will keep the site online as long as possible but if the bandwidth continues to climb I will not be able to afford to.

It's rather disturbing reading what people have to say about me and the site. It's interesting that I've rarely gotten flack about posting pictures like this if they're accompanied by an over-the-top paranoid antiwar rant (nor does antiwar.com, which posts such images centrally on a daily basis), but if I post them sans-politics, to show them as is without politicizing, suddenly I'm a bad guy... People need to see these scenes as they are seen at the time, not as tools of one set of pundits or another.

One of the biggest problems with war is that it's hidden behind a thick political and media filter where each "side" twists it to broadcast their own message. However, war is not fought by the media or the politicians or even the corporate CEOs that profit from it — war is fought by the commoner, and it is the commoner that suffers through war. It is the common man's story that must be told if the uninitiated populace is ever to see war for what it is.

You can read more at his site, here.

Oh, and as for the captions,

I have presented the captions as they were given to me and have not censored or edited them. I do not know what motivated their titling, nor have I asked, nor do I intend to. My goal is only to record them. These are extreme experiences and I make no claim to understand the feelings involved.

This time, The Economist wraps some numbers and some very thoughtful analysis around the two-pronged question of income-inequality and social mobility in the United States. This is something that we rabid left-wingers have been blathering on about for years, so it’s nice to see some in the miserable science make an attempt (1) to quantify it, and (2) to point out that social mobility is a prerequisite for functional capitalism. When the rich get richer because of family connections, regardless of their abilities, and the poor get poorer because the rope is being pulled up out of their reach—and further, when the rich align themselves with those in power, or as is increasingly common, when the rich pass on power to their children behind closed doors so that it never comes out into the open market—we end up with nothing but an unregulated plutocracy masquerading as a democratic republic. Bill Clinton was probably the last poor boy done good we’ll see in high office for a long time. And no, Gonzales doesn’t count, because the real point is not that there exists one anecdotal case of a poor immigrant kid making it to Attorney General, but that most folks who aren’t born into wealth are finding the impediments to affordable education and well-paying jobs increasingly insuperable.

The Economist’s conclusion? “A growing body of evidence suggests that the meritocratic ideal is in trouble in America. Income inequality is growing to levels not seen since the Gilded Age, around the 1880s. But social mobility is not increasing at anything like the same pace: would-be Horatio Algers are finding it no easier to climb from rags to riches, while the children of the privileged have a greater chance of staying at the top of the social heap. The United States risks calcifying into a European-style class-based society.”

The full text of the article is here.

According to army literature, American soldiers should deliver the following message before searching a house: “We are sorry for the inconvenience, but we must search your house to make sure you are safe from anti-Iraqi forces [AIF].”

—in The Economist

Ok, so by now you’ve figured out that I only read one magazine, and I should stop worrying that this blog, on those rare occasions when I post, is starting to sound more and more like an Economist cheerleader. I don’t care. Amid the glut of pulp news being coughed out at you by Fox and CNN and the rest, intelligent assessments of the world around us are hard to come by. With “Support Our Troops” ribbons coming out everyone’s asses and every news channel under the sun portraying the plight of our noble democratic-missionary warriors who risk their lives spreading freedom to ingrate freedom-haters, the first two paragraphs of this week’s missive from the The Economist’s Iraq correspondent serve to remind us of some of the realities of fighting a war that the prime time often whitewashes:

There is only one traffic law in Ramadi these days: when Americans approach, Iraqis scatter. Horns blaring, brakes screaming, the midday traffic skids to the side of the road as a line of Humvee jeeps ferrying American marines rolls the wrong way up the main street. Every vehicle, that is, except one beat-up old taxi. Its elderly driver, flapping his outstretched hand, seems, amazingly, to be trying to turn the convoy back. Gun turrets swivel and lock on to him, as a hefty marine sergeant leaps into the road, levels an assault rifle at his turbanned head, and screams: “Back this bitch up, motherfucker!”

The old man should have read the bilingual notices that American soldiers tack to their rear bumpers in Iraq: “Keep 50m or deadly force will be applied.” In Ramadi, the capital of central Anbar province, where 17 suicide-bombs struck American forces during the month-long Muslim fast of Ramadan in the autumn, the marines are jumpy. Sometimes, they say, they fire on vehicles encroaching within 30 metres, sometimes they fire at 20 metres: “If anyone gets too close to us we fucking waste them,” says a bullish lieutenant. “It’s kind of a shame, because it means we’ve killed a lot of innocent people.”

I guess that is kind of a shame, killing a lot of innocent people. Good thing it’s happening so far away. From here, if you turn your iPod up loud enough, you can’t even hear them screaming.

The article continues, praising the abilities of our well-trained and technologically-unparalleled military to fight the war it must now fight. But the well-chosen quotes from the troops remind us (for we had actually forgotten) that the particular Americans likely to volunteer for military service these days are the ones who were raised on the daytime-ratings mob morality of Jerry Springer and Montel Williams in the ’90s.

Yet armies can be good at war-fighting or good at peacekeeping but rarely good at both. And when America’s well-drilled and well-fed fighters attempt subtler tasks than killing people, problems arise. At peacekeeping, peace-enforcing or policing, call it what you will, they are often inept. Even the best of them seem ignorant of the people whose land they are occupying—unsurprisingly, perhaps, when practically no American fighters speak Arabic. And, typically, the marine battalion in Ramadi has only four translators. Often American troops despair of their Iraqi interlocutors, observing that they “are not like Americans”.

American marines and GIs frequently display contempt for Iraqis, civilian or official. Thus the 18-year-old Texan soldier in Mosul who, confronted by jeering schoolchildren, shot canisters of buckshot at them from his grenade-launcher. “It’s not good, dude, it could be fatal, but you gotta do it,” he explained. Or the marines in Ramadi who, on a search for insurgents, kicked in the doors of houses at random, in order to scream, in English, at trembling middle-aged women within: “Where’s your black mask?” and “Bitch, where’s the guns?” In one of these houses was a small plastic Christmas tree, decorated with silver tinsel. “That tells us the people here are OK,” said Corporal Robert Joyce.

On a darker note, here’s what Bruce Jackson, writing in Counterpunch has to say about images of death in the media...

Since the tsunami hit, the mainstream press and, to a lesser extent, the broadcast and cable network news programs, have been chockfull of images of the freshly dead. We’ve seen images of bodies of children and adults where the water left them; we’ve seen them arranged in neat rows; we’ve seen them bagged and stacked.

Television broadcasts have, in the main, been more suggestive, less specific, more distant in their images than the print press: often you knew that lump was a dead body only because a chattering reporter told you it was. TV executives say that is because their images come into people’s homes where children might come upon them unawares, so they have to limit the reality on the airwaves. Hardly anyone believes they have the children in mind when they plan their programs.

What is perhaps more worthy of note than how many tsunami dead we’ve seen, however, is how many other recent dead we have not seen.

The mainstream media showed, for example, no blood and guts resulting from the 9/11 attacks. Most of the people murdered that day were pulverized or vaporized, but not all. Some of the most horrific images were the sidewalk remains of those who leapt from the World Trade Center’s upper stories before the structures collapsed. The New York Times published a photo of a man diving, his body almost tranquil in flight, the implications of the image horrific. But nothing at ground level. None of the print press and none of the mainstream electronic press published anything at ground level. You could find those images on some hard-to-find web sites: skin and heads with insides elsewhere, with bodies looking like punctured balloons.

Those images showed what every cop and combat soldier knows: violent death trivializes and shifts to someplace you do not want to go every single thing you ever thought about life. But the press—individually or in some collaborative council—decided those images were too much for you to bear, so (unless you roamed the web) you never saw them.

Likewise the carnage in the Holy Land. How many reports have you read of Palestinian bombers with explosives strapped to their bodies, perhaps with added layers of nails to provide extra shrapnel to maim and mutilate whoever wasn’t close enough to be killed outright? How many reports have you read of Israeli tanks blowing up inhabited buildings or nervous Israeli soldiers shooting down ordinary people on their way to work or children on their way to school? And how many Holy Land images of shattered bodies, of a hand, a jaw, an emptied skull, of guts draped over the hood of a car have you seen?

Likewise the carnage suffered by US troops in Iraq. You’ve read about the numbers of U.S. dead and mutilated, and perhaps (if you watch PBS “Newshour”) you’ve seen head and shoulders studio photographs of the most recently killed soldiers. But how many images have you seen of American soldiers dead on the road, their eyes and mouths open, if they still had eyes and mouths? How many images have you see of the limbs blown off the thousands of amputees now filling VA hospitals? How many images have you see of body parts blasted into the roofs and seats and floors of Humvees they hadn’t gotten around to armorplating?

And likewise the far greater carnage suffered by Iraqi civilians. A study published in the British medical journal The Lancet put the dead civilians resulting from the American war of choice in Iraq somewhere around 100,000. Critics say that is off by at least 100%: the US has killed only 50,000 Iraqi civilians, they say. The scholars who did the Lancet study say they were conservative in their numbers, that there are probably far more civilian dead who remain uncounted because there is no one responsible for counting them and no one interested in counting them. However you figure it, there are a huge number of Iraqis who died because of American violence, and a lot of Iraqis who died because of insurgent violence. For every dead Iraqi, how many mutilated Iraqis are there? Two? Five? Ten? Twenty?

Where are their pictures, those dead and mutilated Iraqis? How many images have you seen of Iraqi children blown to dripping pieces of flesh, puddles of blood, scattered white chunks of bone? How many images have you seen of Iraqis who have lost hands, feet, eyes, jaws when bombs when off, when machine guns fired, when mortars fell, when vehicles blew up?

You’ve gotten words about those American and Iraqi deaths and mutilations, but precious few images. The images are parked in the periphery of the information spectrum, on web sites hardly anyone visits. Time doesn’t publish them, and neither does Newsweek, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Washington Post or the Buffalo News. You won’t see them on CBS, ABC, NBC, PBS, or CNN.

Why? Because the daily press and evening news are so attuned to our sensitivity or sensibility they just don’t want to offend us? Because their editors are old and literary enough to be crippled by T.S. Eliot’s fey line, “Humankind cannot stand very much reality?” Or because they just don’t want us to know what the words they hurl at us are really about?

I’ll tell you how powerful pictures are in a world of words. Three photographs changed American opinion about the Vietnam war: Eddie Adams’s photograph of Lt. Col. Nguyen Ngoc Loan blowing the brains out of a handcuffed prisoner on a Saigon street, Nick Ut’s photograph of Kim Phuc Phan Thi running naked down a Vietnamese road after her skin had been burnt off by napalm, and Ronald Haeberle’s photographs of the slaughter at My Lai. People in the U.S. saw those images and they said, “What the fuck are we doing there? Who are we when we can be doing things like that?” Those images trumped the politicians’ words.

Think about what the Abu Ghraib jpgs did to American opinion about the war in Iraq. They’re clumsy, low-res, amateur tourist photographs of ordinary folks having a little fun torturing some other folks nobody (they’d been told) cares about. And those low-res jpgs blew the cover off what the U.S. was really doing to Iraqis, what the U.S. government really thought about Iraqis. After those photos became commonplace, who—other than those idiots and ideologues who have shut off the upper stories of their brains—can look you in the eye and say, “We are in Iraq to make life better for Iraqis?”

But it is less and less likely that we’ll have an Eddie Adams or Nick Ut or Ron Haeberle showing us what we need to see to understand what we’re really doing in Iraq. During the US invasion of Iraq, almost all press photographers were imbedded, dependent on U.S. military support for their survival. (Unembedded press sometimes saw more than embedded press, but they had a far higher death rate.) Even with all the fancy technology that permitted a photographer on the ground to upload images directly to a satellite, few images that would piss off anyone in power ever made it off the ground, and the nearly all of the few that did were killed by editors stateside. Nowadays, photographers can’t go anywhere without a platoon of soldiers to protect them: they can’t roam the countryside, they can’t roam the streets of Baghdad or any other major Iraqi city. They don’t see very much and they are very careful about what they photograph, and their editors back home are even more careful about which of their images you and I get to see.

If ever there was a day to do it, this dawning day’s the one. Taxes blah, healthcare blah, No Child Left Behind blah. What’s true in your private heart? If you know it to be true for all mankind, then go with it. That’s all.

This post will probably be controversial to both people who read this thing, but I can’t help it. I have found it quite interesting how many news sources have been ready over the past two days to interpret bin Laden’s speech for us, but how few have offered to print or air more than a couple of the more inflammatory quotes. Of course, we don’t want to give airtime to a terrorist and a killer, lest we appear to condone, rationalize, or sympathize with what was done. I agree with the sentiment. But, having come of intellectual age in an environment where secondary criticism and analysis are eschewed in favor of sustained contact with the original source, my first instinct was to seek out the whole text. I couldn’t help it. It was natural curiosity. When your country’s sworn ideological nemesis offers you an explanation of the actions and motivations that have slowly been bringing your country to a boil for a period of years, isn’t it natural to want to understand? Not to condone, but to understand? One thing is clear, and probably expected: bin Laden offers a point of view that contrasts sharply with what we’ve been hearing from the news and government for three years now.

There’s a lot of rhetoric I don’t buy, and a lot of religious references I don’t understand, but one quality really stands out: It actually comes across as direct and honest. As much as you disagree with his motivations or his methods, I honestly believe he’s being more truthful than anyone trying to be elected to office. And when he matter-of-factly says that “security is an indispensable pillar of human life and that free men do not forfeit their security, contrary to Bush’s claim that we hate freedom,” I have no choice but to agree. Because, really, does anyone actually believe the freedom-haters line? The division between absolute good and evil? Not if you’ve got your brain turned on.

At one point, bin Laden mentions that “15,000 of our people have been killed,” meaning Muslims, not Al Qaida. Not wanting to take his estimate of the number of the dead at face value, I did some research, and came upon Iraq Body Count, who indeed put the estimate of civilians killed in the Iraq war between 14,220 and 16,350. When we consider (again, not to condone) that the attack that prompted all this killed 3,000 Americans—and we watch all these people waving their flags and their “We will never forget,” posters—what else can I conclude but that they already have forgotten? Wasn’t part of the pain and tragedy of that day that so many innocent people died in the crossfire of an ideological or political struggle that did not concern them? Is it so easy to dismiss five times that many innocent dead because they’re brown and talk funny and live so far away?

I spent a few minutes trying to hunt down the whole text of bin Laden’s speech. I finally found a complete, unedited transcript on Al Jazeera. Click “Read More,” for the complete text, and make up your own mind.

Praise be to Allah who created the creation for his worship and commanded them to be just and permitted the wronged one to retaliate against the oppressor in kind. To proceed:

Peace be upon he who follows the guidance: People of America this talk of mine is for you and concerns the ideal way to prevent another Manhattan, and deals with the war and its causes and results.

Before I begin, I say to you that security is an indispensable pillar of human life and that free men do not forfeit their security, contrary to Bush’s claim that we hate freedom. If so, then let him explain to us why we don’t strike for example—Sweden? And we know that freedom-haters don’t possess defiant spirits like those of the 19—may Allah have mercy on them.

No, we fight because we are free men who don’t sleep under oppression. We want to restore freedom to our nation, just as you lay waste to our nation. So shall we lay waste to yours.

No-one except a dumb thief plays with the security of others and then makes himself believe he will be secure. Whereas thinking people, when disaster strikes, make it their priority to look for its causes, in order to prevent it happening again.

But I am amazed at you. Even though we are in the fourth year after the events of September 11th, Bush is still engaged in distortion, deception and hiding from you the real causes. And thus, the reasons are still there for a repeat of what occurred.

So I shall talk to you about the story behind those events and shall tell you truthfully about the moments in which the decision was taken, for you to consider.

I say to you, Allah knows that it had never occurred to us to strike the towers. But after it became unbearable and we witnessed the oppression and tyranny of the American/Israeli coalition against our people in Palestine and Lebanon, it came to my mind.

The events that affected my soul in a direct way started in 1982 when America permitted the Israelis to invade Lebanon and the American Sixth Fleet helped them in that. This bombardment began and many were killed and injured and others were terrorized and displaced.

I couldn’t forget those moving scenes, blood and severed limbs, women and children sprawled everywhere. Houses destroyed along with their occupants and high rises demolished over their residents, rockets raining down on our home without mercy.

The situation was like a crocodile meeting a helpless child, powerless except for his screams. Does the crocodile understand a conversation that doesn’t include a weapon? And the whole world saw and heard but it didn’t respond.

In those difficult moments many hard-to-describe ideas bubbled in my soul, but in the end they produced an intense feeling of rejection of tyranny, and gave birth to a strong resolve to punish the oppressors.

And as I looked at those demolished towers in Lebanon, it entered my mind that we should punish the oppressor in kind and that we should destroy towers in America in order that they taste some of what we tasted and so that they be deterred from killing our women and children.

And that day, it was confirmed to me that oppression and the intentional killing of innocent women and children is a deliberate American policy. Destruction is freedom and democracy, while resistance is terrorism and intolerance.

This means the oppressing and embargoing to death of millions as Bush Sr. did in Iraq in the greatest mass slaughter of children mankind has ever known, and it means the throwing of millions of pounds of bombs and explosives at millions of children—also in Iraq—as Bush Jr. Did, in order to remove an old agent and replace him with a new puppet to assist in the pilfering of Iraq’s oil and other outrages.

So with these images and their like as their background, the events of September 11th came as a reply to those great wrongs, should a man be blamed for defending his sanctuary?

Is defending oneself and punishing the aggressor in kind, objectionable terrorism? If it is such, then it is unavoidable for us.

This is the message which I sought to communicate to you in word and deed, repeatedly, for years before September 11th.

And you can read this, if you wish, in my interview with Scott in Time Magazine in 1996, or with Peter Arnett on CNN in 1997, or my meeting with John Weiner in 1998.

You can observe it practically, if you wish, in Kenya and Tanzania and in Aden. And you can read it in my interview with Abdul Bari Atwan, as well as my interviews with Robert Fisk.

The latter is one of your compatriots and co-religionists and I consider him to be neutral. So are the pretenders of freedom at The White House and the channels controlled by them able to run an interview with him?  So that he may relay to the American people what he has understood from us to be the reasons for our fight against you?

If you were to avoid these reasons, you will have taken the correct path that will lead America to the security that it was in before September 11th. This concerned the causes of the war.

As for its results, they have been, by the grace of Allah, positive and enormous, and have, by all standards, exceeded all expectations. This is due to many factors, chief amongst them, that we have found it difficult to deal with the Bush administration in light of the resemblance it bears to the regimes in our countries, half of which are ruled by the military and the other half which are ruled by the sons of kings and presidents.

Our experience with them is lengthy, and both types are replete with those who are characterized by pride, arrogance, greed and misappropriation of wealth. This resemblance began after the visits of Bush Sr. to the region.

At a time when some of our compatriots were dazzled by America and hoping that these visits would have an effect on our countries, all of a sudden he was affected by those monarchies and military regimes, and became envious of their remaining decades in their positions, to embezzle the public wealth of the nation without supervision or accounting.

So he took dictatorship and suppression of freedoms to his son and they named it the Patriot Act, under the pretense of fighting terrorism. In addition, Bush sanctioned the installing of sons as state governors, and didn’t forget to import expertise in election fraud from the region’s presidents to Florida to be made use of in moments of difficulty.

All that we have mentioned has made it easy for us to provoke and bait this administration. All that we have to do is to send two  Mujahideen to the furthest point East to raise a piece of cloth on which is written ‘al-Qaida’, in order to make the generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic, and political losses without their achieving for it anything of note other than some benefits for their private companies.

This is in addition to our having experience in using guerrilla warfare and the war of attrition to fight tyrannical superpowers, as we, alongside the Mujahideen, bled Russia for ten years, until it went bankrupt and was forced to withdraw in defeat.

All Praise is due to Allah.

So we are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy, Allah willing, and nothing is too great for Allah.

That being said, those who say that al-Qaida has won against the administration in the White House or that the administration has lost in this war have not been precise, because when one scrutinizes the results, one cannot say that al-Qaida is the sole factor in achieving those spectacular gains.

Rather, the policy of the White House that demands the opening of war fronts to keep busy their various corporations—whether they be working in the field of arms or oil or reconstruction—has helped al-Qaida to achieve these enormous results.

And so it has appeared to some analysts and diplomats that the White House and we are playing as one team towards the economic goals of the United States, even if the intentions differ.

And it was to these sorts of notions and their like that the British diplomat and others were referring in their lectures at the Royal Institute of International Affairs (when they pointed out that) for example, al-Qaida spent $500,000 on the event, while America, in the incident and its aftermath, lost—according to the lowest estimate—more than 500 billion dollars.

Meaning that every dollar of al-Qaida defeated a million dollars by the permission of Allah, besides the loss of a huge number of jobs.

As for the size of the economic deficit, it has reached record astronomical numbers estimated to total more than a trillion dollars.

And even more dangerous and bitter for America is that the Mujahideen recently forced Bush to resort to emergency funds to continue the fight in Afghanistan and Iraq, which is evidence of the success of the bleed-until-bankruptcy plan—with Allah’s permission.

It is true that this shows that al-Qaida has gained, but on the other hand, it shows that the Bush administration has also gained, something of which anyone who looks at the size of the contracts acquired by the shady Bush administration-linked mega-corporations, like Haliburton and its kind, will be convinced. And it all shows that the real loser is . . . you.

It is the American people and their economy. And for the record, we had agreed with the Commander-General Muhammad Atta, Allah have mercy on him, that all the operations should be carried out within twenty minutes, before Bush and his administration notice.

It never occurred to us that the commander-in-chief of the American armed forces would abandon 50,000 of his citizens in the twin towers to face those great horrors alone, the time when they most needed him.

But because it seemed to him that occupying himself by talking to the little girl about the goat and its butting was more important than occupying himself with the planes and their butting of the skyscrapers. We were given three times the period required to execute the operations—All Praise is Due to Allah.

And it’s no secret to you that the thinkers and perceptive ones from among the Americans warned Bush before the war and told him, “All that you want for securing America and removing the weapons of mass destruction—assuming they exist—is available to you, and the nations of the world are with you in the inspections, and it is in the interest of America that it not be thrust into an unjustified war with an unknown outcome.”

But the darkness of the black gold blurred his vision and insight, and he gave priority to private interests over the public interests of America.

So the war went ahead, the death toll rose, the American economy bled, and Bush became embroiled in the swamps of Iraq that threaten his future. He fits the saying, “Like the naughty she-goat who used her hoof to dig up a knife from under the earth.”

So I say to you, over 15,000 of our people have been killed and tens of thousands injured, while more than a thousand of you have been killed and more than 10,000 injured. And Bush’s hands are stained with the blood of all those killed from both sides, all for the sake of oil and keeping their private companies in business.

Be aware that it is the nation who punishes the weak man when he causes the killing of one of its citizens for money, while letting the powerful one get off, when he causes the killing of more than 1000 of its sons, also for money.

And the same goes for your allies in Palestine [by which he means Isreal]. They terrorize the women and children, and kill and capture the men as they lie sleeping with their families on the mattresses, that you may recall that for every action, there is a reaction.

Finally, it behooves you to reflect on the last wills and testaments of the thousands who left you on the 11th as they gestured in despair. They are important testaments, which should be studied and researched.

Among the most important of what I read in them was some prose in their gestures before the collapse, where they say, “How mistaken we were to have allowed the White House to implement its aggressive foreign policies against the weak without supervision.” It is as if they were telling you, the people of America, “Hold to account those who have caused us to be killed, and happy is he who learns from others’ mistakes.” And among that which I read in their gestures is a verse of poetry, “Injustice chases its people, and how unhealthy the bed of tyranny.”

As has been said, “An ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure.”

And know that, “It is better to return to the truth than persist in error.” And that the wise man doesn’t squander his security, wealth, and children for the sake of the liar in the White House.

In conclusion, I tell you in truth, that your security is not in the hands of Kerry, nor Bush, nor al-Qaida. No.

Your security is in your own hands. And every state that doesn’t play with our security has automatically guaranteed its own security.

And Allah is our Guardian and Helper, while you have no Guardian or Helper. All Peace be Upon he who follows the Guidance.

The Economist, champion of the free market and all things economically conservative, whose delicious motto is “established in 1843 to take part in a severe contest between intelligence, which presses forward, and an unworthy, timid ignorance obstructing our progress,” has (albeit lukewarmly) endorsed John Kerry for president. All level-headed, non-Bible-thumping evolution-believing-in conservatives should take note of the implications.

“This time it was Mr. Bush who wavered between defensiveness and aggression. He stood there, scowling, with drooped shoulders and mouth pulled tight, listening to Mr. Kerry with all the attention and pleasure of a man clenching a dollar bill between his buttocks.”

—The Economist

George Soros has launched a website in support of his new campaign in the month leading up to the election, a campaign designed to focus voter attention on the war in Iraq and take his case to the American people for changing the direction of American foreign policy. You should read the whole text of his September 28 speech to the National Press Club in Washington, DC. Even if I didn't already agree with him, I'd still find it quite persuasive.

Or, if you prefer to laugh, you can just watch this instead.

The wind took it! No, wait. The sun was in our eyes! Rumsfeld’s new answer to whether or not there was a connection between Al Qaida and Saddam Hussein: “I have seen the answer to that question migrate . . . over a period of a year in the most amazing way.” How exactly does an answer ‘migrate’? Does it set off poorly-shod down the road with its children running behind? Does it pack all its things into the back of its minivan and careen down the highway? Perhaps it just recamps seasonally in search of good soil. Has he found his inspiration in the seasonal movements of birds? Or perhaps in the sun-parched hands of illegal Mexicans harvesting fruit?

Whatever the inspiration, that is now officially my favorite excuse, toppling Reagan’s “Mistakes were made” from its years-long top spot on the list. Admittedly, Reagan’s was more succinct, but in the name of succinctness he sacrificed many poetic possibilities. Good work, Rummy.

“Why, of course, the people don't want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally, the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship.”

“There is one difference,” I pointed out. “In a democracy the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars.”

“Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.”

—Herman Goering, Nazi Reichsmarshall and Luftwaffe Chief, interviewed by Gustave Gilbert. Goering was found guilty by the Nuremberg tribunal of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and crimes against peace. He was sentenced to death by hanging in 1946, but committed suicide with cyanide capsules just prior to his scheduled execution.

You thought I was just being a paranoid lunatic-fringe guy back when I was going on about the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), and I’m okay with that. It turns out that I was wrong. Or, more specifically, I wasn’t right. And by “not right,” I mean that the true nature and complexity of the situation hadn’t occurred to me. It still hasn’t. There are still many questions to which I’d like answers, but an article that appeared in today’s Washington Post stops just shy of making some pretty hefty accusations.

Perhaps you’ve been following the story on Lawrence A. Franklin, the Defense Department analyst under investigation for allegedly passing secrets to Israel through AIPAC, a pro-Israel lobbying organization. Perhaps you haven’t. I’ll leave it up to you to do the background research if you’re not familiar with the story. The interesting part to me about today’s article was the revelation that the discovery of Franklin happened quite recently in what turns out to be an investigation that dates back at least two years, an investigation about which Condoleeza Rice, Bush’s National Security Advisor, was briefed in 2001, according to this article in USA Today.

The overarching investigation was being conducted by the FBI into alleged spying on behalf of Israel by AIPAC, but was broadened after the seizure of documents from the home of Ahmed Chalabi, who for a while was the White House’s favored candidate for the Iraqi presidency, until it turned out that he most likely was in possession of a huge wad of counterfeit Iraqi currency (confirmed) and had been passing and/or selling sensitive US intelligence to Iran (alleged but probable). Had the administration known how dishonest he was, maybe they wouldn’t have pushed so strongly for his presidency.

Chalabi had been head of the Iraqi National Congress (INC), the exile group which had been receiving large amounts of cash from the U.S. government for years. The placement of many INC members on the Governing Council caused a stink in Iraq, as they were seen largely as U.S. stooges and most hadn’t set foot in the country for 20 to 40 years. The big stink about Chalabi, on the other hand, was that he had been sentenced in absentia to jail in Jordan for bank fraud. As MSNBC put it, “A Newsweek investigation, with which Chalabi cooperated, shows that his own and his family’s financial institutions were shut down by authorities in Switzerland, Lebanon and Jordan because of questionable practices and unsecured loans. The cost to investors and depositors was tens of millions of dollars.” So the administration did know how dishonest he was. And they still pushed for his presidency. What’s up with that?

MSNBC again: “Some American officials, particularly leading Pentagon hawks, regard him as a true democrat and a paragon of Iraqi patriotism, an aristocrat who gave up a potential life of comfort and ease to fight against Saddam at a time when few others dared.” Jim Lobe, published in AlterNet, gave more specifics about Chalabi’s relationship with the “Pentagon hawks” (keep these names in mind, we’ll see them again soon):

Within the administration, Chalabi worked most closely with those who had championed his cause for a decade, particularly neoconservatives close to Cheney and Rumsfeld—Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith and Cheney’s chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby.

Feith’s office was home to the Office of Special Plans (OSP) whose two staff members and dozens of consultants were given the task of reviewing raw intelligence to develop the strongest possible case for war. OSP also worked with the Defense Policy Board (DPB), a hand-picked group of mostly neoconservative hawks, which was chaired until just before the war by Richard Perle, a long-time Chalabi friend.

DPB members, particularly Perle, former CIA director James Woolsey and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, played prominent roles in publicizing reports by INC defectors and other alleged evidence developed by OSP that made Hussein appear as scary as possible.

The OSP, by the way, has since been disbanded. It was highly controversial, having been accused by many of being Rumsfeld’s own personal intelligence agency, whose mission was to twist and torment old intelligence until it seemed to suggest that Saddam Hussein had WMDs. It figured heavily in the “politicization of intelligence” problem in the 9/11 Report. Much of the intelligence that Bush cited in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq came by way of the OSP, some of it from Chalabi himself.

When it came to light, a surprisingly frank interview with Chalabi was published in the Daily Telegraph, a British newspaper, which quoted his reponse when asked about providing false intelligence to the Americans.

Mr Chalabi, by far the most effective anti-Saddam lobbyist in Washington, shrugged off charges that he had deliberately misled US intelligence. “We are heroes in error,” he told the Telegraph in Baghdad.

”As far as we’re concerned we've been entirely successful. That tyrant Saddam is gone and the Americans are in Baghdad. What was said before is not important. The Bush administration is looking for a scapegoat. We’re ready to fall on our swords if he wants.”

Lobe commented at the time: “It was an amazing admission, and certain to fuel growing suspicions on Capitol Hill that Chalabi, whose INC received millions of dollars in taxpayer money over the past decade, effectively conspired with his supporters in and around the administration to take the United States to war on pretenses they knew, or had reason to know, were false.” Either way, Chalabi’s family has extensive interests in a company that has already been awarded more than $400 million in reconstruction contracts, so he’s not hurting, despite his fall from grace.

But enough about him. I’m more interested in the “Pentagon hawks” mentioned above. For in today’s Washington Post article, we discover that “FBI counterintelligence investigators have in recent weeks questioned current and former U.S. officials about whether a small group of Iran specialists at the Pentagon and in Vice President Cheney’s office may have been involved in passing classified information to an Iraqi politician [that’s Chalabi] or a U.S. lobbying group allied with Israel [that’s AIPAC].” And who are they asking about?

Investigators have specifically asked about a group of neoconservatives involved in defense issues, including [Pentagon Undersecretary for Policy] Feith, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, Iraq and Iran specialist Harold Rhode and others at the Pentagon. FBI agents also have asked current and former officials about Richard Perle and David Wurmser, an Iran specialist and principal deputy assistant for national security affairs in Cheney’s office.

Richard Perle, incidentally, was formerly the chairman of the influential Defense Policy Board, until this article in the New Yorker forced him to step down amid accusations of conflict of interest (though he remains on the board). The meeting you may have heard about—the one days after September 11, 2001 made famous by Richard Clarke’s testimony, the one when the topic turned on how to use the WTC attacks to justify an invasion of Iraq—was a DPB meeting. Curiously enough, Chalabi was there as well.

Maybe these names don’t mean much to you. If we check the PNAC website, we find the “Statement of Principles,” which dates from 1997, where we find the following among the signatures (click the colored names for interesting anecdotes about their personal histories):

• Dick Cheney (currently Vice President)
• Donald Rumsfeld (currently Defense Secretary)
• Paul Wolfowitz (currently Deputy Defense Secretary)
• I. Lewis Libby (currently Dick Cheney’s Chief of Staff)
• Jeb Bush (currently Governor of Florida)
• Elliott Abrams (currently Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director on the National Security Council)
  “He was indicted by the Iran-Contra special prosecutor for giving false testimony about his role in illicitly raising money for the Contras but pleaded guilty to two lesser offenses of withholding information to Congress in order to avoid a trial and a possible jail term. He was pardoned by President George H. W. Bush along with a number of other Iran-Contra defendants in 1992.”—tompaine.com)
• Steve Forbes (currently publisher of Forbes magazine)
• Francis Fukuyama (Professor of International Political Economy at John’s Hopkins)
  Curiously, I just discovered but have not yet read a paper he wrote on social capital and civil society, a couple of ideas I’ve played with before in this forum.)
• Dan Quayle

It’s long past my bedtime, so I have to leave you to fill in the rest of the gaps. The point I wanted to make was not just that the same people who have been driving America’s recklessly hellbent foreign policy for the past four years are the same ones who signed onto a self-avowedly imperialistic policy advocacy group, because that’s old news. When Bush was looking for appointees in 2000, it’s as if he just skimmed through the roster of PNAC members to find himself a cabinet. What gaps were left he filled with oil company executives (Condoleeze Rice, for example, sat on Chevron’s board of directors). My point tonight is that, as if the first weren’t bad enough, the FBI are now apparantly asking questions about whether those same people, or others affiliated with them, might not have conflicting loyalties. Their ties to Chalabi certainly raise some good questions, and today’s Washington Post article raises other questions regarding Israel: “The officials whose names came up during questioning have strong ties to Israel. They also share a long-standing position on Iran and other radical regimes. Wurmser, Feith and Perle were co-authors of a 1996 policy paper for then-Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu titled ‘A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm.’ It called for removing Hussein from power in Iraq as part of a broad strategy to transform the region and remove radical regimes.”

So my big question is simply how wide the divide is between all this "freedom is on the march" talk and the real motives of the architects of the war. My preliminary guess is that it’s pretty damn wide. It would be bad enough if it were hypernationalism misleading our leaders into thinking that they can spread democracy militarily, when all it actually does is inflame the young, angry, unemployed Muslim men whose parents, siblings, and friends are dying in the crossfire. It would be far worse if what appears to be hypernationalism is actually a rhetorical device that obfuscates misplaced loyalty to another country or cause, or the exploitation of a tragedy and a national feeling of vulnerability to advance a years-long agenda, both of which, sadly, are within the realm of possibility.

The other question that I’d really like to ask, though, even if it makes me sound like I’m confusing reality with the X-Files, is why the same names keep popping up over and over again, with different affiliations, different job titles, different loyalties, different companies, but always the same names in power, making decisions that benefit each other and the people or companies they work for at our expense, appointing each other to various positions of power, pardoning each other when they get caught, and so on. It sort of makes a mockery of democracy and public accountability, doesn’t it?

Need more? The Christian Science Monitor has a Neocon 101 page just for you.

“To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that we are to stand by the president, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.”   —Theodore Roosevelt

“The point of public relations slogans like ‘Support our troops’ is that they don’t mean anything . . . That’s the whole point of good propaganda. You want to create a slogan that nobody’s going to be against, and everybody’s going to be for. Nobody knows what it means, because it doesn’t mean anything. Its crucial value is that it diverts your attention from a question that does mean something: Do you support our policy? That’s the one you’re not allowed to talk about.”   —Noam Chomsky

Watching the Republican convention last night, I was reminded of a joke I heard recently:

Q: How do you convince an American that you’re not slapping him in the face?
A: Tell him you’re not.

Normally, it’s only fringe publications like Mother Jones or The Nation that find it important to discuss the gap betweeen rich and poor in America. But The Economist, in a typically fact-laden fashion, tackled the question in a September 2003 article entitled “Would You Like Your Class War Shaken or Stirred, Sir?”:

Follow almost any Democratic presidential candidate around, and it won't be long before you hear this statistic. In 1980, the average CEO was paid around 40 times as much as the average worker; now the multiple is above 400. George Bush's tax cuts “for the rich”, say the likes of John Kerry, who formally announced his candidacy this week, must be scrapped to help those of lesser means. Meanwhile, pundits, notably Paul Krugman at the New York Times, have argued that a new “plutocracy” is rising.

By whatever measure you use, the richest Americans have done very well over the past few decades. According to the Census Bureau, the share of national income going to those in the top fifth of earners rose from 44% in 1973 to 50% in 2000. The share going to the top 1% rose to 15% in 1998, higher than it has ever been since the second world war, according to a recent study of tax returns by two economists, Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez.

Take wealth rather than income, and America's disparity is even more startling. The wealthiest 1% of all households controls 38% of national wealth, while the bottom 80% of households holds only 17%, according to the Economic Policy Institute (EPI). Around 85% of stockmarket wealth is held by a lucky 20%.

If the rich have been doing much better than other Americans in relative terms, the poor have failed to improve their lot as they did in the 1950s and 1960s. The wage incomes of the bottom 20% of households have barely grown in real terms since the mid-1970s. As for wealth, the bottom fifth has debts that exceed its assets, making its wealth a negative number. The bottom fifth's percentage of national wealth worsened from -0.3% in 1983 to -0.6% in 1998.

Admittedly, none of the above has much to do with Bush in particular, but it does lead to questions about a larger issue. With the Democratic party having to lean more and more to the center in order to gather a coalition necessary to compete with the Republicans and their faith-based economics, our range of options shrinks when choosing who to represent us in the government. When your only two choices are middle-right and “right-wing nutjob” right, you begin to suspect that some viable policy options are perhaps being left in a dark unswept corner somewhere with most of the country’s poorer and/or more darkly-complected folks. I certainly shouldn’t be criticizing Kerry when, despite my ambivalence or worse about him, he’s our best hope for returning this country to any level of decency and reasonability. Nonetheless, the Economist article ends by making a point that the muckrakers on the left have been shouting about in their free speech zones for years now.

. . . The tax policies of the Bush administration will probably only exacerbate the already wide gap between rich and poor. The inheritance tax has been all but scrapped. Marginal rates on top incomes have come down. Most important may be this year's reduction in capital gains and dividends taxes which, by some estimates, will provide a windfall to just the top 20% of households.

It is these “giveaways” that the Democrats are now concentrating on. But raising marginal tax rates, the Democrats' traditional solution to inequality, usually hits many people who regard themselves as middle-class, and does nothing to reduce the vast fortune of true plutocratic families, such as, well, Mr Kerry's.

Indeed, is the Harvard-educated Mr Kerry, who is married to a Heinz heiress worth $600m, any more an homme du peuple than George II, as some Democrats like to call Mr Bush? Howard Dean, the Democratic front-runner, may stress his occupation as a humble doctor, but he grew up in the Hamptons and Mr Bush's grandmother was a bridesmaid to his granny. As long as the presidency remains the shuttlecock of different scions of the north-eastern aristocracy, Americans may have a hard time thinking of any party as the champions of the poor.

In a much larger article about the aspects of Bush’s presidency that history will regard as most controversial, The Economist presents an analysis of the ways in which he has increased the power of the presidency. Again Reagan looks like a ray of hope in the darkness in contrast to Bush (and remember, for instance, how the former undid decades of work by the labor movement in a morning when he fired all the air traffic controllers?)

A subset of [the Bush administration’s] reaction against scrutiny is the use of what might be called government by small print: slipping additions into law at the last minute or tinkering with the wording of rules that implement laws. As a recent series in the Washington Post argued, such changes often appear minor but can have a big impact. By changing the word “waste” to “fill” in a rule governing coal-mining, for instance, the administration allowed an increase in strip-mining in West Virginia. By adding two sentences about scientific evidence to an unrelated budget bill, it gave itself increased authority to rule in regulatory disputes.

Perhaps the most disturbing way in which the administration has increased its power has been through its public-relations machine. Thomas Jefferson said long ago that a well-informed electorate is the most important constraint on government. By issuing partial and sometimes misleading information, the Bush administration has hampered such scrutiny.

Consider for instance the arguments for tax cuts. Here, Mr Bush made claims about the cost of the cuts and their distributional impact that he should have known were misleading. In 2000, he claimed the first round of cuts would cost $1.6 trillion over ten years, a quarter of the budget surplus at that point. On his own figures, the share was a third, not a quarter, and he arrived at the figure only through outrageous accounting gimmicks that he is now campaigning to forbid.

He also asserted that the cuts would provide “the greatest help for those most in need”, providing a Treasury study to back up his claim. In the past, Treasury studies have been impartial. But this one arrived at its conclusion by leaving out the parts of the tax cut that most benefited the wealthiest (such as the repeal of the estate tax). By any normal measure, the tax cuts have been regressive—hardly “the greatest help for those most in need”.

Taking facts out of context, politicising government studies and presenting anomalous examples as typical are hardly unique to the Bush administration. But they still do damage. The system of checks and balances—indeed, democracy itself—requires voters to be able to understand the impact of actions taken on their behalf, so they can apportion credit or blame fairly. If it is impossible to tell how much of the administration's arguments for war were vindicated or disproved, or who the tax cuts really helped, then proper public accounting is impossible.

Beyond that, members of the administration have occasionally acted in ways that have discouraged public debate directly. In May 2002, the White House's communications director, Dan Bartlett, argued in the Washington Post that Democratic criticisms of administration actions before September 11th were “exactly what our opponents, our enemies, want us to do.” Mr Ashcroft had earlier conflated civil-liberties activists with terrorist sympathisers, telling Congress: “To those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, my message is this: your tactics only aid terrorists.” All this came near to arguing that, after September 11th, debate itself could be treasonous.

Mr Bush has frequently said that voters will give their verdict in November, and that he looks forward to it. But quadrennial elections are not the only means of restraining government. The genius of the American system is that administrations must work within a system of checks and balances. These checks have themselves been checked.

Congress is the main competing source of power. It has become more like an adjunct to the administration. Information encourages public scrutiny. The flow has been reduced. The administration's actions are filtered through civil-service rules and procedures. The rules have been chopped and changed. A free press is essential to the working of democracy. Andy Card, the White House chief of staff, rejected that view, arguing “I don't believe you [the press] have a check-and-balance function.” On occasion, the administration has even crossed the line separating the interests of the state from the party by using taxpayers' money to finance advertising for the Medicare bill.

Almost all governments bend the truth. This one has seldom resorted to outright falsehood; instead, the administration has manipulated public information and breached basic standards of political conduct in Congress, the civil service and public debate. Whatever the merits of increasing presidential authority, Mr Bush has achieved his aim less by winning support for more power than by weakening the authority of other institutions.

I have probably mentioned that The Economist is one of the best magazines in print, and I have probably also mentioned that such a statement coming from my mouth surprises me most of all. After all, what business does a self-avowed anti-globalization liberal have advocating a magazine that champions the World Bank and the IMF as forces by which the world will be improved? Nonetheless, there is something refreshingly insightful about a magazine that describes political power and action by and large in the terms in which decisions are actually made, as opposed to the rhetoric in which they are usually couched after the fact when decisions which have already been made are finally presented to the public. There is also something startlingly refreshing about The Economist’s particular mix of fiscal conservatism and social liberalism, and for good reason.

The main advantage of conservatism, back in the good old days when Reagan was president (note that only the current state of affairs could one recast the Reagan era as a golden age), was small government, the kind that left many policy decisions to the states or, even better, to the munipalities, with the goal in mind that the laws would most accurately reflect the composition of the community at a microcosmic level. Fair and good, I suppose, from a theoretical point of view. Furthermore, he believed, the government being incompetent at best in most endeavors, it should simply not get involved whenever possible. I think most of us can agree with the sentiment behind that. But now, as the Christian Right continues to become more and more influential in politics, for reasons I simply cannot fathom, conservatism has become an unthinking march toward ignorance and regression.

Luckily for me, the folks at The Economist will not see me stopping here to watch their woods fill up with snow, so I can feel relatively free to reprint without permission some of their pertinent insights about the current administration. It is important to keep in mind that the magazine is the self-proclaimed champion of the free market, a typically conservative standpoint. Thus their criticism of George Bush reveals much about the nature of Bush’s conservatism.

This month, we have a study about poverty in America, which deserves to be quoted at length. First, though, take a look at the chart, and notice the year in which poverty began rising so abruptly. Coincidence? Now read on to see what the statisticians at the magazine have to say about how poverty is measured.

Contrary to popular belief, President George Bush’s campaign against terrorism is not the first time the United States has waged war on an abstract noun. In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson declared war on poverty. Then, as now, the administration had some trouble defining the enemy. The poverty line it eventually adopted, a line first drawn by Mollie Orshansky of the Social Security Administration, remains in place today, adjusted for inflation, but otherwise scarcely altered. Two parents, bringing up two kids, are judged to be poor if they live on less than $18,660 a year (for an unencumbered individual under the age of 65, the threshold is $9,573). On Thursday August 26th, the Census Bureau revealed that 35.9m Americans, or 12.5% of the population, fell below this poverty line in 2003, 1.3m more than the year before.

Whatever crude logic it possessed at the time, the Orshansky poverty line is by now quite arbitrary. Its originator calculated the cost of meeting a family’s nutritional needs and then multiplied this figure by three, because families in that era spent about a third of their income on food. The Census Bureau does not repeat this exercise to determine today’s poverty line; it does not recalculate the cost of an adequate diet or remeasure the share of income spent on food. It simply adjusts Ms Orshansky’s figures for inflation. Thus today’s dollar thresholds do not tell us how much a family or individual needs to get by in today’s America; they simply restate the cost of feeding a family in the 1960s in today’s prices, and multiply it by three.

As the Census Bureau is the first to concede, the poverty line is not a “complete description of what people and families need to live”. A more complete description would show that poor families now spend a far bigger share of their budget on housing (nearly 33%, according to the Bureau of Labour Statistics) than on food (just 13.2%). Child care, done for free by the mothers and grandmothers of the 1950s and 1960s, is now a big expense. Deducting this expense from the measured income of families would add 1.9m to the official poverty figure, according to estimates by Isabel Sawhill and Adam Thomas of the Brookings Institution.

But a better measure of poverty would also assess the various weapons the government deploys against it. The current measure ignores non-monetary benefits, such as food stamps. Nor does it count the earned income-tax credit, a benefit paid via the tax code to the working poor, which has become every policy wonk’s favourite way to redistribute money. The Census Bureau has already experimented with such measures, and is probably itching to finally retire the Orshansky line. But its political masters in the Office of Management and Budget may be nervous of any innovation that would raise the official poverty number. To the bureau, the poverty line may be a mere “statistical yardstick”, but to the administration, it is a political stick its opponents might use to beat it with.

But if the level of poverty is fairly arbitrary, changes in the level are quite telling. Poverty fell throughout the long economic expansion of the Clinton years, from 15.1% in 1993 to 11.3% in 2000. Particularly striking was the fall in poverty among single mothers and their families, from 35.6% (4.4m) in 1993 to 25.4% (3.3m) in 2000.

The bubble years were also a period of ferment in the country’s welfare laws. State handouts came with new strings and time limits attached. Single mothers were encouraged, often required, to work. In a 2000 study, Rebecca Blank, who once served on President Bill Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers, concluded that welfare reform—both the state experiments of the early 1990s and the federal overhaul of 1996—reduced the poverty rate among female high-school dropouts by about 5 percentage points.

But the latest census figures show a partial reversal of these gains. Poverty among the households of single mothers has increased from 25.4% in 2000 to 28% in 2003. Child poverty has also increased. In retrospect it is clear that Mr Clinton signed his 1996 welfare reform at an auspicious time: the economy was creating jobs faster than people were being ousted from the welfare rolls; the states implementing the reforms were flush with cash. But as Congress now debates how to revamp and extend the law (the 1996 act was due to expire in 2002), all of these stars have fallen out of alignment.

Firms are reluctant to hire, and even when they do, they are loth to offer health insurance. Employer-sponsored health plans covered 1.3m fewer Americans last year than the year before. State governments are strapped for cash; as a result, they are cutting back on child-care assistance. Many welfare recipients are now close to using up all the months of help they are entitled to. Unfortunately, those who remained dependent on welfare when times were good are the least likely to get a job now that times are not so good.

Benjamin Disraeli, a 19th century British prime minister, likened the rich and the poor to “two nations, between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy, who are as ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts and feelings, as if they were . . . inhabitants of different planets”. As a guide to the less fortunate of these two planets, the Census Bureau’s poverty figures are flawed and anachronistic. But they do show that welfare reform is not by itself enough. Unless the labour market tightens further this year, there will be many more Americans discovering the other planet for themselves in 2004.

We should keep all this in mind while counting the number of references the Republicans make to “compassion” at the convention this week.

When I was living in the Czech Republic and ended up spending all the free time I would usually spend with friends, since I had few, delving into the news and comparing multiple sources of the same stories, I briefly kept a separate blog called, straightforwardly enough, “You Should Be Reading The News More Closely,” which contained links to interesting stories that you had to dig to find, as well as contradictions in coverage that pointed to an interesting story lurking just below the surface. You can find in the bar to the right some links to regular sources of good information, or at least good questions that deserve better answers than I’ve heard so far, but since no one ever clicks them, I thought I’d spend a blog entry explaining what some of them are and calling your attention to them, in light of the impending decision we must all make about the current course of events and whether or not we want to take steps toward regime change at home. For those of you who are too lazy to “click here to continue reading,” I’ll put everything on the front page here. (I understand that your mouse finger can get pretty tired by the end of an internet session; I recommend the following: Finger Weights, The Stretch-Assager [a fine product with an unfortunate name], or The Gripmaster.)

So . . . Where should I start? If you watched Fahrenheit 9/11 and wished that Mr. Moore had substantiated some of his insinuations just a bit more, you might pay a visit to the Center for Cooperative Research, which rigorously documents all of its insinuations, though admittedly at times it sounds just a bit rabid. You have to do a little critical thinking of your own while you read. Nonetheless, it is one of the most interesting open-source news database projects I’ve seen, and I guarantee, if you spend a few hours with this site, you will inevitably come to the conclusion that there are far more questions than answers regarding the current administration’s methods and motives.

Ancient History is an interesting article (from the Cato Institute, a libertarian think-tank) that is very informative about the history of US intervention in the Middle East. If you’re curious about the Middle Eastern entanglements of the Bush family in particular (also alluded to in Fahrenheit 9/11), you’ll find more information than you probably want to know in this article from Kevin Phillips. Interestingly, the editorial first appeared in the LA Times but has since, as far as I can tell, disappeared from their website. Phillips, incidentally, is a former Republican strategist who worked under Nixon’s Attorney General. He gradually turned into a “muckraking populist,” to quote The Nation, and is responsible for two recent influential books: Wealth and Democracy (2003) and American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush (2004).

Everyone should be aware of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) and their agenda, which our current president has been following in lock-step since September 11, 2001. Many of his advisors, both current and those who have been forced to resign, have prominent positions in this definitive neocon organization. This article by Bette Stockbauer, from antiwar.com is also a bit rabid at times, but very informative. If you have the patience to read more in depth, you might as well visit the PNAC website and read their other position papers. They’re pretty open about their imperial vision. There is also a detailed and oft-updated website following their every move: pnac.info.

That’s all for today. There’s plenty more where that came from.

This is a pretty interesting article by Jim Hightower about the increasingly common practice of “free speech zones” that we’re starting to see wherever folks gather to do what used to be called protesting. The powers that be in both parties learned some valuable lessons in the 1960s, and have been learning other valuable lessons since then about using the media to manipulate public opinion. It’s a science now.

We have good motives. We have a grandiose vision of the ideal society: poverty has been abolished and racism is a bad memory of the distant past; everyone has free access to as much medical care and education as they want; there is plenty of leisure-time for everyone; exploitation has been eradicated. It is the noblest of dreams.

Yet we find when we try to take steps to bring this dream to fruition that people sometimes do not live up to our expectations. When we try to broaden the social safety net, there are complaints that the lazy people would take advantage of the welfare system, collecting money at home when they could work. When we try to make medical care available to everyone, there are complaints that the unhealthy people would have little incentive to take care of themselves, since the cure for their unhealth would cost them little or nothing out of pocket. When we try to ensure that people of all races, cultural backgrounds, and sexual orientations have opportunities to exercise their right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, there are complaints of many sorts.

So we begin to admit that we need to tweak things a little bit. First off, we start with the complainers, and we try to enlighten them. In doing so, we find that we must first remove many of their ignorant preconceptions about people of other races and sexual orientations. We explain how cycles of poverty and discrimination lead to conditions that make it appear that minorities are lazy or stupid. We explain that the complainers’ own revulsion at people of the same sex loving each other is just a cultural preconception, or if we’re brave, we explain that the revulsion is based on another example of culture-dependent ignorance that was written into an old book which, no matter how much they cherish it, may well have been written and/or perpetuated by people who wanted to systematize that oppression. We address their complaints about the lazy people and the unhealthy people by saying that, yes, we’re working on them too.

And so we are. We are busy explaining to the lazy people of color that their laziness is the product of years of poverty and discrimination. We try to teach them how to break those cycles. We explain to lazy people who lack color that their laziness is at least the product of poverty, and perhaps feelings of powerlessness. We try to convince them all to work hard to educate themselves in order to break those cycles, but we find that those who are not still children have had bad habits and preconceptions instilled deeply into them already. We find ourselves saying the same things to some of the same people over and over again, and they seem not to be trying to change. So we turn to their children instead, and we try to raise them up to higher standards. We teach them good values, like tolerance and ethics, even if those values put them at odds with their own parents and culture, even if it sometimes requires drastic steps such as forcibly removing them from the bad influences of their own homes and environments. We try to teach them to ignore the temptations of gangs, drugs, and teenage sex, while those same forces try very hard not to be ignored.

It soon becomes clear that the problem is deeply-rooted and web-like. Whenever we try to put our finger on the cause of the problem, we find that cause to be the effect of some other problem. So we turn to the more primary problem and find that it, in turn, is also an effect of something else. Sooner or later, we find a more primary problem that turns out to be reinforced by the effects of a problem we have already investigated. These problems are causing each other in a chicken-and-egg kind of way. It is very frustrating.

Yet we have so much faith in human nature, faith in the ability of humans to exceed and transcend their limitations. After all, we are the species who rose above the animalistic constraints of kill or be killed; through our ability to reason, we have developed keen faculties of morality and justice, faculties that have become so honed that they now dominate single individuals, perpetuating themselves through us and guiding our further development as a species. Who could imagine it to be impossible for people to succeed who set their hearts and minds to the task of eradicating the baser parts of our nature? If we lack the means, no one can deny that we have the desire.

But we also acknowledge that the individual is a very impressionable unit of the species, and that sometimes an individual can learn very unhealthy habits and unhealthy views when he lives in unhealthy surroundings. It soon becomes clear: The way to elevate those wayward individuals, to help them rise to the potential inherent in their nature, is to elevate the society in whose shadow they live. If the society is healthy, the impressionable individuals that constitute it will absorb the ambient good from their surroundings, and they will be healthy in turn. If we think about it further, we realize that a healthy society is not just a means to an end, though; it is a desirable goal in its own right.

Such lines of thinking give birth to social engineering. I was talking a while ago about social engineering in the context of communist Czechoslovakia and asking in what way communism—which began as a noble experiment firmly rooted in the belief that humans, through education and force of will, can completely reforge themselves and their society according to rational principles of social justice—went so horribly awry. This is based on the assumption that communism, as it was put into practice in the twentieth century, bore almost no resemblance to the Marxist vision that spawned it. It seems difficult to believe the alternative: that it began as a passionate vision to dominate the world through totalitarianism, in order that a few men with consonant-riddled surnames could crush the hopes and dreams of millions of people in order to maintain their slippery grip on absolute power. It may have grown to fit that description later, but it did not begin so.

The late 1800s were filled with many such Utopian movements in every part of the world. It was the heyday of the International Workers of the World, of populist politics in the US, of Mother Jones and Eugene Debs, of the Haymarket Riot. Most of these movements in Europe and America were reactions to the injustices and abuses of the unchecked rise of industrialism. Yet it was in Russia where the ideas actually gained enough momentum to foment a revolution, in a Russia that was still largely a feudal agrarian aristocracy with almost no industrial capacity. You can see passing references in both Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, who were largely concerned with issues other than social justice, to the socialists, communists, and anarchists whose ideas were starting to percolate into Russian society 30 or more years before the revolution in 1917.

Why communism degenerated from the most ambitious experiment in social justice in the history of mankind into such far-reaching totalitarianism is left to be answered by the historians who understand these things far better than I do. The interesting question for me is the pale shades of such thinking that lie at the base of the agenda of political correctness in the US.

Marx became a very popular political philosopher in the US in post-’60s American academia, probably because his vision of human civilization’s inevitable march toward justice meshed so well with the American left-wing intelligentsia’s own attempts to purge the nation of racial and economic inequality. (His popularity also attests to the size of the divide between him and totalitarianism; it has been perfectly safe to revere Marx without anyone assuming you endorse Stalin.) I seem to remember that Marx ranked very high (slightly below Jesus?) a couple of years ago on some well-circulated list of the most influential people in history. To people who have never read his writings, Marx’s ideas are very compelling, for they allow idealists to anchor an elaborate and majestic vision of the potential of human civilization on their faith in the malleability of human nature by means of education and proper upbringing. (This in turn owes much to Locke’s notion of the Blank Slate; for a very interesting discussion of the ecological relationship between this philosophy and modern conception of human nature, I whole-heartedly recommend the book of the same name by Steven Pinker.)

People who have read Marx’s writings, on the other hand, find him slightly less compelling, not because of any shortcomings in his ideas, but because he would also rank very high on a list of the most long-winded and tedious writers in history (just slightly below his ideological arch-nemesis, Adam Smith, who tops the list because he would often spend pages on end discussing the advantages and disadvantages of various ways to calculate, say, the value of a barrel of nails). I’m not droning on about Marx because I think the entire political correctness movement is pinned on his ideas. He merely seems like a good place to start when talking about the dangers of social engineering. One could just as easily begin with Orwell. (Not that I’m going to begin with either of them, though.)

The architects of our representative democratic republic were not just designing a fair and workable government when they donned their wigs and waistcoats in Philadelphia. The philosophical debate that led to the ideas they were trying to implement in a robust constitutional framework had been raging for centuries. The ideas that were penned into the constitution hinged on a wide range of assumptions and philosophical beliefs about human nature. After all, only if one considers people to be basically good and just creatures, capable of agreeing on and instituting laws for the common good, even if they must necessarily limit their own freedom in the process, can one even begin to imagine such a thing as democracy.

What about morality? I bring up the founding documents of the US only because the values expressed therein form such a cornerstone of how Americans view the web of relationships between the individual, society, and government. It’s actually a bit strange if you think about it: The Declaration of Independence was written 228 years ago by a group of men who were trying to justify that the King of England no longer had sovereignty over a certain group of his colonies. And yet we quote that rhetoric to this day when we talk about issues of right and wrong in both public and private spheres, in addition to such seemingly esoteric notions as unalienable rights bestowed upon individuals by their creator, rights that are somehow so bound up with our existence as human beings that they cannot be stripped away in the temporal world, except in Guantanamo Bay.

So wait a minute. . . am I to understand that there is an authority that can supersede the right of my government to legislate over me? and that this authority, without so much as a wave of its hand, can emasculate the vast power structure of the government, any government, when the government tries to overstep its bounds? Where is this authority? I would be honored to meet it.

Oh, my naïve little one, you say, you will never meet this authority. It is an abstract concept, an absolute morality, a philosophical argument—couched in the judicious use of the term “Creator” in that document because, as conventional wisdom has it, those men did not want to weave into the moral fabric of this new country any particular theological doctrine.

So wait a minute. . . you’re telling me that there is a philosophical argument with more power than my government with all of its guns, policemen, jails, litigation, procedures, and paperwork? And were my government to try to make a decree that contradicts that unseen and esoteric authority, channels exist by which I, a puny and insignificant individual, can triumph over such a vast and incomprehensible power structure because, you say, there are ways in which I have more power than the government, “power” in a far more fundamental sense of the word than simply that I elect certain people to office? that in fact the government only has a right to exist as long as I give it my consent? Nonsense.

But we have internalized the rhetoric that argues for that system; it sounds completely natural to think that way. The philosophical arguments of the founding fathers have insinuated themselves into our individual moral beliefs—to such an extent, in fact, that they form the framework on which many of our beliefs as individuals hang, without which many of those beliefs mean nothing—whether we realize it or not.

But the notion of absolute right and wrong is a beautiful and very dangerous idea. The founding fathers walked a very narrow path: They built a country on the notion of an absolute morality, but they did not enunciate its nature or its source. They merely plucked bits and pieces of it from the air and made those pieces axiomatic (“We hold these truths to be self-evident”): the equality of all individuals; the notion that government derives its power from the consent of the governed; the notion of unalienable rights.

There arises a difficulty, which is inherent in basing a government on a framework of notions rather than on a list of specific ordinances: When new issues arise that must be answered but have no precedent in the constitutional laws of the country, we can only hold these new issues up to the light and peer at them in order to try to figure out how they fit into the extant framework. This process turns a democratic republic into an ongoing philosophical debate about what is right and what is wrong, about the ultimate extent of the abstract moral authority that rules us.

I’ve been slicing and carving away at this amorphous problem for many paragraphs now, and I know you’ve been hoping I would get around to the point eventually. Lucky for you, I think I’m finally able to state the nature of the problem as I see it. There are two parts:

(1) The part of our individual moral framework that stems from internalizing the founding American rhetoric, arguably the system of beliefs which unites us as Americans, addresses the macroscopic scale of the government and the microscopic scale of the individual, but ignores everything in the middle (except the matter of the 50 states, but I’m lumping them in with the government). Thus it remains silent on the subject of social movements, which can gain far more momentum (power) than individuals, but are quite different in nature from government, though there are times at which social movements (women’s suffrage, civil rights, etc.) by virtue of their scale can approach that of government in their pervasiveness.

But recall also (2) the unenunciated nature of the absolute morality on which the nation is built. Since we have that assumption subtly built into the country’s structure, it is possible for you and I to agree on the rightness of the enunciated principles, but to disagree emphatically about their source. That of course is directly in line with the integrity of personal belief. However, depending on the extent to which we believe we have access to that source, it is possible for me to believe that my convictions are “righter” than yours. Since the nature of the underlying absolute morality is not explicitly stated, but only alluded, you with your Bible, for instance, can appeal to an absolute system and claim it to be the proper one to inform decisions about issues that are not explicitly addressed in the documents, while I with my liberal biases can appeal to a different absolute system and claim it to be the authority, and even she with her seemingly relative morality of multiculturalism, where no one has the right to undermine someone else’s own personal beliefs, even she can appeal to an absolute system. But because we disagree about the undelineated moral framework of which the particular laws are merely shadows, no one can prove that his or her system is in fact the absolute underlying authority.

Into this nebulous region between axioms and consequences, between macroscopic and microscopic, spring social movements which try to amass enough popular support to influence the government to legislate according to their beliefs on the similarly nebulous matters that occupy that region. The NAACP gets organized, the ACLU, NOW, the Moral Majority, and so on. As corporations have become global in scale, some of them amassing incomes that surpass the GDP of many small countries, we can even throw corporate and industry lobbyists into that group. Some groups, instead of lobbying the government, try to lobby individuals, in order to convince them that a certain belief, and hence a certain resultant action or choice of candidate, is the only morally defensible one. Each of these groups seems to work through channels inherent in the democractic system—by convincing people to vote a certain way, often by convincing them to hold a certain opinion; or by trying directly to influence the government to legislate so that galvanizing popular opinion is not necessary. (It doesn’t matter, for instance, if the majority of people in the country believe that abortion should be legal. If you can influence the lawmakers directly, you can see to it that your own moral beliefs become the law of the land, and popular opinion becomes largely irrelevant. To be fair, though, a parallel example on the other side of the political spectrum would be that of directly influencing lawmakers to legalize gay marriage, even though a majority of Americans finds it unpalatable.)

So sometimes, recalling the little parable that began this diatribe, we find ourselves unable by logical persuasion to convince people that we are right. But we are so certain of our convictions (how could it be otherwise?) that we find ourselves unable or unwilling to live in a society that doesn’t reflect them. And we are so certain that our beliefs are cut from the same cloth as the moral framework that clothes the society that we view contrary beliefs as unenlightened somehow, or prejudiced, or sinful, or backward.

So the problem seems to arise when one group views its social model as morally superior to another group’s, and tries to subvert the democratic process in bringing about a society that reflects their model. When we are arguing about ideas on their own merits, the better idea usually has a habit of rising to the surface. (The truth is its own best defense, after all.) But when we have a collision of conflicting moral frameworks, each with different assumptions built in, then there is no common ground on which to argue about ideas on their own merits. We instead, and often without realizing it, switch to arguing about the rightness and wrongness of axiomatic frameworks. Faggots are sinful, you say, because the Bible has decreed it, and so you cannot willingly live in a society that allows them to marry. But I don’t believe literally in the Bible, especially in the words of Paul, so I can’t accept your argument. But if I don’t believe in the Bible, you say, then I have no moral framework from which to argue; I have only a thorny briar of lies.

So what does it mean when you (more properly, your social movement) have a vision of how society should be, but many of the constituent members of that society seem not to share your ideals or, worse, even reject them? What does it mean to embark on a mission to change the individuals for the sake of a better society? In a pure idealized democracy, the kind that never actually exists except on paper, the society goes in the direction of the majority of the people. Even if the people are wrong, misguided, or stupid, they and no one else have the right to decide for themselves the nature of their society. One might argue that it was precisely to protect against such mob rule that our country was constituted as a representative democracy. In fact, only such reasoning can justify the existence of, say, the electoral college.

But consider whether or not a group of reformers who become frustrated at the ignorance of so many others—and thus deem it necessary to try to mould them in order that the sociological changes they have in mind can be pursued—seem inherently undemocratic somehow. For example, if 70% of the people in my town hate faggots, but I am a member of the 30% who respect the rights of homosexuals, what do I do? I can accept that I am in the minority and accept that the majority should have their way. But I am also educated and open-minded, so clearly I see that those 70% are closed-minded and prejudiced; in order for the society to reflect the set of values I know to be more enlightened, I work to convince those 70% that they are unenlightened and need to elevate their moral code.

To keep the example simple, let’s follow this route: When they refuse to listen, I decide to become a teacher, and I try to impart my wisdom to their children before the children fall into their parents’ bigoted and prejudiced ways. Those parents, for their part, decide to home-school their children, in order to instill in them the proper moral underpinnings and protect them from being corrupted by my vacuous and hedonistic non-beliefs. We both believe we have right on our side, and we both have a vision of society toward which we are working, but we are both subverting the democratic process by using education as social engineering. While far more extreme examples of this exist (the Hitler Youth in Germany and the Young Pioneers in Czechoslovakia come to mind), using education as a means to indoctrinate young people into a given moral framework is a very dangerous practice, no matter how well-intentioned.

For example, to bring the matter to an issue of current significance, consider the example of the US government working to foster the development of the mujaheddin in Afghanistan in the 1980s to resist the Soviets The US, through USAID and the University of Nebraska, spent millions of dollars developing and printing textbooks for Afghan schoolchildren. The textbooks were filled with violent images and militant Islamic teachings, part of a covert attempt to spur resistance to the Soviet occupation. For instance, children were taught to count with illustrations showing tanks, missiles and land mines. Lacking any alternative, millions of these textbooks were used long after 1994; the Taliban were still using them in 2001. In 2002, the US started producing less violent versions of the same books, which George Bush said would have “respect for human dignity, instead of indoctrinating students with fanaticism and bigotry.” Bush failed to mention who created those earlier books (paraphrased from cooperativeresearch.org; see also The Washington Post, 3/23/2002 and CBC, 5/6/2002.) It was justified at the time because we were working to thwart the efforts of the Soviets, who were most likely being similarly underhanded. In the name of spreading freedom and democracy, we subverted both. It wasn’t the last time.

I was confronted by the same issue (though admittedly in a less insidious form) when I was studying to be a teacher at U of I several years ago, when in Educational Policy Studies 201 we read excerpts from the primers for school children that were put into wide circulation in the US at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. The primers superficially taught seemingly apolitical skills such as counting, reading, and writing, but the examples they used subtly communicated a certain value system: industriousness, loyalty to an employer, the dependence of the nuclear family on a one-wage-earner/one-care-taker model, and so on. The schools were in effect being used to circumvent the dominant social model of the day. When the industrialists found it difficult to convince enough adults to work in the factories—after all, they were used to being self-employed craftsmen in the old-world model—the industrialists turned to the schools in an attempt to engender the value system that was most conducive to the social order they envisioned.

Nonetheless, I earlier mentioned the possibility that we are united as Americans by our common belief in the founding American rhetoric. (It’s either that, or that we happen to inhabit the same landmass; I don’t know about you, but the latter doesn’t arouse much patriotism in me.) A necessary part of citizenship, then, a necessary part of having a functional society at all, is the communication of moral standards from one generation to the next, and between individuals laterally, all with a conduit to the legislative body who can make laws that reflect the values of the people. There is no other way to have a coherent society. So part of the process to which I’ve been objecting so emphatically is in fact a necessary part of living among people. A society simply cannot exist without it. I freely admit that it is unavoidable to indoctrinate children into some moral framework, unavoidable to try to influence your peers and contemporaries to see the world the way you do. But which moral framework should be taught in the schools? Which should influence the laws? Which should we pledge allegiance to? Which should we fight to defend? I have had these questions for years now, even before my EPS class put them into words for me, and I still have no answer.

But I do know this: Whether it’s an attempt to breed an army in Afghanistan, an attempt to build a worker’s utopia in Russia, an attempt supposedly to breed ignorance and bigotry out of children in America, or an attempt to protect children from the dangers of the secular world and raise them in a good Christian value system in which the parents wholeheartedly believe—despite the extent to which I agree or disagree with the particular motives of any particular group of people who would use social engineering as a means to an end, I cannot help but to find the whole thing creepy.

The sun is showing today in very small patches and strips, but the ground is still muddy and my laundry, which has been hanging on the line for two days already, is still damp. It's early February, and after weeks of bitter cold, the coldest of which seemed to take place during our trip to Krakow, it has warmed up into what must be the low 50s.

Whenever I become fed up with the state of things in America, the first impulse is always to wipe away and start from scratch, to expunge and bleach the temporary condition and head back to the start, when the system and the government and the people were fresh, before too much arbitrary sediment had accumulated (see Hawthorne's The Custom House). I doubt that is ever an impulse in Europe, except for those countries that are just reemerging after being subsumed under totalitarian states, and even then the urge is not to scratch everything and start from nothing. The urge is instead to return to how things would have been, how they had been before WWII, or WWI, or however far you have to go back in order to find the golden age. For the Czech Republic, it's between the wars, because that was their only time of independence, a little golden age between the Hapsburgs and the Germans, later to be handed over to the Soviets. For the Balkan states, you have to go further back, and even then you might not find the golden age, because for them it was the Ottomans and the Hapsburgs arguing and alternately conquering and reconquering them for centuries, and probably, if I knew my history a little better, I could say that it was the Romans before them.

Self-determination. Something that Americans rarely think about, because for almost the whole history of our nation, we have been self-determined. In fact, it is the act of declaring self-determination that we mark as our independence day, not anything to do with the actual fighting or winning of the war. We are, so we think, impervious to external attack and external influence, and we aim to keep it that way. Am I just hung up on the people vs. government issue? I keep coming back to that, have been for years. I keep getting angry at how those in control, whatever their party affiliation, embrace the noble lie, making sure the people have just enough to eat and just enough to hope for to keep them happy in their regular lives of eating and working and screwing and making babies and trying to retire. When things are too bleak there is revolution, or if not revolution, then unrest and political shakeups and uncertainty. This is not what we want. It is in the best interest of the politicians to make sure that times are calm and uneventful, that there are no crises. People react and vote you out of office when crises arise. From what I can tell, the political parties differ only in how much they want to make the people happy. For the Republicans (ignoring the rhetoric and looking just at their actions), business and war-making are the top priorities. For the Democrats, at least health care and job security make it somewhere on the list of priorities.

Maybe this is the wrong way to approach it. For the people who make the rules, it's not an issue of people vs. government. I'm looking at symptoms and trying to deduce the policies that produce them, which is only possible when every policy is single-minded and 100% effective. And, at least to some extent, I do understand the need for various noble lies. The truth is that we do need to spend a decent amount of money on the military and on national defense. The truth is that the world is somewhat Hobbesian, that in some ways it is a zero-sum game when it comes to international relations. The truth is that most of the citizens of this country cannot or do not want to spend their free time debating the merits of multilateralism versus unilateralism. So they watch reality TV and politicians appoint and reappoint each other to and from various boards of directors and take care of the messy details with which we do not want to concern ourselves. You get the government you deserve, I have heard said.