Today is the last day of Black History Month. While of course every day should be one where we reflect on the contributions of all peoples to improve American democracy, this month has always held a special place given the unique experience of black people in the United States. From property, a people who were quintessentially American yet judged less than human fought to perfect American Democracy in the face of unimaginable bigotry, violence, and evil. For me, that is worth (at least) one month out of the year.
This year, I have chosen to reflect on the complexities of the Black experience by offering a series entitled, “Black History Month is…” Sure, black history month is an obligatory reciting of great deeds, firsts, and inventors. But as I have gotten older, I have come to see that history is much more complex. I still cling to The Black Book (my favorite tome of coming of age negro awareness). Slowly, I have to accept that black folks are like all people. Despite the inherently politicized nature of our experience in the West and our special “Blue’s Sensibility,” some black folks choose to fight against white supremacy and State power, while others choose to be bystanders (or even literally and metaphorically get in bed with it). The collective experience of Black America is not just one of resistance where 24/7, of everyday, and of every hour, we are engaged in some great freedom struggle against the Racial State and white hegemonic power. No, sometimes the true fruits of liberty are the freedom to simply “be.”
In total, while there are everyday Black heroes whose success in a society–where upon birth they were immediately deemed less than, separate and unequal, or doomed to second class citizenship by virtue of their blood quantum–was measured by living a good life, there are others less heroic, less brave, and perhaps not even commendable who are also part of Black history. I tried to capture just a little of that complexity with my “Black History Month is…” series.
As we end the month, I would like to add one more wrinkle to how we conceptualize what does (or does not) count as the experience and history of Black Americans–an intervention that may be provocative (or even offensive) to some. I would suggest that Black History Month is also everyday white people doing the right thing. This is no pat on the back, false praise, and get out jail card for those white Americans who want to imagine that in mass their people were on the right side of history in this country–any fair minded appraisal of the Black Freedom Struggle and how White America was complicit with and benefited from racism would immediately throw that assertion into the dustbin of history.
When I speak of everyday white folks doing the right thing, I mean those quiet white people who nudged history forward by selling homes to black folks in “restricted communities” when such a choice could have meant professional suicide. I mean those quiet white folks who were in charge of integrating their offices and places of employment…and did so fairly and professionally. I mean those quiet white folks who reached out to the first wave of black students who crossed the colorline and bravely entered what were formerly all White, Jim and Jane Crow spaces. I mean those quiet white folks who served honorably and side by side with their black brothers and sisters in the aftermath of President Truman’s groundbreaking military desegregation order. I mean those white bank officers who approved loans for blacks when the convention was that we should be denied. And of course I mean the Freedom Riders, Abolitionists, and those who were down like John Brown despite the risk to their own lives.
In total, I mean those quiet white folks who did the right thing not because they were especially righteous, moral, or noble. Some acted on principle. Others acted on self-interest. And a few were simply being themselves and knew of no other way to behave.
The choice to stand with or against power is simply that–a choice. When some white folks, especially of the post-Civil Rights, post-racial, Benetton Obama generation say, “I don’t know what to do about racism! I am just one person” Or “that was so long ago, I shouldn’t feel guilty about the past, most white people would have done the same things if they lived then and we should judge history in its context!”
In response, I simply say that “people make choices.” You can choose to act. You can choose to stand pat. White people, as human beings, with full agency, make that choice everyday. For example, white people like Charles Moore, legendary photographer of the Civil Rights Movement, chose to do the right thing. Here, and in that way, I hold white folks to the same level of accountability and justice as I do my black and brown kin.
I don’t know if that bar is set to high or too low. But the standard exists. And this generation of white Americans is part of a continuum of history to which they are responsible. Ultimately, Black History Month is everyday white people doing the right thing. In this month, as well as year round, white folks should be at least as reflective regarding this fact as their fellow black Americans.
By Matthew Phelan || WhoWhatWhy.com
It seems unusual for a staid, respected publication (one that has received three National Magazine Awards in just this past decade) to start treating a celebrated journalist (who himself has won two National Magazine Awards in just this past decade) as if he were nothing more than a paranoid crank.
It seems unusual, but it’s exactly what the staff of Foreign Policy has done to Seymour Hersh, following a lecture the venerated reporter gave at Georgetown University’s campus in Doha, Qatar. You may know Hersh as the dogged investigator who exposed the My Lai Massacre during Vietnam. You may know him as the staff writer for The New Yorker who published some of the earliest pieces on Abu Ghraib in May 2004. You might even know him as the man derided and then vindicated for claiming that Dick Cheney was running a secret assassination squad right out of the Vice President’s office. (In truth, the squad was and is a bipartisan affair, initiated under Clinton and still operative under Obama.)
Yet, given the Foreign Policy staff’s derisive commentary on Seymour’s January 17th talk, you would think he was some credulous rube midway through his first Dan Brown novel.
Hersh “delivered a rambling, conspiracy-laden diatribe here Monday,” Blake Hounshell reported on the magazine’s Passport blog. His delusional fantasia: The existence of ties between the U.S. Military’s Joint Special Operations Command and a secretive Catholic order called the Knights of Malta. As Hounshell elaborates:
[Hersh] charged that U.S. foreign policy had been hijacked by a cabal of neoconservative “crusaders” in the former vice president’s office and now in the special operations community:
“That’s the attitude,” he continued. “We’re gonna change mosques into cathedrals. That’s an attitude that pervades, I’m here to say, a large percentage of the Joint Special Operations Command.”
He then alleged that Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who headed JSOC before briefly becoming the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, and his successor, Vice Adm. William McRaven, as well as many within JSOC, “are all members of, or at least supporters of, Knights of Malta.”
Hersh may have been referring to the Sovereign Order of Malta, a Roman Catholic organization commited [sic] to “defence [sic] of the Faith and assistance to the poor and the suffering,” according to its website.
“They do see what they’re doing — and this is not an atypical attitude among some military — it’s a crusade, literally. They see themselves as the protectors of the Christians. They’re protecting them from the Muslims [as in] the 13th century. And this is their function.”
“They have little insignias, these coins they pass among each other, which are crusader coins,” he continued. “They have insignia that reflect the whole notion that this is a culture war. … Right now, there’s a tremendous, tremendous amount of anti-Muslim feeling in the military community.”
Hounshell, Foreign Policy’s web editor, has questioned Hersh’s reporting before, first speculating on the identity of a Hersh source, then on that hypothetical source’s credibility. However, this particular incident was unique in that it has yielded a small brushfire of attention, including three additional response pieces at foreignpolicy.com, reblogging by angered Catholic groups and a write-up in the Washington Post.
The next day, the post was followed by an elaborately sarcastic “hot tip,” written to Hersh open-letter style by Foreign Policy contributing editor and Washington Post special military correspondent Tom Ricks:
Hey Sy, a friend with good military connections tells me that U.S. special operations forces were covertly involved in the Knights of Malta’s stalwart defense of the island in 1565 against the Ottoman Turks. Lifting the siege was easy because the Turks turned tail when they saw those Ma Deuce .50 caliber machine guns.
This categorically high-handed snark came with the added force of Ricks’ being a Pulitzer Prize winner himself and the author of two blistering accounts of the Iraq war: Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq and its General Petraeus-centered sequel, The Gamble. He has been covering the military beat for the Post since 2000, performing double duty there and at Foreign Policy after it was acquired by The Washington Post Company in 2008.
That same day, FP associate editor Joshua Keating provided an ‘FP Explainer’ piece entitled “Who Are the Knights of Malta — and What Do They Want?” dismissing Hersh’s claims with the conclusion that:
There’s not much evidence to suggest that the Knights of Malta are the secretive cabal of anti-Muslim fundamentalists that Hersh described. (For the record, when contacted by Foreign Policy, McChrystal said that he is not a member.) But they are certainly an anomalous presence in international politics and have provoked their share of conspiracy theories over the years.
Then, two days later, Hounshell produced a supplemental post defending himself from a chorus of disgruntled commenters and Salon.com’s Glenn Greenwald. “I thought it was self-evident that several points Hersh made were off-base and conspiratorial,” Hounshell began, “but perhaps it’s worth spelling things out for everyone.”
Let’s do the same.
Just how “off-base and conspiratorial” are Hersh’s claims? Who are the Knights of Malta, exactly, and what has been previously reported of their ‘special operations’ and government ties?…
[READ the rest of this story WhoWhatWhy.com]
We should all know by now that Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s attacks on organized labor (and similar attacks by Republicans in Ohio, Michigan, and beyond) are not about balancing budgets. They are about undermining the single most important institutional force opposing exclusive big business control over U.S. politics. As Fox News anchor Shep Smith succinctly explained in a moment of refreshing candor for the network: “Bust the unions; it’s over.”
Now, it’s not at all surprising that, upon taking power, the Republicans would act quickly and forcefully to bolster their base (strengthening the power of corporate America) and disempower their political foes in the labor movement. Such is the essence of hard-nosed politics.
When Democrats take power, we would expect the converse: strong, swift, and sweeping actions to protect Americans’ right to join a union. Right?
Wrong. Instead of voicing a full-throated defense of workers’ rights, Democrats have consistently regarded protecting collective bargaining, updating ancient labor laws, and eliminating rampant corporate abuse of the system to be special interest concerns, of no real priority to the party as a whole.
Carter, Clinton, Obama. Again and again, labor has been told that its legislative priorities should take a back seat to more pressing matters, and again and again moments of political opportunity have passed with no action being taken to shore up labor rights.
The picture is not pretty:
Throughout the country there has been a severe erosion of the right to organize….Grim statistics…point to a regime of fear, intimidation and isolation which characterizes many American workplaces—and denies workers the right to organize. One in ten US workers who attempt to organize is illegally fired, with reinstatement a lengthy bureaucratic procedure taking up to three years. The US remains one of the only advanced industrial jurisdictions where the majority of workers are denied basic employment protection, such as requiring “just cause” for employment termination. Rather, they are subject to the doctrine of “employment at will” essentially permitting employees to be fired at the employers’ whim.
That’s Elaine Bernard, writing in 1993, shortly after Bill Clinton was elected. Bernard outlined a variety of labor law reforms urgently needed at the time. Sadly, they’re pretty much the exact same ones needed today. When he wasn’t busy passing NAFTA, Bill Clinton didn’t end up finding a lot of time to fight for these types of changes. Since then, the percentage of the American workforce represented by unions has only continued to decline.
With Obama, labor came prepared with a clear legislative focus: the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), which included card check neutrality and other important reforms. Obama vowed to support it.
Yet, once again, while business geared up for an aggressive fight, Democrats considered unions’ demands to be not particularly pressing. The movement was told to wait, and we saw headlines like, “Labor’s ‘priority’ on back burner.” Late soon become never: after Democrats lost their sixty-seat majority in the Senate in late 2009, EFCA was considered dead.
Harold Meyerson, who has provided some of the better coverage of Democratic failures to support labor, writes in the Washington Post:
By my count, this marks the fourth time in the past half-century that labor’s efforts to strengthen workers’ ability to organize have been deferred by the Democratic presidents and the heavily Democratic Congresses they supported. In 1965, about the only piece of Great Society legislation not enacted was the repeal of the Taft-Hartley Act provision that gave states the power to block unions from claiming as members all the employees in workplaces where they had won contracts. In 1979, as American management was beginning to invest heavily in union-busting endeavors, the first effort to reform labor law failed to win cloture in the Senate by one vote as President Jimmy Carter stood idly by. In 1994, President Bill Clinton responded to a similar labor-backed effort by appointing a commission to recommend changes in labor law to the next Congress—which turned out to be run by Newt Gingrich. And last year, by asking his labor supporters to wait, Obama ensured—unintentionally, of course—that the next effort to revive organizing must wait until the next overwhelmingly Democratic Congress.
Meanwhile, the percentage of American workers in unions steadily declines. During the 1965 effort, more than 30 percent of private-sector workers belonged to unions. In 1979, the share was 21 percent; in 1994, 11 percent; and in 2009, just 7.2 percent. When the next chance to rewrite labor law comes around, the rate of private-sector unionization could be down to trace elements….
In a deunionized America, it’s not clear who, if anyone, will fund campaigns such as those the unions funded this year, for universal health care and financial regulation. It’s also not clear who, if anyone, will persuade working-class whites to vote Democratic. (Over the past half-century, white male union members have voted Democratic at a rate 20 percentage points higher than their nonunion counterparts.)
No nation has ever been home to a middle-class majority absent a sizable labor movement. In their failure to advance labor’s prospects, the Democrats condemn themselves to a future of fewer Democratic voters and their nation to a future of mass downward mobility.
Meyerson elaborates on his argument in a longer article here.
Admittedly, card check neutrality was a hard sell in the Senate. Its demise was not entirely the fault of the administration, which had to deal with the Blue Dogs and Benedict Arnolds such as Senator Arlen Specter. But the Democratic Party as a whole bears responsibility for an inexcusable failure to pass the rest of the reforms in EFCA. As Nathan Newman explains, even without card check, they might have secured important provisions ensuring faster unionization elections, stronger penalties for employees who illegally fire pro-labor employees, and arbitration for first contracts—all things that could make a significant difference for those organizing the hostile private sector.
As it is, employers can continue to break the law with near impunity, and unions continue their long decline. This is not just a disaster for working people. It is a recipe for self-destruction on the part of the Democratic Party.
Republicans like Scott Walker and his well-heeled donors get it. Unfortunately, the Democrats don’t.
(Cross-posted from the “Arguing the World” blog at Dissent magazine.)
The Madison rotunda is full of a spiritual presence in the thousands of shouting citizens. Unlike many of the collective incantations I’ve witnessed in recent years, there is that progressive anger mixed into the singing. At the root of the power of the right-wing apocalyptic Christianity is the collective ecstasy of singing and praying, repeating beliefs in unison… We have seen the results: the warmongering and homophobia and earth-hatred that grips our politics. For years the progressive community has been flummoxed by the strength of the personal claim that a right-wing fundamentalist can have…
In Madison there is the very rare demonstration of a politically Left spirit world, a whirlwind of vibrating smiles and flung arms and hands – and the spectacle is like a presence crashing through from Paul Robeson, from Sojourner Truth, from Emma Goldman. It is a coming back of the great marches in the 1930’s around Union Square that were labeled “labor turmoil” by the New York Times – and now the Times is doing that again.
We departed Madison with memories of the Labor and Civil Rights movements, but also we could feel the Battle of Seattle. The student-labor coalition, the race, gender and class diversity in the rotunda, took us back to November of 1999. And we knew that the stacking of references from the past, of movements and martyrs that we could name, was a kind of defense against the strongest feature in the rotunda, which was how in the present tense it was, in the Spirit, inspired, “in-spirited.”
A grandmother from Eau Claire, Wisconsin, stops Savi and Lena and me on the marble balcony, and begins to confess it all, her whole life, she is wide-eyed and singing her words – and she will tell us her history up to that moment. She is a life-long nurse who raised a family with her electrician husband Hal. Her present moment is so glorious that she is pouring her life through it. We just stand there and take it in. She tells us her name again, and then starts over by reciting a memory that has been attending her all day, about how she was playing the clarinet in the high-school band about 50 years ago, and the horn section got the wrong signal and went out across the football field all by itself. And then this little laughing lady in the ginger-colored coat looks over the edge of the balcony and screams “Union Power!” into the massive rotating brew of shouts.
People are finding their lives in Madison. Or, their lives are living things and are finding them. It’s hard to figure it out but it’s easy to see. A methodical thief wants to take their money from them, but the seizure by this returning presence of life, this Spirit, is overwhelming the old subject of the Tea Party governor. You start by shouting “My life matters!” and then a roaring cataract comes up through your body and the language triples in volume and the words change to “My life is here now!”
By Robert Greenwald and Derrick Crowe
The latest general to find himself excoriated in the pages of Rolling Stone, Lt. Gen. William Caldwell, should resign immediately for using psychological operations, commonly known as “psy-ops” against U.S. lawmakers visiting Afghanistan. If he will not resign immediately, President Obama should fire him.
Caldwell is one of the most pivotal military officers in President Obama’s failing escalation strategy in Afghanistan and is charged with training the Afghan National Security Forces. According to Rolling Stone, he pressured reluctant psy-ops personnel into putting their talents to use to try to manipulate lawmakers into providing more funds and troops for a war that Americans don’t support.
First of all, it doesn’t matter whether anything Caldwell tried succeeded in changing legislators’ minds. The use of funds and resources dedicated to psychological/information operations to influence any American citizens, much less those who control the purse strings for your pet project, is illegal on its face. It doesn’t matter if they used the most advanced techniques available to influence behavior or simply working on beefing up PowerPoint slides and handouts. If Caldwell directed people paid and trained out of the propaganda purse to help influence U.S. citizens, he broke the law. And breaking that law intentionally, even defiantly (his spokespeople reportedly shouted “It’s not illegal if I say it’s not!” when challenged.), is alone worthy of his dismissal.
Beyond the simple matter of a pivotal ISAF official breaking a very clear law even when he and his staff were made aware of their behavior’s illegality, Caldwell’s actions convey a dangerous and disturbing attitude towards Members of Congress and Senators. The Rolling Stone article reports that Caldwell wanted “pressure points” on lawmakers that he could “leverage” to “get inside their heads.” His staff wanted to know how they could “secretly manipulate” legislators “without their knowledge.” This behavior and mentality goes way beyond advocating for one’s preferred projects and policies. Caldwell in his staff seem to view the civilian branch of the government as a kind of target.
The alarming disrespect and aggression in Caldwell’s and his staff’s reported behavior may not have provided as many sensational quotes as those given by McChrystal and his staff prior to his canning, but their posture toward civilian control of the military is far, far worse. That posture comes with a serious amount of resources that could do real harm to our democracy. According to a 2009 report by the Associated Press,
This year [2009] the Pentagon will employ 27,000 people just for recruitment, advertising and public relations — almost as many as the total 30,000-person work force in the State Department… [T]he Pentagon’s rapidly expanding media empire… is now bigger in size, money and power than many media companies.
$547 million goes into public affairs, which reaches American audiences. And about $489 million more goes into what is known as psychological operations, which targets foreign audiences.
Just for comparison, petroleum giant BP spent “only” $7.3 million on lobbying Congress last year. If behavior like Caldwell’s isn’t forcefully curtailed, the Pentagon could potentially spend well over 135 times that amount with a State-Department-sized specialized workforce to promote this ugly war that Americans don’t support, and our voices will be washed out of the democratic process.
Brave New Foundation’s Rethink Afghanistan campaign is calling for Caldwell’s immediate resignation (or firing, if he will not resign). If we can get 10,000 signatures, we’ll deliver the petition to Congress and the White House next week. With Congress out of session this week, it’s up to us to speak out on this before it gets swept off the front pages and under the rug. Please help us stand up to the misuse of our dollars on propaganda and sign our petition today.
If you’re fed up with this war that’s not making us safer and that’s not worth the cost, join Rethink Afghanistan on Facebook and Twitter, and Meetup with others who want this war to end.
It’s illegal in America now to buy or sell a human being, but a recorded telephone conversation between a Republican governor and a guy he thought was a billionaire benefactor shows that it’s still possible to own a politician.
Wisconsin’s Republican Gov. Scott Walker didn’t have time to talk to Democratic leaders or union officials about his anti-union legislation – a proposal that has incited protests by tens of thousands for more than a week in Madison. But he jumped on the phone for 20 minutes this week when told the caller was billionaire David Koch, who was Walker’s second largest campaign contributor, who provided $1 million to a GOP fund to attack Walker’s opponent and who bankrolls radical libertarian organizations and the Tea Party.
Republicans like Walker, owned by billionaires like Koch, are fulfilling demands from corporate interests that government “free” enterprise by slashing corporate taxes and regulation. Over the past three years, America has suffered the consequences of a government under-funded after tax breaks to the rich and under-performing after years of lax regulation. The result: a growing federal deficit, the Wall Street collapse, the BP oil spill and the deaths of 29 Upper Big Branch miners. Still, Republicans want more government atrophy. That would leave only one restraint on corporate control of the economy, environment and government.
That one restraint is labor unions. A union is workers using their constitutionally-guaranteed freedom to assemble, the right to get together as a group, in this case a labor organization, to negotiate collectively with employers for better wages, benefits and working conditions.
Workers who gathered together in unions over two centuries in this country have succeeded in raising their wages, as well as the wages of non-union workers in competing industries. Union workers secured improved working conditions so fewer were killed on the job. And they achieved creation of the federal Occupational Health and Safety Administration, which protects the safety of all workers. Over the decades, unions played a major role is obtaining legislation barring child labor, standardizing the 40-hour work week, and creating both Social Security and Medicare.
Similarly, studies show union successes enhance the lives of all workers in a state. In anti-union states, the average worker earns $5,333 less a year, the proportion of people without health insurance is 21 percent higher and the rate of workplace death is 51 percent higher. In addition, there’s evidence that union workers improve quality. Currently, after receiving an education from union teachers, Wisconsin youngsters collectively score second highest in the nation on the ACT/SAT college admission tests. By contrast, the five states barring teacher unions rank at the bottom of the pack: South Carolina dead last at 50th; North Carolina, second last at 49th; Georgia third from last at 47th; Texas fourth from last at 47th, and Virginia ever so slightly better at 44th.
Still, Wisconsin Gov. Walker wants to destroy his state’s teachers unions. Two studies determined that public workers, that is those employed by governments such as teachers, firefighters and police officers, earn less than their counterparts in the private sector when both benefits and education are factored into the calculation. It wasn’t union workers, in the public or the private sector, who caused states’ financial crises. That was gambling on Wall Street, which ravaged the economy. Still, Republican governors across the country are demanding that government workers pay.
The government workers in Wisconsin already agreed to accept Walker’s financial demands – that they pay more for their pensions and health care. This negates Walker’s contention that this dispute is about the budget. The governor is demanding more than those financial concessions. He wants the legislature to cripple the unions’ ability to bargain for improvements in the future. In his “budget repair bill,” he would strip government workers of their right to negotiate over working conditions and benefits. They’d be able to discuss wages but could never get an increase above inflation.
This is union busting. At the demand of corporate interests. And Walker is joined by Republicans in Ohio, Indiana, Oklahoma, Tennessee and others in attempting to do it, both to private and public sector workers.
This is not about money. It’s about controlling America. Corporations have bought Republicans, who now chant the corporate mantra that government coddles its citizens with the likes of mine and food safety rules.
Walker’s eagerness to talk to David Koch illustrates this. Koch and his brother Charles own the second largest privately-held company in America. Only the fortunes of Warren Buffett and Bill Gates exceed the Kochs’ $35 billion. They’ve used that money to finance the supposedly-grassroots Tea Party and conservative groups like the Americans for Prosperity Foundation (APF) that have funneled money into anti-reform policies – including attempts to reverse environmental and health care legislation.
It’s a giant circle. Koch got Walker elected. The Koch-backed Tea Party now rallies in Madison against the public employees. The Koch-financed APF bought $320,000 in TV ads against the public workers. Other Koch-financed GOP governors are sending letters of support to Walker. In his few weeks as governor, Walker passed legislation to lower tax rates for and limit damage awards against businesses like the Kochs’. In addition, tucked into the anti-union bill is a provision that would enable Walker to sell the state’s power plants to the Kochs without bids or state agency review.
Corporations are accomplishing their goal of shriveling government to the point of ineffectiveness so “enterprise” is “free” to run rogue. Now with their purchased politicians, corporations are trying to do the same to unions – the only organization other than government that has traditionally effectively defended working Americans.
In the recorded conversation between Walker and a liberal blogger posing as Koch, Walker accepted an offer of a vacation trip from the “billionaire” if he “crushed” the public employee unions and said his effort was to get “our freedoms back.”
That’s exactly right. This is a contest between the excesses of “free” enterprise and the constitutionally-protected freedom of assembly. And getting “our freedoms back” means wresting them back from corporations.
While the US government expresses outrage over the brutality of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi toward his own people, we’re missing a complex but significant wrinkle that ties Qaddafi to America’s cover-up of the true path to war in Iraq.
In May, 2009, a man named Ibn Shaikh al-Libi supposedly committed suicide while being held in a Libyan jail. Al-Libi is a deeply, deeply interesting fellow. Back in 2002, he was tortured by Egypt under US direction. It appears that the reason the US government had him tortured was not to stop some imminent attack on the United States, but to generate alleged—and false— links between Al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein that could justify invading Iraq.
Al-Libi was captured and sent to Egypt, where under severe torture including waterboarding, he related what turned out to be false information about purported Saddam-9/11 links. Al-Libi later explained that he provided that material because that’s what his captors wanted to hear, and it ended his torture.
Nick Baumann wrote about it in 2009 in Mother Jones:
Al-Libi was the man whose false confession, obtained under torture, of a link between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda provided the Bush administration with its casus belli for war with Iraq. It didn’t seem to matter that al-Libi’s claim that Bin Laden had sent operatives to be trained in the use of weapons of mass destruction by Hussein’s people didn’t make any sense. “They were killing me,” al-Libi later told the FBI about his torturers. “I had to tell them something.” A bipartisan Senate Intelligence committee report would later conclude that al-Libi lied about the link “to avoid torture.”
More on this at The Washington Note, where former Colin Powell aide Lawrence Wilkerson weighed in.
Given the enormity of what al-Libi’s revelations represent, then his continued presence and ability to witness the true background to the Iraq invasion made him a grave threat to the Bush-Cheney administration and the potential vulnerability of its leading lights to war crimes prosecution.
Thus, the fact that he suddenly “killed himself” while being held by Qaddafi’s police state at least raises the question of whether Qaddafi was doing a favor for the US. Of course, by 2009, when al-Libi suddenly died, Obama had become president—but it’s safe to say that deep, covert cleanup operations don’t end with an inauguration.
With the world delighting in the abdication of the dictator Mubarak in Egypt and now the Libyan Qaddafi’s potential demise, the least we can do is examine the threads back to our own country. If we do not pay attention to these things, we are all culpable.
Image Credit: (thefullwiki.com)
al-Libi BEFORE serious torture
Behold the New Right’s latest manufactured scandal. What is the over/under on how long before this video becomes the Fox News rage of the day?
Let’s parse the description which accompanies the clip on the website Founding Bloggers. It reads:
“Wow. Just wow. What do you get when SEIU aggressive progressives are confronted with the antithesis of their world view, a black gay conservative American? Their racist heads implode, of course!In the video below, SEIU thugs hurl vile personal verbal attacks at a free and independent thinking black homosexual conservative American.”
We don’t need the genius of Noam Chomsky or George Lakoff to analyze the semiotics at work in the above passage. Just as with the Herman Cain liberal racism framing, the New Right has once more discovered victimology, the politics of grievance, and political correctness. Notice the emphasis: this conservative “victim” is described as “free,” “independent,” “thinking,” and “American.” As a bonus, the subject of the video is also the Other and now because of his political orientation is doubly marginalized. Thus by implication, liberals, progressives, people of color–and now our GLBQT brothers and sisters who are not Right-wing quislings–are not free, independent, thinking, or American.
Question: is the discovery of “racism” by Right-wing reactionaries the unintended consequence and hell-spawn blowback of 3rd wave feminism’s development of the critical framework known as intersectionality?
Long time readers know that I love counterfactuals. I also find prediction markets compelling intellectual exercises as well. In that spirit, let’s collectively work through the newest Right-wing echo chamber Dunning-Kruger talking point meme.
So then, a game: What will be the next group that Right-wing reactionaries rush to defend against liberal racism? Some preliminary entries:
1) One legged libertarian hermaphrodites?
2) Overweight, left handed millionaires?
3) Tall blondes who read Ayn Rand and belong to their local university’s Objectivist Society?
4) Tea Party tea baggers who are discriminated against in the labor market because of their felony status?
Who would you add to the list?
Nothing says “sanctity of life” better than cervical cancer, breast cancer, and HIV!
That’s why on February 18th, so-called “pro-life” members of the House of Representatives, voted 240 to 185 to defund Planned Parenthood, a premier women’s healthcare provider for nearly a century, serving 3 million women a year in its 800 centers across the country. The leader of the crusade, Representative Mike Pence (R Indiana), prides himself on being “a Christian, a conservative, and a Republican, in that order,” promising during his campaign, ” to deliver … legislation that will prevent abortion providers like Planned Parenthood from receiving a single dime from the federal government.” The fact that abortion is legal aside, 97% of Planned Parenthood’s services are NOT abortions, but rather cancer screening and prevention, STD testing and treatment, contraception and general women’s health care, ranging from high blood pressure to urinary tract infections. But Pence apparently, didn’t get the whole Jesus healing the sick thing–the lepers, the blind, the deaf, the mute, the blood-disease afflicted, the dropsy-sufferers, the hand-withered, etc. (which in all fairness you miss if you blink while reading the bible, since Jesus’s healing appears only 22 times and only in the Book of Matthew… and Luke… and Mark… and John). But Pence has decided to throw out the unaborted baby out with the healing bath water.The resolution still has to pass the Senate. In order to get the Vote Yes to Life and No to Health! campaign going in the Senate, here are our top 10 names for the amendment.
- The Anti-Pap-Test Amendment: Planned Parenthood provides nearly one million Pap tests each year.
- The Pro-HPV Bill: Pap tests screen for HPV (Human papillomavirus), a disease which at least 50%of sexually active men and women get at some point in their lives. Approximately 20 million Americans currently have HPV and another 6 million people become newly infected each year. But this amendment means that even more people would contract the virus and the genital warts it causes!
- The Pro Life, Pro-Cervical Cancer Bill: Pap tests also screen for, help prevent and lower rates of cervical cancer, which, though highly preventable and treatable, is one of the top 5 killers of women.
- The Anti-Mammogram Bill: Planned Parenthood also provides 830,000 breast exams and mammograms each year.
- The Pro-Life, Pro Breast Cancer Bill: These exams screen for breast cancer, which approximately 200,000 women will be diagnosed with and 40,000 women will die from this year. But if this bill passes, we will be able to get those numbers up even higher! As fewer women have access to these life and breast-saving exams, more women will lose their breasts and lives to cancer!
- The Pro-HIV Amendment: Planned Parenthood provides nearly four million tests and treatments for sexually transmitted infections, including HIV. If the Pro-STD Amendment passes, imagine how many more people will not only have untreated STDs, but will unknowingly spread them to other people! With HIV, chlamydia, gonorrhea, syphilis, herpes and more, the possibilities are infinite!
- The Pro-Unplanned Pregnancy Bill: Planned Parenthood services help prevent more than 612,000 unintended pregnancies each year. But if the Pro-Unwanted Pregnancy Bill passes, there could be 612,000 more unplanned or unwanted pregnancies and countless more women without access to contraceptives, resources and education
- The Anti-Fertility Bill: Just as Planned Parenthood helps women avoid unplanned pregnancies, it helps those who want to be pregnant get pregnant with male and female infertility tests, resources and information. But if the Anti-Fertility Bill passes, who knows how many hopeful would-be parents will be hopeless and child-less!
- The anti-general Healthcare Bill: Planned Parenthood also provides general health care, such as anemia testing, cholesterol screening, diabetes screening, physical exams, flu vaccines, help with quitting smoking, high blood pressure screening, tetanus vaccines, and thyroid screening. This Amendment would increase rates of disease and even death for countless women! In all fairness, at least the Republicans are consistent in their anti-health care stance.
- The pro-UTI Bill: Planned Parenthood tests and treats UTIs or Urinary Tract Infections, which 1 of 5 women have at least once, and consist of burning pain during urination, an urge to urinate when your bladder is nearly empty, feeling like you need to urinate all the time, difficulty controlling when you urinate, lower abdominal pain or back pain, and blood and/or pus in your urine! This amendment would mean more pain and more pus! What could be better?
So that’s what they mean by from welfare to work. First you go force the poorest Americans into the workforce, then you go after their bargaining power. Wisconsin has long been the eye of this storm.
“We have an environment in Wisconsin in which any poor family can climb out of the despair of poverty and pursue the American dream.”
So said former Wisconsin governor Tommy Thompson, singing his own praises to the Heritage Foundation back in the early ’90s. By the time Bill Clinton ended the federal welfare program in ‘96, Wisconsin’s W-2 program had already cut off AFDC entitlements and forced poor moms to work for benefits. That pushed thousands of poor women into the labor market. Average wages were around $7.00 an hour; homelessness rose, as did the number of children in foster care; Milwaukee’s black infant mortality rate went up 37%, and as soon as the 90’s bubble burst, unemployment and poverty swelled.
Thompson called his policy “compassionate”– and that’s the problem. It redefined what was morally acceptable to do to poor people, and with a whole lot of help from strategically funded media, the same reasoning wormed its way into the national mind. Democrat Bill Clinton boasted about “ending welfare as we know it,” and signed a brutal ‘96 bill, casting it as doing RIGHT by the poor. Now that’s the same language being used to take down the unions.
Inside the dark Victorian mansion of the Bradley Foundation in benighted Milwaukee, there must be smiles all around. The same ideologically-driven outfit that paid for the task force that devised Thompson’s welfare plan is now backing Walker’s drive to criminalize collective bargaining.
In fact, as Wisconsin journalists reported with alarm two years ago, the CEO of the Bradley Foundation, Michael Grebe, was Scott Walker’s campaign chair and the head of his transition team. Bradley has long treated Wisconsin as its radical policy science lab. It must be itching to carve another notch in its community-destroying cane.
Paying for politicians is child’s play. To crib from the debt peddlers: pushing right wing policy is costly. Actually pacifying workers? Priceless.
The F Word is a regular commentary by Laura Flanders, the host of GRITtv and editor of At The Tea Party, out now from OR Books. GRITtv broadcasts weekdays on DISH Network and DIRECTv, on cable, and online at GRITtv.org and TheNation.com. Follow GRITtv or GRITlaura on Twitter and be our friend on /*<' + '/script>'); })();/*]]>*/
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