Accountability for Thought Crimes

The brouhaha over the speech by Barack Obama’s pastor is troublesome. We here in the United States don’t have double standards. We’re above that – our standards are triple, quadruple. Typical of any great power where citizens are deeply indoctrinated from birth, any sentiment expressed against our country and its activities are automatically held up for ridicule and condemnation. Those who hold themselves up for leadership have to profess deep and abiding love for the motherland, and commissars and brownshirts are on the lookout for transgressions. Even if the perceived sin is minor or disconnected from the candidate, he is held accountable.

So I note with interest that Barack Obama has been called to task for 1) not wearing a lapel pin showing the flag; 2) not holding his hand over his heart during the national anthem; 3) having a wife who implied that in times past she had not “really” been proud of her country; and 4) having a pastor who knows a little history and gave some emotional expression thereto.

Standards were no less severe in the old Soviet Union. Commissars were really proud all the time.

Thoughtful journalists are now analyzing the speech by The Reverend Jeremiah Wright for ideological purity. It’s not that the reverend is not allowed to express his thoughts freely. We pride ourselves in allowing free expression. But we do punish it severely. (We never allow thought criminals to appear on TV or be published in newspapers, except to be ridiculed.) The Reverend Wright obviously committed thought crime. The only question is, should Barack Obama be held accountable for the crime?

Most say yes – he is guilty by association. Some are withholding judgment – yes, there is some sort of crime here, but let’s withhold full imputation of guilt until the exact nature of the crime is detailed. Gotta hear the whole speech.

It’s not a matter of extremism. All manners of extremism are expressed daily in our land, though I must admit that when everyone is extreme, no one is extreme.

Take for example the beliefs of Pastor John Hagee, who has endorsed John McCain. Hagee’s views are probably not extreme here in the home of the brave, hence the free pass. But he has called the Catholic Church a “great whore”, a standard fundamentalist view, and believes that the Unites States should launch a first strike on the sovereign nation of Iran, thereby triggering Armageddon. Billions will die in that event, but fundamentalists, giving way to base sadism, rejoice in that.

John McCain says he is “very honored” by Hagee’s support, though it must be said that he is concerned about losing the Catholic vote. That’s rational.

I’m slow and thick, so bear with me: We only hold politicians accountable for thought crimes that involve criticism of the United States? The expression of hatred for the Catholic Church or a death wish for the mass of humanity is common, not extreme, and therefore not punishable?

I come in contact with this every day. Our atmosphere is oppressive, rigorous orthodoxy is vigorously enforced. But we also have a first amendment. We are different from the Soviets in that we don’t put people in jails or asylums for speaking out against the homeland. We’re more thoughtful than that. We merely marginalize these people and excoriate anyone even remotely associated with them.

You gotta have your mind right. And the lesson here is that if we associate with anyone who expresses thoughts that are not patriotic, there is accountability.

I got it now. Barack Obama, you are guilty of thought crime. Account for yourself.

How the U.S. Manufactures Terrorists

The following article exposes a disgraceful situation. It is unfathomable that a country as rich as ours does not provide basic foodstuffs and medical care to the Iraqi people. We could also repair of sewage and electrical systems that we destroyed in the First Gulf War. It’s been seventeen years!

The Iraqi people, once a proud and wealthy country with subsidized health care and education to the highest levels, has been decimated by two brutal and barbaric attacks, one in 1991, the other in 2003. There are apparently no serious efforts to put the country back on its feet.

After five years it rings hollow to say that the Bush Administration is merely incompetent, or to blame the victims, as Americans are wont to do. At a certain point one has to admit the possibility that the policy might well be destruction of the country, of scattering its factions to the winds, this to allow for for permanent military occupation and thereby control of its oil.

That Iraqi people happen to live atop that oil? That is the problem. They’ve been a damned incovenience from the very start.

I challenge any who have, by display of bumper-stickers and other courageous acts, supported this war. Defend, if you would, the unconscionable human toll that has followed the military occupation and conquest of Iraq, 1990 to present.

Childhood Is Dying

Inter Press Service
By Dahr Jamail and Ahmed Ali*

BAQUBA, Mar 10 (IPS) – Iraq’s children have been more gravely affected by the U.S. occupation than any other segment of the population.

The United Nations estimated that half a million Iraqi children died during more than 12 years of economic sanctions that preceded the U.S. invasion of March 2003, primarily as a result of malnutrition and disease.

But childhood malnutrition in Iraq has increased 9 percent since then, according to an Oxfam International report released last July.

A report from the non-governmental relief organisation Save the Children shows Iraq continues to have the highest mortality for children under five. Since the first Gulf War, this has increased 150 percent. It is estimated that one in eight children in Iraq dies before the fifth birthday: 122,000 children died in 2005 alone. Iraq has a population of about 25 million.

According to a UN Children’s Fund report released this month, “at least two million Iraqi children lack adequate nutrition, according to the World Food Programme assessment of food insecurity in 2006, and face a range of other threats including interrupted education, lack of immunisation services and diarrhoea diseases.”

IPS interviewed three children from different districts of Baquba, the capital city of Iraq’s volatile Diyala province, 40 km northeast of Baghdad.

Firas Muhsin is seven, and lives in Baquba with his mother. His father was killed two years ago by militants who shot him in his shop.

Firas attends school four hours every day near his house. On rare occasions he gets to play with neighbours’ children, but always under the eyes of his mother.

Firas is allowed to move no more than ten metres from the house; his mother is afraid of strangers. Kidnapping of Iraqi children is common now, and many are believed to have been sold as child labourers or as sex workers.

Iraqi officials and aid workers have recently expressed concern over the alarming rate at which children are disappearing countrywide in Iraq’s unstable environment.

Omar Khalif is vice-president of the Iraqi Families Association (IFA), an NGO established in 2004 to register cases of the missing and trafficked. He told reporters in January that on average at least two Iraqi children are sold by their parents every week. In addition, another four are reported missing every week.

“The numbers are alarming,” Khalif said. “There is an increase of 20 percent in the reported cases of missing children over a year.”

Firas spends hours each day sitting at the door looking at people. The door is his only outlet. In the afternoon, his mother calls him inside to do his homework. After dinner, his big hope is to watch cartoons — if there is electricity from their private generator.

The mother faces a shortage of kerosene needed just for heating. “My children feel cold and I cannot afford kerosene,” she told IPS.

Many children Firas’s age do not get to school at all. According to the UN, 17 percent of Iraqi children are permanently out of primary school, and an estimated 220,000 more are missing school because they and their families have been displaced. That adds up to 760,000 children out of primary school in 2006.

These are in-country figures, and do not include the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children and youth whose education is interrupted or ended because their families have fled to other countries. UNHCR estimates that at least 2.25 million Iraqis have fled their country.

Qusay Ameen is five, and lives with his mother, father, two sisters and a brother. His father was a sergeant in the former military, and is now unemployed. He receives a monthly pension of 110 dollars. He tries to support the family by selling cigarettes on the roadside. Qusay’s mother is a housekeeper. Qusay hopes to begin school next year when he turns six.

After breakfast, always something simple like fried tomato with bread, Qusay wants to play, but he has nothing to play with but a small broken plastic car his brother found near the neighbour’s door. He spends most of the morning playing with this car. He seems happiest when he gets to visit his neighbour’s house, because they have a swing in the garden.

Like most Iraqi children now, Qusay has grown used to being in need. He rarely gets sweets, or new clothes.

The family house is incredibly small — one bedroom and a place used as both kitchen and bathroom. Everyone sleeps in one room, which is extremely cold through the winter months. There are not enough beds or covering, and everyone has to sleep close together for warmth.

The house has few basic necessities, and of course no television or useful household appliances. There is a small kerosene cooker used for both cooking and heating.

According to the UN Children’s Fund, only 40 percent of children nationwide have access to safe drinking water, and only 20 percent of people outside Baghdad have a working sewerage service. About 75,000 children are among families living in temporary shelters.

Ali Mahmood, 6, has lived with his uncle in Baquba after his parents were killed by a mortar explosion two years ago in random shelling by militants. Next year he will join primary school near his uncle’s house.

Ali’s days are alike, and quiet. His only friends are his uncle’s children. When they go to school, he simply spends his time alone. It does seem the uncle’s family is not able to look after him as well as his own might have. His uncle Thamir is doing his best, but life is difficult, and Thamir has responsibility for a big family.

Ali is deprived of just about everything in childhood; he has no place to play, or things to play with. And he has nobody to think of his future.

And already, he has responsibilities waiting; he has been told he must take care of his younger brother when he grows up.

Firas, Qusay and Ali are all children, but none the way children should be.

(*Ahmed, our correspondent in Iraq’s Diyala province, works in close collaboration with Dahr Jamail, our U.S.-based specialist writer on Iraq who has reported extensively from Iraq and the Middle East)

Launching Swiftboats

Propaganda is easy to defeat. Sunlight is all it takes. Once a person is aware that something is propaganda, it loses its effectiveness. Therefore, much of the battle in American politics is about credibility – propaganda has to look like real news. Crude attacks and distortions have to have a credible basis.

Americans are swimming in propaganda, blissfully unaware. But that’s another story. It doesn’t do any good to talk about it, because Americans also think that we are sterile like an operating room, and that propaganda is done by evil people in other lands. So it’s interesting to watch the propagandists at work, plying thier trade. It’s amazing how good they are at it. It’s instructive and disheartening all at once.

Sidenote: It’s also interesting how the science of propaganda is not taught on any college campus. Insiders like Rove and Luntz did not study propaganda in college. They learned on the job. But it’s an organized body of knowledge that is passed on from one generation to the the next and improved upon. It originated under the Wilson Administration to build support for our involvement in World War I. Practitioners were themselves surprised at how effective it was – there were riots in American towns, Germans, like current Muslims, cowered in fear.

The latest gimmick in the arsenal of the propagandist is the viral video. It has advantages – like catching a cold, by the time the host is aware of it, the virus has already taken hold. They spring up out of nowhere. No one starts them, but every blog and bored emailer spreads them. They can be as ugly and evil as they please, as no one is accountable, especially not the people who spread them.

I’m referring, of course, to the current video making the rounds of Barack Obama’s pastor having a royal rant. It’s hurting him – hurting him badly. And he can’t do a damned thing about it.

I’d be very surprised if the video wasn’t put out from one of two sources: the Clinton campaign, or the Republican Party that prefers to run against Clinton over Obama. But that’s another advantage of the viral video – deniability. Neither group needs even remotely be associated with the attack.

That’s American politics. We’re not a thoughtful lot. Most of us, when we vote, haven’t anymore than a vague collections of impressions about the candidates we support. In 2004 most people voted for either Kerry or Bush thinking that they held positions completely opposite their actual stands. We are the Paris Hilton of democracy – we look good, but there’s no meaningful mental activity registering.

The art of politics is to make impressions. Fleeting impressions – people aren’t going to be swayed by logical analysis or principled stands. They won’t take the time. So it doesn’t do any good that Obama put up a thoughtful reply to the viral video. Few will read it.

Well, I’m here to do my part. Here’s some information being put out by Vietnam Veterans Against John McCain:

John McCain was a legacy – he didn’t earn his way in the military. It was handed him on a platter by his grandfather and father. He graduated fifth from the bottom of his class at the Naval Academy. He lost a total of five aircraft while piloting, three due to pilot error. He spent a total of 20 hours in combat in Vetnam, and for that was awarded a Silver Star, a Legion of Merit for Valor, a Distinguished Flying Cross, three Bronze Stars, two Commendation medals plus two Purple Hearts and a dozen service medals. Most grunts passed through the military in far more danger, and got nothing in return save a dose of Agent Orange.

There are suspicions that McCain was given preferential treatment while in captivity in Vietnam due to his royal lineage (the Vietnamese thought they could use him as a bargaining chip), and that the Russians have evidence of this. Therefore, if elected president, Medvedev will have him over a barrel.

There. True, there’s no evidence beyond testimony of a shadowy group called Vietnam Veterans Against John McCain, not officially connected with any campaign. McCain might be able to put up information to counter everything above, but in so doing he calls attention to it and gives it credibilty. The only thing he can hope to do is ignore it and hope it has no effect.

Like Kerry did.

Consensual Screwing

Democrats often tell us that we have to support their right-leaning candidates in order to get some of what we want. Settling for less is their way of existence. So when Steve Kelly of Bozeman ran against Dennis Rehberg in 2002, Democrats dropped him like a hot stone. Acquiescence is not Kelly’s strong suit.

Kelly is a bright and creative man, and would have made an excellent Congressman. His passion is the environment, and he is one of the founders of the Alliance for the Wild Rockies, an aggressive and non-compromising environmental group. He had a letter in yesterday’s Bozeman Chronicle (not available on line) about environmental toadies.

Back when Marc Racicot was governor and Republicans controlled the legislature, they came up with a scheme for dealing with environmentalists called “Consensus Councils”. The idea was to get everyone to sit down at a table and talk out their problems, with government officials acting as mere facilitators. However, in cynical Racicot fashion, the councils were soon turned on their ears, and facilitators were trumpeting concessions by environmentalists that had never been made. It was a triangulation process designed to work against them. These were Clinton times.

Consensus Councils have gone away, but the concept lives. Recently here in Bozeman quiet trail users lost their shirts in a facilitated set of meetings put on by Gallatin National Forest. Trails formerly devoted to quiet use were turned over to motorized users for the majority of the time. True to form, GNF trumpeted the loss of quiet time as a wonderful achievement of accommodation by trail users.

Which brings us to Steve Kelly. He’s not a consensus guy. He’s a fighter. He wrote to the Chronicle in response to two op-eds put up by Bob Ekey of the Wilderness Society, who is making a big deal about “civility” and “collaboration”. Kelly doesn’t care for Ekey’s tendency to seek agreement by yielding ground.

Civility requires politeness and courtesy, as well as an understanding that some independent-minded people have no interest in abandoning strongly held positions based on principles. Excoriating “radicals” because they won’t compromise is hardly a recipe for collaborative success. This kind of father-knows-best attitude breeds all sorts of mistrust and discontent and fuels the myth that all environmentalists are elitist.

Indeed. The faulty logic behind the consensus process is that the answer always lies somewhere in the middle. In the Gallatin trails dispute, for example, it was perfectly appropriate to insist on no motorized vehicles on our quiet trails. But that position was seen as radical. As soon as the quiet trail users sat down at the table to negotiate, they lost.

I believe we have institutions and political processes in place that need reform. What we don’t need is a substitute (stakeholder) process that relieves our elected public officials and agencies of their mandatory duty to make tough political and policy decisions.

And that is the driving force behind these consensus processes – public officials are intimidated by the noisy, belligerent factions, usually the motorized crowd. Fearing to take them on, and also fearing back-door backlash from higher-up elected officials (usually the late Conrad Burns, but also Dennis Rehberg), forest service and other public employees have opted for the collaboration process. It’s a way of dodging bullets.

What’s wrong with decisions based on sound economic and scientific evidence, and the rule of law? Public participation is the mechanism anyone, and everyone, can use to keep the pressure on during government decision-making processes.

Protecting wilderness, old growth habitat, lynx and grizzly bear habitat and key bull trout watersheds is controversial business. We don’t give up, and we don’t give in without a fight. In this age of political correctness, there are still a few environmentalists out there who believe in results.

Being well-liked by one’s opponents is so conveniently compromising.

Kelly pretty much sums up the problem we have with Democrats, in addition to milquetoasty environmental groups. He underlines why that party abandoned him in 2002. He’s everything modern Democrats aren’t, bold and thorough and possessing courage of convictions. Both the party and the environmental community could use a few more like him.

Campaign Rhetoric

I frankly don’t think that either Obama or Clinton will get us our of Iraq. Look at the stakes – they are much too high. We invaded to take control of their oil and establish permanent military bases. Those were bipartisan goals – it is no accident that Clinton voted for the war. She still supports it. Most likely Obama too. Candidates don’t get much media attention unless they are ballplayers, and Obama has never lacked for media attention.

So we’re not about to reverse course based on election year politicking. It’s just not in the cards. It’s about as likely as renegotiation of NAFTA.

Nonetheless, I liked this ad. Emotionally, and for no good reason, I’m pulling for Obama. Clinton strikes me as having that hungry look, even if not lean.

Great Marketing Decisions of All Time

1. A guy with a company that makes razors went to his boss and said “Hey – I know a way to double our sales. Put two blades in each razor.” (They’re up to five now.)

2. A guy with a beer company went to his boss and said “Hey – let’s take some of the calories out of beer so people will drink more of it. We can charge the same price.”

The Fringe With the Surly On Top

I am privileged to speak out on the man who represents me in Helena, Representative Roger Koopman of Bozeman, our own version of Eric Coobs. Koopman, I think by all standards and definitions, is a wingnut. He wiles away his hours in Helena proposing legislation that goes nowhere while at the same time alienating the people he has to work with to get anything accomplished. He’s a classic crank. Even when he speaks in a friendly manner and tries to sound reasonable, I can feel the rage beneath. This is not a sane man.

Koopman’s latest gambit is an attack on his fellow Republicans, namely, those who were so bold as to make a deal with Governor Schweitzer to formulate a workable budget in 2007. Koopman, in the name of ideological purity and calling them “socialists”, is forming a movement to run true believers against them. It’s going to be somewhat comical.

The list was complied based on a voting index released last fall by Missoula law professor Rob Natelson. Here’s his hit list: Llew Jones (Conrad), Walter McNutt (Sidkeny), Duane Ankney (Colstrip), Jesse O’Hara (Great Falls), Bill Glaser (Huntley), Bruce Malcolm (Emigrant), John Ward (Helena), Carol Lambert (Broadus), Elsie Arntzen (Billings), Gary McLaren (Victor), and Mike Milburn (Cascade).

It’s hard to predict the fallout here. Koopman is a fringe player, though not necessarily marginalized within his own party. Primary battles between the socialists listed above and hard right foes could well further polarize the party and give the Democrats a workable majority. Maybe in Montana, unlike Washington, a majority can get something done.

Another possible outcome: The Republican Party regroups, expels its far-right radical elements, and once again becomes a bastion for common-sense conservatives.

Somehow, I don’t see that happening. These are tempestuous times, and the extremes rule. More likely, Koopman and Natelson will have modest success, and we end up with another standoff in Helena with the far right entrenched, and the reasonable people advised, quoting Billings Senator Mike Lange, to shove it up their asses.

The Strange Case of Luis Posada Carriles

What would you do with a man who was convicted of planting a bomb on an airplane that killed 73 people? The plane was blown up in the air, an explicit act of terrorism. What if this same man orchestrated bombings of hotels that killed numerous people, including a high-profile and completely innocent Italian businessman. What if he was arrested and convicted of plotting to blow up an auditorium full of students, trying to get to Fidel Castro? (He actually had the equipment to do it when arrested – this is no pizza delivery boy.) What if he supervised torture, attaching electrodes to penises, kicking an eight month pregnant woman in the belly, killing the baby? What if he forced a mother to watch as he crushed lit cigarettes on her baby?

Such a man ought to be shot or hanged or at least incarcerated for life without parole. I favor his death in a most painful manner.

His name is Luis Posada Carriles. He now lives in Miami. The Venezuelan government would like to extradite him and try him, but get this – the U.S. refused to allow the deportation because they fear the Venezuelans would torture him. He’s roaming free in this country, and will apparently never pay a price for his crimes against humanity.

The Bush Administration reserves the right to bomb countries that harbor terrorists. If they are consistent in enforcing this policy, they should now unleash B52’s and fighter jets on Washington, D.C.

The Importance of Linking

I’m linking here to Mike because that’s what we bloggers do. We link to one another. Mike will pick up on the link, and he’ll come here and read what I say, and he might comment. It’s only fair. He put up something really interesting, and I commented over there. If he comments here, the circle will be complete.

Mike’s a smart guy, but when it comes to politics, it’s really hard to tell about people. As with religion, some very smart people can believe some very weird stuff. But Mike, for all his weirdness, is having a revelation of sorts, and it is one so important that I hope other bloggers link to me as I link to him, or bypass me and link directly to him. What he has discovered (and he is not surprised, I must emphasize), is that Obama is being duplicitous about NAFTA. Obama really supports NAFTA in its current form. He’s just trash-talking it because he wants to win the Ohio primary. Ohioans, in their dense stupidity, think they’ve been hurt by NAFTA.

Go and read Mike’s post, please, so I don’t have to repeat everything here.

Sometime I’m going to read more about NAFTA. All I have is vague impressions. I assume that the treaty was written by and crafted to benefit American corporations, and that no one spoke for Mexican campesinos at that time. They don’t matter. I assume it was merely a continuation of our old habits – imperialism, we used to call it. We need two things from backward countries, mainly those to the south of us – cheap labor and cheap commodities. We do not, repeat, do not, want them to develop. Quite the opposite. If they try to do so, we will fight them every step of the way. At the same time, there are things we need to protect – “intellectual property”, we call it – our ideas and patents on seed technology and our weapons technology and, of course, our movie and music industries, but not our jobs, as our leaders and our corporations don’t care about our jobs, and think we are overpaid anyway.

So NAFTA, if crafted correctly, would give us access to their cheap labor and commodities while protecting our most important assets. But not our jobs.

So I assume that when NAFTA was crafted, it would be done so with hardly any input from workers here, none from those abroad, and when the expected fallout occurred, that economists working for American corporations and the universities and think tanks they support would tell us how really good NAFTA is for us. That’s how it’s done – it’s a circle back-pat, to be delicate. (They did negotiate “side agreements” on labor and the environment in response to public pressure fourteen years ago, but that was just window dressing.)

Fallout from NAFTA? Loss of jobs here. Mexican farmers have been devastated by cheap corn going down there, and in turn are coming here in droves to work the underground economy undercut our wage structure. And our corporations hire them for less than they would have to pay Americans. Win-win.

But it’s all theoretical – I mean, Ohioans really aren’t that stupid, and might know a thing or two, and there really is a massive migration from south to north going on since NAFTA passed. But our economists tell us that this is all good, or that if it is bad, that it wasn’t caused by NAFTA.

(Just a side note – in Mike’s links, they talk about how good NAFTA has been for us, and give NAFTA credit for every positive thing that has happened these last fourteen years since its passage, assuming if two things happen at once, once caused the other. Much of that is probably devil-in-detail kind of stuff, some of it just professional manipulation of statistics, but the interesting thing is this – they only talk about what is good for the U.S. – not Mexico or Canada. And they don’t talk about the migration.)

Anyway, here’s something critical – our politicians of both parties are supported by the corporations who crafted NAFTA, and are not going to do anything to change it. In fact, they will support its expansion to every other backward country foolish enough (or whose politicians are bought enough) to go along. So Clinton and Obama, who are bashing NAFTA in public in Ohio, are not serious. So it would make sense that they would reassure Canadian leadership by back channel not to pay attention. And that’s what they did. That’s what Mike wrote about.

Do yourself a favor, link to Mike, link to me, let’s make a circle link. Let’s spread the word amongst ourselves. Obama and Clinton are lying about NAFTA. Mike exposed them.