Free press in Cook County?

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
-First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution
called the Bill of Rights, adopted in 1789

"Go now, and tell it on the mountains and in the cities. From your Web sites and laptops,tell it. From the street corners and the coffee house, tell it. On campus and at the mall, tell it. Tell it at the synagogue, sanctuary, and mosque. Tell it. Tell it where you can, when you can, and while you can. Tell America what we need to know--and we just might rekindle the patriot's dream."
-Bill Moyers, keynote address
National Conference on Media Reform
Minneapolis, June, 2008

Cook County is blessedly free of corporate-dominated media. Oh ya sure, the News Herald is owned by a media group but it's not Fox, not Murdoch, not even a very big player in the control-of-information game that was invented by the neocons who now control all three branches of the U.S. government--at which the founders would turn over and rise up from their grave to peaceably assemble and protest.
Lucky, yes, but well-served for the 21st century? True says no. Mind you, True is only a humble, ragtag collective. But She formed in response to a gap between the grapevine and the published Word a couple years back when Grand Marais was being invaded by Big Developers. That issue was happily resolved, to the benefit of most if not all.
New issues emerge, however, in our 21st century where technology daily changes the nature of the "press" even as most information is not now printed but rather published in cyberspace. And our backward local "press" have not joined the free and open Internet where anybody, anywhere can google something like "Poplar River impairment" and get all the published news articles from the local angle. Well, once we could get it from the News Herald but now it has gone private and you have to sign away your life story and pay money just to see an article. As for the Star, they are SO 20th century, you just have to save a copy of every paper.
And even here in our cozy little county our media have more serious limitations than Internet access. Let's name them:
The Star, the News Herald and WTIP are beholden to advertisers. Once the News Herald did editorials about issues in Cook County but now, nobody does.
WTIP is the emerging leader in comprehensive and substantive news coverage. They do a great job, covering issues and meetings that neither paper seems to manage to attend or explore.
But nobody gives us a big picture, nobody tries to put it all together (even inadequately, which would be a start), nobody fills in the gaps between the gossip mill and the deep truth.
Outsiders, even summer residents, can read and listen to every word but they still can't figure out what is really going on. That's partly because covering meetings, the basic stuff of the three branches of media, doesn't tell the stories but only describes the meetings.
OK, let's get specific, with a couple of examples.
1) The new major issue in Cook County is the big plans for development of Lutsen Mountain into an Aspen-like monstrosity. While this huge proposed travesty of the Cook County development ordinance looms large as an even greater threat than turning Grand Marais into a huge marina with Disney condos, there is scarcely a peep about it in the news.
2) Directly related to the Mountain Megalomania is the impairment of the Poplar River and the big misinformation being disseminated freely in both papers by--you guessed it--the OWNERS of Lutsen Mountain, who call themselves the "Poplar River Mangement Board." The irony here is that although these guys could well afford to BUY a page in both papers, they got it for free, in direct conflict with the policies that opinions and letters be strictly limited in word count. True will be exploring the Poplar River issues, trying to sift Truth from Sediment, in future posts.
But the point is, nobody else is looking at the big picture here, or taking any kind of a stand. Certainly not the county board which dances around and dodges with silly stuff about the legality of a special tax district that would force other Poplar River landowners to pay for the damage wreaked by the Lutsen Mountain owners, or the Lutsen Town Board that agrees to anything they want.
And here is the great failing of the media: what the Founders feared most when they wrote the First Amendment: that people can't make informed decisions without all the information. Both papers have printed full-page ads purporting to be "facts" by Lutsen Mountain owner Tom Rider. NOBODY has bothered to do any fact-checking.
Editorials have two purposes: one, to engage a public discussion and two, to bring a truthful perspective to the slipshod, piecemeal and disconnected stories that make up the daily news. We badly need them here, even without Rupert Murdoch's blockade of any facts at all.

Obama landslide winner in Cook County: Yes!

Nobody even came close to challenging Barack Obama's caucus victory in Cook County on Super Tuesday. This is good. True is old enough to remember the 1960 election of President John Kennedy, also an inspiring and charismatic figure but he only won by a short margin. How different the future of our country might have been if he had lost; despite the right wing assassins who took him down along with his brother Bobby, MLK Junior and John Lennon, we at least had a time where idealism found a place in the sun, where young people were thrilled to work on behalf of their country, where the rich and the poor united in working for America and for the world. "Ich bin ein Berliner," said JFK to screaming crowds in Berlin, long before the Wall was torn down. "Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country." Thousands of young people flocked to the Peace Corps and millions more of us worked on a more local scale to bring peace and justice to our people.
Much of being a great leader is being a visionary, capturing the hopes and dreams of the people. John Kennedy made some big mistakes early on, most noticeably bringing us to the brink of nuclear war over the Bay of Pigs. But, he learned and he always led from the heart.
And that is why True believes in Barack Obama. He might not stand up so strong as John Edwards on behalf of the poor, the two Americas, but when elected I believe he will step into the big footprints of history. I believe he will try to extricate us from the endless and evil war in Iraq, will start a new dialogue with other nations, will build a base of Americans with his experience as a community organizer guides him....Nobody else has the capacity to inspire the young, to bring everybody back to the table where peace and justice might be on the agenda.
YES, Cook County!
True

Laura: A Yellow Rose in Texas

She’s the flower of White Southern Womanhood, our First Lady Laura Bush. A stand-by-your-man lady, even though she has gajillions more brain cells than her doofus cowboy dry drunk hubby who has delusions of bringing on Armageddon, and just might pull it off before he gets nabbed for his evil deeds and his reign of death and disaster. Still, she simpers along beside him, smiling and waving for every photo op.
She has barely uttered a peep about his disastrous policies for women or health so far in his six-year reign, except for a token wish that he might select a woman for the Supremes and some lip service to the downtrodden women of the Islamic world. WHICH had the net effect of furthering the Bozo’s Evil Caliphate proclamation.
But now, in search of a legacy, she comes on board for women’s heart health. She blindsides (apparently) the powerful American Association for Retired Persons (AARP) which has steadily lobbied for health care reform (meaning, against Bushco and cronies). She wangles a front-page story in the latest Bulletin, touting the amazing information that women need equal treatment with men for heart disease. Using that old Southern Charm she explains how she can’t really get about in public so she works out with her personal trainer and the White House exercise machines. God bless her, poor thing.
The AARP Bulletin compares Laura's crusade(?)with the projects taken on by former First Ladies, for example the Highway Beautification project of dear Lady Bird Johnson, God rest her soul. The thing is, all these other ladies decided early on what they would do and stuck to it.
And what about hubby’s supersizing support for the drug industry at the expense of seniors (aka Medicare Plan D)? Or his depriving millions of poor or low-income women and children from health access by cutting government subsidies AND caving to the big-insurance lobbies? What about that? No comment, if you please. Laura will think about it tomorrow. While she helps to put together the new presidential library, what there is of it after the classified secrets have been deleted.

‘No More War’ Float Ruffles Iron Range - CommonDreams.org

Close to home: Veterans for Peace on the Iron Range found their float "No More War" banned in Virginia. Other nearby towns expressed similar concerns. Read the story here:

‘No More War’ Float Ruffles Iron Range - CommonDreams.org

We Want Our Humanity Represented! Impeachment for Torture, Now! - CommonDreams.org - Sent Using Google Toolbar

True Blue wants the USA to survive the depradations of the Bush & Cheney coup (takeover) that feeds the new empire ruled by corporate CEOs.

Please, friends, gird up your loins,summon your courage,and look the BushCo evil in the face. Just say no. Stand firm for human rights, peace and justice. Many and many of us are watching from the wings.

True

Published on Sunday, July 1, 2007 by CommonDreams.org
We Want Our Humanity Represented! Impeachment for Torture, Now!
by Hank Edson
There is no shortage of reasons why we should impeach President Bush and Vice-President Cheney. Their crimes are so extensive and so egregious that it is hard to find time to grasp just how deliberate their pursuit has been over the past several years. Today’s topic, torture and how impeachment for torture is necessary to the representation of humanity in our democracy, does not even cover the subset of impeachable offenses: war crimes. By my count, this subset contains six separate impeachable war crimes committed by Bush and Cheney: (1) the supreme war crime of commencing a war of aggression, (2) torture, (3) extraordinary rendition, (4) termination of habeas corpus, (5) inhumane weaponry (such as daisy cutters, depleted uranium shells, and phosphorus bombs), and (6) the usurpation of Iraqi self-determination in economic and political affairs protected under the Geneva Conventions. If every America could take just fifteen minutes to read nine or ten pages telling the story of Bush and Cheney’s willful commitment to torture, it would go far to reorient the mindset in our country that has so passively accepted conduct by our leadership that is absolutely offensive to our values, aspirations, and responsibilities as a democratic people. With hope for such a transformation in our public discourse, I offer this summary of one of the most disgraceful episodes of a disgraceful presidency.

White House Cowboys and Dungeon Masters

In 1996, Congress passed the War Crimes Act, which made it a criminal act to violate the ban against torture and cruel of degrading treatment found in the Geneva Conventions. The United States ratified the Geneva Conventions in 1955. As a result of congressional ratification, the conventions already carried the force of law in the United States without the need for the 1996 War Crimes Act to make the government’s use of torture illegal.[1] Notwithstanding this doubly clear statement of law, five days after 9/11 Vice President Dick Cheney was already mentally adding dungeons to the defense assessment the Neo-Conservative think tank, Project for a New American Century, had prepared for him for use in installing the U.S. industrial-arms complex throughout the Middle East.

On September 16, 2001, Cheney told Tim Russert on Meet the Press,

We also have to work, though, sort of the dark side…a lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies…it’s going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve our objective.” [2]

Juvenile George Bush took up his Vice President’s demented, but dead serious advice with gusto, telling his then-counter-terrorism czar, Richard Clarke and his then-Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld,

“I don’t care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass.”[3]

What penance will America have to pay for placing such a man in its highest office?

Building the Legal Shield

As former CIA analyst Ray McGovern writes, “‘Dark-side’ operations, using ‘any means at our disposal’ - like, say, ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ - by law require a ‘finding’ signed by the president.” [4] To protect himself in the event this “finding” was improper, Bush called upon his counsel, Alberto Gonzales, who provided a January 25, 2002 memo to the president authored by Cheney’s counsel, David Addington. The memo described as “quaint” and “obsolete” a number of provisions of the Geneva Conventions relating to prisoners of war. The memo also concluded that there was a “reasonable basis in law” that Bush could avoid any future criminal prosecution for violating the U.S. War Crimes Act of 1996. [5]

Secretary of State Powell, however, disagreed with the advice and inserted the following warning in Gonzales’ January 25, 2002 memo:

“A determination that the GPW [Geneva Convention of Prisoners of War] does not apply to al-Qaeda and the Taliban could undermine US military culture which emphasizes maintaining the highest standards of conduct in combat, and could introduce an element of uncertainty in the status of adversaries.”

The next day, Powell wrote his own memo, adding that abandoning the Geneva Conventions would “undermine public support among critical allies [and] reverse over a century of US policy and practice in supporting the Geneva conventions and undermine the protections of the law of war for our troops.” [6]

Powell’s objections, however, were fruitless. On February 7, 2002, Bush signed the memorandum ordering our armed forces in the subtlest of language “to treat detainees humanely and, to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity, in a manner consistent with the principles of Geneva.” The qualification, “to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity,” meant: “when you get an order to torture, do it.” As with so many of the outrages in the Bush administration, the author of the torture memo, Addington, was later promoted for his good work to take over as Cheney’s Chief of Staff when Lewis Libby was indicted. Addington’s legal work was later condemned by 130 of the nation’s most respected jurists, including twelve federal judges and eight former American Bar Association presidents for failing in his “high obligation to defend the Constitution.”[7]

The Administrative Base for Torture

Once the legal shield had been put in place to permit the White House to order torture, the next step was to give the order, but to do it in such a way that the order would be impossible to trace. After the Iraq invasion, it was the man who General Tommy Franks called “the fucking stupidest guy on the face of the earth,” Undersecretary of Defense Doug Feith, who was called upon to do the dirty work. His office was given the responsibility of planning the occupation and reconstruction of Iraq.

True to the familiar pattern of White House methodology, Journalist Jim Lobe describes this decision as “effectively exclude[ing] input from Iraqi experts from the State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency, and even from the Iraqi-American community, who had participated in a mammoth project that anticipated most of the problems occupation authorities have since encountered.”[8]

Working in Feith’s office at this time was Stephen Cambone, who was instrumental in transferring Major General Geoffrey Miller from the Guantanamo Bay detention camp to Abu Ghraib prison. Lobe reports that Miller “brought high-pressure interrogation tactics barred by the Geneva Conventions with him from Guantanamo” and that Newsweek, The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times all reported that “top officials in the Pentagon, acting on the advice of civilian lawyers, authorized a reinterpretation of the Geneva Conventions to permit tougher methods of interrogation of prisoners of war.”[9] It was no doubt this new administration of a “torture policy” that led Secretary of State Colin Powell to call Feith’s operation the “Gestapo Office.”[10]

Despite Powell’s continued opposition, the new interrogation techniques were approved in April 2003. According to Lobe, senior Pentagon officials simultaneously approved excluding JAG officers, who normally are present to ensure the Geneva Conventions are followed. During this time, Scott Horton, a former senior JAG officer then serving as chairman of the committee on International Human Rights of the New York City Bar Association was contacted by JAG officers disturbed about the new policy. Lobe writes that “[a]ccording to Horton, the JAG officers identified the main forces behind loosening the rules as Feith and the Pentagon’s general counsel, William Haynes, another political appointee.”[11]

The “Enhanced” Techniques of a “few Bad Apples”

On the ground in Iraq, as many as fifty thousand men and women were being jammed into Abu Ghraib at a time. The cells were twelve-by-twelve and, according to veteran journalist Seymour Hersh, were “little more than human holding pits.”[12] After the Iraq invasion, Rumsfeld ordered that a secret Pentagon interrogation unit dedicated to collecting intelligence about al-Qaeda be assigned responsibility for interrogating prisoners in Iraq. Hersh wrote, “According to interviews with several past and present American intelligence officials, [the program] ‘encouraged physical coercion and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners in an effort to generate more intelligence about the growing insurgency in Iraq.’” Hersh further reported in that anonymous military and intelligence sources indicated that Rumsfeld approved the use of interrogation tactics implicated in the Abu Ghraib torture scandal.

Specifically, special “biscuit teams,” as the soldier call them, staffed with psychologists, psychiatrists, and physicians knowledgeable about Arab cultures would create conditions specifically designed to inflict maximum psychological pain within the cultural parameters of their prisoner’s psychology. Thus, American soldiers were instructed to make use of deeply seated religious taboos, their prisoner’s cultural anxiety caused by aggressive dogs, and culturally specific forms of humiliation to torture prisoners of war under their charge. Soldiers threatened naked prisoners with attack dogs. They used injections, suppositories, and other “techniques” to make the prisoners chained to the floor of their cells lose control of their bowels. Some prisoners they wiped with fake menstrual blood. Female interrogators questioned men forced to stand naked before them.

A former specialist in a military intelligence battalion, Tony Lagouranis has spoken openly about interrogations techniques he used in Abu Ghraib, Al Asad Airfield, and other locations in Iraq through out 2004, which he admitted were torture. The techniques he used included the use of dogs, waterboarding and prolonged stress positions. At Al Asad Airfield, he witnessed prisoners being shackled and hung from an upright bed frame welded to the wall. Lagouranis says these techniques “take a healthy guy and you turn him into a cripple, at least for a period of time.” Lagouranis, who reported the detainee abuses, only participated in techniques that “were technically legal.” Lagouranis told one reporter, “I started realizing that most of the prisoners were innocent. We were torturing people for not reason. I started getting really angry and really remorseful and by the time I got back I completely broke down.”[13]

Joseph Polermo writes:

“They bombarded them with loud music for days at a time and kept them under fluorescent lights. Other practices included: ‘Harsh heat or cold, withholding food; hooding for days at a time; naked isolation in cold, dark cells for more than thirty days; and “stress positions” designed to subject detainees to rising levels of pain.”[14]

General Antonio M. Taguba’s report on the Abu Ghraib scandal found repeated instances of “sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses” including:

“Breaking chemical lights and pouring the phosphoric liquid on detainees; pouring cold water on naked detainees; beating detainees with a broom handle and a chair; threatening male detainees with rape; allowing a military police guard to stitch the wound of a detainee who was injured after being slammed against the wall of his cell; sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick, and using military working dogs to frighten and intimidate with threats of attack, and in one instance actually biting a detainee.”[15]

We all saw the pictures: the pyramids of naked bodies, the forced masturbation in front of female guards, the hooded figure with fake electrodes hooked to his finger tips, the smiling young girl with the snarling dog at leash’s end.

The lawyer of one of the enlisted men court marshaled because of the scandal complained of the absence of accountability up the command chain:

“Do you really think a group of kids from rural Virginia decided to do this on their own? Decided that the best way to embarrass Arabs and make them talk was to have them walk around nude?” [16]

All told, seven soldiers were convicted for participating in the torture; one was sentenced to ten years in prison. Whatever the culpability of these grunt soldiers was, these soldiers were committed legally and culturally to a chain of command that did not take lightly unscripted departures from routine duties, explicit orders, and the military’s code of honor. The claim that the torture was but the act of “a few bad apples,” not only defies the overwhelming evidence that such conduct was endorsed, encouraged, and engineered with White House knowledge, but is also a completely unrealistic portrayal of the psychology of enlisted servicemen and women.

It turns out that the photos we all saw were staged by “contract interrogators” working for Titan Corporation, hired under the Rumsfeld Doctrine of privatized war. The photos were to be used as psychological intimidation tools in future interrogations.[17] The use of civilian contractors served to put another layer of insulation between the high command and the troops being blamed, as the civilian contractors are not accountable under the same chain of command as the M.P.’s who were court marshaled were.

The Dungeon Master and the Scapegoat

The highest-ranking military officer reprimanded because of the torture scandal was Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, the first female to ever command soldiers in a war zone-a fact that ought to be suspicious in and of itself.

Karpinski, who had never run a prison system, was given command of three large jails, eight battalions, and thirty-four hundred Army reservists, most of whom, as Seymour Hersh points out, “like her, had not training in handling prisoners.”[18] She would eventually be demoted to Colonel because of the torture revelations.

When Doug Feith and Stephen Cambone got Two Star Major General Geoffrey Miller transferred from Guananamo Bay to Abu Ghraib, Miller told Karpinski that he was going to “Gitmo-ize” the operation and use the M.P.s to assist the interrogators to enhance interrogations. The M.P.’s, however, were under Karpinski’s command, whereas interrogators were answerable to the commander of the Military Intelligence Brigade.

Karpinski says, “I explained to him that the M.P.s were not trained in any kind of interrogation operations, and he told me that he wanted me to give him Abu Ghraib, because that’s the location he selected.”[19] Essentially, Miller was going to misuse untrained M.P.s under someone else’s command to insulate himself from the legal consequences of torturing prisoners.

Miller focused his interrogation operation in Cell Blocks 1A of Abu Ghraib, which he put under the charge of Colonel Pappas. Meanwhile, General Sanchez, who was responsible for the entire Iraqi command ordered General Karpinski to Camp Victory near the Iranian border. Karpinski said, “He wanted me away from the situation. He wanted me away from the possibility of finding out about what was going on in interrogations. So he incrementally moved me farther away, took Abu Ghraib away from me, then moved me out of Baghdad completely.” When the scandal broke, however, it would be Karpinski who was targeted by the higher command to take the blame.[20]

Karpinski told journalist Amy Goodman about the first news she got of torture being conducted at her own prison:

About the situation at Abu Ghraib, I was first informed by an email that I received on classified-what they call “classified traffic.” I opened it up late one night on the 12th of January 2004. And it was from the commander of the Criminal Investigation Division. He sent me an email and said, “Ma’am, I just want to make you aware, I’m going into brief the C.G.,” meaning General Sanchez, “on the progress of the investigation at Abu Ghraib. This involves the allegations of abuse and the photographs.” That was the first I heard of it.

I did not receive that email or phone call or a message from General Sanchez himself, who would ultimately attempt to hold me fully responsible for this, but from the C.I.D. Commander. And I was alarmed at just that short email. I was not in Baghdad at the time. I was at another location very close to the Iranian border, so we made arrangements to leave at the crack of dawn to drive down to Abu Ghraib to see what we could find out about this ongoing investigation and went through the battalion over to Cell Block 1A. The people who would normally be working on any shift were not working. The sergeant that I spoke to said that their records had been seized by the investigators, and they started a new log to account for prisoners, make sure that their meals were on time, those kin of things, and he pointed out a memo that was posted on a column just outside of their small administrative office. And the memorandum was signed by the Secretary of Defense…by Donald Rumsfeld. And said-it discussed interrogation techniques that were authorized. It was one page. It talked about stress positions, noise and light discipline, the use of music, disrupting sleep patterns, those kind of techniques. But there was a handwritten note out to the side. And this was a copy. It was a photocopy of the original, I would imagine. But it was unusual that an interrogation memorandum would be posted inside of a detention cell block, because interrogations were not conducted in the cell block.[21]

The handwritten note, in the same script as Rumsfeld’s signature, said: “Make sure this happens.” Essentially, Rumsfeld gave an order to Karpinski’s untrained M.P.s to apply “enhanced techniques” that were, at best, only to be applied by the trained “Intelligence Brigade” under a separate command. The order, however, was never passed through General Karpinski.

Rumsfeld, Feith, Cambone, and Miller had “Gitmo-ized” Abu-Ghraib and when they got caught, they blamed the first and only female war zone commander, who they had kept completely out of the loop. Karpinski confirmed that the M.P.s understood the memorandum to come from Rumsfeld, himself. Karpinski further explained that Rumsfeld had also ordered some prisoners to be held without a prisoner number or notation in the prisoner database-omissions which violate the Geneva Conventions. Karpinski says that on several occasions prisoners fell into this category of “ghost detainees.” According to the ACLU, there is documentary evidence that at least 21 detainees were murdered while in detention as a result of “enhanced” interrogation techniques, but of course, we cannot know how many undocumented prisoners may have been murdered as well.[22]

Although Karpinski took responsibility for violating the Geneva Conventions in allowing ghost prisoners to be kept undocumented in the prison database, she says she also protested to the prison legal advisor, Colonel Warren, when one such prisoner, prisoner “Triple X,” was ordered by Rumsfeld to be held in secrecy: “It’s a violation. You have to put people on the database. And how much longer are we going to be held responsible for him? You take control of him. If you want to violate a Geneva Convention, that’s up to you, but I don’t want to keep him in one of our camps this way.”

Karpinski asserts that responsibility for the torturing that occurred at Abu Ghraib ought “to start at the very top, and the original memorandum directing interrogation…” which Bush signed and that the M.P.s who were court marshaled were “unfairly and unjustly held accountable for all of this, as if they designed these techniques, as if Linddie England deployed with a dog collar and a dog leash.”[23]

The Department of Defense Investigates Itself; Bush Does Nothing

When the torture scandal broke in the Press, Rumsfeld appointed a four-person commission to investigate. All four members of the commission were members of the Defense Policy Board, the private advisory board that played an unprecedented role in influencing the decision to go to war and that assisted in the manipulation of evidence presented to the public and the United Nations about the dangers presented by Saddam Hussein. Two of the members of the investigative commission were also past Secretaries of Defense-part of the military-arms complex old-boy network unlikely to place blame on a fellow Secretary of Defense.

Predictably, the commission exonerated the three senior most senior officers responsible for prisoner interrogation, Rumsfeld, Army Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, and Major General George Fay. Instead, the commission concluded that ‘freelancing’ guards on the night watch were responsible for the torture, not any effort orchestrated from higher up to collect more information from prisoners.[24] Human Rights Watch criticized the commission’s report for failing to look into the connection between the torture and Rumsfeld’s approval of interrogation techniques that intentionally used pain, humiliation and abuse of prisoners.”[25] Former congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman argues, “President Bush failed to ensure a full investigation and to see that the responsible parties, including higher-ups were held accountable. These failures are impeachable offenses.”[26]

Torture’s Lobbyist

Meanwhile, Congress decided that since President Bush did not seem to understand the U.S. War Crimes Act of 1996, it was necessary in 2005 to pass a new law, once more clearly outlawing torture. When the senate passed the McCain amendment banning torture by a definitive majority of 91 to 9, Cheney proved himself a national embarrassment by lobbying Senator McCain, hard to exempt the C.I.A. Of course, McCain is a man who had personally endured torture as a prisoner of war in the same Vietnam War, which as a young man Cheney promoted, but avoided serving in by obtaining numerous deferments.

Torture’s Anti-Democratic Authoritarian Puppet

When both houses passed the McCain amendment without Cheney’s exemption, President Bush added one of his over 1,000 signing statements to it, declaring that the act of signing the bill into law did not mean that he was legally bound to follow the new law. In this case, Bush used his signing statement to reserve the right to use torture if he thought it was necessary for national security.[27] Thus, after three iterations of an absolute prohibition against torture passed by the legislative branch and signed by the President-once in the ratification of the Geneva Conventions in 1955, again in the U.S. War Crimes Act of 1996, and a third time in the 2005 McCain anti-torture amendment-George W. Bush still persisted in his determination to use torture in defiance of the law.

Accountability in the White House

In the final assessment, we have Donald Rumsfeld signing memos authorizing violations of the Geneva Conventions and running out of the Pentagon a deliberate effort to expand interrogation techniques to include illegally cruel and degrading treatment specifically developed by the so-called “biscuit teams.” Under Rumsfeld, we have Doug Feith’s “Gestapo office,” in which Stephen Cambone orchestrates the transfer of Major General Miller to Abu Ghraib to get M.P.s outside Miller’s chain of command to assist in the use torture techniques in Iraq previously developed at the infamous Guantanemo Bay detention facility.

We have the pathologically authoritarian Vice President Dick Cheney declaring on national television just five days after the national trauma of the September 11th attacks, “We also have to work, though, sort of the dark side… without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies… any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve our objective.”[28] Then after revelations of torture, murder, and perversion cause worldwide revulsion toward the United States and after congress passes a completely unnecessary third law to again outlaw torture, still Cheney continues to lobby obsessively the law’s author for an exception that would allow torture by the CIA to continue.

And finally, we have an incredibly juvenile and himself, psychologically manipulated puppet, president George W. Bush who takes up his Vice President’s demented, but dead serious advice with gusto, telling his then-counter-terrorism czar, Richard Clarke and his then-Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, “I don’t care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass.”[29] Then after the congress has passed the third and completely unnecessary prohibition against torture, Bush goes on to add to the law a signing statement declaring his intention to disregard the law whenever he sees fit.

We Want Our Humanity Represented!

After all these facts are reported in the press, still we have Nancy Pelosi saying, “Impeachment is off the table,” and “the American people want congress to get to work,” not to engage in “partisan struggles.” I beg to differ. The American people want a process for accountability when the President of the United States abuses the power and reputation the American people gave him to torture human beings in violation of three separate legal acts, not to mention the principle set forth in the 8th Amendment prohibiting cruel and unusual punishment. The American people want their humanity represented and their humanity lies in the application of the democratic process that prevents elected leaders from abusing their power. Passing a law in congress has done nothing to stop Bush’s abuse of power. Getting “to work” is not what we, the people, elected a Democratic congress to do in 2006. We can get by without anti-flag burning amendments and new labels for DVDs. What we cannot do without is an impeachment of a president who willfully defies congress for the purpose of torturing human beings.

As the Dean of Yale Law School, Harold Koh says:

“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.”[30]

The balance of power in our democracy, however, is not defined by the law in and of itself, but by exercise of the law by those with a legal claim. Thus, under the Constitutional framework that supports our democracy, the limits of the commander-in-chief’s power are ultimately defined by the exercise of the right of impeachment. By failing to exercise the people’s legal claim against the vice president and president, Congress is letting the vice-president and president seize a despot’s hold over our humanity. This is not a moment in history for simply getting to work; it is the moment for dropping everything and making a stand for who we really are.

Hank Edson is an author, attorney, and activist located in the San Francisco Bay Area. His blog, “MP3 - My Politics and Progressive Perspective” can be found at: http://hankedson.squarespace.com

[1] Elizabeth Holtzman, “Calling Nancy Pelosi: The People’s Case for Impeaching Bush,” The Washington Spectator, November 14, 2006, http://www.commondreams.org/views06/1114-22.htm.

[2] Ray McGovern, “Cheney and Fried Rice in Hot Water,” CommonDreams.org, December 10, 2005, http://www.commondreams.org/cgi-bin/print.cgi?file=/views05/1210-27.htm.

[3] Ray McGovern, “Cheney and Fried Rice in Hot Water,” CommonDreams.org, December 10, 2005, http://www.commondreams.org/cgi-bin/print.cgi?file=/views05/1210-27.htm.

[4] Ray McGovern, “Cheney and Fried Rice in Hot Water,” CommonDreams.org, December 10, 2005, http://www.commondreams.org/cgi-bin/print.cgi?file=/views05/1210-27.htm.

[5] Ray McGovern, “Cheney and Fried Rice in Hot Water,” CommonDreams.org, December 10, 2005, http://www.commondreams.org/cgi-bin/print.cgi?file=/views05/1210-27.htm.

[6] Ray McGovern, “Cheney and Fried Rice in Hot Water,” CommonDreams.org, December 10, 2005, http://www.commondreams.org/cgi-bin/print.cgi?file=/views05/1210-27.htm.

[7] Ray McGovern, “Cheney and Fried Rice in Hot Water,” CommonDreams.org, December 10, 2005, http://www.commondreams.org/cgi-bin/print.cgi?file=/views05/1210-27.htm.

[8] Jim Lobe, “Pentagon’s Feith Again at Center of Disaster,” Inter Press Service, May 20, 2004 http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0520-02.htm.

[9] Jim Lobe, “Pentagon’s Feith Again at Center of Disaster,” Inter Press Service, May 20, 2004 http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0520-02.htm.

[10] Bob Woodward, Plan of Attack, (New York, Simon & Schuster 2004), p. 292.

[11] Jim Lobe, “Pentagon’s Feith Again at Center of Disaster,” Inter Press Service, May 20, 2004 http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0520-02.htm.

[12] Seymour M. Hersh, “Torture at Abu Ghraib,” The New Yorker, May 10, 2004, http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/05/10/040510fa_fact?printable=true.

[13] Tara McKelvey, “We Were Torturing People For No Reason,” The International Herald Tribune, March 29, 2007, http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/03/29/166.

[14] Joseph Palermo, “Bush’s Shame: From “Buscuit” Teams to PTSD,” CommonDreams.org, March 20, 2007, http://www.commondreams.org/views07/0320-28.htm.

[15] Seymour M. Hersh, “Torture at Abu Ghraib,” The New Yorker, May 10, 2004, http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/05/10/040510fa_fact?printable=true.

[16] Seymour M. Hersh, “Torture at Abu Ghraib,” The New Yorker, May 10, 2004, http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/05/10/040510fa_fact?printable=true.

[17] Amy Goodman, “Col. Janis Karpinski, the Former Head of Abu Ghraib, Admits She Broke the Geneva Conventions But Says the Blame ‘Goes All the Way to the Top,” Democracy Now!, October 26, 2005, http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/10-/26/1423248.

[18] Seymour M. Hersh, “Torture at Abu Ghraib,” The New Yorker, May 10, 2004, http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/05/10/040510fa-fact?printable=true.

[19] Amy Goodman, “Col. Janis Karpinski, the Former Head of Abu Ghraib, Admits She Broke the Geneva Conventions But Says the Blame ‘Goes All the Way to the Top,” Democracy Now!, October 26, 2005, http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/10-/26/1423248.

[20] Amy Goodman, “Col. Janis Karpinski, the Former Head of Abu Ghraib, Admits She Broke the Geneva Conventions But Says the Blame ‘Goes All the Way to the Top,” Democracy Now!, October 26, 2005, http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/10-/26/1423248.

[21] Amy Goodman, “Col. Janis Karpinski, the Former Head of Abu Ghraib, Admits She Broke the Geneva Conventions But Says the Blame ‘Goes All the Way to the Top,” Democracy Now!, October 26, 2005, http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/10-/26/1423248.

[22] Amy Goodman, “Col. Janis Karpinski, the Former Head of Abu Ghraib, Admits She Broke the Geneva Conventions But Says the Blame ‘Goes All the Way to the Top,” Democracy Now!, October 26, 2005, http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/10-/26/1423248.

[23] Amy Goodman, “Col. Janis Karpinski, the Former Head of Abu Ghraib, Admits She Broke the Geneva Conventions But Says the Blame ‘Goes All the Way to the Top,” Democracy Now!, October 26, 2005, http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/10-/26/1423248.

[24] Chris Shumway, “Rumsfeld’s Torture Panel Clears Rumsfeld,” The New Standard, August 26, 2004, http://www.antiwar.com/orig/shumway.php?articleid=3450.

[25] Chris Shumway, “Rumsfeld’s Torture Panel Clears Rumsfeld,” The New Standard, August 26, 2004, http://www.antiwar.com/orig/shumway.php?articleid=3450.

[26] Elizabeth Holtzman, “Calling Nancy Pelosi: The People’s Case for Impeaching Bush,” The Washington Spectator, November 14, 2006, http://www.commondreams.org/views06/1114-22.htm.

[27] Phil Worden, “Has Bush Committed Impeachable Acts?,” The Bangor Daily News, April 30, 2007, http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/04/30/875/print/

[28] Ray McGovern, “Cheney and Fried Rice in Hot Water,” CommonDreams.org, December 10, 2005, http://www.commondreams.org/cgi-bin/print.cgi?file=/views05/1210-27.htm.

[29] Ray McGovern, “Cheney and Fried Rice in Hot Water,” CommonDreams.org, December 10, 2005, http://www.commondreams.org/cgi-bin/print.cgi?file=/views05/1210-27.htm.

[30] “About John Yoo’s Torture Memo,” The National Lawyer’s Guild, Boalt Hall Chapter, http://nlg.boalt.org/Yoo.html.

Cheney Power Grab: Says White House Rules Don’t Apply to Him - CommonDreams.org

How remarkable. Bushco has authorized war under false intelligence, torture, spying on Americans, signing statements refusing to obey the law, unprecedented corporate corruption disguised as no-bid government contracts, refusal to obey the Bill of Rights including separation of church and state and freedom of the press.... the list goes on, but True is stunned by Cheney's latest: the rules do not apply to him.
Still, a guy who can shoot his pal with impunity, a guy who can trash gay rights even though his daughter is a lesbian, a guy who can plot against Americans who just might vote against him.... well, what else might we expect?
Declaration of being Emperor is just the next step.


Cheney Power Grab: Says White House Rules Don’t Apply to Him - CommonDreams.org

True tabs

Dear readers,
Let's face it; True is getting too big. A long story takes up too much space on the blog.
SO, we are working on issuing more "labels": in the past these have been fairly generic, like "environment" or "cook county."
As we get more specific, readers can click on our labels and see EVERY single post related to that label.... Actually readers can do the same thing now, but if you click "environment" you will have way more posts than you probably want to read.
Please bear with us. We are all volunteers. We wish we had a better website but must work with our blogger.
Thanks so much,
True

A hitchhikers guide to the blogosphere

Dear readers,
We are now on the map! Follow Kilroy 60's SECOND link to see us in his Guide.
True

Kilroy_60 said...
I like the approach of this blog. Interesting how you get the big picture and the grassroots.Given that, I've chosen True North to be included in the newest edition of A Hitchhiker's Guide To The Blogosphere. Keep up the good work.Cheers!
1:14 PM
Kilroy_60 said...
Sorry folks, the link changed. You'll find the Hitchhiker's Guide here.
2:49 PM

News Herald parent sold to Dallas media group

Yikes! Dallas, Texas: the site of the JFK assassination, the boiling center of the super-right-wing-oil rich and their anti-democracy agenda. Texas, the home of the lawless cowboy prez whose brother stole the election in Florida that brought him to office, whose wealthy entitlement family roots have convinced him that he deserves to end up on home plate without actually running around the bases.
Our wonderful, 117-year old Cook County News Herald, which has managed to survive intact despite many previous acquisitions after an un-named and unlamented owner sold out to the highest bidder a few years back.
But the local staff have soldiered on, despite staff cuts and long hours to the profit of the new owners. They have if anything raised the news coverage, as well as the photos and page layout, to an unprecedented high.
Well. Perhaps it won't matter what media conglomerate takes over next, so long as the local folks still put the paper together. This sort of takeover acquisition of newspapers in recent years is virtually universal. We can only hope for the best here in Cook County...
But, for all small local newspapers, it is not for the best that rich conglomerates take them over. Cui bono? Read the Duluth story below:
True


· Duluth News Tribune ·

Democrats Cave on Timetable

True really really hates to say I told you so. What the hell did we elect these bozo Dems for? They are lily-livered cowards and just as beholden to special interests as the evil Repugs.
Some Americans and thousands of Iraqis will die because the Dems have no guts. Billions more will be spent that could better be applied to our desperate domestic needs. Hatred of our country will multiply without limits.
The people of the United States will .... what? Cave like those Deficient Dems? or, Just Say No to more evil, unjust, stupid war.....
With just the faintest hope from True


Truthdig - Ear to the Ground - Democrats Cave on Timetable

GAO Says Homeland Security is Breaking Privacy Laws

What kind of country do we want to live in? I won't be flying to Hawaii like one of our luminous locals who found herself on the No-Fly list due to no fault of her own.
Well, I AM at fault in my unflagging criticism of this administration and its policies that increase terrorism and insecurity and death and dislocation and destruction and torture and hatred in our world. So, if I go, it will be across the border to Canada and I won't be coming back.
True

GAO Says Homeland Security is Breaking Privacy Laws

Catholics, Baptists dominate Congress

By a wide majority, Catholics are the most represented group in Congress (155 members), followed by Baptists (59 members). For us Minnesotans, there are only 17 Lutherans! Can you believe it? Still, there are 37 Episcopalians and despite some criticism these two Protestant sects have merged to some extent. (Think, Garrison Keillor: I've got nothing against Episcopalians, but I'm a Lutheran till I die.")

True was just wondering about the demographics of Congress. In a country where freedom of speech and religion are guaranteed, this should not matter.... but, today, we have presidentially sanctioned limits on both speech and religion..... True himself adamantly supports freedom of religion and separation of church and state. But that's a sword that cuts both ways.

Today the pope reiterated the Catholic position on abortion. Baptists are not really well known for ecumenical thinking, or even reconciling congregations. True just wonders to what extent the religious makeup of Congress determines its vote, no matter what the religious or non-religious makeup of its constituency. Just wondering, just asking.

True



FCNL: Legislative Action Center

Can you foster or adopt these incarcerated young dogs?

Help! Four puppies and a yearling need fostering and/or GOOD homes. Good means being committed to the difficult task of training for these younglings, with shepherd and rottweiler genes that require a firm and steady hand.
Animal Advocates doesn't lecture, but True can. It's a crime that people allow their animals to breed indiscrimately and then abandon the offspring. It's a crime that people get cute, free puppies and then abandon them when they need to be trained and spay/neutered.
It's a crime, and maybe there is nothing to be done about it. But, those of us who care need to take responsibility. We need to open our hearts to unwanted pets who can't survive on their own, who have been bred for hundreds or thousands of years as human companions.
SO, you can't adopt. Can you foster? So, you can't foster. Can you help to find foster homes? Can you offer training? Low-cost spay/neuter?
The Animal Advocates don't have money to hire trainers or pay for vets. All they have to offer is love and a commitment to save lives and find truly good homes.



From:
"Animal Advocates" View Contact Details Add Mobile Alert
To:
news@boreal.org
Subject:
four shep pups still need homes
Date:
Tue, 8 May 2007 17:18:08 -0500

four month old and full of life.......been cooped up in pound for
over a
week. Need help to foster or permanent home for the three boys and one
lady.
Foster one or more,just need to get them in a setting where they can be
puppies.. e mail or call 387 1781
--"Advocating for the stray and unwanted animals in the Arrowhead
Region of
Minnesota"
Boreal Access Web Mailer

From:
"Animal Advocates" View Contact Details Add Mobile Alert
To:
news@boreal.org
Subject:
young male rot mix needs home
Date:
Tue, 8 May 2007 17:15:08 -0500

Jones is a year old,fixed,current shots. He is very affectionate
and
needs a yard or lots of walks. Sweetest face around. He has been in the
pound
too long. If interested e mail or call 387 1781, Foster or forever
home
needed. Gay
--"Advocating for the stray and unwanted animals in the Arrowhead
Region of
Minnesota"
Boreal Access Web Mailer

Urgent FDA Warning re antidepressants for kids

There's still time to call legislators who are on the conference committee regarding HF6, "safe" schools (i.e. "war is peace"-get it?) regarding the dangerous TEENSCREEN legislation authored by a board member of the Teenscreen group herself!
Controversy and conflict of interest abound on this one, let alone the irresponsible and dangerous consequences to
our children, let alone parent's rights. CALL NOW the numbers listed at the end of this email. It is vitally important that
the legislators are not swayed by those who stand to make money on this deal. See the latest from the FDA below.

NOTE: THE ONLY PEOPLE WHO HAVE COME OUT IN SUPPORT OF THIS LEGISLATION ARE THOSE WHO STAND TO MAKE MONEY FROM IT. WHERE ARE THE PARENTS AND STUDENTS WHO HAVE SUPPOSEDLY BENEFITTED FROM THIS? THEY DON'T EXIST!

Can this be any more clear??? Call your legislator NOW. See this week's articles on this issue below:

FDA News
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASEMay 2, 2007
Media Inquiries: Sandy Walsh, 301-827-6242Consumer Inquiries: 888-INFO-FDA
FDA Proposes New Warnings About Suicidal Thinking, Behavior in Young Adults Who Take Antidepressant Medications
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) today proposed that makers of all antidepressant medications update the existing black box warning on their products' labeling to include warnings about increased risks of suicidal thinking and behavior, known as suicidality, in young adults ages 18 to 24 during initial treatment (generally the first one to two months).
The proposed labeling changes also include language stating that scientific data did not show this increased risk in adults older than 24, and that adults ages 65 and older taking antidepressants have a decreased risk of suicidality. The proposed warning statements emphasize that depression and certain other serious psychiatric disorders are themselves the most important causes of suicide.
"Today's actions represent FDA's commitment to a high level of post-marketing evaluation of drug products," said Steven Galson, M.D., MPH, director of FDA's Center for Drug Evaluation and Research. "Depression and other psychiatric disorders can have significant consequences if not appropriately treated. Antidepressant medications benefit many patients, but it is important that doctors and patients are aware of the risks."
People currently prescribed antidepressant medications should not stop taking them. Those who have concerns should notify their health care providers.
The proposed labeling changes apply to the entire category of antidepressants. Results of individual placebo-controlled scientific studies are reasonably consistent in showing a slight increase in suicidality for patients taking antidepressants in early treatment for most of the medications. Available data are not sufficient to exclude any single medication from the increased risk of suicidality.
The proposed labeling update follows similar labeling changes made in 2005 that warned of a suicidality risk in children and adolescents who use antidepressants. At that time, FDA asked manufacturers to add a black box warning to the labeling of all antidepressants to describe this risk and to emphasize the need for appropriate monitoring and close observation, particularly for younger patients taking these medications. In addition, FDA directed manufacturers to develop Medication Guides, FDA-approved user-friendly information for patients, families and caregivers, that could help improve monitoring. Medication Guides are intended to be distributed at the pharmacy with each prescription or refill of a medication.
Also in 2005, FDA began a comprehensive review of 295 individual antidepressant trials that included over 77,000 adult patients with major depressive disorder (MDD) and other psychiatric disorders, to examine the risk of suicidality in adults who are prescribed antidepressants.
In December 2006, FDA's Psychopharmacologic Drugs Advisory Committee agreed that labeling changes were needed to inform health care professionals about the increased risk of suicidality in younger adults using antidepressants. Additionally, the committee noted product labeling needed to reflect the apparent beneficial effect of antidepressants in older adults and to remind health care professionals that the disorders themselves are the most important cause of suicidality.
FDA has been developing language to revise product labeling and update the Patient Medication Guides for these products. Manufacturers of antidepressants will now have 30 days to submit their revised product labels and revised Medication Guides to FDA for review.
Products involved in today's action include:
Anafranil (clomipramine)Asendin (amoxapine)Aventyl (nortriptyline)Celexa (citalopram hydrobromide)Cymbalta (duloxetine)Desyrel (trazodone HCl)Elavil (amitriptyline)Effexor (venlafaxine HCl)Emsam (selegiline)Etrafon (perphenazine/amitriptyline)fluvoxamine maleateLexapro (escitalopram hydrobromide)Limbitrol (chlordiazepoxide/amitriptyline)Ludiomil (maprotiline)Marplan (isocarboxazid)Nardil (phenelzine sulfate) nefazodone HClNorpramin (desipramine HCl)Pamelor (nortriptyline)Parnate (tranylcypromine sulfate)Paxil (paroxetine HCl)Pexeva (paroxetine mesylate)Prozac (fluoxetine HCl)Remeron (mirtazapine)Sarafem (fluoxetine HCl)Seroquel (quetiapine)Sinequan (doxepin)Surmontil (trimipramine)Symbyax (olanzapine/fluoxetine)Tofranil (imipramine)Tofranil-PM (imipramine pamoate)Triavil (perphenazine/amitriptyline)Vivactil (protriptyline)Wellbutrin (bupropion HCl)Zoloft (sertraline HCl)Zyban (bupropion HCl)
For more information:
Antidepressant use in children, adolescents, and adults, including the draft labeling and draft
Medication Guides www.fda.gov/cder/drug/antidepressants/default.htm
FDA's Psychopharmacologic Drugs Advisory Committee, including transcripts from the December 2006 meeting www.fda.gov/ohrms/dockets/ac/cder06.html#Psychopharmacologic
21,211 Total Signatures - TeenScreen petition: http://www.petitiononline.com/TScreen/petition.html
From: Parents Against TeenScreen [mailto:parents_against_teenscreen@earthlink.net] Sent: Thursday, May 03, 2007 6:37 AMTo: Parents Against TeenScreenSubject: Yo Minnesota - More

Go Minnesota Go!

Also check out the following links to see letters from a lot of people opposed to Teen Screen:

Several are from the St. Cloud Times, St. Cloud, Minn.:

http://www.sctimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070503/OPINION/105030023/1006/NEWS01


http://www.sctimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070503/OPINION/105030026/1006/NEWS01%C2%A0


http://www.sctimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070503/OPINION/105030025/1006


http://www.sctimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070503/OPINION/105030024/1006

Finally, this link updates the status of TeenScreen in the Minnesota House and Senate and provides some contact information:
http://www.fda.gov/bbs/topics/NEWS/2007/NEW01624.html

Bev Miller

DFL-led House OKs shift in tax burden, Pawlenty promises veto

Governor Tim Pawlenty, best known for a swell haircut, a toothy smile and a total lack of understanding of Minnesota history and values, has promised to veto a House bill shifting some of the state's tax burden to those who can afford it.
Dear old Hubert H. Humphrey, our long-winded and well-beloved former Vice President, who faithfully spoke his joyful message at DFL bean feeds, would be glad today at the House vote. Paul Wellstone, the people's senator, would be jumping up and down with joy.
Minnesota has (until the bad old Reagan years) always been about its people, its workers, its children and their collective well being. AND also, about supporting local governments and schools so the big tax burdens don't fall on the few.
True is proud to provide the link to this story from the Strib. Hopefully people in Cook County will recognize that the old Minnesota way that produced a great way of life is still the best way.
Read on:

DFL-led House OKs shift in tax burden

Grand Marais poor tax

True,
There are many ways that the poor are over-taxed. Onesuch is the sales tax, that same one now in the state legislature asking that everybody pay one percent on everything they spend except for food and clothing. This is to support "infrastructure improvements" that could probably be supported by existing grant programs, both federal and nonprofit.
Another such is the proposed gas tax increase of 10 cents per gallon, a blip to the comfortable middle class, a mosquito to the rich, but for us poor folks a devastating blow. We don't have mass transit in Cook County so cars are our only access to jobs.
None of us make enough money to pay income tax. Think about that. But we pay hundreds of dollars in fees and sales taxes that bring our total tax burden at least to the level of the middle class.
Po' folks like me also live on fixed incomes (NOT welfare, cowboys! Think, Social Security) that don't always meet our essential needs. For this very reason, the federal fuel assistance program was created to ensure that we don't freeze solid during the winter. In past years the worst of the winter heating costs were largely subsidized by it.
This year, the subsidies were cut drastically. Also the Grand Marais Public Utilities fees per kilowatt hour went up by about 20 percent. And, even when a grant was approved, it was strung out over four months.
For me, True, this meant that my utility liability more than doubled over last winter. I don't have any heat source except for small electric heaters and wood.
But the Poor Tax was added on: I have to pay a stiff penalty of $15 to $20 per month because the fuel assistance help I counted on was denied or delayed.
I will be paying this Poor Tax every month in 2007 as well as the excess fees charged this year, as well as the gap resulting from federal budget cuts.
Are you rich?
Well, lucky you. But you don't pay any more in taxes and fees than I do, with my IRS taxable income of minus zero.
Anonymous (Oh don't think I am so dumb as to sign my name to this!)

Tourism sales: one-third or 82 percent?

Readers, check out this story in yesterday's Duluth paper. It says about one-third of sales in Cook County are tourism-related, a far cry from the 82 percent used by the tourism group calling itself the Economic Analysis Council that wants us all to pay more in sales taxes to increase tourism promotional budgets.
It does look like the Minnesota House may balk at the proposal for a recreation tax to create a super-tourism board.
True has heard rumblings all over the county of people who don't want to pay a regressive sales tax to support the industry that pays us the least (on average $297 per week) of all county jobs.

Click the link to read the story, "Tapping Assets of the North Shore":

· Duluth News Tribune ·

A Time For Anger, A Call To Action

Dear readers,
On this Good Friday which also takes place during Passover, I am taking the unusual step of posting the entire text of this passionate and spiritually inspiring speech made by Bill Moyers in February. He urges us to look to the teachings of Jesus as well as the roots of our democracy and then do our part to bring America back on the right track.
If you like this speech, check out one made just over a year ago, called "A Time for Heresy" at http://alternet.org/story/33958/. You may have to first go to the Alternet website archives to access this story.
True


A Time For Anger, A Call To Action
By Bill Moyers

-
The following is a transcript of a speech given on February 7, 2007 at Occidental College in Los Angeles.
-
I am grateful to you for this opportunity and to President Prager for the hospitality of this evening, to Diana Akiyama, Director of the Office for Religious and Spiritual Life, whose idea it was to invite me and with whom you can have an accounting after I've left. And to the Lilly Endowment for funding the Values and Vocations project to encourage students at Occidental to explore how their beliefs and values shape their choices in life, how to make choices for meaningful work and how to make a contribution to the common good. It's a recognition of a unique venture: to demonstrate that the life of the mind and the longing of the spirit are mirror images of the human organism. I'm grateful to be here under their auspices.

I have come across the continent to talk to you about two subjects close to my heart. I care about them as a journalist, a citizen and a grandfather who looks at the pictures next to my computer of my five young grandchildren who do not have a vote, a lobbyist in Washington, or the means to contribute to a presidential candidate. If I don't act in their behalf, who will?

One of my obsessions is democracy, and there is no campus in the country more attuned than Occidental to what it will take to save democracy. Because of your record of activism for social justice, I know we agree that democracy is more than what we were taught in high school civics - more than the two-party system, the checks-and-balances, the debate over whether the Electoral College is a good idea. Those are important matters that warrant our attention, but democracy involves something more fundamental. I want to talk about what democracy bestows on us?the revolutionary idea that democracy is not just about the means of governance but the means of dignifying people so they become fully free to claim their moral and political agency. "I believe in democracy because it releases the energies of every human being" - those are the words of our 28th president, Woodrow Wilson.

I've been spending time with Woodrow Wilson and others of his era because my colleagues and I are producing a documentary series on the momentous struggles that gripped America a century or so years ago at the birth of modern politics. Woodrow Wilson clearly understood the nature of power. In his now-forgotten political testament called The New Freedom, Wilson described his reformism in plain English no one could fail to understand: "The laws of this country do not prevent the strong from crushing the week..." He wrote: "Don't deceive yourselves for a moment as to the power of great interests which now dominate our development... There are men in this country big enough to own the government of the United States. They are going to own it if they can." And he warned: "There is no salvation in the pitiful condescensions of industrial masters... prosperity guaranteed by trustees has no prospect of endurance."

Now Wilson took his stand at the center of power - the presidency itself - and from his stand came progressive income taxation, the federal estate tax, tariff reform, the challenge to great monopolies and trusts, and, most important, a resolute spirit "to deal with the new and subtle tyrannies according to their deserts."

How we need that spirit today! When Woodrow Wilson spoke of democracy releasing the energies of every human being, he was declaring that we cannot leave our destiny to politicians, elites, and experts; either we take democracy into our own hands, or others will take democracy from us.

We do not have much time. Our political system is melting down, right here where you live.

A recent poll by the Public Policy Institute of California found that only 20% of voters last November believe your state will be a better place to live in the year 2025; 51% say it will be worse. Another poll by the New American Foundation - summed up in an article by Steven Hill in the January 28th San Francisco Chronicle - found that for the first time in modern California history, a majority of adults are not registered with either of the two major parties. Furthermore, writes Hill, "There is a widening breach between most of the 39 million people residing in California and the fewer than 9 million who actually vote." Here we are getting to the heart of the crisis today - the great divide that has opened in American life.

According to that New American Foundation study, frequent voters [in California] tend to be 45 and older, have household incomes of $60,000 or more, are homeowners, and have college degrees. In contrast, the 12 million nonvoters (7 million of whom are eligible to vote but are not registered) tend to be younger than 45, rent instead of own, have not been to College, and have incomes less than $60,000.

In other words, "Considering that California often has one of the lowest voter participation rates in the nation - in some elections only a little more that 1/3 of eligible voters participate - a small group of frequent voters, who are richer, whiter, and older than their nonvoting neighbors, form the majority that decides which candidates win and which ballot measures pass." The author of that report (Mark Baldassare) concludes: "Only about 15% of adult people make the decisions and that 15% doesn't look much life California overall."

We should not be surprised by the consequences: "Two Californias have emerged. One that votes and one that does not. Both sides inhabit the same state and must share the same resources, but only one side is electing the political leaders who divide up the pie."

You've got a big problem here. But don't feel alone. Across the country our 18th political system is failing to deal with basic realities. Despite Thomas Jefferson's counsel that we would need a revolution every 25 years to enable our governance to serve new generations, our structure - practically deified for 225 years - has essentially stayed the same while science and technology have raced ahead. A young writer I know, named Jan Frel, one of the most thoughtful practitioners of the emerging world of Web journalism, wrote me the other day to say: "We've gone way past ourselves. I see the unfathomable numbers in the national debt and deficit, and the way that the Federal government was physically unable to respond to Hurricane Katrina. I look at Iraq; where 50% of the question is how to get out, and the other 50% is how did so few people have the power to start the invasion in the first place. If the Republic were functioning, they would have never had that power."

Yet the inertia of the political process seems virtually unstoppable. Frel reminds me that the chairman of the Senate Budget Committee can shepherd a $2.8 trillion dollar budget through the Senate and then admit: "It's hard to understand what a trillion is. I don't know what it is." Is it fair to expect anyone to understand what a trillion is, my young friend asks, or how to behave with it in any democratic fashion?" He goes on: "But the political system and culture are forcing 535 members of Congress and a President who are often thousands of miles away from their 300 million constituents to do so. It is frightening to watch the American media culture from progressive to hard right being totally sold on the idea of one President for 300 million people, as though the Presidency is still fit to human scale. I'm at a point where the idea of a political savior in the guise of a Presidential candidate or congressional majority sounds downright scary, and at the same time, with very few exceptions, the writers and journalists across the slate are completely sold on it."

Our political system is promiscuous as well as primitive. The first modern fundraiser in American politics - Mark Hanna, who shook down the corporations to make William McKinley President of the United States in 1896 - once said there are two important things in politics. "One is money, and I can't remember the other one." Because our system feeds on campaign contributions, the powerful and the privileged shape it to their will. Only 12% of American households had incomes over $100,000 in 2000, but they made up 95% of the substantial donors to campaigns and have been the big winners in Washington ever since.

I saw early on the consequences of political and social inequality. I got my first job in journalism at the age of 16. I quickly had one of those strokes of luck that can determine a career. Some of the old timers were on vacation or out sick and I was assigned to cover what came to be known as the 'Housewives Rebellion.' Fifteen women in my home town decided not to pay the social security withholding tax for their domestic workers. They argued that social security was unconstitutional, that imposing it was taxation without representation, and that - here's my favorite part - "requiring us to collect (the tax) is no different from requiring us to collect the garbage."

They hired themselves a lawyer - none other than Martin Dies, the former Congressman best known, or worst known, for his work as head of the House Committee on Un-American Activities in the 30s and 40s. He was no more effective at defending rebellious women than he had been protecting against Communist subversives, and eventually the women wound up holding their noses and paying the tax. The stories I wrote for my local paper were picked up and moved on by the Associated Press wire to Newspapers all over the country. One day, the managing editor called me over and pointed to the AP ticker beside his desk. Moving across the wire was a notice citing one "Bill Moyers" and the News Messenger for the reporting we had done on the rebellion.

That hooked me. In one way or another - after a detour through seminary and then into politics and government for a spell - I've been covering politics ever since.

By "politics" I mean when people get together to influence government, change their own lives, and change society. Sometimes those people are powerful corporate lobby groups like the drug companies and the oil industry, and sometimes they are ordinary people fighting to protect their communities from toxic chemicals, workers fighting for a living wage, or college students organizing to put an end to sweatshops.

Those women in Marshall, Texas - who didn't want to pay Social Security taxes for their maids - were not bad people. They were regulars at church, their children were my friends, many of them were active in community affairs, and their husbands were pillars of the business and professional class in town. They were respectable and upstanding citizens all.

So it took me awhile to figure out what had brought on that spasm of reactionary rebellion. It came to me one day, much later. They simply couldn't see beyond their own prerogatives. Fiercely loyal to their families, to their clubs, charities, and congregations - fiercely loyal, in other words, to their own kind - they narrowly defined membership in democracy to include only people like them. The women who washed and ironed their laundry, wiped their children's bottoms, made their husbands' beds, and cooked their families meals - these women, too, would grow old and frail, sick and decrepit, lose their husbands and face the ravages of time alone, with nothing to show from their years of labor but the creases in their brow and the knots on their knuckles.

In one way or another, this is the oldest story in America: the struggle to determine whether "We, the People" is a spiritual idea embedded in a political reality - one nation, indivisible - or merely a charade masquerading as piety and manipulated by the powerful and privileged to sustain their own way of life at the expense of others.

We seem to be holding our breath today, trying to decide what kind of country we want to be. But in this state of suspension, powerful interests are making off with the booty. They remind me of the card shark in Texas who said to his competitor in the poker game: "Now play the cards fairly Reuben. I know what I dealt you."

For years now a small fraction of American households have been garnering a larger and larger concentration of wealth and income, while large corporations and financial institutions have obtained unprecedented power over who wins and who loses. Inequality in America is greater than it's been in 50 years. In 1960 the gap in terms of wealth between the top 20% and the bottom 20% was 30 fold. Today it's more than 75 fold.

Such concentrations of wealth would be far less of an issue if the rest of society were benefiting proportionally. But that is not the case. Throughout our industrial history incomes grew at 30% to 50% or more every quarter, and in the quarter century after WWII, gains reached more than 100% for all income categories. Since the late 1970s, only the top 1% of households increased their income by 100%.

Once upon a time, according to Isabel Sawhill and Sara McLanahan in The Future of Children, the American ideal of classless society was 'one in which all children have roughly equal chance of success regardless of the economic status of the family into which they were born. That's changing fast. The Economist Jeffrey Madrick writes that just a couple of decades ago, only 20% of one's future income was determined by the income of one's father. New research suggests that today 60% of a son's income is determined by the level of his father's income. In other words, children no longer have a roughly equal chance of success regardless of the economic status of the family into which they are born. Their chances of success are greatly improved if they are born on third base and their father has been tipping the umpire.

As all of you know, a college education today is practically a necessity if you are to hold your own, much less climb the next rung. More than 40% of all new jobs now require a college degree. There are real world consequences to this, and Madrick drives them home. Since the 1970s, median wages of men with college degrees have risen about 14%. But median wages for high school graduates have fallen about 15%. Not surprisingly, nearly 24% of American workers with only a high school diploma have no health insurance, compared with less than 10% of those with college degrees.

Such statistics can bring glaze to the eyes, but Oscar Wilde once said that it is the mark of truly educated people to be deeply moved by statistics. All of you are educated, and I know you can envision the stress these economic realities are putting on working people and on family life. As incomes have stagnated, higher education, health care, public transportation, drugs, housing and cars have risen faster in price than typical family incomes, so that life, says Jeffrey Madrick, "has grown neither calm nor secure for most Americans, by any means."

Let me tell you about the Stanleys and the Neumanns, two families who live in Milwaukee. One is black, the other white. The breadwinners in both were laid off in the first wave of downsizing in 1991 as corporations began moving jobs out of the city and then out of the country. In a documentary series my colleagues and I chronicled their efforts over the next decade to cope with the wrenching changes in their lives and to find a place for themselves in the new global economy. They're the kind of Americans my mother would have called "the salt of the earth". They love their kids, care about their communities, go to church every Sunday, and work hard all week.

To make ends meet after the layoffs, both mothers took full-time jobs. Both fathers became seriously ill. When one father had to stay in the hospital two months the family went $30,000 in debt because they didn't have adequate health care. We were there with our cameras when the bank started to foreclose on the modest home of one family that couldn't make mortgage payments. Like millions of Americans, the Stanleys and the Neumanns were playing by the rules and still getting stiffed. By the end of the decade they were running harder but slipping further behind, and the gap between them and prosperous America was widening.

What turns their personal tragedy into a political travesty is that while they are indeed patriotic, they no longer believe they matter to the people who run the country. They simply do not think their concerns will ever be addressed by the political, corporate, and media elites who make up our dominant class. They are not cynical, because they are deeply religious people with no capacity for cynicism, but they know the system is rigged against them.

"Things have reached such a state of affairs," the journalist George Orwell once wrote, "that the first duty of every intelligent person is to pay attention to the obvious." The editors of The Economist have done just that. The pro-business magazine considered by many to be the most influential defender of capitalism on the newsstand, produced a sobering analysis of what is happening to the old notion that any American child can get to the top. A growing body of evidence - some of it I have already cited - led the editors to conclude that with "income inequality growing to levels not seen since the Gilded Age and social mobility falling behind, the United States risks calcifying into a European-style class-based society." The editors point to an "education system increasingly stratified by social class" in which poor children "attend schools with fewer resources than those of their richer contemporaries" and great universities that are "increasingly reinforcing rather than reducing these educational inequalities." They conclude that America's great companies have made it harder than ever "for people to start at the bottom and rise up the company hierarchies by dint of hard work and self-improvement."

It is eerie to read assessments like that and then read the anthropologist Jared Diamond's book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Succeed or Fail He describes an America society in which elites cocoon themselves "in gated communities, guarded by private security guards, and filled with people who drink bottled water, depend on private pensions, and send their children to private schools." Gradually, they lose the motivation "to support the police force, the municipal water supply, Social Security, and public schools." Any society contains a built-in blueprint for failure, warns Jared Diamond, if elites insulate themselves from the consequences of their own actions.

So it is that in a study of its own, The American Political Science Association found that "increasing inequalities threaten the American ideal of equal citizenship and that progress toward real democracy may have stalled in this country and even reversed."

This is a marked turn of events for a country whose mythology embraces "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" as part of our creed. America was not supposed to be a country of "winner take all." Through our system of checks and balances we were going to maintain a healthy equilibrium in how power works - and for whom. Because equitable access to public resources is the lifeblood of any democracy, we made primary schooling free to all. Because everyone deserves a second chance, debtors, especially the relatively poor, were protected by state laws against their rich creditors. Government encouraged Americans to own their own piece of land, and even supported squatters' rights. In my time, the hope of equal opportunity became reality for millions of us. Although my parents were knocked down and almost out by the Great Depression, and were poor all their lives, my brother and I went to good public schools. The GI Bill made it possible for him to go to college. When I bought my first car with a loan of $450 I drove to a public school on a public highway and stopped to rest in a public park. America as a shared project was becoming the engine of our national experience.

Not now. Beginning a quarter of a century ago a movement of corporate, political, and religious fundamentalists gained ascendancy over politics and made inequality their goal. They launched a crusade to dismantle the political institutions, the legal and statutory canons, and the intellectual and cultural frameworks that have held private power. And they had the money to back up their ambition.

Let me read you something:

When powerful interests shower Washington with millions in campaign contributions, they often get what they want. But it is ordinary citizens and firms that pay the price and most of them never see it coming. This is what happens if you don't contribute to their campaigns or spend generously on lobbying. You pick up a disproportionate share of America's tax bill. You pay higher prices for a broad range of products from peanuts to prescriptions. You pay taxes that others in a similar situation have been excused from paying. You're compelled to abide by laws while others are granted immunity from them. You must pay debts that you incur while others do not. You're barred from writing off on your tax returns some of the money spent on necessities while others deduct the cost of their entertainment. You must run your business by one set of rules, while the government creates another set for your competitors. In contrast, the fortunate few who contribute to the right politicians and hire the right lobbyists enjoy all the benefits of their special status. Make a bad business deal; the government bails them out. If they want to hire workers at below market wages, the government provides the means to do so. If they want more time to pay their debts, the government gives them an extension. If they want immunity from certain laws, the government gives it. If they want to ignore rules their competition must comply with, the government gives its approval. If they want to kill legislation that is intended for the public, it gets killed.

I'm not quoting from Karl Marx's Das Kapital or Mao's Little Red Book. I'm quoting Time Magazine. From the heart of America's media establishment comes the judgment that America now has "government for the few at the expense of the many."

We are talking about nothing less that a class war declared a generation ago, in a powerful polemic by the wealthy right-winger, William Simon, who had been Richard Nixon's Secretary of the Treasury. In it he declared that "funds generated by business... must rush by the multimillions" to conservative causes. The trumpet was sounded for the financial and business class to take back the power and privileges they had lost as a result of the Great Depression and the New Deal. They got the message and were soon waging a well-orchestrated, lavishly-financed movement. Business Week put it bluntly: "Some people will obviously have to do with less... .It will be a bitter pill for many Americans to swallow the idea of doing with less so that big business can have more." The long-range strategy was to cut workforces and their wages, scour the globe in search of cheap labor, trash the social contract and the safety net that was supposed to protect people from hardships beyond their control, deny ordinary citizens the power to sue rich corporations for malfeasance and malpractice, and eliminate the ability of government to restrain what editorialists for the Wall Street Journal admiringly call "the animal spirits of business."

Looking backwards, it all seems so clear that we wonder how we could have ignored the warning signs at the time. What has been happening to working people is not the result of Adam Smith's invisible hand but the direct consequence of corporate activism, intellectual propaganda, the rise of a religious literalism opposed to any civil and human right that threaten its paternalism, and a string of political decisions favoring the interests of wealthy elites who bought the political system right out from under us.

To create the intellectual framework for this revolution in public policy, they funded conservative think tanks that churned out study after study advocating their agenda.

To put muscle behind these ideas, they created a formidable political machine. One of the few journalists to cover the issues of class, Thomas Edsall of the Washington Post, reported that "During the 1970s, business refined its ability to act as a class, submerging competitive instincts in favor of joint, cooperate action in the legislative area." Big business political action committees flooded the political arena with a deluge of dollars. And they built alliances with the religious right - Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority and Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition - who gleefully contrived a cultural holy war that became a smokescreen behind which the economic assault on the middle and working classes would occur.

From land, water, and other resources, to media and the broadcast and digital spectrums, to scientific discovery and medial breakthroughs, a broad range of America's public resources have been undergoing a powerful shift toward elite control, contributing substantially to those economic pressures on ordinary Americans that "deeply affect household stability, family dynamics, social mobility, political participation and civic life."
What's to be done?

The only answer to organized money is organized people.

Again:

The only answer to organized money is organized people.

And again:

The only answer to organized money is organized people.

I came to Occidental because your campus has a reputation for believing in a political system where ordinary people have a voice in making the decisions that shape their lives, not just at the ballot box every two or four years in November, but in their workplaces, their neighborhoods and communities, and on their college campuses. In a real democracy, ordinary people at every level hold their elected officials accountable for the big decisions, about whether or not to go to war and put young men and women in harm's way, about the pollution of the environment, global warming, and the health and safety of our workplaces, our communities, our food and our air and our water, the quality of our public schools, and the distribution of economic resources. It's the spirit of fighting back throughout American history that brought an end to sweatshops, won the eight-hour working day and a minimum wage, delivered suffrage to women and blacks from slavery, inspired the Gay Rights movement, the consumer and environmental movements, and more recently stopped Congress from enacting repressive legislation against immigrants.

I believe a new wave of social reform is about to break across America. We see it in the struggle for a 'living wage' for America's working people... Last November, voters in six states approved ballot measures to raise their states' minimum wage above the federal level; 28 states now have such laws. Since 1994, more than 100 cities have passed local living wage laws that require employers who do business with the government - who get taxpayer subsidies, in other words - to pay workers enough to lift their families out of poverty.

Los Angeles has led the way, passing one of the nation's strongest 'living wage' laws in 1997. And just the other day the LA City Council voted to extend that "living wage" law to the thirty-five hundred hotel workers around the Los Angeles Airport - the first living wage law in the country to target a specific industry and a specific geographic area. But it took last fall's march down Century Boulevard - organized people! - to finally bring it about and it took the arrest of hundreds of college students, including several dozen from Occidental.

The great abolitionist Frederick Douglass said that "if there is no struggle, there is no progress." Those who profess freedom, yet fail to act - they are "men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning, they want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters... power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what people will submit to, and you have found the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them."

What America needs is a broad bi-partisan movement for democracy. It's happened before: In 1800, with the Jeffersonian Democrats; in 1860, with Radical Republicans; in 1892, with the Populists; in 1912, with Bull Moose Progressives; in 1932, with the New Deal; in l964, with Civil Rights activists - each moment a breaking point after long, hard struggles, each with small beginnings in transcendent faith.

Faith! That's the other subject close to my heart that I have come talk about. Almost every great social movement in America has contained a flame of faith at its core - the belief that all human beings bear traces of the divine spark, however defined. I myself believe that within the religious quest - in the deeper realm of spirituality that may well be the primal origin of all religion - lies what Gregg Easterbrook calls "an essential aspect of the human prospect." It is here we wrestle with questions of life and purpose, with the meaning of loss, yearning and hope, above all of love.

I am grateful to have first been exposed to those qualities in my own Christian tradition. T.S. Eliot believed that "no man [or woman] has ever climbed to the higher stages of the spiritual life who has not been a believer in a particular religion, or at least a particular philosophy." As we dig deeper into our own religion, we are likely to break through to someone else digging deeper toward us from their own tradition, and on some metaphysical level, we converge, like the images inside a kaleidoscope, into new patterns of meaning that illuminate our own journey.

For most of our history this country's religious discourse was dominated by white male Protestants of a culturally conservative European heritage - people like me. Dissenting voices of America, alternative visions of faith, or race, of women, rarely reached the mainstream. The cartoonist Jeff McNally summed it up with two weirdoes talking in a California diner. One weirdo says to the other. "Have you ever delved into the mysteries of Eastern Religion?" And the second weirdo answers: "Yes, I was once a Methodist in Philadelphia." Once upon a time that was about the extent of our exposure to the varieties of Religious experience. No longer. Our nation is being re-created right before our eyes, with mosques and Hindu Temples, Sikh communities and Buddhist retreat centers. And we all have so much to teach each other. Buddhists can teach us about the delight of contemplation and 'the infinite within.' From Muslims we can learn about the nature of surrender; from Jews, the power of the prophetic conscience; from Hindus, the "realms of gold" hidden in the depths of our hearts," from Confucians the empathy necessary to sustain the fragile web of civilization... Nothing I take from these traditions has come at the expense of the Christian story. I respect that story - my story ?even more for having come to see that all the great religious grapple with things that matter, although each may come out at a different place; that each arises from within and experiences a lived human experience; and each and every one of them offers a unique insight into human nature. I reject the notion that faith is acquired in the same way one chooses a meal in a cafeteria, but I confess there is something liberating about no longer being quite so deaf to what others have to report from their experience.

So let me share with you what I treasure most about the faith that has informed my journey. You will find it in the New Testament, in the gospel of Matthew, where the story of Jesus of Nazareth unfolds chapter by chapter: The birth at Bethlehem. The baptism in the River Jordan. The temptation in the wilderness. The Sermon on the Mount. The healing of the sick and the feeding of the hungry. The Parables. The calling of the Disciples. The journey to Jerusalem. And always, embedded like pearls throughout the story, the teachings of compassion, forgiveness, and reconciliation:


Love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who spitefully use you and persecute you.

Whoever strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other to him also... and whoever compels you to go one mile, go with him two.

If you bring your gift to the altar, and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift before the altar, and go your way. First be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer our gift.

Judge not, lest ye be judged.

In these pages we are in the presence of one who clearly understands the power of love, mercy, and kindness - the 'gentle Jesus' so familiar in art, song, and Sunday School.

But then the tale turns. Jesus' demeanor changes; the tone and temper of the narrative shift, and the Prince of Peace becomes a disturber of the peace:
Then Jesus went into the temple of God and drove out all those who bought and sold in the temple, and overturned the tables of the moneychangers..... and he said to them, "It is written, 'My house shall be called a house of prayer but you have made it a den of thieves.'"


His message grew more threatening, amid growing crowds right on the Temple grounds. In his parable of the wicked tenants, he predicted the imminent destruction of the Jerusalem elites, setting in motion the events that led to his crucifixion a short time later.

No cheek turned there. No second mile traveled. On the contrary, Jesus grows angry. He passes judgment. His message becomes more threatening. And he takes action.

Over the past few years as we witnessed the growing concentration of wealth and privilege in our country, prophetic religion lost its voice, drowned out by the corporate, political, and religious right who hijacked Jesus.

That's right: They hijacked Jesus. The very Jesus who stood in Nazareth and proclaimed, "The Lord has anointed me to preach the good news to the poor" - this Jesus, hijacked by a philosophy of greed. The very Jesus who fed 5000 hungry people - and not just those in the skyboxes; the very Jesus who offered kindness to the prostitute and hospitality to the outcast; who raised the status of women and treated even the hated tax collector as a citizen of the Kingdom. The indignant Jesus who drove the money changers from the temple - this Jesus was hijacked and turned from a friend of the dispossessed into a guardian of privilege, the ally of oil barons, banking tycoons, media moguls and weapons builders.

Yet it was this same Jesus who inspired a Methodist ship-caulker named Edward Rogers to crusade across New England for an eight hour work day; called Frances William to rise up against the sweatshop; sent Dorothy Day to march alongside striking auto workers in Michigan, fishermen and textile workers in Massachusetts, brewery workers in New York, and marble cutters in Vermont; who roused E.B. McKinney and Owen Whitfield to stand against a Mississippi oligarchy that held sharecroppers in servitude, challenged a young priest named John Ryan to champion child labor laws a decade before the New Deal, and summoned Martin Luther King to Memphis to join sanitation workers in their struggle for a decent wage.

This Jesus was there on Century Boulevard last September, speaking Spanish. And it is this resurrected Jesus, in the company of the morally indignant of every faith, who will be there wherever Americans are angry enough to rise up and drive the money changers from the temples of democracy.

To you students at Occidental, let me say: I have been a journalist too long to look at the world through rose-colored glasses. I believe the only way to be in the world is to see it as it really is and then to take it on despite the frightening things you see. The Italian philosopher Gramschi spoke of the "the pessimism of the intellect and the optimism of the will." With this philosophy your generation can bring about the Third American Revolution. The first won independence from the Crown. The second won equal rights for women and for the sons and daughters of slavery. This third - the revolution of the 21st Century - will bring about a democracy that leaves no one out. The simple truth is we cannot build a political society or a nation across the vast divides that mark our country today. We must bridge that divide and make society whole, sharing the fruits of freedom and prosperity with the least among us. I have crossed the continent to tell you the Dream is not done, the work is not over, and your time has come to take it on.