www.democracyisnotfreedom.com/bipartisanmonopoly01.asp

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The Bipartisan Political Monopoly in the U.S.

Most Americans tend to think politically in terms of a “two-party system” in which the Republicans and Democrats are in a permanent face-off over the destiny of the U.S. nation - state. Conventional wisdom (for whatever it’s worth) says these two parties represent the only two viable (and supposedly polar opposite) “mainstream” positions on any relevant issue. Anything else is an all-but-irrelevant fringe point of view.

Year after year, voters choose between the two parties, seldom (if ever) asking why there are only two choices, or how much the agenda of either party is even consitutionally legal, or reflective of the principles (i.e., personal liberty and responsibility, limited government, etc.) on which the national government was established in the first place.

Conventional wisdom (again, for whatever it’s worth) suggests that no other parties are needed, that the two parties monopolizing the U.S. political system are all we need for “democracy.” Other parties are free to try and join the contest, but none has a sufficiently compelling or popular platform to merit public consideration. The government itself, along with the major media outlets, reinforce this mentality, further establishing popular belief in the “two-party system” as the American way.

Flaws in the “Two-Party System”

Because they are not readily visible to the public naked eye, a number of flaws in the “system” have gone unnoticed for many years, leaving most folks deceptively complacent, lulled into an ill-informed acquiesence to what they perceive as an otherwise robust and healthy American institution.

Two Parties—One Fiscal Agenda

It is instructive to observe not only the popularized differences between the two parties that control the “system,” but also the historical patterns and deeds in which they participated with remarkable unity. Throughout the many decades of their shared domination of U.S. politics, with respect to monetary and fiscal policy (and its long-term effect on The People and their property), both parties have:

increased federal taxation (including the constitutionally questionable direct “income tax”)

increased the size of the federal budget

increased the size of the federal deficit

increased the size of the national debt

abandoned the fiscally responsible practice of using a balanced budget

played an active role in the increased size of the federal government

created and expanded federal bureaucracies and police agencies to impose innumerable arbitrary regulations and penalties, thereby hindering private commerce and free enterprise

engaged heavily in the practice of “pork barrel” (tax-and-spend favoritism) politics,

including corporate welfare when and where it suited their agendas (i.e., getting or keeping power)

Despite what politicians from either party may say (or have said), neither party, in deed, platform, or policy, has opposed any of the above activities with any compelling measure of consistency or zeal since the late 1800s. At the federal level, both the Democratic and Republican parties have engaged continuously in creating a bloated, power-grabbing “national” government at the direct expense of The People’s liberty and their property (through excessive taxes and confiscatory statutes). For example, both parties either largely supported or acquiesced to:

the creation of the Federal Reserve system in 1913, in which a private bank cartel was awarded unprecedented (and unconstitutional) control over U.S. monetary and fiscal policy

the (unconsitutional) outlawing of private ownership and coerced confiscationgold by president Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933

the (unconsitutional) severing of U.S. monetary policy from the gold standard by president Richard Nixon in 1971

the plundering of U.S. citizens’ property through government-induced inflation, directly or indirectly resulting from the systematic implementation of the above three acts

Similarly, presidents of both parties (typically with congressional complicity) have:

repeatedly used “executive orders” and “emergency powers” to wage costly, unconstitutional, undeclared wars abroad against opponents that posed no direct threat to U.S. security

given away billions in aid and “loans” to foreign governments, much of which has never benefited the people over whom those governments rule

incurred ever greater national debt, the liability for which rests only with The People themselves, who, given no say in these actions, were instead “persuaded” to “trust the government”

[By the way, these are historical facts, folks. I know it’s not pretty, but the truth isn’t always a thing of beauty. And remember not to confuse walk with talk: Most politicians will say anything to stay in office (i.e., power). But it’s not their talk that matters as much as their walk (what they’ve actually done).]

Two Parties—One Foreign Policy Agenda

Under the control of one or both parties, U.S. military force was used abroad without a (constitutionally requisite) declaration from Congress well over one hundred times during the past hundred years alone.[ 1 ]

In the vast majority of cases, the goal was not the protection of the lives, liberty, or property of U.S. citizens on U.S. soil against foreign attack, nor their lawful protection abroad. Instead, in almost every case, a presidential administration (largely with congressional complicity) acted outside its lawful authority, to use lethal military force abroad (forcibly funded by a coercive “income tax” scheme) for achieving a constitutionally unlawful foreign policy goal.

In these and other constitutionally unlawful actions, presidents as far back as Lincoln have arbitrarily suspended the Law of the Land in order to centralize and increase the power of the federal government, often abusing that same power (especially since World War II) to engage in unwarranted military actions abroad.

All their campaign slogans and platforms (the talk) aside, both the Democrats and the Republicans have had various turns controlling the White House and one or both Houses of Congress. Yet at no time did either party actually employ that political edge to reverse any of the above trends in any meaningful or substantial measure. To the contrary, both have “pushed the envelope” in disregarding the legal limitations imposed by the U.S. Constitution, resulting in today’s bloated, power-hungry federal government.

While Democrats and Republicans may both point fingers and make noise about their opponents’ “records,” these aspects of both parties’ actual records don’t afford them much in the way of long-term bragging rights.

Things don’t get much better when one looks at social policies, either. Pick any social or moral cause for which either party claims (or has claimed) to stand, and you can find multiple instances where members of Congress, presidents, and other officials representative of that party took pragmatic action compromising that very cause.

Two Parties—One State & Local Agenda

The two parties that have shared control of America’s political landscape for more than a century together have easily exercised tremendous influence over federal, state, and local governments and the national media, “legally” hindering other voices from reaching the ears of the American public.

While giving lip service to the Constitution and parroting phrases like “rule of law” (which carry little meaningful weight amidst a plethora of consistently unlawful actions), proponents and protectors of the bipartisan monopoly (both the deliberate and the unwitting) largely exclude “third party” challenges from serious public consideration.

One of the most effective means of accomplishing this end has been State- and local-level election laws requiring non-monopoly candidates and parties to “prove” they deserve to be on the ballot by gathering an arbitrarily high number of (thousands of) signatures and/or jumping through other legal hoops.

If both parties truly have nothing to fear from “third party” candidates, and have genuine confidence in the voice of an informed electorate (the voters), one may reasonably wonder why both Democrats and Republicans have jointly gone to such lengths to hinder the participation of non-Democrats and non-Republicans in the election process at all levels.

The Presidential Debates Scam

A highly instructive example of the bipartisan monopoly in action involves the “presidential debates” in which the two parties (and only the two parties[ 1 ]) participate every four years. It’s no secret (though they don’t publicize it themselves) that these carefully staged events are heavily controlled and protected by the two parties, shielding both parties’ candidates from issues for which neither party wants to be held accountable.

Sound like another “conspiracy theory” to you? The whole sordid scam is thoroughly documented at the website of Open Debates http://www.opendebates.org/theissue/ [ 2 ], an organization dedicated to exposing this farce and getting the voices of the “third parties” heard. I urge you to take the time to study their coverage, and make your own informed assessment of the matter.

Candidate - Party - State Ballots - State Write-Ins - Electoral Votes

Bush - Republican - 51 - 0 - 538
Kerry - Democrat - 51 - 0 - 538
Nader - Independent - 35 - 5 - 363
Peroutka - Constitution - 36 - 3 - 407
Badnarik - Libertarian - 49 - 0 - 527
Cobb - Green - 28 - 7 - 396
Details of the 2004 presidential election (and “debates”) provide further insight into the perpetuation of the bipartisan monopoly of what should be an entirely non-partisan event. By mid-October, the “third party” candidates were on the ballots of U.S. states with potential electoral votes as indicated in the table at left.

The number of electoral votes needed to win a presidential election in 2004 was 270, so every candidate shown in the table would have technically been capable of winning the presidency, if it hadn’t been for the fact that all but the first two were virtually ignored by the U.S. government, both major parties, and the media in general. (How many times have you seen the “other four” viable candidates and their positions on any issues even mentioned (in any form) in the media [let alone on what are supposed to be non-partisan “debates”]?)

Suffice it to say that there is something terribly wrong when both public (taxes) and private funding are used to give the two largest parties additional, unnecessary and free advertising and exposure under the guise of “public debate,” to the deliberate exclusion of four viable, officially registered, and politically competitive platforms. The “news” media ought especially to be ashamed, since they pretend to offer balanced treatment of presidential elections, yet they largely ignore the presence and platforms of the “third parties,” as well as the injustice done to them via such charades as the “presidential debates.”

Conclusion

The evidence will not bear ignoring forever.

The Republicans and the Democrats have been pretending to be something like arch-enemies for many decades, during which time their real enemy has been the truth: The truth about the degree to which they share an agenda; the truth about how that agenda has served to centralize ever more power in their hands at the federal level; the truth about the bankruptcy toward which they have steered the U.S. monetary system and fiscal policies; and the truth about how most (if not all) of these endeavors are unmitigated violations of the Constitution, which they pretend to honor.

This agenda has been far from harmless. It has effectively plundered from U.S. citizens their property, their liberty, their lawful birthright, and in some cases their very lives. It has carefully conditioned us to think all this was normal, and that the principles and ideals of the founders (individual liberty and responsibility, free markets, and limited government) are somehow no longer fashionable.

Unfortunately, this trend isn’t likely to change until enough U.S. citizens both recognize this political monopoly for what it is (and what it has done), and stand up against the power-hungry monopolists, alerting their neighbors to the scam, and refusing to go along with the “two-party” charade. While some stirrings of this sort have been visible for some years now, there’s no compelling indication that widespread change can realistically be expected soon.

Some hope might be found in the increasing likelihood that many of those scattered stirrings may soon emerge into local and/or regional pockets of outright concerted revolt against the designs of the bipartisan monopolists. With such telltale signs of the times as Ruby Ridge, Waco, and the “Patriot Act” in its wake—and more of the same sure to come—it should be no surprise if various communities of patriots should start congealing into forces to be reckoned in the face of such a string federal abuses of power.

Only time (and the intestinal fortitude of an undetermined number of U.S. citizens) will tell.

"...She falls back on the old “there are no quick and easy answers” ploy to give an aura of thoughtfulness to a dishonest and constantly shifting position on the war..."

http://www.amconmag.com/2006/2006_03_27/cover.html

March 27, 2006 Issue

Copyright © 2006 The American Conservative

Hillary the Hawk

The Democrats’ Athena only differs from Bush on the details.

by Justin Raimondo

When “the Moose” talks, Democrats listen—just like the Republicans did when he was flacking on their behalf. And the Democrat listening the closest to this Trotskyist-turned-neoconservative is Hillary Rodham Clinton, supposedly the leader of the party’s far-left wing.

With his reputation for giving good quote, “the Moose,” a.k.a. Marshall Wittmann, formerly John McCain’s communications director and now a bigwig at the Democratic Leadership Council, is a legendary character in Washington circles. Once a member of the Trotskyist Spartacist League and an officer in the Young People’s Socialist League, Wittmann, like many admirers of the Red Army’s founder, moved rightward during the Reagan era and eventually wound up as the Christian Coalition’s political director. From this strategic vantage point he jumped on McCain’s Straight Talk Express—and then jumped ship entirely, falling into the arms of the DLC and landing, as always, on his feet.

From Leon Trotsky to Ralph Reed to Hillary Clinton is a long, torturous road to follow, yet the chameleon-like Wittmann—who styles himself a Bull Moose progressive in the tradition of his hero, Theodore Roosevelt—has navigated it expertly. Wittmann’s new role as Hillary’s unofficial Rasputin is perfectly suited to her current political needs. Eager to overcome her reputation as the leader of the party’s left wing, Hillary is “repositioning” herself, in modern parlance, as a “centrist,” i.e. a complete opportunist. She could have no better teacher than Wittmann, who from the pulpit of his “Moose-blog,” advises her to “seize the issue of Iranian nukes to draw a line in the sand.” While paying lip service to multilateralism, she should “make it clear that while force is the last resort, she would never take it off the table in dealing with the madmen mullahs and the psychotic leader of Iran.”

This advice was proffered on the morning of Jan. 18. By that evening, when Hillary gave her scheduled speech at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School, it had clearly been taken to heart: “I believe that we lost critical time in dealing with Iran,” she averred. Accusing the White House of choosing to “downplay the threats and to outsource the negotiations,” she disdained Team Bush for “standing on the sidelines.”

“Let’s be clear about the threat we face now,” she thundered. “A nuclear Iran is a danger to Israel, to its neighbors and beyond. The regime’s pro-terrorist, anti-American and anti-Israel rhetoric only underscores the urgency of the threat it poses. U.S. policy must be clear and unequivocal. We cannot and should not—must not—permit Iran to build or acquire nuclear weapons.” To be sure, we need to cajole China and Russia into going along with diplomatic and economic sanctions, but “we cannot take any option off the table in sending a clear message to the current leadership of Iran—that they will not be permitted to acquire nuclear weapons.”

Wittmann celebrated his apparent success in influencing the Democratic presidential frontrunner by exulting that “the Moose has a mind meld with Hillary.” Taking the opportunity to rally the shrinking but strategically placed pro-war wing of the Democratic Party around a “united front,” he staked out for her a position in favor of “multi-lateral action, if possible, but unilateral action, including military options, if necessary, against the growing Iranian nuclear threat.”

Hillary’s newfound centrism isn’t completely insincere. Her bellicose interventionism has a history: it was Hillary, you’ll recall, who berated her husband for not bombing Belgrade soon enough and hard enough. As Gail Sheehy relates in Hillary’s Choice:

Hillary expressed her views by phone to the President: ‘I urged him to bomb.’ The Clintons argued the issue over the next few days. [The president expressed] what-ifs: What if bombing promoted more executions? What if it took apart the NATO alliance? Hillary responded, ‘You cannot let this go on at the end of a century that has seen the major holocaust of our time. What do we have NATO for if not to defend our way of life?’ The next day the President declared that force was necessary.

Together with Madeleine Albright—who famously complained to Colin Powell, “What good is it having this superb military you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?”—Hillary constituted the Amazonian wing of the Democratic Party during the years of her husband’s presidency. Her effort to outflank the Republicans on the right when it comes to the Iran issue is a logical extension of her natural bellicosity.

Hillary is nothing if not consistent: in her floor speech to the Senate during the debate over the resolution authorizing the use of force in Iraq, she declared, “the facts that have brought us to this fateful vote are not in doubt”—a statement she has never acknowledged regretting. Particularly endearing to the War Party, she framed her “aye” vote in terms of the classic neoconservative myth of Bush I’s betrayal:

The first President Bush assembled a global coalition, including many Arab states, and threw Saddam out after forty-three days of bombing and a hundred hours of ground operations. The U.S.-led coalition then withdrew, leaving the Kurds and the Shiites, who had risen against Saddam Hussein at our urging, to Saddam’s revenge.

Hillary would have occupied Iraq a decade earlier, riding into Baghdad at the head of her troops like Pallas Athena descending on the Trojans, striding boldly into what Gen. William E. Odom has described as “the greatest strategic disaster in our history.”

Hillary hails the 1998 bombing of Iraq, ordered by her husband, which killed thousands of Iraqi civilians, and recounts the official mythology promulgated by the Bush administration: “[T]he so-called presidential palaces … in reality were huge compounds well suited to hold weapons labs, stocks, and records which Saddam Hussein was required by UN resolution to turn over. When Saddam blocked the inspection process, the inspectors left.” As we now know, there was nothing even approaching WMD in those palaces, and Iraq had been effectively disarmed at that point. In late February or early March, Scott Ritter, then a UN arms inspector, met with then-U.S. ambassador to the UN Bill Richardson. Ritter was told to provoke an incident so the U.S. could finish bombing by the start of the Islamic New Year holiday.

Hillary, however, didn’t let any inconvenient facts get in her way. She boasted that it was under a Democratic administration that the U.S. “changed its underlying policy toward Iraq from containment to regime change” and took credit for the bright idea of putting Ahmad Chalabi, convicted embezzler and known liar, on the U.S. payroll. Her speech reads like a Weekly Standard editorial, reiterating each of the War Party’s talking points—the bio-weapons fantasy, the links to al-Qaeda gambit, the phantom nuclear arsenal: “This much,” she maintaind, “is undisputed.”

What is undisputed these days is that the entire rationale for war was based on trumped-up evidence of Iraq’s alleged transgressions, but Hillary is unrepentant: “No, I don’t regret giving the president authority because at the time it was in the context of weapons of mass destruction, grave threats to the United States, and clearly, Saddam Hussein had been a real problem for the international community for more than a decade.”

But there was no threat to the U.S. and Hillary knows it. What’s more, her hardcore constituency knows it, and they are becoming increasingly alienated from—even actively hostile to—their putative presidential frontrunner over this issue. Their anger is stoked by evidence that Hillary has imbibed the same neocon Kool-Aid that has intoxicated the Bush administration and blinded it to the failure of its policies in Iraq.

On a trip to Iraq during which 55 people—including one American soldier —were killed by suicide bombers, Hillary was merrily chirping that the occupation was “functioning quite well” and that the surge of suicide attacks indicated that the insurgency was failing. Security was so bad that the road to the airport was impassable, and the Senate delegation had to be transported to the Green Zone by military helicopter. They dared not venture out into the streets of Baghdad.

The disconnect between rhetoric and reality, between the antiwar views of Hillary’s left-wing base and the militant interventionism of Wittmann and the DLC crowd, finally forced her to come to grips with the contradiction—or at least to appear to do so. This occurred not in a public speech but in an e-mail sent to her supporters in which the trouble she is in is acknowledged in the first sentence: “The war in Iraq is on the minds of many of you who have written or who have called my office asking questions and expressing frustration.” Chances are, these callers were expressing frustration not only with the policies of the Bush administration but with her own complicity with Bush’s Middle Eastern agenda of seemingly endless aggression.

She falls back on the old “there are no quick and easy answers” ploy to give an aura of thoughtfulness to a dishonest and constantly shifting position on the war. While insisting that we should not “allow this to be an open-ended commitment without limits or end,” she reassures the War Party by distancing herself from John Murtha and others who want an orderly withdrawal in a relatively short time: “Nor do I believe that we can or should pull out of Iraq immediately.” She hails the elections as the signal that we can start the withdrawal process sometime “in the coming year,” but not completely: we must leave behind “a smaller contingent in safer areas with greater intelligence and quick strike capabilities”—a tripwire, in short, in the form of permanent bases.

This goes beyond anything the Bush administration would ever admit, even as it starts building those facilities—14 “enduring bases” across Iraq. The White House has been cagey about this, preferring to speak in vague generalities: we are not supposed to notice that construction was begun prior to any agreement with the Iraqi government. With Hillary signing on to this plan for a permanent military presence in Iraq—in effect, a shadow occupation—the debate over U.S. policy in the region is settled.

If we knew then what we knew now, Hillary avers, Congress “would never have agreed” with the decision to go to war, but she forgets her previously expressed “undisputed” certainty that Saddam possessed and posed a grave threat. She complains that the administration did not act to gain international support, but it did go to the UN and made every effort to give the invasion a multinational gloss. She berates the Bush administration for failing to “level with the American people”—as if they would have gone along with it had they known that the American presence would be widely detested. She hectors the White House and Rummy for not heeding the advice of General Shinseki that as many as 200,000 troops would be necessary to occupy Iraq —as if that wouldn’t have caused a great many second thoughts in those who otherwise supported the war. She has called for more troops to be sent—even as she holds out the prospect of reducing the American presence “in the coming year.”

The president, Hillary charges, does not have a “plan” for “concluding and winning” the war. Disdaining “a rigid timetable” for withdrawal, she calls for devising “a strategy for success”—without defining what a victory would look like. When push comes to shove, her position is the same as the administration’s, albeit with minor modifications: we’ll leave when we’re good and ready and not a moment sooner.

This is not likely to assuage her core constituency—or, indeed, the rest of the country—which is increasingly opposed to continuing the war; the only red meat she throws at her base is a sharp rebuke to the Bushies for “impugning the patriotism of their critics.” Don’t mistake criticism for “softness,” she rails: Hillary, the war goddess, is no softy. Nor should we confuse her critique of the administration’s means with a fundamental objection to the War Party’s ends.

What does Hillary want? A smarter, smoother, better-planned interventionism, one that our allies find more amenable and yet is, in many ways, more militant than the Republican version—one that “levels with the American people” about the costs of empire and yet doesn’t dispute the alleged necessity of American hegemony. As she finds her voice as a would-be commander in chief, it isn’t one the traditional Left in this country will recognize. Hers is not the party of Eugene McCarthy but of the neoconservative Wittmann.

“If some Democrats have a modicum of imagination,” Wittmann recently wrote, “they would move to the President’s right on national security. Of course, that would require them to take on some of those on the left flank. But, if a donkey is ever to occupy the Oval Office in the foreseeable future, he or she must be perceived as being as tough or tougher than the Republicans on national security.”

The Hillary wing of the Democratic Party is taking “the Moose” up on his bet that they can outflank the Bush administration on the war front, with Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee head Congressman Rahm Emanuel taking the lead by working actively to spike antiwar candidates like Paul Hackett. When Congressman Murtha denounced the war, Emanuel snapped, “Jack Murtha went out and spoke for Jack Murtha.” Not true: he spoke for the majority of Americans, who now oppose the war and want out, and especially for the activist base of the Democratic party, which cheered while the bigwigs sought to distance themselves. What then is his party’s position on the central issue of the day? “At the right time we will have a position” on the war, he avers, and yet Emanuel has a position decidedly in favor of continuing and even escalating the conflict.

Asked recently by Tim Russert if he would still vote for the resolution authorizing war with Iraq knowing that the WMD meme was a crock, Emanuel’s answer was an unequivocal “Yes.” His critique of the president’s war policy is, like that of many, if not most, Democrats, limited to means, not ends. “There was not a plan” for the war’s aftermath, says Emanuel, and all he and his fellows in Congress want is not a reconsideration of our policy but only “a modicum of competency in the management of this war.” Taking up the Kerry mantra, Emanuel urges the president to “level with the American people” about the long hard slog fighting to “win” in Iraq will require—as if some magic blueprint could put a wrongheaded policy right.

Russert pulled his quote-out-of-a-hat trick—“So as long as our troops [are] engaged, we should suspend the debate over how and why, focus on the mission, unite as a country, in prayer and resolve, hope for a speedy resolution of this war with a minimum of loss. God bless America”—and wondered whether this didn’t contradict what Emanuel had just said. The answer, a flat “No,” was telling: “In fact, Tim, what I actually believe it’s consistent in this perspective. … I think the president came, as you know, for resolution to Congress. He got that. Second, he asked multiple times for the resources to fight that war. He has got that. What we ask in return is a plan.”

Yet what sort of plan could possibly have prevented the dissolution of the Iraqi state and the onset of civil war? What would have blocked the Iranians from extending their influence into the Shi’ite south of the country and taking over the leadership of the central government in Baghdad? It’s true that General Shinseki warned that we would need 200,000 soldiers to manage the occupation. Without radically reducing our commitments elsewhere, however, such a force is largely imaginary—unless the Democratic plan involves reintroducing the draft. Nothing quite so forthright has come from Emanuel’s direction—only vague hopes that somehow the Europeans will come to our rescue.

If the Democratic establishment’s stance on the war is at odds with the party’s antiwar activist base, then their outright warmongering on the Iranian issue puts the two factions on a collision course. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi—who effectively quashed fellow California Democrat Lynn Woolsey’s resolution calling for a withdrawal timetable —has followed the Hillary-Emanuel-DLC party line, while managing somehow to assuage her constituents with plenty of pork and partisan rhetoric. When it comes to Iran, however, she is just as belligerent as the next neocon: Pelosi co-sponsored legislation imposing draconian economic sanctions on Iran and stops just short of calling another war.

If Hillary maintains her lead in the Democratic presidential sweepstakes—and with over $21 million in the bank, she’s way ahead of any potential rivals—and the party establishment effectively strangles insurgent antiwar activism at the grassroots level, an increasingly “isolationist” electorate will be faced with a choice between two interventionist candidates, giving credence to what Garet Garrett, that lion of the Old Right, bitterly observed in 1951:

Between government in the republican meaning, that is, Constitutional, representative, limited government, on the one hand, and Empire on the other hand, there is mortal enmity. Either one must forbid the other or one will destroy the other. That we know. Yet never has the choice been put to a vote of the people.

Justin Raimondo is editorial director of Antiwar.com

March 27, 2006 Issue

http://www.counterpunch.org/frank03232006.html

March 23, 2006

Political Lemmings

The Democrats and the Precipice

By JOSHUA FRANK

Can you really oppose the occupation of Iraq and still call yourself a Democrat? I'm not so sure. The majority of Washington Dems continue to applaud Bush's invasion of Iraq as well as his debauched crusade against terror. A few antiwar voices have echoed though Democratic corridors, but none have produced any genuine shifts in ideology, let alone direction. Nor will they.

It wasn't long ago when a handful of activists hailed Rep. Dennis Kucinich's bid for the White House as worth fighting for. He seemed to oppose the war in Iraq and even offered a plan to get troops out quicker than any of the Democratic frontrunners. People were hopeful their support for Dennis would make an impact on the presidential race -- and maybe even pull the Democratic Party in their direction. It never happened. Two years have now past and those who handed out fliers and buttons for Kucinich have nothing to show for their efforts.

So, why are Dennis Kucinich and his most loyal supporters still Democrats?

That's a question I wish someone would answer. As far as I can tell, the reason the Dems can't stand up to Bush is that they actually believe in this foolish war. They aren't afraid or spineless, as so many claim -- they just support the president and his imperialist ventures. If Kucinich opposes the occupation, as he and his supporters have said over and again, then why is he still a member of a party that overwhelming backs it? Where the hell has he been, anyway?

Sorry Big D, whatever you are doing out there it's not working all that well. Your party doesn't need you. A new one does.

The same can be said for Rep. John Murtha, who was all but laughed out of office by his Democratic buddies when he put forward his strategic redeployment plan a few months ago. Even Rep. Cynthia McKinney, who courageously cast her vote for immediate and unconditional withdraw from Iraq, is still a Democrat. Why? McKinney would be better off jumping ship and throwing her weight into building a real alternative to business as usual. How can someone with such a keen understanding of what's really going in this world remain a Democrat?

Cynthia, if you really want to end this war, why don't you help give birth to a new party instead of attempting to resurrect a dead one?

Then, of course, we have the new progressive superman, Senator Russel Feingold, a hopeful 2008 Democratic presidential nominee. Like Kucinich of 2004, Feingold is being lauded as our last best hope for defeating the Republican demagogues. But ol' Russ isn't finding much sympathy from his fellow Democrats these days.

Last week Feingold introduced S. Res. 398, which calls for the "censure" of the president over his illegal wiretapping incursions. Such a plea was long overdue. All leading Democrats immediately took cover, dodging any sharp-shooting questions about the resolution. As of March 21, not a single leading Senate Democrat had come out in support of the bill. Feingold stood alone.

So, what are you doing Russ? Why are you still a Democrat, anyway?

And there's your biggest problem. Feingold's fight to restore integrity in Washington (if there ever was such a thing) is hindered by his party allegiance and reluctance to break rank. The same can be said for every other DC Democrat who is willing to criticize Bush, including Rep. John Conyers. At the end of the day Conyers, like Feingold, McKinney and Kucinich -- is still a member of a party that supports the occupation of Iraq and Bush's war on civil liberties.

Whatever they say won't change that. Worst of all, when push comes to shove, and the Democrats nominate another pro-war candidate, all their causes will be sidelined. Party loyalty will matter more than the mounting death toll in Iraq.

I hate to say it, but that kind of bullshit will never end a war.

Joshua Frank edits the radical news blog www.BrickBurner.org and is the author of Left Out! How Liberals Helped Reelect George W. Bush, published by Common Courage Press (2005). Josh can be reached at BrickBurner@gmail.com.

"...You’re gonna die laughing. Before that happens, try to get over your cognitive dissonance soon. Work on it. See somebody, shrink, reverend, guru, gas station attendant, bartender, masseuse, book club, whoever works for you. 'Cause, sorry to say, the joke’s on you..."

http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_628.shtml

America’s cognitive dissonance

By Jerry Mazza

Online Journal Contributing Writer

Mar 24, 2006,

Cognitive dissonance: writer James Atherton calls it “a psychological phenomenon which refers to the discomfort felt at a discrepancy between what you already know or believe, and new information or interpretation. It therefore occurs when there is a need to accommodate new ideas, and it may be necessary for it develop so that we become ‘open’ to them.” It’s that queasy feeling that rises often in your gut online and screams, “I DON’T BELIEVE THAT!”

It’s what happens “if someone is called upon to learn something that contradicts what they already think and know -- particularly if they are committed to that prior knowledge -- they are likely to resist the new learning. Even Carl Rogers recognized this. Accommodation is more difficult than Assimilation, in Piaget’s terms,” writes Atherton.

“And -- counter-intuitively, perhaps -- if learning something has been difficult, uncomfortable, or even humiliating enough, people are less likely to concede that the content of what has been learned is useless, pointless or valueless. To do so would be to admit that one has been ‘had,’ or ‘conned.’” Folks, could that be anyone you know? Well, give them some understanding.

It’s what one brilliant reader wrote to me after reading my Lobotomizing America article. “The true lobotomizing took place in the populace in their K-12 schooling. Now, excruciating cognitive dissonance effectively protects all but the most hardened skeptics from seeing and critically interpreting what our dear leaders have done and are continuing to do.

”People do not want to believe the truth. Unfortunately, I believe those of us who want to expose the truth must have something viable, palpable, and feel-good enough to substitute for what we try to take away from people: Their false notions of or preferred ignorance of what is really happening.

”I read all the alternative news and forums and blogs of those who are digging into the truth and presenting evidence for the trail of horrendous acts. But it wears me down, and I've turned negative, reclusive and hopeless. Luckily, I'm really old so it doesn't matter much . . ."

This woman’s observations pierced me, so much so that I wrote back to her, “As to you're being old, it doesn't much matter. That sounds like your own cog dis. As far as I can see, your mind works beautifully. So use it. As the expression goes, what you don't use you loose. We wouldn't want that to happen. America needs every awakened mind it has, young, middle-aged, old, or positively ancient.

“FL Wright did the Guggenheim at 80, lived to 90 to see it almost completed. Paul Newman at 80 plus is not only a top actor, but runs a huge food enterprise, which yields the money for summer camps around the world for kids with fatal diseases. Onwards, my dear, and Further, as Ken Kesey would say. We need all the cage-shakers we can get. One must fight back or suffer the depression of the defeated.”

Meeting a Cognitive Dissonant Disaster

Do I love the people that write in or do I love them? Even this Cognitive Dissonant dude, the one who wrote in as soon as Online Journal ran my article, “Why Larry Silverstein can’t get it up.” He said, “Jerry, I just read your editorial/report on the current and history of the WTC, mostly with mouth open in disgust.” There’s an image for you.

”First off, let's just get this out of the way because you are a little vague: do you think 7WTC was taken down (by US interests) on purpose?” Duh, I didn’t think I was vague. That’s what I was saying, yeah, yes. Well, “If your answer to that is ‘yes or ‘maybe’ please just stop reading and don't bother responding. I have no intention of starting a discussion with an insane person. Ok, so you are presumably sane since you are still reading.” How does he know I’m sane if I’m still reading? Is he playing with a full deck?

He then says, “Your next claim that is absolutely crazy is that the PA wanted to tear down the twin towers! Please provide some proof of this besides vague claims.” Gee, I thought I said they couldn’t demolish it because that was against the law. That’s not vague. They could only dismantle it girder by girder and the cost of that was prohibitive. To quote me, “Demolishing prohibited by law but doable by an act of god or godlessness.”

I guessed he missed it, because he asks: “Do you actually think the PA would want to tear down the (cash-cow, once they were fully leased) twin towers? Do you actually think a private developer (Silverstein) would lease them for 99 years if they were such a burden financially?” Err, duh, he thought it was a great deal at first. He probably still does. He made $500 million on it. He just can’t get the loot together to do what he has to do to get it up, the Liberty Tower. Originally, the PA was just happy to unload WTC on Silverstein. Get it. They gave him a sweetheart deal: $120 million a month for 99 years. A more apt figure would have been a billion a month. But then, my write-in, Mr. C D ended with some poetry meant to be the ultimate diss . . .

”What Color Is the Sky in Your World?”

Oh wow, gee, well, the color of the sky in my world is a vibrant blue, totally cloudless, like that morning on 9/11 when the airliners hit the Twin Trade Towers and there weren’t enough planes to respond because they were tied up in a half dozen drills and the air traffic controllers didn’t know what was a drill and what had gone real. In fact, FEMA had conveniently come to town the night before to play in the “terror hijacking drills.” Mayor Rudy Guiliani stuck his foot in his mouth and told us.

See, in this vibrantly blue sky you can clearly see a homegrown apocalypse occurring, even from the Upper West Side. Actually as my older son, from his rooftop in the East Village, saw the South Tower go down in seconds, free-falling, exploding top and bottom. The white smoke caused by explosives looked like a huge Rasta hair-do. It wasn’t the black jet fuel smoke puffing from the initial plane hit.

Even my aged aunt, who has trouble with her sight these days, could clearly see each tower go down in a matter of seconds, as she stared from her sixth floor apartment window on 6th Avenue and Houston Street, looking downtown, straight at them. As they came down, tears came to her eyes.

Yup, it was a sky in which my wife who was in Brooklyn could see the second plane turning 180 degrees (nigh impossible for a pilot, but not for a radio-controlled plane) to slam into the South Tower. She called me as it was happening and gasped on the phone to put on the TV, that only minutes before some members of the film crew she was working with had seen the first plane hit the North Tower. Now, their video was replaying the second hit.

Also, George Bush told reporters later that he had seen the first hit on TV and thought that was some lousy pilot, ha ha. That was some gaff, ha ha, because it wasn’t shown on TV that morning, ha ha. The crews weren’t there yet. He could have seen it in his secure, closed circuit communications room at the elementary school he was visiting and listening to pupils reading a book about a pet goat while New York burned, ha ha. But it wasn’t till the next day that the TV stations got some footage shot that morning by a French crew making a documentary about the WTC. They caught the crash by accident. That footage was duplicated and used on the news, such as it was.

Then, pal, there’s my friend Jay, who saw it from the 107th floor of the North Tower, from the restaurant Windows on the World, where he was a manager. He called his wife to say he was going downstairs to see if he could help with whatever trouble there was and then he would come home. That was the last time she and their two kids heard from him. That’s my sky.

I can still clearly see us sitting at his wake and an oil painting of him on an easel staring back at us. He was posed in a dark blue suit, white shirt, and reddish tie, a friendly smile on his mustached face that never moved. Jay was on the PTA with us, and helped every charity he could, and never said no, even that morning. So blue, so cloudless, so vibrant, it hurts.

In fact, my vibrant blue sky that day shed pieces of correspondence, memos, trade notes, letters, all from the exploding towers, into my cousin’s small garden in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, maybe five miles away. That’s what a blast it was. He walked home from work, uptown New York that day, over the Brooklyn bridge to his brownstone to find that effluvia of life. He gathered each holy piece with his son and put it all in a box and into a closet for safekeeping. It makes him teary to talk about it.

That’s what color my sky is, Mr. Cognitive Dissonance. But hey, dude, you got a president to back you up. He still thinks Iraq is a success. More than 2,300 Americans dead, an estimated 250,000 Iraqis (citizens and solders) dead. And over a trillion bucks blown, according to Bob Herbert in the March 23 New York Times, “George Bush’s Trillion-Dollar War.” And then there’s the Kurds and the Shias going at the Sunnis and visa versa, a civil war. No exit strategy. And it’s a success. You think Bush has trouble adjusting what he believes to what is really happening? I do.

Even Brzezinski Is Bailing

Even Zbigniew Brzezinski, who wrote of the need for a Pearl Harbor-like incident in his book, The Grand Chess Board -- an incident that could be used to militarize America -- is now bailing. That same language and notion appeared on PNAC's Program for a New American Century) website, envisioning the neocon march to empire via preemptive war. That same Brzezinski said Wednesday night on Jim Lehrer’s News Hour it was time to cut bait and split Iraq. This is also the man who helped organize the Mujahideen with Osama bin Laden and the CIA to help Jimmy Carter fight Russia in 1978 when it took our bait and invaded Afghanistan. Am I making sense? Am I entertaining you? Am I keeping you up? I hope so, dude. I don’t want to lose you.

Everybody knew we needed Afghanistan to run those Unocal pipelines south, carrying the oil from up north in the Caspian Sea region down to Pakistan and India and the Indian Ocean to China.

Am I making sense? I know you think I’m nuts. But you didn’t even understand what I wrote about Larry and the boys and the asbestos-bomb of the WTC.

Money, oil and power, dude, that’s what it was all about. And 9/11 was just the “Pearl Harbor” to get the attack on Afghanistan going. Then a simple leap of a lie to get us into Iraq, the lie that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, which no one has found yet, and millions of Americans believe are there, somewhere, under a mushroom cap (not cloud). Cognitive dissonance on a mass scale.

That’s my sky, Mr. CD, wherever you are, thinking that CNBC and Sean Hannity and Bill Riley and all the right-wing fakes are telling you the truth. The truth is that for the first time a big time publication, New York Magazine, March 27, pg. 28, is running a multi-page story, “The Ground Zero Grassy Knoll” by Mark Jacobson, seriously questioning 9/11. Someone may actually have gone through their processing cycle and given up the dissonance and perceived some truth. By the way, the Grassy Knoll was in Dealey Plaza where Kennedy was ambushed and killed, by at least eight gunshots from three different angles, as seen by a CIA man on the original Zapruder film footage.

September 11 was also an inside job, Mr. C D, that Bush and Boyz, the Pentagon, DOD, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Wolfowitz, George Tenet, the Intel agencies, the FBI helped to happen, squelching warnings left and right. This according to FBI Agent Harry Samit, supposedly a witness against Moussaoui, but who said he warned his supervisors more than 70 times that they should look at Moussaoui’s laptop, but nobody did. They didn’t bungle it by accident. It was The Plan. They made it happen. They already knew what Moussaoui could tell. He’s just another patsy.

See, my sky is clear blue. I can see why they had a whole slew of terror hijacking drills going on that September 11. So planes were siphoned off to every drill and the air traffic controllers were confused as to what was what, who was who, when the first tower was hit and the drill went real. So they have to call for planes for New York from Otis Air Base in Cape Cod Massachusetts, 150 miles away, and they arrive too late. Monmouth Air Base in Jersey, 10 miles away, no deal. Read my article Moussaoui takes the fall for 9/11 and find out what happened at the Pentagon in DC. Or call 1-800-294-5250 to order the second edition of Loose Change right now. How simple and entertaining can I make it for you?

And since we’re challenging notions, let’s really jog that cognitive dissonance. Flight 93 never crashed in southern Pennsylvania. What they found was a 20-foot wide hole with a bunch of scrap poured in. Flight 93, which had gone west actually landed at 10:45 a.m. in Cleveland’s Hopkins Airport. Its 200 passengers were evacuated within a half-hour to an empty NASA facility nearby. What happened to them then? Your guess is as good as mine. Maybe they are in paradise with the poor people from Flight 77 that never hit the Pentagon. But there’s more.

How about Katrina, the second 9/11, which was also “allowed” to happen. Bush sits on his duff for days after he’s notified the storm is number five huge, the levees could go down. Was it cognitive dissonance? He couldn’t see a category five hurricane take down a nice ole town like New Orleans? Why can’t he and his associates put pieces together? Why can’t they act? And if they can’t, why in the hell are they sitting at the helm of the Ship of State. Why aren’t they thrown in the brig in irons? Answer me, Mr. C D. I think you’re a little bonzo for believing all this crap.

What Color Is Your Sky? Vanilla?

Is it a Vanilla Sky like that Tom Cruz movie, a romantic action fantasy? Where the handsome guy gets all the babes in some totally implausible plot as implausible as 9/11’s script would seem to the ignorant, the uninterested, the disengaged, the inbred cognitive dissonants.

Nor is this adult cognitive dissonance limited to your average American-I-don’t-know-anything-about-politics. Catch this.

“Less than a week after he denounced the ‘wayward path’ of deficit spending to a gathering of 2,000 Republican Party stalwarts, Bill Frist,” according to the March 21 New York Times editorial Deficit Demagogues, “the Senate majority leader and would-be president, was busy presiding over business as usual in the Senate . . ." where “51 Republican Senators and one Democrat approved a $2.8 trillion budget for 2007. . . . after Frist and 51 other Republicans voted to raise the nation’s debt limit for the fourth time in five years -- this time by $781 billion, to nearly $9 trillion. All of that increase will be needed to pay for earlier tax cuts and spending increases, and, if the Republicans get their way on taxes, to pay for future deficit-financed tax cuts.” The shadows of 1929 lengthen over our endless blue sky.

Is this Congress’ cognitive dissonance? Maybe. Maybe just your ordinary garden-variety dumb crooks, don’t give a rat’s ass crooks, every single one of them. At least Mr. Vanilla Sky who wrote to me revealed his total innocent ignorance. These guys know better, but they don’t care. Until we hit the Wall, the Great D of 2008.

As to their constituency, the Republican voters, the grand old party and its new found Conservative Christians who want to teach Unintelligent Design and wait for the Rapture to sweep them up from all this hellfire, here is cognitive dissonance sine qua non, the real thing, full blown, terminal. They ain’t a letting go of one piece of crap that’s been told or taught to them by Pat Robertson, George HW Bush, Billy Graham, The Easter Bunny, The Spoon-Benders, The War Lords, The KKK, The Reconstructionists, CFR and so on. No, sir/ma'am, hold on to that crap, till you bust.

So, there it is, lovers of truth. The Comedia as Dante would call it, the grand comedy of 21st century living. You’re gonna die laughing. Before that happens, try to get over your cognitive dissonance soon. Work on it. See somebody, shrink, reverend, guru, gas station attendant, bartender, masseuse, book club, whoever works for you. 'Cause, sorry to say, the joke’s on you. Oops, I mean us! I have to stop thinking it’s only about them.

Jerry Mazza is a freelance writer living in New York. Reach him at gvmaz@verizon.net.

Copyright © 1998-2006 Online Journal

"...we are all enablers in this control scenario. We create our own damn prison. By silence, by apathy, by the whole damned “hear no evil, speak no evil, see no evil” thing. By virtue of our cowardice, we deserve every damn thing that happens. We deserve every twist of the corporate/political screw. We deserve every George W. Bush..."

http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_626.shtml

It’s time to use the H-word

By Frank Pitz

Online Journal Contributing Writer

Mar 24, 2006, 01:41

The word holocaust from the Greek word holokauston, meaning “a completely (holos) burnt (kaustos) sacrificial offering.” In Iraq, Bush is daily, through murder most foul, making a sacrificial offering of Iraqi men, women and children to the god of empire.

Thus far the murderous Bush has sacrificed over 300,000 Iraqis upon the altar of greed. In his deranged mind Bush sees the light and the way; the light of the burning corpses of thousands of victims and the way of imperialism’s road map.

The Bush administration kills with impunity. The Bush administration uses the horrific tool of genocide as the lynchpin of their foreign policy. The Bush administration follows in the footsteps of previous imperialists slogging through the blood of hundreds of thousands.

That blood also flows from the veins of the troops who must blindly follow the dictates of the corporate/political master.

Bush’s insanity has no end, knows no bounds and death is but a means to an end; the ending of a race, a religion, a nation or whatever else may seemingly stand in the way of the mad cabal of warmongers who dance around the cauldron of destruction in an orgasmic frenzy.

Since 1991, through sanctions and war, corporate Amerika has murdered over one million Iraqis, true counts will be left to future -- if there are future -- historians, since “we don’t do body counts.”

We didn’t do body counts of the Native Americans either. Nor did we do body counts of the Spaniards, Mexicans, Filipinos or Hawaiians. We had no time to do body counts, the assets of Cuba, Guam, Puerto Rico, the Philippines and the Hawaiian Islands were all that counted to William McKinley 108 years ago. Then, like now, fear was instilled in the weak Amerikan psyche (“Spain was an imminent threat”). With the able assistance of media barons William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer the campaign to “spread freedom and democracy (manifest destiny) throughout the world,” began. Like Bush, McKinley also talked to God, and received the Almighty’s blessings for the rape, pillage and murder of innocents.

Amerikan corporate imperialists and their compliant partners in crime -- politicians and media -- have been raping, pillaging and murdering ever since. Every Amerikan expansion (war) was fueled beforehand by an extensive government, media, fear-based propaganda campaign; and it has never failed the corporate bloodsuckers.

For well over 100 years, corporate Amerika has used weapons of mass destruction (WMD), or whatever variant thereof was applicable to the period. Think Reagan in the 80s, and his delusional pronouncements about the Nicaraguan army poised to invade Harlingen, Texas. So, corporate Amerika slaughtered over 500,000 folks down in that small geopolitical corner of the world; once again making the world safer for democracy, and saving Harlingen, Texas. During the same time frame Reagan, in a speech before Congress, opined how “Ameri(k)a was once again standing tall,” after 10,000 Marines went up against 30 Cuban construction workers in Grenada.

Between the end of the Spanish-Amerikan war and well into the 20th century, corporate Amerika sent troops into Latin American countries on 40 different occasions. All the while making the world “safe for democracy.” Of course, never, ever mentioning the little fact that we were also making the (corporate) world safe for profits.

To the victor go the spoils, as well as the task of rewriting history. A history steeped in the blood of innocents; soon becomes a history revamped, to show Amerika as “standing tall,” full of patriotism, jingoism and the glory of the Homeland.

The faithful sheep parrot the party line and buy the requisite magnets for their gas-guzzling cars. The faithful sheep jump at each media pronouncement, which proclaims the latest, newest threat to the beneficent Shepard and his flock. And immediately, the polls are taken and the threat instantly becomes the “greatest threat to national security.”

The latest, greatest, imminent threat of course, is Iran. The faithful sheep have dutifully responded to the ubiquitous pollsters and now view that country as soon being on our doorstep with crazed bombers and nukes. Just ask the Amerikan people, they’ll tell you that is true, those Iranians are coming to get us.

The Amerikan people are easily cowed, why is that? Could it be our collective guilt over being the bully of the world? The old “what goes around comes around” thing? Like, deep in our communal soul we know that corporate Amerika through their political lackeys have committed and continue to commit genocide both at home and around the globe.

That is some very heavy-duty shit to carry around. So we soon become caught up in this whole anxiety thing, I mean, hell, half the damn country is popping a pill for something; or seeking other avenues of escape from Bush’s reality. Keeping the faithful fearful, always works for the oppressor, and we are easily cowed. Corporate/political despots count on that fear, for control.

Of course, we are all enablers in this control scenario. We create our own damn prison. By silence, by apathy, by the whole damned “hear no evil, speak no evil, see no evil” thing. By virtue of our cowardice, we deserve every damn thing that happens. We deserve every twist of the corporate/political screw. We deserve every George W. Bush.

What I see in my country today puts me in mind of the old “duck and cover” drills of the '50s; collectively, we are all in a “duck and cover” mode.

Frank Pitz is a reporter, who writes for a small weekly in the high desert of the Mojave in southwestern Nevada. You can contact Frank at fpitz76@hotmail.com.

Copyright © 1998-2006 Online Journal