Tuesday, October 20, 2009

Women and the Senate


THE ABSURD TIMES




One of you sent this in. It is just one more defining issue on what it means to be a Republican. I will follow it (since we might as well do this right) with a famous essay "On Women" that at least shows no one has really evolved in the last 200 years or so. The links are worth following as well.

Here it is:

The gang rape and the Republicans

Behold, 30 U.S. senators who don't give a damn about battered women

Friday, October 16, 2009

The world's tallest domestic dog? Adorable. The world's biggest newborn baby? Sad and disturbing.

Waterless urinals in every new building in Los Angeles? A positive step. Canada's disgusting oilsands and Coal Country, a new documentary detailing the environmental atrocities in Appalachia? Heart wrenching and depressing.

Jimmy Page showing Jack White and the Edge how to play "When the Levee Breaks" in It Might Get Loud? All flavors of awesome. Garth Brooks coming out of retirement? Anesthetizing.

See, it's all a matter of perspective. It's all a matter of context and spin, into which bin we toss the delightful refuse of our culture to recycle and re-use it another day.

It is with this wonky filter in mind we turn our gaze to the gaping hellmouth that is the U.S. Senate, that drab cauldron of grumpy old men, defeminized women and tiny handful of rebellious dissenters, all of whom claim to have your best interests at heart but mostly only really give a damn about which lobbyist will help them best make their next boat payment.

Do I sound a little bitter? I cannot imagine why. Let us watch the senate and see if we can figure it out.

Look at them shuffle and sneer, hem and haw! Watch as they willingly eat their own souls with an ice pick and some turpentine, then step up to the media microphones and try to sound ennobled and magnanimous when in fact they only make everyone within earshot feel lost and fatalistic. So cute.

It's the same old spectacle, isn't it? There they go, tossing around the health care reform issue like it didn't affect millions of humans every single day, throwing in massive compromises and snags just so the GOP can fellate its pals in the insurance industry and a gaggle of aggrieved Democrats can get their egos fluffed and you still won't be able to get a decent dental plan for your family.

But now, just for fun, let's take it a step further. Or rather, darker. Let's go ahead and step right onto one of those large, rusty nails sticking up from the senate floor, so painful as to make your stomach turn, a bit of your lunch jump back into your throat.

It's a story from the dark political underbelly that makes you question the entire setup, rethink humanity, and lean out your window and scream: what the hell is wrong with these people? Who are they, really? Why do we give them power?

Here is freshman Minnesota senator Al Franken's first-ever legislative action, a relatively simple, almost laughably surefire bill requiring the Pentagon no longer do business with any contractor -- hi, Halliburton! -- that requires its employees to agree that she cannot sue said contractor if she is, oh let's just say, gang raped by its employees.

You read that right. It's a can't-sue-us-if-you're-raped clause. In a U.S. government contract. Aimed squarely at Halliburton. Thanks, Dick Cheney!

First, you are required to get over your initial disgust that such legislation is even necessary, that such clauses even exist and that the Pentagon is already doing business with such contractors (hi, Halliburton/KBR!), and that there has already been a truly horrible case validating it, wherein a 20-year-old female employee was allegedly gang-raped by contractors, locked in a shipping container, abused every way from Sunday, and found out later she was unable to sue.

Let us pause to imagine if, say, Wal-Mart had such a clause. Or maybe Toys 'R' Us. Starbucks. Let us imagine the appalled outcry. But Halliburton? Dick Cheney's vile little spitwad of shameless war profiteering? No problem. Hey, it's Republican-endorsed military contracting. No one said it was ethical.

But that's not most the repellant part. Ready?

The most repellant part is the 30 U.S. senators -- Republicans each and every one -- who just stepped forth to vote against the Franken amendment, essentially saying no, women should have no right to sue if they are sexually abused or gang raped, Halliburton and its ilk must be protected at all costs, and by the way we hereby welcome Satan into our rancid souls forevermore. God bless America.

Let us repeat, for clarity. Franken's amendment passed with a vote of 68-30. Meaning 30 U.S. senators voted against the elimination of the rape/sue clause. Meghan McCain, call your dad. He's one of them.

Here is where you try and do it. Here is where you bring in the filter mentioned above, try to figure out where to slot such wretched information, how to make even the slightest sense of it.

And then you discover a horrible truth: you can't. Turns out, when faced with such vileness, all filters fail. All balance is thrown off. You thought you had some sort of way to process and attain perspective? You are proven wrong.

So perhaps all we can do is ponder how pathetic and sad these various senator's lives must be, how these bitter old men will now go home at night and announce around the dinner table that, yes, today they worked very hard to help improve the welfare of the nation by essentially enabling rape and sexual abuse, tried their darndest to prevent women who've been viciously attacked from having much legal recourse. And lo, Satan will chuckle happily.

Then maybe these senators will try and hug their wives, or their daughters. And maybe, if there's any justice in the universe, their wives and daughters will slap them as hard as humanly possible, lock them in a shipping container, and never let them touch them again.

P.S.; Would you like a complete list of these 30 senators' names? Right here.

Why look, there's grandpa McCain. There's disgraced man-child John Ensign. Hooker-lovin' David Vitter. Saxby Chambliss. Inhofe. It's a veritable welfare-state who's who of Dick Cheney's sanctum of oily fluffers, and many more who would love to be. Shall we write a nice letter to them? Or maybe their wives and daughters?


Mark Morford

Mark Morford's column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SFGate. Contact him here. To get on the notification list for this column, click here and remove one article of clothing. To get on Mark's personal mailing list (appearances, books, blogs, yoga and more), click here and remove three more. His website is right here.

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Monday, October 12, 2009

There goes the planet -- Oh Shit

THE ABSURD TIMES



Just recently it was made shockingly clear to me how much denial persists as to climate deterioration. As I write this in below freezing early October, fresh from seeing the Major League Baseball elimination series canceled due to snow and then played the next day in 29 degree weather, I just received a forwarded letter written by someone who once showed signs of literacy and common sense calling the whole ecology movement akin to the Nazi Party.

Personally, I don't give a damn, as I mentioned before, as I will die within a decade or so anyway, but deliberate idiocy has a way of irritating me. The fact that I don't give a damn just proves what Bernard Shaw said in his Back to Methuselah about the life span of the human race being too short as most leaders do not live long enough to face the consequences of their actions. It may be one reason that younger people usually favor more liberal causes, on the whole, than older ones.

At any rate, at the same time, this article from the Nation appeared in my mailbox. I thought I'd pass it on:



Climate Roulette

Comment

By Mark Hertsgaard

This article appeared in the October 26, 2009 edition of The Nation.

October 7, 2009


They say that everyone who finally gets it about climate change has an "Oh, shit" moment--an instant when the full scientific implications become clear and they suddenly realize what a horrifically dangerous situation humanity has created for itself. Listening to the speeches, groundbreaking in their way, that President Obama and Chinese President Hu Jintao delivered September 22 at the UN Summit on Climate Change, I was reminded of my most recent "Oh, shit" moment.

It came in July, courtesy of the chief climate adviser to the German government. Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, chair of an advisory council known by its German acronym, WBGU, is a physicist whose specialty, fittingly, is chaos theory. Speaking to an invitation-only conference at New Mexico's Santa Fe Institute, Schellnhuber divulged the findings of a study so new he had not yet briefed Chancellor Angela Merkel about it. The study has now been published. If its conclusions are correct--and Schellnhuber ranks among the world's half-dozen most eminent climate scientists--it has monumental implications for the pivotal meeting in December in Copenhagen, where world leaders will try to agree on reversing global warming.

Schellnhuber and his WBGU colleagues go a giant step beyond the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the UN body whose scientific reports are constrained because the world's governments must approve their contents. The IPCC says that rich industrial countries must cut emissions 25 to 40 percent by 2020 (from 1990 levels) if the world is to have a fair chance of avoiding catastrophic climate change. By contrast, the WBGU study says the United States must cut emissions 100 percent by 2020--i.e., quit carbon entirely within ten years. Germany, Italy and other industrial nations must do the same by 2025 to 2030. China only has until 2035, and the world as a whole must be carbon-free by 2050. The study adds that big polluters can delay their day of reckoning by "buying" emissions rights from developing countries, a step the study estimates would extend some countries' deadlines by a decade or so.

Needless to say, this timetable is light-years more demanding than what the world's major governments are talking about in the run-up to Copenhagen. The European Union has pledged 20 percent reductions by 2020, which it will increase to 30 percent if others--like the United States--do the same. Japan's new prime minister likewise has promised 25 percent reductions by 2020 if others do the same. Obama didn't mention a number, but the Waxman-Markey bill, which he supports, would deliver less than 5 percent reductions by 2020. Obama's silence--doubtless a function of the fact that Republicans are implacably opposed to serious emissions cuts--allowed Hu to claim the higher ground at the UN. Hu went further than any Chinese leader has before, pledging to curb greenhouse gas emissions growth by a "notable margin" by 2020. Obama dropped his own bombshell, however, urging that all G-20 governments phase out subsidies for fossil fuels. "The time we have to reverse this tide is running out," Obama declared. Alas, the WBGU study suggests that our time is in fact all but gone.

Obama, like other G-8 leaders, agreed in July to limit the global temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above the preindustrial level at which human civilization developed. Schellnhuber, addressing the Santa Fe conference, joked that the G-8 leaders had agreed to the 2C limit "probably because they don't know what it means." In fact, even the "brutal" timeline of the WBGU study, Schellnhuber cautioned, would not guarantee staying within the 2C target. It would merely give humanity a two-out-of-three chance of doing so--"worse odds than Russian roulette," he wryly noted. "But it is the best we can do." To have a three-out-of-four chance, countries would have to quit carbon even sooner. Likewise, we could decide to wait another decade or so to halt all greenhouse emissions, but this lowers the odds of hitting the 2C target to fifty-fifty. "And what kind of precautionary principle is that?" Schellnhuber asked.

There is a fundamental political assumption underlying the WBGU study: that the right to emit greenhouse gases is shared equally by all people on earth. Known in diplomatic circles as "the per capita principle," this approach has long been insisted upon by China and most other developing countries and thus is seen as essential to an agreement in Copenhagen, though among G-8 leaders only Merkel has endorsed it. The WBGU study applies the per capita principle to the world population of 7 billion people and arrives at an annual emissions quota of 2.7 tons of carbon dioxide per person. That's harsh news for Americans, who emit 20 tons per person annually, and it explains why the US deadline is the most imminent. But China won't welcome this news either. Its combination of high annual emissions and huge population gives it a deadline only a few years later than Europe's and Japan's.

"I myself was terrified when I saw these numbers," Schellnhuber said. He urges governments to agree in Copenhagen to launch "a Green Apollo Project." Like John Kennedy's pledge to land a man on the moon in ten years, a global Green Apollo Project would aim to put leading economies on a trajectory of zero carbon emissions within ten years. Combined with carbon trading with low-emissions countries, Schellnhuber says, such a "wartime mobilization" might still save us from the worst impacts of climate change. The alternative is more and more "Oh, shit" moments for all of us.

About Mark Hertsgaard

Mark Hertsgaard (markhertsgaard.com), a fellow of The Nation Institute and The Nation's environment correspondent, is the author of five books, which have been translated into sixteen languages. His next book, Living Through the Storm: How We Survive the Next 50 Years of Climate Change, is forthcoming from Houghton-Mifflin. more...
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Friday, October 09, 2009

Nobel Peace Prize??!!

THE ABSURD TIMES



Photo: Edward Said (sigh eed) -- more about him below.

As soon as I heard the news that our President, Barak Obama, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, my first reaction was "Damn, there go my chances." I never do well with committees, anyway. People in Game Theory know that the best and the worst never have a change with a committee decision. Well, except perhaps this time.

In 1938, the committee was divided between Adolph Hitler and Ghandi for the prize. Instead, it was given to a group that helped refugees.

Meanwhile, there is other stuff going on. One is the UN report by a South African Jew. It is highly critical of Israel and thus he becomes a "self-hating Jew," and joins Noam Chomsky and Norm Finklestein in that category. I must confess that I have not read the report myself. I wanted to, but it is about 6 Megabytes of PDF to download, but here is the link for you:
http://www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/hrcouncil/specialsession/9/docs/UNFFMGC_Report.pdf
You can decide for yourself. These things are never made available.

There was a discussion of it, however, on Democracy Now. Some of you may remember Edward Said, author of Orientalism, and Palestinian. He was a Professor at Columbia University and could play Beethoven's Sonatas on the concert pianist level (well, better than some). He was close friends with Daniel Barenboim, a musical genius, to further harmony and understanding between Palestinian and Israeli youth, especially. Edward Said, therefore, was attacked repeatedly by the likes of Derschowitz, but Columbia endowed a chair in his honor. The interview below is with his successor as Said (Sigh eed) died of cancer a few years ago.

One last note, Edward Said believed in a one state solution, as does Kaddafi. This, of course, would force a separation of church and state, an insalubrious notion smacking of democracy.

Oh yes, another photo of Said with some politician:



Guest:

Rashid Khalidi, Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University. He is the author of several books, including Sowing Crisis: American Dominance and the Cold War in the Middle East and The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood.

Rush Transcript

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JUAN GONZALEZ: The Security Council has rejected Libya’s request to hold an emergency session on South African Judge Richard Goldstone’s recently released report on Israel’s three-week war on Gaza last winter. Instead, the Council has agreed to advance a regular meeting to address the issues it raises.

The 575-page report by the United Nations fact-finding mission accuses Israel of war crimes and deliberately targeting civilians in Gaza. It also accuses Hamas of indiscriminate rocket fire. The report urges that the UN Security Council refer allegations to the International Criminal Court if either side fails to investigate and prosecute suspects. Some 1,400 Palestinians and thirteen Israelis were killed during the war on Gaza.

Meanwhile, outrage among Palestinians continues to rise over Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s decision to withdraw support for further action in regard to the Goldstone investigation. Last week, Abbas backed the postponement of a vote by the Human Rights Council to send the report to the Security Council for possible action. The decision reportedly came after heavy American and Israeli pressure.

This is Gaza resident Najma Abbas.

    NAJMA ABBAS: [translated] We have rights, and we demand to have them, despite those who disagree. The European countries agreed and were willing to sign on. How is it possible that our own flesh and blood refused?


JUAN GONZALEZ: Bill Van Esveld of Human Rights Watch criticized the Obama administration’s actions regarding the Goldstone report.

    BILL VAN ESVELD: Due to American pressure, strong pressure from Washington, the Palestinians have withdrawn their request that the UN act on the Goldstone report. What the US has effectively done is sent a strong signal that Israel doesn’t need to investigate itself, because that was the recommendation of the Goldstone report.


JUAN GONZALEZ: After six days of protests, a senior Abbas adviser told the Voice of Palestine radio Wednesday that, quote, “What happened is a mistake, but (it) can be repaired.”

Well, for more on the report and the Palestinian Authority’s decision, I’m joined now here in the firehouse studio by Palestinian historian Rashid Khalidi. He is the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University and the author of several books, including Sowing Crisis: American Dominance and the Cold War in the Middle East and The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood.

Welcome to Democracy Now!

RASHID KHALIDI: Thank you, Juan.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, the reaction over the past week in the Palestinian—in the Occupied Territories, as well as in the Middle East in general? Have you seen anything like this in the past in regard to the Palestinian Authority leadership?

RASHID KHALIDI: I actually haven’t. This is unprecedented. You have a wide range of calls, not only condemning what Mahmoud Abbas, Abu Mazen, did in instructing his representatives in Geneva to call for postponement of consideration of the Goldstone report, but we’re now hearing calls for the President’s resignation. These are not just coming from Hamas or the usual quarters. They seem to be coming from a very broad range of civil society groups, even members of the President’s own political party, Fatah.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And in terms of the prospects of that happening—I mean, obviously, in Gaza there have been posters up now—

RASHID KHALIDI: Right.

JUAN GONZALEZ: —in the streets in recent days calling Mahmoud Abbas a traitor. But the prospects of any change in leadership, from your perspective?

RASHID KHALIDI: Well, I think he’s definitely been weakened by this. There’s no question that Israel and the United States twisted their pliable client, if you want to call him that, much more than they had any reason to, in terms of what the traffic would bear, what his popularity and his legitimacy, which were very, very limited to begin with, would sustain. And the backlash has really been quite ferocious. I can’t remember seeing anything like this. I think he’s wounded. I think he’s quite severely wounded.

Whether it will lead to a change or not, I don’t know. This comes at a time when there are efforts to bring about another reconciliation meeting between Fatah and Hamas, and it’s hard to say how this might play into it. There are a number of Arab countries that seem to be pushing hard in that direction. His being weakened in this circumstance may have an effect on that.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, the report itself was rejected by Israel and was criticized by US officials. But what specifically did it recommend?

RASHID KHALIDI: It simply recommended that both the Palestinian Authority and Israel investigate the allegations that the Goldstone committee looked at: allegations of war crimes, allegations, in some cases, of crimes against humanity, by Israel, primarily, but also by Hamas. So it simply called for these two sides to investigate and then for the Human Rights Council in Geneva to refer the results of that, if needed, to the Security Council.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Now the Palestinian Authority—at least in the last day or so, a couple of spokespeople have said that “this was a mistake, we’re reconsidering it.” But what do you expect will happen at the Security Council now?

RASHID KHALIDI: Well, I don’t expect very much to happen in the Security Council, frankly. It’s now been postponed to a regular meeting of the Security Council, which was scheduled to discuss the Middle East and which has, I guess, been moved up ’til next week—to next week, so it will be brought before the council presumably next week. I don’t see the United States changing its position of 360-degree support for Israel.

The problem here is that they are losing their ally in Ramallah, and they’re acceding to having it even considered yesterday by the council. And considering moving up the meeting, I think, is a recognition of the fact that they’ve already done themselves some harm in Washington.

The interesting things are happening in Palestine now, I think. I think that the idea that a Palestinian leader would prevent an international body from even considering a report, which condemns both Hamas, but primarily Israel, is horrific to most Palestinians and most people in the Arab world. The satellite TV stations are focusing on this to a very high degree, and the outrage is really quite palpable, and from one end of the spectrum to the other.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And, of course, this all comes as the US envoy George Mitchell is preparing for—will be arriving in the Middle East again—

RASHID KHALIDI: Yet again.

JUAN GONZALEZ: —yet again—

RASHID KHALIDI: Yet again.

JUAN GONZALEZ: —to attempt another round of negotiations for a peace settlement. Your sense of how this will affect the ability of the Palestinian Authority to have any leverage in those discussions?

RASHID KHALIDI: Well, the Israelis have delivered yet another slap in the face to Senator Mitchell and to the Obama administration. This has been their habit for decades. Every time an American envoy comes, a new settlement is opened or some outrageous statement is made.

The Israeli foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, has basically said, “There’s not going to be a deal. There won’t be peace with the Palestinians. We just have to manage this conflict,” and something along those lines, in effect saying there’s no point.

So I think that you have an Israeli government that seems to be hardening its position, and in particular with the actions that the government is taking in Jerusalem, where there’s a very high level of tension over subterranean excavations by the Israeli Antiquities Authority, which is increasingly being infiltrated by extremist settler groups, where there have been home demolitions and expulsions of people from their homes and expansion of new settlements. The Israelis are, in effect, staking a very tough position out, ahead of any talks that Mitchell might be able to start.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And how do you expect Mitchell to function in light of the fact that the—at least Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority have made it clear—

RASHID KHALIDI: Right.

JUAN GONZALEZ: —precondition of real negotiations is a halt to the settlement expansions?

RASHID KHALIDI: Well, they’ve announced a number of measures involving new tenders for housing and settlements, new building in Jerusalem, which the Netanyahu government says is excluded from any ban even if there were to be one, such that the question now will be, who is going to back down? Will Mahmoud Abbas, who’s, as I think everybody agrees, been significantly weakened by his own mistakes in this Goldstone matter—is he going to be able to back down further on this issue and say, “Sure, we’ll talk with you about dividing the pie, while you continue to eat it up”? He’s in a much, much, much more difficult position. Will the Obama administration continue to back down in the face of Israeli intransigence? I don’t know.

JUAN GONZALEZ: There have also been some reports in the Arab press of some—pointing to a possible corruption situation with Mahmoud Abbas’s son and a cell phone company that—

RASHID KHALIDI: Yeah.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Could you talk about that?

RASHID KHALIDI: Sure. One element of the blackmail, which reportedly has been exercised by the Israelis on the Palestinian Authority in order to persuade them not to go forward with consideration of the Goldstone report in Geneva, was a denial of the granting of a license to a second Palestinian cell phone company in the Occupied Territories.

The situation now is that there’s one Palestinian company, not allowed to build cell phone towers in over 60 percent of the West Bank, and a [inaudible], four or five, I think, or six Israeli companies, which build, all over the West Bank, cell phone towers. And so, you basically can’t get decent reception. What the Palestinian Authority had been asking for was to have the right to build in occupied Palestine another set of cell phone towers, so that, A, there could be competition, and B, there could be better coverage.

Now, the corruption angle has to do with the apparent fact that Mahmoud Abbas’s son is involved with that second company. The bigger issue, of course, is the Israelis denying this extension of cell bandwidth and denial of permission to build, and thereby strangling the Palestinian economy. Cell phones are really crucial, given the fragmentation of territory caused by the way the occupation functions in the West Bank.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, Rashid Khalidi, professor of modern Arab studies at Columbia University, I want to thank you for being with us.

RASHID KHALIDI: Thanks, Juan.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And we’ll be continuing to cover this story in the future.



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Wednesday, October 07, 2009

A War of Absurdity

This just happened as I was about to write something on the subject. Perfect:

A War of Absurdity

TruthDig

By Robert Scheer

October 7, 2009


THE ABSURD TIMES



Robert Scheer is the editor of Truthdig, where this article originally appeared. His latest book is The Pornography of Power: How Defense Hawks Hijacked 9/11 and Weakened America (Twelve).




US Marines walk inside their base before patrolling near town of Khan Neshin in Rig district of Helmand province Reuters Photos<br/>

Reuters Photos

US Marines walk inside their base before patrolling near town of Khan Neshin in Rig district of Helmand province

Every once in a while, a statistic just jumps out at you in a way that makes everything else you hear on a subject seem beside the point, if not downright absurd. That was my reaction to the recent statement of the president's national security adviser, former Marine Gen. James Jones, concerning the size of the terrorist threat from Afghanistan:

» More

"The Al Qaeda presence is very diminished. The maximum estimate is less than 100 operating in the country, no bases, no ability to launch attacks on either us or our allies."

Less than 100! And he is basing his conservative estimate on the best intelligence data available to our government. That means that Al Qaeda, for all practical purposes, does not exist in Afghanistan--so why are we having a big debate about sending even more troops to fight an enemy that has relocated elsewhere? Because of the blind belief, in the minds of those like John McCain, determined to "win" in Afghanistan, that if we don't escalate, Al Qaeda will inevitably come back.

Why? It's not like Al Qaeda is an evil weed indigenous to Afghanistan and dependent on its climate and soil for survival. Its members were foreign imports in the first place, recruited by our CIA to fight the Soviets because there were evidently not enough locals to do the job. After all, US officials first forged the alliance between the foreign fighters and the Afghan mujahedeen, who morphed into the Taliban, and we should not be surprised that that tenuous alliance ended. The Taliban and other insurgents are preoccupied with the future of Afghanistan, while the Arab fighters couldn't care less and have moved on to more hospitable climes.

There is no indication that any of the contending forces in Afghanistan, including the Taliban, are interested in bringing Al Qaeda back. On the contrary, all the available evidence indicates that the Arab fighters are unwelcome and that it is their isolation from their former patrons that has led to their demise.

As such, while one wishes that the Afghan people would put their houses in order, these are not, even after eight long years of occupation, our houses. Sure, there are all sorts of angry people in Afghanistan, eager to pick fights with each other and most of all any foreigners who seem to be threatening their way of life, but why should that any longer have anything to do with us?

Even in neighboring Pakistan, the remnants of Al Qaeda are barely hanging on. As the Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday, "Hunted by US drones, beset by money problems and finding it tougher to lure young Arabs to the bleak mountains of Pakistan, Al Qaeda is seeing its role shrink there and in Afghanistan, according to intelligence reports and Pakistan and US officials..... For Arab youths who are al Qaeda's primary recruits, 'it's not romantic to be cold and hungry and hiding,' said a senior US official in South Asia."

It's time to declare victory and begin to get out rather than descend deeper into an intractable civil war that we neither comprehend nor in the end will care much about. Terrorists of various stripes will still exist as they have throughout history, but the ones we are most concerned about have proved mighty capable of relocating to less hostile environments, including sunny San Diego and southern Florida, where the 9/11 hijackers had no trouble fitting in.

There is a continued need for effective international police work to thwart the efforts of a widely dispersed Al Qaeda network, but putting resources into that effort does not satisfy the need of the military establishment for a conventional field of battle. That is the significance of Gen. Stanley McChrystal's leaked report calling for a massive counterinsurgency campaign to make everything right about life in Afghanistan, down to the governance of the most forlorn village. The general's report aims not at eliminating Al Qaeda, which he concedes is barely existent in the country, but rather at creating an Afghan society that is more to his own liking.

It is a prescription, as the Russians and others before them learned, for war without end. That might satisfy the marketing needs of the defense industry and the career hopes of select military and political aspirants, but it has nothing to do with fighting terrorism. In the end, it would seem that some of our leaders need the Afghanistan battleground more than the terrorists do.

About Robert Scheer

Robert Scheer, a contributing editor to The Nation, is editor of Truthdig.com and author of The Pornography of Power: How Defense Hawks Hijacked 9/11 and Weakened America (Twelve) and Playing President (Akashic Books). He is author, with Christopher Scheer and Lakshmi Chaudhry, of The Five Biggest Lies Bush Told Us About Iraq (Akashic Books and Seven Stories Press.) His weekly column, distributed by Creators Syndicate, appears in the San Francisco Chronicle. more...
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Friday, October 02, 2009

Gaddaffi -- TOO FAR OUT




THE ABSURD TIMES:
TOO FAR OUT


I'm including the lllustration I wanted to use last time.

To tell you the truth, he is so far out that I'm not sure that even I fully understand him, but I'm doing my best here.

Let's start with his speech that left the western media terminally puzzled and angry, but they really didn't know why they were angry except that it was a long speech with no break for commercial interruptions, Reagen said he was a bad guy and bombed him, killing his daughter and perhaps other children, and he let the tribe of the convicted Lockerbie bomber be greeted by his family and tribe and gave him a traditional getting himself. Other than that, they understand very little, but they really don't feel comfortable with him.

The speech was essentially about the United Nations itself. The Preamble is fine, he says, but the articles of incorporation make it clumbsy and onerous. Actually, he is not alone in this. For different reasons, one of George Bush's appointee's felt that the top 10 floors should be bombed. Yet Georgie put him there as our ambassador. The general consensus about him was that he was insane, but not dangerous. That was John Boulton.

He then talks to the General Assembly about that other part of the UN, the Security Council. He pointed out that the entire operation was designed in reaction to Germany (he didn't seem to think Japan had much to do with it since we nuked it) and is essentally a Western European organization. It's structure is out of date for today's situations. [It might be added that the five nations with the veto power once included Taiwan, of all places.]

Many leaders had difficulty getting there. One co-pilot could not get a Visa, the doctor for another leader could not get a visa, etc. We complain that we have such a burden in hosting these nations and who knows where a terrorist could be, eh?

There have been votes of about 188 for and 2 against on certain resolutions. Since the states were the United States and Israel, the resolution failed.

He decided the hell with the nuclear weapon. So we took him off our "terrorist" list. Seriously, if he had one, what would he do with it? Israel said it feared an attack. Does anyone really think he is that stupid? Or that Israel is really in such danger with a mere 200 to 300 nuclear weapons or bombs to use in retaliation? He figured he didn't need it.

Well, Gadaffi suggests that the entire General Assembly say "Thank you," very politely to the United States, "we appreciate your sacrifice and hospitality, and so on," and then move to a time zone closer to GMT, Switzerland, for example, or why not Malta?

He is not that popular with many Arab Countries either. He walked out of a meeting of the Arab League considering them just talkers and went to work trying to organize with Africa instead. During the reign of Bush I, I asked a leading Arab Ambassador what he thought of him. He said, "We wish the U.S. would stop paying so much attention to him."

Then it hit me. Gadaffi just freaks out uptight western Republican types. On top of it, he doesn't wear a tie! Add the tent bit and it's ballistic time.

People get upset at the tent. What's with the tent? What the hell difference does it make? He likes tents. He has his own security or bodyguards -- all women, highly skilled in martial arts. I've seen them and can assure you that it would not be wise to mess with them. He is an equal opportunity employer and feminist.

People think he is still running Lybia. He really isn't. He only leads the revolution. He set up this system of committees and councils and, frankly, they are not very unified on anything. This has been the case since about 1980.

People wonder why he is only a Colonel. Well, he could have made himself a general any time he wanted, but why bother? He's leading a revolution. His GREEN BOOK reads very much like something by the Fabian Society written by H.G. Wells, Sidney Webb, or Bernard Shaw.

Oh yes, what about Bin Laden. Well, he says, Al Quada is in New York, not Pakistan. And it wasn't Bin Laden who flew an airplane into a building in New York. Frankly, why pay him so much attention? Get on with your life.

Well, I can't think of any other things about him that puzzle people, so I'll end here.

Saturday, September 26, 2009

Gaddafi the Cool


THE ABSURD TIMES



In case you wonder how to spell his name, or transliterate it, above is the banner for his website.




And this is a full-sized photo of him with a bunch of things pinned on his shirt. Well, actually that photo got lost, so here is one of him making his speech.

Now, after a long time of just hearing crazy stuff from our right wing loonies, we actually are hearing alot of pertainant information from the leaders of the world as the United Nations begins. The first thing to do is to get to the website from the UN and download the speeches along with translation. You have to use Realplayer to do it -- I guess they supply the stream or format free for them. You can down Realplayer and, I think, the free version will let you download the speeches.

Next, catch Gaddafi on CNN at 12 CDT for an hour interview with Fareed Za(and whatever). He's a pretty good interviewer and certainly knowledgable. Ahmedinejad was on CNN with Larry King and drove him nuts. King tried to confront him on the holocause and he instead started asking King questions. We would have seen a live heart-attack ahd King not been able to run to a commercial every 2 minutes. Maybe it will be re-run.

After that, we can really talk about what has been happening. Morales said he wouldn't talk as long as Gaddafi as he "said it all" and then applauded. What bothers western media was 1) the speech lasted 90 minutes and 2) there were no breaks for commercials. Additionally, since he had never addressed the General Assembly, he went back to the UN establishment and discussed its history and shortcomings. He said it was time to just thank the US for all its trouble and move the entire thing to another continent. Additionally, most of what he said was factually accurate.

Normally, he looks as if he is on hash, but this time he didn't. However, there were additional interviews lately where he is is old self. Anyway, we'll catch up on all this, but I wanted to let you know first about the material.

The next post should contain some links. Nah, why not have them here?

UN: http://www.un.org/ga/

You can find CNN yourselves.

On the UN: Right above the "present Speaker" are the archives. Khaddafi was on day one (1) as was Ahmedinejad. Morales on the second day. You can check them out and then download the ones you want. There are plenty of conversion programs as "Freeware" what you can use if you prefer another format. The typescript of the speech should also be available, but it is in PDF. I hate PDF. Who likes it? Also, conversion to ascii programs available as freeware.

Later we can talk about the UN and the salient points made.








Tuesday, September 22, 2009

Ralph Nader is Back


THE ABSURD TIMES


Illustration: We never did congratulate Al. Now we have to get a replacement for Kennedy.



AMY GOODMAN: As the United States prepares to host the Group of Twenty nations summit in Pittsburgh later this week, President Obama vowed Saturday to prevent a repeat of last year’s Wall Street collapse. In his weekly radio and internet address, the President promised to work with G20 leaders to take on the, quote, “reckless risk-taking and irresponsibility” that led to the crisis.

    PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: The first meeting of the G-20 nations in April came at the height of the global financial crisis, a crisis that required unprecedented international cooperation to jumpstart the world’s economies and help break the downward spiral that enveloped all our nations. At next week’s summit, we’ll have, in effect, a five-month checkup to review the steps each nation has taken, separately and together, to break the back of this economic crisis. And the good news is that we’ve made real progress since the last time we met, here at home and around the world.

    Because of the steps taken by our nations and all nations, we can now say that we’ve stopped our economic freefall. But we also know that stopping the bleeding isn’t nearly enough. Our work is far from over.

    We can’t allow the thirst for reckless schemes that produce quick profits and fat executive bonuses to override the security of our entire financial system and leave taxpayers on the hook for cleaning up the mess. And as the world’s largest economy, we must lead, not just by word, but by example, understanding that in the twenty-first century financial crises know no borders.

    Not surprisingly, lobbyists for big Wall Street banks are hard at work trying to stop reforms that would hold them accountable, and they want to keep things just the way they are. But we can’t let politics as usual triumph, so business as usual can reign.


AMY GOODMAN: Meanwhile, Senate Banking Committee Chair Chris Dodd is expected to propose a new plan to oversee banks that would merge the four banking agencies into a single regulator. His suggestion would combine the Federal Reserve, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Office of Thrift Supervision, and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency into a single agency. The plan is expected to run into opposition from House Financial Services Committee Chair Barney Frank, as well as President Obama.

Well, for more on the ongoing fallout of the economic crisis, a look at healthcare, as well as his new book, I’m joined now by a leading critic of the existing financial system. Ralph Nader is a consumer advocate, corporate critic, attorney, author, activist, former presidential candidate a number of times over. For four decades he has helped us drive safer cars, eat healthier food, breathe better air, drink cleaner water, work in safer environments.

He’s the author of several books, including In Pursuit of Justice and The Good Fight. This time, Ralph Nader is out with a work—well, it’s not exactly fiction or nonfiction. He calls it a practical utopia. It’s called “Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!”

We welcome you to Democracy Now!

RALPH NADER: Thank you, Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: It’s good to have you with us, Ralph.

Well, let’s start on the economy, on this year anniversary of the collapse, and where you think we have come to in this year.

RALPH NADER: Well, President Obama is engaging in political progressive talk, but one year later, nothing has happened in Congress. There hasn’t even been a bill to financially regulate, bring under the rule of law and accountability Wall Street and the financial industry, hasn’t even gone to a committee yet. They’re just going to begin hearings in the Senate Banking Committee. There’s a massive attack on the consumer regulatory agency to protect people who have mortgages and credit cards and other financial instruments by the Chamber of Commerce and other corporate lobbies. So you see the corporate lobbies swarming over Congress, political action committee money, but no legislative action whatsoever.

I don’t think this has a precedent in American history. There’s never been a criminal, speculative, massive collapse, such as occurred on Wall Street, affecting trillions of dollars of worker pension money, mutual funds, savings, jobs, affecting communities all over the country, and no action in Congress. That’s the test. It’s not the rhetoric. It’s whether these bills are moving through, by 535 men and women who put their shoes on every day like you and I do. And that’s not happening. And that’s the way you want to analyze it.

AMY GOODMAN: What do you think needs to happen? What is that legislation that needs to be passed?

RALPH NADER: Well, there’s a proposal crafted in part by Elizabeth Warren, who’s head of the Congressional Oversight Panel, to make sure that the Wall Street firms behave themselves. And she’s a professor of law at Harvard Law School. That’s a very well-drafted bill. There are some proposals to strengthen the organization of financial consumers, bank depositors, insurance policy holders, etc., that needs to be put in there. But the overall bill to repeal the Clinton-era repeal of Glass-Steagall, to repeal the Franklin Delano Roosevelt reforms—you have to repeal the repeal of those reforms, which set the stage in 1999 and 2000 for the rampant, wild speculation with other people’s money by investment banks and banks—Citigroup, Merrill Lynch, Bank of America and others, Goldman Sachs, of course.

AMY GOODMAN: The poverty rate, the number of people who are losing their homes, foreclosure, where do we stand?

RALPH NADER: Well, again, the administration cannot level with the American people, because whether it’s Obama or Bernanke or Secretary Treasurer Geithner, they cannot say anything negative, because they’re afraid of the markets. And so, all they say is mild positives. And so, they can’t level with the American people. So they use indicators that favor the corporate balance sheet, but not the worker balance sheet or the pensioneer balance sheet.

And so, poverty is going up, unemployment is shooting up, underemployment is massive. There’s probably 17 percent of the American people are unemployed or underemployed. Wages are stagnant or declining. And, of course, consumer debt is increasing. Home foreclosures are increasing. Those are the indicators you’ve got to put front and center. They’re the people indicators, not the corporate, business, economist indicators.

Hey, the banks are starting to make more profit. Yeah, but they’re being bailed out by Washington, and they can be technically insolvent and still make more profit, because they’re charging such high interest rates, fees and penalties.

AMY GOODMAN: Ralph Nader, you talk about legislation saving us. A new report by the watchdog group Common Cause reveals the financial industry spent $42 million lobbying Congress during the first six months of the year and that nine of the top recipients of securities money so far this year are Democrats, like Senator Schumer of New York, topping the list, taking in something like $680,000 in campaign contributions.

RALPH NADER: It’s the same old rut. And that’s why I really wrote this work of fiction, because we are not imagining, Amy, what is necessary by way of money, organizers in the field, strategy, smarts, determination to break this massive corporate-state gridlock that’s put our country into a paralysis. Our country is stuck in traffic. It is being prevented from solving many problems or diminishing them—public transit, housing, consumer protection, living wage, universal health insurance, single payer, all these corporate crime crackdowns. All of these are problems that can be addressed and solved, but not when there’s too much power in too few hands, who make the decisions for the many to the many’s disadvantage.

So we have to—we have to ask ourselves the question: What will it take to break through? What will it take to put the people back into their sovereignty? What will it take to make sure that we enforce the Constitution and we don’t get in these foreign military adventures that are unconstitutional, violate statutes and violate international treaties, not just under Bush-Cheney, but there’s an unseemly continuity in this area under the Obama administration.

AMY GOODMAN: We’ve been talking about Congress. What about the G-20? I mean, you have world leaders gathering in Pittsburgh later this week. Also, many thousands of protesters are expected. But where does this story, whether we’re talking about the economy or healthcare, fit into the global picture and G-20? What can be accomplished there?

RALPH NADER: G-20 is a talk fest. It’s good for the Pittsburgh economy for about a week. The rallies are good, indicates that people are still trying to fight back. Nothing’s going to happen. We’ve seen this again and again with the G-20 and whatever G-number has had these meetings, whether in Canada or Europe or United States.

The issue again is, are we going to get the leadership from the enlightened super-rich to put the field organizers on the ground and to put the money into progressive campaigns and citizen action? For example, $1 billion will get us single payer in a year—that’s my sense—if we had field organizers and mobilization in every congressional district. I mean, if there was a private vote right now in Congress, about a third of them would support a single-payer system. But they are surrounded by these drug industry and health insurance lobbies and the money that’s dangled before them.

So we have to break through, and the only way we can break through is the majesty of our mind generating a higher level of imaginative “what if.” What if we have this kind of resource or these kinds of film organizers or these kinds of mass media attentions? Which is why I wrote this book, “Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!” And that’s in quotes. And it comes from a very interesting story at the beginning of the book that I can tell you, if you’re interested.

AMY GOODMAN: And we’re going to hear that story after break. We’re talking to Ralph Nader, longtime consumer advocate, ran for president of this country time and time again, raising issues like those he’s raising like right now. And he has a new book out. It’s not his typical book, not that any of them are, but this one is a—well, a kind of work of fiction, “Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!” Stay with us.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: Our guest is Ralph Nader. He has a new book out. It’s called “Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!” The title may surprise you, and we’ll find out why that title in a minute.

But we want to talk about healthcare first. President Obama was on five networks on Sunday: on CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC and Univision. He skipped Fox, because they skipped his healthcare joint address to Congress. I want to play a clip from his appearance on CBS’s Face the Nation with Bob Schieffer.

    PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: As I’ve said, about two-thirds of what we’ve proposed would be from money that’s already in the healthcare system but just being spent badly. And as I’ve said before, this is not me making wild assertions. You know, you always hear about waste and abuse in Washington, and usually it doesn’t mean much, because nobody ever finds where that waste and abuse is. This is money that has been directly identified, that the Congressional Budget Office, that Republican and Democratic experts agree is there, that is not improving the quality of our health. So the lion’s share of money to pay for this will come from money that’s already in the system.

    Now, we are going to have to find some additional sources of revenue for the other third or so of the healthcare plan. And what I—and I’ve provided a long list of approaches that would not have an impact on middle-class Americans. They’re not going to be forced to pay for this. Insurance companies, drug companies are going to have to be ponying up, partly because right now they’re receiving huge subsidies from folks.

    BOB SCHIEFFER: But aren’t they going to then pass that on to consumers? I mean, that’s what, you know, the Chamber of Commerce is saying. They’re starting a big ad campaign—

    PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: Right.

    BOB SCHIEFFER: —right now. They say you’re going to put these taxes on these insurance companies, on people that make things like x-rays and lab tests and all of that, and they’re just going to turn right around and pass it right on to the consumer.

    PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: Here’s the problem. They’re passing on those costs to the consumer anyway. The only difference is—

    BOB SCHIEFFER: But this will be more.

    PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: No, the difference is, is that they’re making huge profits on it, Bob. Look, bringing about change in this town is always hard. When you’ve got special interests that are making billions of dollars, absolutely they’re going to want to keep as much of the profits that they’re making as possible. And by the way, those insurance companies, even during these down years, have been making terrific profits. We don’t mind them making profits; we just want them to be accountable to their customers.


AMY GOODMAN: President Obama on CBS’s Face the Nation with Bob Schieffer. Ralph Nader, your response?

RALPH NADER: Well, it just shows is—he’s saying the right things, but the proposals he has are riddled with verbal indecision, like he won’t say if he doesn’t get a public choice or a Medicare alternative for people who are unable to afford private insurance, he won’t sign the bill. Now, in Congress, if you don’t draw the line the way LBJ used to, for example, or Franklin Delano Roosevelt, they eat you alive. They sense weakness. They sense excessive concessions. And that’s what he’s doing with all the media coverage he’s getting. He’s not putting forth a straightforward “this is what has to be done if we’re going to reduce the gouging and the waste and the fraud.”

The only approach that can do that is full Medicare for all, full government health insurance with private delivery, free choice of hospital and doctor. You’ve heard it a hundred times. That’s the only way, in western Europe and Canada, they’ve been able to control costs. So, in western Europe and Canada, they cover everybody for less than $4,000 per capita a year. In this country, it’ll be $7,500 per capita this year. And there won’t be—the tens of millions, 50 million people, won’t be covered, and tens of millions will be underinsured. I mean, to see all this data, it’s on this website, singlepayeraction.org.

But the point is that he keeps saying we’ve got to squeeze the waste and fraud, etc., and there’s enormous fraud. There’s $250 billion of billing fraud and abuse. And you can check the—Malcolm Sparrow at Harvard University has got the information on that. There are $400 billion out of $2.5 trillion, which is the health expenditure bill—$400 billion in administrative waste, all these people in Aetna and CIGNA and other companies denying people’s benefits and all the bureaucracy that these corporations generate, and not to mention their executive compensation.

So we really got—we have documented these problems. This country’s progressive movement has documented these abuses from A to Z—books, articles, documents, congressional reports. It’s time to ask the question: What is it going to take in terms of money, organizers, resources, creativity, to turn this country around in the reflection of what most people would like to see the United States of America become?

AMY GOODMAN: Your book, “Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!”, it’s just out. Kind of fiction, not really nonfiction, you call it a practical utopia. Where did you get the title?

RALPH NADER: The title came from—Warren Buffett was watching post-Katrina in his living room in Omaha, and he saw these streams of poor people fleeing the floods and the winds, and no food, no water, no shelter, on the highways north of New Orleans. And no one was helping them. And so, he couldn’t take it anymore, and he got a whole convoy of supplies, and he took them down to the New Orleans area. He went down himself and distributed all the food and the tents and the medicine to these desperate families and came across an African American family, who was helping, and the grandmother grabbed his hands, looked up at him and said, “Only the super-rich can save us.”

And that haunted him all the way back to Omaha, where he developed a plan to get seventeen older super-rich enlightened Americans at a hotel on a mountaintop in Maui, Hawaii, and basically asked themselves, what is it going to take to turn this country around? It’s going to take mass media. One of the seventeen is Barry Diller. And it’s going to take a reversal of the insurance industry. It’s Peter Lewis. It’s going to take dealing with deficits and subsidies and organizing the veteran and veteran groups and the women’s clubs around the country. Ross Perot. It’s going to take a real coordination and putting in a lot of money. That’s what they all represented. Bill Cosby is one of them. Phil Donahue is one of them. Yoko Ono is one of them. William Gates, Sr., Leonard Riggio, Bernard Rapoport. These and others get together, and it all happens in one year, 2006.

When you read this book, you’ll not only get a lift in terms of the feasibility of change, if we only change the predicates and stop trying to go after trillion-dollar industries with a few million dollars of citizen group budgets, and you not only get a lift, but you can see, step by step, the strategy, the tactics—how they set up a People’s Chamber of Commerce with tens of thousands of progressive small businesses around the country; how they set up a sub-economy, where they bought all kinds of businesses and got inside the corporate beast, because they own these companies; how they developed mass media; how they got people’s attention through the use of, for example, this parrot, Patriotic Polly, which got on TV early in 2000 and got millions of emails when it kept saying, “Get up! Don’t let America down! Get up! Don’t let America down!”

You know, in the early part of the twentieth century, Amy, and the latter part of the nineteenth, there were practical utopias, or there were just plain utopias, like Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, that really infused and raised the horizons of the progressive movement and people like Eugene Debs. In fact, that book sold a million copies, Looking Backward. We’ve stopped doing that in the last two generations. Our imaginations have been stifled by the grim reality of concentrated corporate power.

But when you see how these Meliorists, which is what these seventeen super-rich elderly progressive Americans called themselves, when you see how Sol Price, who started the Price Club, took on Wal-Mart to unionize Wal-Mart, you will see what happens when there’s smarts, determination and adequate money to take on a behemoth like Wal-Mart. You’ll also see how entrenched right-wing politicians, when they’re surrounded with mass movements back in their congressional district, and they’re basically confronted with ultimatum in this climactic scene in Congress at the end of the book, how they react.

And it’s important, I think, for all of us to stop just documenting and documenting and diagnosing and proposing these things, when there’s no power behind, there’s no juggernaut, there’s no pressure to organize the mass of the citizenry in the directions that really reflects their public sentiment, to use Abraham Lincoln’s phrase.

AMY GOODMAN: Ralph Nader, why fiction?

RALPH NADER: Because nonfiction prevents you from imagining. You have to, in effect, document Blackwater. You have to document the atrocities in Iraq, the military-industrial complex. All of these books, wonderful books, are coming out, more than ever in American history. You’ve had many of the authors on your program. But they are bound by nonfiction. They’re bound by the realities of concentrated power, which they are exposing in terms of their abuses. So you have to have fiction to raise the imaginative capability, what is feasible to fulfill life’s possibilities for people in this country and abroad. And that’s why fiction is so important.

I didn’t take the novel approach, because that’s very restrictive. That’s why it’s called a practical utopia. A professor in California, Russell Jacoby, wrote a book in 1999 called The End of Utopia, and I picked it up. I said, “What’s this all about?” because, you know, utopia, in most people’s minds, is like off-the-chart science fiction. It turns out he documented how, even in the academic world, the capacity and ability to imagine has been frozen. It’s been stuck, just like the society is stuck in traffic. So that’s why the fictional approach was used.

And also, look, you have a mega-billionaire. His name is Jerome Kohlberg. He was a big acquisition, merger person on Wall Street. His passion is election reform, which is part of this book. And while he started it a little bit, and then nobody, you know, rallied to his cause, but the key is, was he willing to spend a half-a-billion dollars getting it underway? That’s the key here. This entire redirection of our country embodied in this fiction of “Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!” was pulled off not just by smart strategies, legions of organizers, legions of grassroot lecturers, but the whole thing cost less than $15 billion.

And you know there are people—Bloomberg is worth more than that. Carl Icahn is worth more than that. One multibillionaire. We have to imagine, step by step. So there are no magic wands in this book. This is a very realistic, month-by-month strategy for a titanic power collision with the entrenched CEOs and their political allies.

Leslie Stahl read this on her vacation in August, and she wrote me a very nice letter. You know, she’s the correspondent for 60 Minutes. And she thought the book was engrossing, creative and funny. And I said, “I’ll take all three, Leslie.”

AMY GOODMAN: Ralph Nader, why do you call these people “Meliorists”?

RALPH NADER: Because they were trying to figure out what they were going to call themselves to avoid a Bush Bimbaugh-type smear. One of the characters in the book is Bush Bimbaugh, who we all know is a takeoff on Rush Limbaugh. And a wonderful scene there when he invited Ted Turner into his studio, because he was losing ratings because of the growth of the progressive movement. They were saying, “What do we call ourselves so we’re not smeared, you know, by the editorialists of the Wall Street Journal or others?” And they came up with this word Meliorist, which means betterment. These are retired, progressive, enlightened billionaires and mega-millionaires who want to better the country. That’s what they called themselves.

But they didn’t go public until the mid-year, as they—that they were a coordinated effort. And as a result, they were able to engage in a strategy of coordinated surprise when they took on the CEOs.

And the Darth Vader in the book, who’s called Lobo, retained by the CEO Goliaths, represents every conceivable effort to stop the Meliorists. This is a titanic power collision. It’s not philanthropy. It’s not soft charity. It’s shifting power from the few to the many, top down, bottom up. That is, top down from the mega-rich, enlightened older people who are the Meliorists, down to the low [inaudible].

There’s a very good section in the book on how they did it in southwest Oklahoma to take on a thirty-eight-year-old veteran, House Rules Committee veteran, Republican—remember, the scene takes place in 2006—how they mobilized it in very practical ways. It eliminates all the stereotypes that we’ve learned to swallow as progressives about red state, blue state. It gets down to the concrete lives and the concrete hopes and the concrete capacities of our country.

AMY GOODMAN: So, have you lost faith in grassroots movements making that difference, making that change?

RALPH NADER: No, they can’t make it without very significant resources. If you want to set up 2,000 people organized in each congressional district, as the Meliorists do, you’re going to need tens of millions of dollars to get the staff, the offices, to find those 2,000 people, to root them so they go beyond the first year and they institutionalize themselves.

And this book, I hope, will be read by mega-billionaires. I hope they’ll say, “You know, all this time we wanted to do something about the crazy war on drugs or the prison reform or tax reform”—it’s inside their heads, but they’re very discouraged. I’ve talked to a lot of these super-rich, enlightened people over the years. I’ve never seen them so demoralized about the state of their beloved country. And in their advanced years, they don’t want to just watch it decay. But they’re all very egocentric, in a way. I mean, they’re entrepreneurs. They’ve done it, you know, without great help. And they don’t collaborate. And that’s the key, that the seventeen Meliorists are far more powerful than the sum of their parts, in terms of what they bring to this gigantic battle with the corporate and political power structure.

AMY GOODMAN: Have you gotten reaction from any of them, since this is a fictional account, but you’re using real people, real descriptions, real super-rich in the book?

RALPH NADER: I think they’re starting to read it now. They’ve had it for a couple weeks. It’s going to—you know, it’s a pretty hefty book, and the whole reason is because it’s all in the details. And the details are not dull. The idea here is to make apathy boring and to make civic action exciting. There are parades and bands, and the activity is in the rhythm of people’s cultural habits as they’re eased out into the public arena from the desperation of their private lives, economically and otherwise.

AMY GOODMAN: Ralph Nader, as we go back to the issue of healthcare and what needs to be done, one of your key issues over the decades, Max Baucus, after months of negotiation, comes out with a bill, which now has no Republican support. Many Democrats are saying they will not support it. What do you think of Baucus and his plan and where really this is going to go and what you think needs to happen? Would you support a plan without a public option, though you are a single-payer advocate?

RALPH NADER: No, the public option, or what they should have called it, “public choice,” if they knew language, it’s not going to work. It will always be strapped by all kinds of restrictions. Even if it passes, they’ll have it straightjacketed. Only a certain number of people can even buy insurance from this proposed public option.

Senator Baucus is a typical Democrat in Republican clothing. He’s a crypto-Republican. Now, would he get away with this if there were several million dollars in grassroot mobilization in his home state of Montana? I mean, Montana has sent some pretty progressive senators in the past. The people haven’t changed. They just are not being brought together by field organizers in the kind of effort that’s described in this book, “Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!” But there’s very little going on in Montana. There’s a few rallies. There are a few demonstrations. But there’s a critical mass that’s needed there.

It looks like Baucus’s version is going to prevail with some tweaks in the Senate. Then you’re going to have the Waxman version in the House in the various committees. And then what are they going to do when they come into conference with the swarms of drug and health insurance lobbies? The drug companies have 450 full-time lobbyists on Capitol Hill, almost one to every senator and representative, not to mention their nationwide support network.

Now, the single-payer people, I don’t even know if they have one full-time lobbyist. So we have to ask ourselves, are we serious here? And if you are a super mega-rich, enlightened elderly person, or not elderly person, are you going to get serious, in terms of where you, without anybody persuading you, where you already want this country to go? That’s what we have to confront here.

The single payer is a majoritarian issue. It’s supported by 59 percent of physicians in a poll last year. A larger number of nurses, a lot of health economists support it. Why isn’t it moving? Because the people are not in charge of the Congress, even though they’re the only ones that have the vote; corporations are in charge, even though they have no vote.

AMY GOODMAN: Ralph Nader, last question, and we only have less than a minute, but the White House has announced that President Obama is going to be meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, Palestinian President Abbas in New York on Tuesday. That’s tomorrow. This, after US special envoy George Mitchell left Israel with no deal on a resumption of peace talks in the region. What do you think needs to happen there?

RALPH NADER: For a minute, I thought you said President Obama was going to meet with progressives in the White House on healthcare, which he’s never done. He’s met with CEOs.

I don’t think President Obama has any cards with the Israeli military approach to the Palestinians. He’s not going to cut off economic aid, which Prime Minister Netanyahu in 1996 in a joint address to Congress said he was going to phase out, because Israel is a modern economy, which has universal health insurance, by the way. He’s not going to cut off military aid. What are his cards? Poor George Mitchell is shuttling back and forth between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv and Ramallah. He has no cards either.

The only way to begin changing this is to bring the Israeli peace movement to the US Congress for widely publicized hearings. These are ex-generals, ex-security chiefs, former mayors, members of the Knesset, former ministers. They’ve been pummeled by the recent events of the militarists. But once they’re given a national exposure here in this country, they will connect with about 50 percent or more of the Israeli people who want a two-state solution.

You know, it’s just like anything else. The majority of the people were against the Iraq invasion, yet the neocons and people in the White House, a minority among public opinion, plunged us into this war. Similarly, in Israel. Once the Israeli peace movement, with all those credentialed and accomplished people, connect with the Palestinian peace movement, with whom they have worked out in intricate ways in the Geneva meetings years ago a two-state solution, then you’ll see Israeli society begin turning around. And that’s about the only political lever the Congress and Obama would have. Put them up before the Senate and the House. In sixty years, they have—Israeli peace movement leaders have never been invited for one hour of congressional testimony.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to leave it there. Ralph Nader, thanks so much for being with us, longtime consumer advocate, presidential candidate, his latest book called “Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!”


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