“I do know that it’s true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could — if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down. That would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down.”
Some humans ain’t human
Some people ain’t kind
You open up their hearts
And here’s what you’ll find
A few frozen pizzas
Some ice cubes with hair
A broken Popsicle
You don’t want to go there
Some humans ain’t human
Though they walk like we do
They live and they breathe
Just to turn the old screw
They screw you when you’re sleeping
They try to screw you blind
Some humans ain’t human
Some people ain’t kind
You might go to church
And sit down in a pew
Those humans who ain’t human
Could be sittin’ right next to you
They talk about your family
They talk about your clothes
When they don’t know their own ass
From their own elbows
Jealousy and stupidity
Don’t equal harmony
Jealousy and stupidity
Don’t equal harmony
Mmmm Mmmm
Mmmm Mmmm
Mmmm Mmmm
Mmmm Mmmm
[Spoken:]
Have you ever noticed
When you’re feeling really good
There’s always a pigeon
That’ll come shit on your hood
Or you’re feeling your freedom
And the world’s off your back
Some cowboy from Texas
Starts his own war in Iraq
Some humans ain’t human
Some people ain’t kind
They lie through their teeth
With their head up their behind
You open up their hearts
And here’s what you’ll find
Some humans ain’t human
Some people ain’t kind
~John Prine
There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part; you can’t even passively take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!
~Mario Savio, Berkeley, 1964
Bring Back Warren Harding
By FRANK RICH (NYT)
Published: September 25, 2005
THERE are no coincidences. On Monday, as L. Dennis Kozlowski was slapped with 8 to 25 years in jail for looting Tyco International of some $150 million, the feds were making their first arrest of a high-ranking member of the Bush administration. The official was David Safavian, the chief of White House federal procurement policy who once worked for Jack Abramoff, the sleazy Republican lobbyist whose disreputable client list, in another noncoincidence, included Tyco. While it’s an accident of timing that Mr. Safavian was collared at his suburban Virginia home just as Mr. Kozlowski was sent to the slammer in New York, the two events could not better bracket a corrupt era worthy of the Gilded Age.
Ours will be remembered as the Enron era. Enron itself is a distant memory — much like all that circa 2000 talk of a smoothly efficient C.E.O. presidency led by a Harvard M.B.A. and a former chief executive of Halliburton. But even as American business has since been purged by prosecutions and reforms, the mutant Enron version of the C.E.O. culture still rules in Washington: uninhibited cronyism, cooked books, special-favors networks, the banishment of whistle-blowers and accountability. More than ideology, this ethos has sabotaged even the best of American intentions, whether in Iraq or New Orleans. Unchecked, it promises greater disasters to come.
As recently as 10 days ago, when he resigned before his arrest, Mr. Safavian was the man who set purchasing policy for the entire federal government, including that related to Hurricane Katrina relief. The White House might as well have appointed a contestant from ”The Apprentice.” Before entering public service, Mr. Safavian’s main claim to fame was as a lobbyist whose clients included Indian gaming interests and thuggish African regimes. Mr. Safavian now faces charges of lying and obstructing the investigation of Mr. Abramoff, the Tom DeLay-Ralph Reed-Grover Norquist pal who is being investigated by more agencies than looked into 9/11. Mr. Abramoff’s greasy K Street influence-peddling network makes the Warren Harding gang, which operated out of its own infamous ”little green house on K Street,” look like selfless stewards of the public good.
You know that the arrest of Mr. Safavian, one of three known Abramoff alumni to migrate into the administration, is the start of something big. Alberto Gonzales’s Justice Department announced it only after Mr. Safavian had appeared in court and had been released without bail. The gambit was clearly intended to keep the story off television, and it worked.
It won’t for long. The Enron odor emanating from Mr. Safavian is of a piece with the rest of the cronyism in the Katrina preparedness package. The handing off of FEMA from President Bush’s 2000 campaign manager, Joe Allbaugh, to Mr. Allbaugh’s even less qualified buddy, Michael Brown, in 2003 is now notorious. (The two men have been friends for 25 years but were not college roommates, as I wrote here last week.) But that’s only the beginning: the placement of hacks like ”Brownie” and Mr. Safavian in crucial jobs hasn’t been slowed one whit by what went down on their watch in New Orleans.
Witness the nomination of Julie Myers as the new head of immigration and customs enforcement at the Homeland Security Department. Though the White House attacked the diplomat Joseph Wilson for nepotism because he undertook a single pro bono intelligence mission while his wife was at the C.I.A., it thought nothing of handing this huge job to a nepotistic twofer: Ms. Myers is the niece of Gen. Richard Myers and has just married the chief of staff for the homeland security secretary, Michael Chertoff. Her qualifications for running an agency with more than 20,000 employees and a $4 billion budget include serving as an associate counsel under Kenneth Starr; in that job, she helped mastermind the costly and doomed prosecution of Susan McDougal, and was outwitted at every turn by the defense lawyer Mark Geragos.
Ms. Myers is only the latest example of Mr. Chertoff’s rolling the dice with Americans’ safety during his brief tenure in Homeland Security. After the bombings in London in July, he vowed to maximize his department’s ”finite human and financial capital to attain the optimal state of preparedness.” Yet the very same day, the president nominated Tracy Henke as Homeland Security’s new executive director of the Office of State and Local Government Coordination and Preparedness. Ms. Henke, a John Ashcroft political appointee at the Justice Department, has since been unmasked as an Enron-style spinner of numbers. As Eric Lichtblau of The Times reported in August, it was she who ordered the highly regarded nonpartisan head of the Bureau of Justice Statistics, Lawrence Greenfeld, to delete a reference to politically embarrassing data in a government press release for a report on racial profiling. When Mr. Greenfeld complained, he was demoted.
Imagine Ms. Henke, in her Homeland Security job, having sway over press releases about our disaster readiness. There is likely to be nothing but good news until it’s too late. But if the hiring of the likes of Ms. Henke, Ms. Myers and Mr. Safavian is half of the equation in Enron governance, the other half is the punishing of veteran civil servants like Mr. Greenfeld for doing their jobs honestly. Even as it fills its ranks with Abramoff golf-junket partners, political flunkies and underemployed relatives, the administration silences those who, like Sherron Watkins at Enron, might blow the whistle on any Kozlowski or Ebbers or Rigas fleecing or betraying the taxpayers. Three weeks before Mr. Safavian’s arrest, the Army Corps of Engineers demoted another procurement official, Bunnatine Greenhouse, who was a 20-year veteran in her field. Her crime was not obstructing justice but pursuing it by vehemently questioning irregularities in the awarding of some $7 billion worth of no-bid contracts in Iraq to the Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root.
Ms. Greenhouse and Mr. Greenfeld are only two of the many whistle-blowers done in by this administration so far. (Congressman Rahm Emanuel, Democrat of Illinois, lists nine on his Web site.) Even top government officials who are not whistle-blowers, merely truth-tellers, are axed. Lawrence Lindsey, the president’s chief economic adviser, was pushed out after he accurately projected the cost of the Iraq war at$100 billion to $200 billion. Gen. Eric Shinseki, the Army chief of staff, was shunted aside after he accurately estimated the number of required troops (’’several hundred thousand”) for securing Iraq. Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld, who presented rosy scenarios of getting the job done with Iraqi oil income and low troop deployments, stayed on to bungle the war.
Their errors were compounded when the administration staffed the post-Saddam American occupation with exactly the same kind of appointees it would later bring to homeland security: the two heads of ”private sector development” in Iraq were a former Bush fund-raiser in Connecticut and a venture capitalist who just happened to be Ari Fleischer’s brother. As The Washington Post reported last year, major roles in the L. Paul Bremer regime were given to 20-somethings with no foreign service experience or knowledge of Arabic simply because they had posted their résumés at the Heritage Foundation, the same conservative think tank where Mr. Bremer had chaired a task force.
The damage done to the mission in Iraq and homeland security alike by Enron governance is immeasurable. Administration apologists who now claim that hurricane relief will bring still more examples of innovative, C.E.O.-style governmental enterprise (Mr. Bush’s ”Gulf Opportunity Zone,” for instance) conveniently sidestep the harsh truth that such schemes are destined to be as empty and corrupt as Andrew Fastow’s Raptor partnerships at Enron once they’re staffed from the apparently infinite crony talent pool.
YET it’s not only the administration that is to blame, any more than it is only the executives who are at fault when a corporation rots. Culpability also belongs to the board that rubber-stamps the shenanigans — to wit, Congress. Republicans in the Senate are led by Bill Frist, who, in the grandest Enron manner, claimed last week that it was to avoid a conflict of interest that his supposed ”blind trust” unloaded all of his holdings in a Frist family-founded company just before its stock tanked. (Federal prosecutors and the S.E.C. are investigating.) As for the Democrats, they are nonpareil at posturing about the unstoppable nomination of John Roberts — a conservative, to be sure, but the rare Bush nominee who seems both qualified for his job and unsullied by ethical blemishes. Yet when David Safavian was up for a job involving hundreds of billions of dollars, and much of his dubious résumé was fully known, he was approved by the ranking Democrat, Joe Lieberman, and all his colleagues of both parties on the Governmental Affairs Committee.
Which is to say that the rest of us, the individual shareholders in government who have voted in our Enron-era politicians, are responsible, too.
| The Prioress You scored 5% Cardinal, 71% Monk, 58% Lady, and 37% Knight! |
| You are a moral person and are also highly intellectual. You like your solitude but are also kind and helpful to those around you. Guided by a belief in the goodness of mankind you will likely be christened a saint after your life is over.
You scored high as both the Lady and the Monk. You can try again to get a more precise description of either the Monk or the lady, or you can be happy that you’re an individual. |
 |
The test tracked 4 variables: How you compared to other people your age and gender:
|
[Hat tip to Heretik]
I have been a regular on the blog since April 15, 2004, but I couldn’t say what the community means to me any better than Greg.
for me this blog has been like a really friendly bar/coffee hang out that opened right on the other side of my little computer cubby wall here in the hills of new york. and i discovered it just as my heart was about to be broken in the last election so it was perfect timing. i have learned alot, gotten to show off my feeble class clown skills, been able to rant, reflect on my life, support others, share in attempts to impact the politics of the country, have real time bull sessions while bush was lying to america and in general enrich my life…it is a treasure and i thank all of you who participate and the folks who make it appear in front of my face anytime of the day or week when i just hit the right keys…peace.Posted by gregg on September 18, 2005 at 10:30 PM
Message: I Care About the Black Folks
By FRANK RICH (NYT) 1565 words
Published: September 18, 2005
CORRECTION APPENDED
ONCE Toto parts the curtain, the Wizard of Oz can never be the wizard again. He is forever Professor Marvel, blowhard and snake-oil salesman. Hurricane Katrina, which is likely to endure in the American psyche as long as L.Frank Baum’s mythic tornado, has similarly unmasked George W. Bush.
The worst storm in our history proved perfect for exposing this president because in one big blast it illuminated all his failings: the rampant cronyism, the empty sloganeering of ”compassionate conservatism,” the lack of concern for the ”underprivileged” his mother condescended to at the Astrodome, the reckless lack of planning for all government operations except tax cuts, the use of spin and photo-ops to camouflage failure and to substitute for action.
In the chaos unleashed by Katrina, these plot strands coalesced into a single tragic epic played out in real time on television. The narrative is just too powerful to be undone now by the administration’s desperate recycling of its greatest hits: a return Sunshine Boys tour by the surrogate empathizers Clinton and Bush I, another round of prayers at the Washington National Cathedral, another ludicrously overhyped prime-time address flecked with speechwriters’ ”poetry” and framed by a picturesque backdrop. Reruns never eclipse a riveting new show.
Nor can the president’s acceptance of ”responsibility” for the disaster dislodge what came before. Mr. Bush didn’t cough up his modified-limited mea culpa until he’d seen his whole administration flash before his eyes. His admission that some of the buck may stop with him (about a dime’s worth, in Truman dollars) came two weeks after the levees burst and five years after he promised to usher in a new post-Clinton ”culture of responsibility.” It came only after the plan to heap all the blame on the indeed blameworthy local Democrats failed to lift Mr. Bush’s own record-low poll numbers. It came only after America’s highest-rated TV news anchor, Brian Williams, started talking about Katrina the way Walter Cronkite once did about Vietnam.
Taking responsibility, as opposed to paying lip service to doing so, is not in this administration’s gene pool. It was particularly shameful that Laura Bush was sent among the storm’s dispossessed to try to scapegoat the news media for her husband’s ineptitude. When she complained of seeing ”a lot of the same footage over and over that isn’t necessarily representative of what really happened,” the first lady sounded just like Donald Rumsfeld shirking responsibility for the looting of Baghdad. The defense secretary, too, griped about seeing the same picture ”over and over” on television (a looter with a vase) to hide the reality that the Pentagon had no plan to secure Iraq, a catastrophic failure being paid for in Iraqi and American blood to this day.
This White House doesn’t hate all pictures, of course. It loves those by Karl Rove’s Imagineers, from the spectacularly lighted Statue of Liberty backdrop of Mr. Bush’s first 9/11 anniversary speech to his ”Top Gun” stunt to Thursday’s laughably stagy stride across the lawn to his lectern in Jackson Square. (Message: I am a leader, not that vacationing slacker who first surveyed the hurricane damage from my presidential jet.)
The most odious image-mongering, however, has been Mr. Bush’s repeated deployment of African-Americans as dress extras to advertise his ”compassion.” In 2000, the Republican convention filled the stage with break dancers and gospel singers, trying to dispel the memory of Mr. Bush’s craven appearance at Bob Jones University when it forbade interracial dating. (The few blacks in the convention hall itself were positioned near celebrities so they’d show up in TV shots.) In 2004, the Bush-Cheney campaign Web site had a page titled ”Compassion” devoted mainly to photos of the president with black people, Colin Powell included.
Some of these poses are re-enacted in the ”Hurricane Relief” photo gallery currently on display on the White House Web site. But this time the old magic isn’t working. The ”compassion” photos are outweighed by the cinéma vérité of poor people screaming for their lives. The government effort to keep body recovery efforts in New Orleans as invisible as the coffins from Iraq was abandoned when challenged in court by CNN.
But even now the administration’s priority of image over substance is embedded like a cancer in the Katrina relief process. Brazenly enough, Mr. Rove has been officially put in charge of the reconstruction effort. The two top deputies at FEMA remaining after Michael Brown’s departure, one of them a former local TV newsman, are not disaster relief specialists but experts in P.R., which they’d practiced as advance men for various Bush campaigns. Thus The Salt Lake Tribune discovered a week after the hurricane that some 1,000 firefighters from Utah and elsewhere were sent not to the Gulf Coast but to Atlanta, to be trained as ”community relations officers for FEMA” rather than used as emergency workers to rescue the dying in New Orleans. When 50 of them were finally dispatched to Louisiana, the paper reported, their first assignment was ”to stand beside President Bush” as he toured devastated areas.
The cashiering of ”Brownie,” whom Mr. Bush now purports to know as little as he did ”Kenny Boy,” changes nothing. The Knight Ridder newspapers found last week that it was the homeland security secretary, Michael Chertoff, not Mr. Brown, who had the greater authority to order federal agencies into service without any request from state or local officials. Mr. Chertoff waited a crucial, unexplained 36 hours before declaring Katrina an ”incident of national significance,” the trigger needed for federal action. Like Mr. Brown, he was oblivious to the humanitarian disaster unfolding in the convention center, confessing his ignorance of conditions there to NPR on the same day that the FEMA chief famously did so to Ted Koppel. Yet Mr. Bush’s ”culture of responsibility” does not hold Mr. Chertoff accountable. Quite the contrary: on Thursday the president charged Homeland Security with reviewing ”emergency plans in every major city in America.” Mr. Chertoff will surely do a heck of a job.
WHEN there’s money on the line, cronies always come first in this White House, no matter how great the human suffering. After Katrina, the FEMA Web site directing charitable contributions prominently listed Operation Blessing, a Pat Robertson kitty that, according to I.R.S. documents obtained by ABC News, has given more than half of its yearly cash donations to Mr. Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network. If FEMA is that cavalier about charitable donations, imagine what it’s doing with the $62 billion (so far) of taxpayers’ money sent its way for Katrina relief. Actually, you don’t have to imagine: we already know some of it was immediately siphoned into no-bid contracts with a major Republican donor, the Fluor Corporation, as well as with a client of the consultant Joe Allbaugh, the Bush 2000 campaign manager who ran FEMA for this White House until Brownie, Mr. Allbaugh’s college roommate, was installed in his place.
It was back in 2000 that Mr. Bush, in a debate with Al Gore, bragged about his gubernatorial prowess ”on the front line of catastrophic situations,” specifically citing a Texas flood, and paid the Clinton administration a rare compliment for putting a professional as effective as James Lee Witt in charge of FEMA. Exactly why Mr. Bush would staff that same agency months later with political hacks is one of many questions that must be answered by the independent investigation he and the Congressional majority are trying every which way to avoid. With or without a 9/11-style commission, the answers will come out. There are too many Americans who are angry and too many reporters who are on the case. (NBC and CNN are both opening full-time bureaus in New Orleans.) You know the world has changed when the widely despised news media have a far higher approval rating (77 percent) than the president (46 percent), as measured last week in a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll.
Like his father before him, Mr. Bush has squandered the huge store of political capital he won in a war. His Thursday-night invocation of ”armies of compassion” will prove as worthless as the ”thousand points of light” that the first President Bush bestowed upon the poor from on high in New Orleans (at the Superdome, during the 1988 G.O.P. convention). It will be up to other Republicans in Washington to cut through the empty words and image-mongering to demand effective action from Mr. Bush on the Gulf Coast and in Iraq, if only because their own political lives are at stake. It’s up to Democrats, though they show scant signs of realizing it, to step into the vacuum and propose an alternative to a fiscally disastrous conservatism that prizes pork over compassion. If the era of Great Society big government is over, the era of big government for special interests is proving a fiasco. Especially when it’s presided over by a self-styled C.E.O. with a consistent three-decade record of running private and public enterprises alike into a ditch.
What comes next? Having turned the page on Mr. Bush, the country hungers for a vision that is something other than either liberal boilerplate or Rovian stagecraft. At this point, merely plain old competence, integrity and heart might do.
Correction: October 2, 2005, Sunday Op-Ed columns by Paul Krugman (Sept. 5 and 9), Maureen Dowd (Sept. 10) and Frank Rich (Sept. 18) said Michael Brown, the former FEMA director, was a college friend or college roommate of Joe Allbaugh, his predecessor. They went to different colleges and later became friends.
If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be. ~Thomas Jefferson
One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors. ~Plato
People often say, with pride, “I’m not interested in politics.” They might as well say, “I’m not interested in my standard of living, my health, my job, my rights, my
freedoms, my future or any future.” ~Martha Gellhorn
Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives. ~John Stuart Mill
As mankind becomes more liberal, they will be more apt to allow that all those who conduct themselves as worthy members of the community are equally entitled to the protections of civil government. I hope ever to see America among the foremost nations of justice and liberality. ~George Washington
Of all the varieties of virtues, liberalism is the most beloved. ~Aristotle
Somebody came along and said ‘liberal’ means ’soft on crime, soft on drugs, soft on defense and we’re gonna tax you back to the Stone Age because people shouldn’t have to go to work if they don’t want to. And instead of saying, ‘Well, excuse me, you right-wing, reactionary, xenophobic, homophobic, anti-education, anti-choice, pro-gun, Leave it to Beaver trip back to the ’50s, we cowered in the corner and said, ‘Please don’t hurt me.’ ~The West Wing
Liberalism is, I think, resurgent. One reason is that more and more people are so painfully aware of the alternative. The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness. ~John Kenneth Galbraith
Liberalism is trust of the people, tempered by prudence; conservatism, distrust of the people, tempered by fear. ~William Gladstone
Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants. People have the right to expect that these wants will be provided for by this wisdom. ~Jimmy Carter
Liberalism is the supreme form of generosity; it is the right by which the majority concedes to minorities and hence it is the noblest cry that has ever resounded on this planet. ~Jose Ortega y Gasset
A liberal is a man or a woman or a child who looks forward to a better day, a more tranquil night, and a bright, infinite future. ~Leonard Bernstein
If I did not believe, if I did not make what is called an act of faith (and each act of faith increases our capacity for faith), if I did not have faith that the works of mercy do lighten the sum total of suffering in the world, so that those who are suffering in this ghastly struggle somehow mysteriously find their pain lifted and some balm of consolation poured on their wounds — if I did not believe these things, the problem of evil would indeed be overwhelming.
~Dorothy Day
“If those in charge of our society - politicians, corporate executives, and owners of press and television - can dominate our ideas, they will be secure in their power. They will not need soldiers patrolling the streets. We will control ourselves.” ~Howard Zinn, historian and author
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“The point of public relations slogans like “Support our troops” is that they don’t mean anything… That’s the whole point of good propaganda. You want to create a slogan that nobody’s going to be against, and everybody’s going to be for. Nobody knows what it means, because it doesn’t mean anything. Its crucial value is that it diverts your attention from a question that does mean something: Do you support our policy? That’s the one you’re not allowed to talk about.” ~Noam Chomsky
The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts. ~Bertrand Russell, philosopher, mathematician, author, Nobel laureate (1872-1970)
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Our country is not the only thing to which we owe our allegiance. It is also owed to justice and to humanity. Patriotism consists not in waving the flag, but in striving that our country shall be righteous as well as strong. ~James Bryce
The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either, but right through every human heart, and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. Even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained; and even in the best of all hearts, there remains a small corner of evil. It is impossible to expel evil from the world in its entirety, but it is possible to constrict it within each person. ~Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
The Time is Now
Three Major Initiatives for the Impeachment Movement
Dear Jennifer,
The overwhelming response to the latest call for impeachment from Ramsey Clark has given the impeachment movement the ability to intensify the nationwide effort and to launch new initiatives.
There are three specific pillars to this campaign and it is urgent that all members and supporters of the ImpeachBush/VoteToImpeach.org participate and spread the word to family members, friends, neighbors, and co-workers. Everyone can participate either directly as a volunteer and/or by making a financial contribution.
The three upcoming Impeach Bush initiatives are critical because the possibility of impeachment has never been greater than right now.
On September 10, 2005 the AP-Ipsos poll reported that President Bush’s job approval has dropped below 40 percent for the first time, reflecting widespread disgust with the ongoing Iraq war, his response to the human catastrophe to Hurricane Katrina, and his “friends” in the oil and energy corporations, who have taken advantage of both the war and the hurricane to engage in price gouging and raise gas prices dramatically. Bush’s systematic shredding of the Bill of Rights and the Constitution is another principal factor that accounts for the rising tide of disgust and outrage.
The impeachment agenda:
September 24: Mobilize a massive contingent for the National March on Washington DC. This is a demonstration initiated by the peace movement and it is shaping up to be the largest demonstration since the beginning of the Iraq war. We will make the demand “Impeach Bush” highly visible throughout the day. The ImpeachBush movement will be assembling at the south side of the White House (an area called the Ellipse at 11:00 am). You can pick up ImpeachBush banners, placards, signs, literature, hats, and petitions. We need volunteers to help us dispatch people and materials starting in the early morning of September 24. If you can help out please send an email letting us know your availability to be an ImpeachBush.org volunteer.
September 26: Flood Congress with emails calling for Impeachment. ImpeachBush/VoteToImpeach.org is setting up an easy to use mechanism so that hundreds of thousands of emails can be sent by people all over the country on Monday September 26 demanding that their elected official introduce Articles of Impeachment for George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and other high officials.
Take out full page newspaper ads. We have placed full page newspaper ads in the New York Times, Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle and in newspapers in other parts of the country. We are soliciting funds now so that the next round of newspaper ads can follow directly after the September 24 mass demonstrations and the September 26 National Lobbying Day.
The number of new people joining the impeachment movement is increasing each day. But this a huge effort that requires significant funding. Many people have contributed but we must do more.
We need funds now to help promote and transport people who want peace to Washington on September 24, for the next round of newspaper ads, and for the acceleration and continuation of the impeachment drive into the Congressional elections next year. Please take a moment to make a much needed donation, by clicking here.
Sincerely,
All of us at ImpeachBush.org
Over the past two weeks President Bush has failed in his response to Hurricane Katrina, and as a result thousands of Gulf Coast residents - most of them poor - have been tragically neglected, leading to preventable suffering and death. Our government let them down. Many of them lacked the means to leave their cities; our government failed to help them evacuate. In the wake of the storm many of these poor residents lacked food, water, and medicine. Several days after the storm had passed, many of them still did not have these supplies. A good friend of mine put it well: The often unseen poor, well, they are among us. We see them now. And it’s not just bad schools and an unlivable minimum wage and no healthcare. They don’t even have enough money to get out of the way of a hurricane. They had nowhere to go and no car to get them there. It’s a new attribute of poverty. Not enough money to get out of the way of a killing wind.
But government failure is nothing new for too many of these victims. Before Hurricane Katrina struck, twenty-three percent of New Orleans residents were living in poverty. The Americans who suffered the worst in this disaster are the Americans who always suffer the worst, because for too long our government has turned a blind eye to their plight. Unfortunately, it takes a disaster like this one for the government to see the reality that too many Americans are facing.
Today, the relief effort is focused on providing, food, shelter, and clothing to thousands of men and women. That’s the right thing to do.
But the victims of Katrina want more than life’s necessities. They want a chance to rebuild their lives. Many of them also want to help rebuild a city and a coastline that mean so much to them, and so much to all Americans.
We ought to give them the chance to help through a New America Initiative. This initiative, which is modeled after the Works Progress administration, would help them rebuild a devastated region and offer good-paying jobs and hope to the displaced. Join me and say no to President Bush’s failed leadership in a growing call to take this tragedy and turn it into an opportunity. It is not enough to talk about it; we will have to show this Administration that the real leadership means visionary action. You, one by one, can increase the power of the call to action by signing my New America petition here:
Join me as I call for President Bush to create this initiative.
Every single signature increases the power of the call and the chance for real hope for our brothers and sisters. If anything good can come from this terrible tragedy, it can be a New Orleans and a Gulf Coast that represent the one America we all believe in, not the two Americas we’ve seen on television for the last ten days. And the way to build that one America is to help the victims of Katrina take control of their own destiny, with good jobs that contribute to the cause.
A little over 75 years ago, America was struck by a different kind of hurricane, the Great Depression. Like Katrina, the Depression left responsible and hard-working Americans without work and, often, without hope. After years when America did nothing, Franklin Roosevelt called Americans to action. He said something then that is still true today:
These dark days will be worth all they cost us if they teach us that our true destiny is not to be ministered unto but to minister to ourselves and to our fellow men.
Today, hundreds of thousands of Katrina’s victims have no money, no jobs, no hope. The Labor Department says it will create some new temporary jobs, but it’s not nearly enough for all these men and women. Work is what they want, and work is what they need.
We have done it before; we can do it again. But this time the vision is not coming from the White House, so it has to come from the people. It has to come from you. In response to the Great Depression, FDR created new opportunities for men and women to work through his alphabet soup of new agencies like the Works Progress Administration and the Civilian Conservation Corps. Today, we’ve got plenty of government agencies, but we need to adopt the same simple idea as FDR.
That’s why I want to reject the Republicans’ failed philosophy of taking care of wealthy insiders at the expense of everyone else. I propose this New America initiative dedicated to creating good-paying jobs for Katrina’s victims so they can get back on their feet, get the skills they need, and rebuild New Orleans.
Join me as I call for President Bush to create this initiative.
In the meantime, it’s crucial that we continue to support relief organizations that are working with the victims of Hurricane Katrina. Here’s a short list of such organizations. Please give what you can.
Red Cross
Hurricane Housing
NAACP
In this crisis we’ve seen how detrimental the failure of Presidential leadership can be. But even in this horrible tragedy we have an opportunity to make life better than it was for thousands of impoverished Americans along the Gulf Coast. You and I see these opportunities because we’ve always been looking for them. It’s time that the President sees them too.
- John
JOY GORDON has written extensively on the Oil-for-Food program,
including articles in Harper’s Magazine and Le Monde Diplomatique. She
said today: “The Volcker Committee’s final report focuses a great deal
on improprieties that had little impact on the Oil-for-Food program.
Where it adds up the actual money involved, it finds that the amount of
money that went into Iraq illicitly through the program totaled $1.8
billion over the seven-year history of the program. This is far less
than had been claimed in earlier CIA and GAO reports, and by contrast it
is much much less than the amount of Iraqi funds that were mismanaged by
the U.S. or disappeared altogether during its occupation of Iraq — in
just a 14-month period. Just one example, according to the audit reports
that have been released, was that no information could be provided about
what happened to $8.8 billion of Iraqi funds sent to ministries under
U.S. control. The Volcker reports’ claims of financial improprieties are
minor compared to the magnitude and the speed with which Iraq’s funds
disappeared once they were in the hands of the U.S. occupation.”
IAN WILLIAMS said today,
“The Volcker Report lacks a sense of proportion, although it grudgingly
admitted that the U.N. Oil-For-Food program was a success and saved
untold Iraqi lives from the ravages of sanctions. … It is time for
other U.N. members to realize that when the Bush administration talks
about ‘reform,’ it means beating the U.N. into subservience. Other
members should stop worrying about consensus on the Sixtieth Anniversary
Statement, vote for its contents in the General Assembly and work to
implement them, with or without Bolton or Bush’s assent.”
BERT SACKS,
Active for years with the humanitarian group Voices in the
Wilderness, Sacks was fined by the U.S. government after going to Iraq
and distributing medicine. He said today: “The real scandal with
Oil-for-Food is that $64 billion of Iraq’s own wealth was all that was
permitted by the U.S. through the U.N. Security Council. After war
reparations and other deductions were made, this came to less than a
dollar a day for each of 20 million Iraqis in the South-Central regions
for all their needs — food, water, electricity, medicine, everything.
Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children died because the limit of a
dollar a day was ‘woefully inadequate’ to meet their needs — and the
U.S. and the U.N. Security Council knew that. That’s the real scandal.”
KATHY KELLY, co-founder of Voices in the Wilderness. This August, U.S.
Federal District Judge John Bates ordered payment of a $20,000 fine
against the group for violating the sanctions on Iraq. She said today:
“The Oil-for-Food program was intended to ease the crippling effects of
economic sanctions which primarily punished Iraqi civilians. By
supplying 27 million Iraqis with food and medicine in exchange for
letting Saddam Hussein export oil, the program saved many lives, but it
was always too little and too late. … Voices in the Wilderness broke
the sanctions at least 70 times. We brought donated medicines to
children and families in Iraq, from 1996-2002. … Our group was fined
$20,000 for bringing this medicine. The judge agreed that it was lawful
and proper for the U.S. government to deny needed drugs and medical
supplies to Iraq’s most vulnerable citizens, despite the evidence that
several hundred thousand innocent children were dying because of brutal
economic sanctions. … Voices will not pay a penny of this fine.”
from the Institute for Public Accuracy
Dear friends,
I wish I was making this up, but I’m not.
Last night I made a purchase at my favorite
Catherine’s (a plus-size women’s store with locations
all over greater Austin) and the women who worked
there were happily boxing up bras for women who had
fled Katrina. As you may have heard, plus size
clothing– especially bras– has been hard to come by.
The Red Cross was willing to pay full price, they had
supplied the needed sizes, and the shipment was to go
to the Austin shelter today.
WELL! This morning I had to exchange one item, so
found myself at Catherine’s once again. While I was
standing there a call came in from “upper management”
(undoubtedly a man). It had been decided that
Catherine’s could not afford to deplete their stock so
severely because they want to have plenty on hand for
“their customers” for this week’s sale (buy 1, get one
half off) and therefore the stores were being ordered
to deliver only half of the Red Cross order. Mind
you, the Red Cross was offering to pay FULL PRICE!
The woman who was assisting me with my purchase broke
down and cried. So did I.
After the cursing and crying was done, I told the
saleswoman to haul two bras, any two, out of the boxes
she had ready to go to the shelter (half of which she
was going to have to put back in stock). Because
there’s a sale going on, I paid full price for one and
half price for the other– so Catherine’s got 25% less
out of me than the Red Cross would have paid. So, the
two I bought will go to the shelter in addition to the
half-order paid for by Red Cross.
People, I’m going to spare you the lecture on the
inherent misogyny and racism in corporate America,
particularly in corporations catering to women– at
least for today.
THIS IS WHAT I’M ASKING YOU TO DO: if you’re near a
Catherine’s and if you can afford it, please go buy
two bras– they’ll probably still be there boxed up
for the Red Cross– and have the store include your
purchase with whatever shipment they have still left
to go to the shelter. If you can’t buy two, buy one.
Whatever you are able to do, please take a Comment
Card from the counter, fill it out, and tell
Catherine’s what you think of their decision to deny
these women the simple decency of a bra that fits.
Remind them that many of these women will end up
resettling in communities where Catherine’s does
business and will end up being “real” customers.
Remind them, too, that a sale is a sale and profit is
profit no matter who writes the check– seems to me
that they could have made more money selling to the
Red Cross at full price than letting individual
purchasers buy at a discount– what kind of business
sense does that make?
Finally, remind them that they are a wealthy
corporation– made wealthy by women like many of us
who enjoy and are able to afford their
middle-to-upscale merchandise. The very idea that
we, their customers, are so spoiled and selfish that
we would be unwilling to postpone a purchase for a
week or two so that women in desperate need could be
supplied is insulting– and it’s WRONG! Moreover,
Catherine’s could WELL AFFORD to DONATE every last bra
that the shelter needed and they damn well ought to do
it. Please, tell them. Even if you can’t go to a
store, here’s a link to their website:
Note that they are VERY proud of their “community
relations.” Well, they need to get busy and do some
“community relating” in Austin and help these women
RIGHT NOW!
Thank you for listening to this rant. Please pass
this email on to everyone you know who is a woman or
who has ever loved a woman– plus size or not. If you
have a blog or post to a blog, please post it.
MommaG
A Message from Ramsey Clark:
Dear Supporter,
The stunning human tragedy of Katrina makes the impeachment of President Bush more urgent. His priority is not poor people, but militarism to exploit the poor at home and abroad.
President Bush sent National Guard units to Iraq from Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi in a criminal war of aggression and military occupation. They were thus unavailable to provide emergency services in their own states, or protect their own families. He refused to return them from Iraq to save and serve their own people, instead only authorizing the return of some Air National Guard personnel to protect and repair equipment at an Air Force Base. These forces and the resources that they command should be used to meet people’s needs, not for violence.
His tax cuts for the rich, huge increases in military spending and deliberate slashes in social programs, including those funds specifically requested for flood control and to strengthen dikes in New Orleans and the surrounding areas, and his complete failure to even consider emergency transportation for the known poor in the path of a level-5 hurricane, followed by days of failure to send federal emergency relief personnel to seek and save the many thousands whose lives were known to be threatened, who were pleading for help on television and who faced death, was criminal negligence at best, and a failure to faithfully perform his duties as President.
George W. Bush will never recognize the rights or human dignity of the immense and growing population of Americans - overwhelmingly African American and other minorities and elderly - living in Third World conditions here at home. They were the principal victims of Katrina, as they are of his failure to assure equal protection of the laws to all. Their plight and peril will worsen while President Bush remains President.
The only act that can stop President Bush from continuing his criminal war of aggression against Iraq and his arrogant criminal acts and threats against Cuba, Haiti, Iran, Korea, Syria, Venezuela and any country in his path is impeachment. Impeachment is an act already two years past due. The cost of delay is staggering: two thousand U.S. military deaths, ten thousand and more wounded, many thousands more disabled, more than 100,000 Iraqi deaths, several hundred thousand injured, nearly $200,000,000 in federal funds, and even greater damage to Iraq in shattered lives and smashed cities and infrastructure. The cost of delay, already staggering, is greater every day.
While proclaiming freedom his credo, George W. Bush has done more to destroy freedom and the human dignity which it nourishes than all other Presidents in our history. Who would have dreamed of Abu Ghraib, scores of prisoners murdered, assassinations and summary executions, Guantanamo, thousands imprisoned in the U.S. without Constitutional protections, or sent to be tortured in client states with impunity, all for a President and those acting for him? What prior President has proclaimed himself above the law, coerced more than 100 countries into bilateral treaties promising never to surrender a U.S. citizen to the International Criminal Court?
The world watches and wonders why, if the American people are free, they fail to resist the criminal violence of their President.
The only act that can redeem the United States in the hearts and minds of those still capable of forgiving and believing our government can change its violent ways is the impeachment of George W. Bush and the responsible officials of his administration before it is too late.
The time to begin a final drive for impeachment is now. Together, we are not helpless. Power is in the people united for peace. Perseverance through the midterm Congressional elections in November 2006 can force incumbent members of the House of Representatives to impeach President Bush or face defeat. Failing that, it can restore integrity and honor to the President’s oath to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”
The Constitution, written with the abuses of King George III painfully in mind, is unequivocal in the action required for criminal conduct of civil officers of the United States:
“The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” Article II, Section 4.
The Nuremberg Judgment proclaimed war of aggression “the Supreme international crime.” World War II was comprised of wars of aggression. President Bush boasted assassination and summary executions in his 2003 State of the Union message.
We need your help. Vote to Impeach. Persuade others to vote to impeach now.
The impeachment campaign will be achieving its largest ever street visibility by organizing a huge contingent on September 24th, at what will be the largest peace demonstration in Washington D.C. since the war of aggression against Iraq began in March 2003. The demonstration will call loud and clear for impeachment, withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq and Afghanistan, and full reparations to the victims of U.S. violence.
We are organizing buses from many cities on September 24th. Ticket prices are being kept low so that everyone who wants to come can attend. Printing banners, signs, posters add to the expenses. We are also preparing to publish another round of full page ads in the New York Times and other newspapers so that the message of impeachment resonates not only on September 24, but in the critical weeks and months ahead.
We need money now to help promote and transport people who want peace to Washington on September 24, for the next round of newspaper ads, and for the acceleration and continuation of the impeachment drive into the Congressional elections next year. Please take a moment to make a much needed donation, by clicking here.
Sincerely,
Ramsey Clark
“We need food and water and they sent us men with guns.” ~Katrina survivor
How far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving and tolerant of the weak and strong. Because someday in life you will have been all of these. ~George Washington Carver
To care for anyone else enough to make their problems one’s own, is ever the beginning of one’s real ethical development. ~Felix Adler
…when we finally know we are dying, and all other sentient beings are dying with us, we start to have a burning, almost heartbreaking sense of the fragility and preciousness of each moment and each being, and from this can grow a deep, clear, limitless compassion for all beings. ~Sogyal Rinpoche
The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only object of good government. ~Thomas Jefferson
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