Tea Bagging

The tea-bag revolt of a few weeks ago had me thinking of Chester A. Riley [look him up if you are too young].  “What a revoltin’ development this is,” Riley used to say in one of the most iconic phrases created on radio and the early years of television.  I wish I knew what it was that the tea-bag movement was a protest against.  Revolutionaries carried out the original Boston Tea Party to protest a tax on tea but how that event related to this one I have no idea.  

For the last eight years I’ve waited for angry citizens to take to the streets to protest the proto-fascist Bush government which, with the connivance first of a Republican and then a Democratic Congress, gutted the Constitution by removing the right of Habeas Corpus; made a mockery of the First, Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Amendments; rolled over the concepts of the right to privacy; violated the rights of due process; appropriated more than $1 trillion to fight an immoral and illegal preemptive war; allowed unregulated banks and Wall Street oligarchs to bring the country to its knees; put millions of people around the world out of work; caused millions to lose their homes to foreclosure.  But masses of people certainly did not do that then nor did the tea-bag protesters do that now.  

What a revoltin’ development this is. 

No, what they protested, I guess, was taxes.  The protestors carried signs that said,  “Give me liberty, not debt,” “No more spending,” and “Taxation is Piracy.”  The “official” website for the movement “attacked the government for ‘spending trillions of borrowed dollars, leaving a debt our great-grandchildren will be paying.’”  

Excuse me?  While I have been a critic of President Obama’s financial stimulus plan because, as Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman has pointed out, the plan does not spend enough nor on the right things, I’m astonished that the tea-baggers could possibly be protesting their own rescue.  Where do they think the current tax cut for 95 percent of people came from?  Bush? Do these people think the ruling oligarchy is going to end the new depression?  They can’t.  Wall Street and the major banks are broke, busted, kaput.  Where were these people for the last eight years when the Bush administration ran up the nation’s largest deficit in history in pursuit of empire?  

I know where they were: I can answer my own question.  They fell in line with Bush.  They supported his policies.  Remember when the Iraq war had 85 percent approval ratings?  I do; many of us were in that 15 percent minority.  We were out on the streets.  It was us at whom those middle fingers were raised.  Now those middle-finger waving war supporters are loosely throwing around concepts - - fascist, socialist, Communist that they are unable to define, understand or differentiate among - - hoping that some name, any name, will stick to Obama.  Unbelievably, some of these people are also calling for Obama’s impeachment something they never called for in the previous eight years, as commentator Walter Brasch recently pointed out. 

Ironically, the idea for the Tea Party originated with CNBC commentator Rick Santelli and was promoted by the likes of Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly Glenn Beck and “dozens of other conservative talking mouths who are among the” richest   1 percent in the country.  It is that ruling class who are the real target of tax increases that Obama may institute next year.  “May” being the operative word.  I wouldn’t hold my breath.

Nice.  The richest 1 percent stir up the pitchfork crowd to save their own bank accounts.  As Chester A. Riley said, “What a revoltin’ development this is.”

Meaning In Life

After a cheap shot claiming I want to abridge the right of a free press to print what it deems news, and a false claim that I said “the Easter celebration of the resurrection of Jesus Christ is a concoction of the Bronze Age mentality that arose out of ignorance and superstition,” [which of course it is], George Vavrek in a recent “My Turn” op-ed in The Daily World got down to his point: in essence the writer claimed that I and other atheists believe there is no meaning or purpose to our existence.  He made this claim so that he could put in a plug for the wonders of Easter and his belief that “the resurrection of Jesus Christ . . . is the key to knowing the answers to life’s most important questions. . . .”  In other words, the writer is yet another delusional, sky-god, true-believer.  Certainly he is entitled to his delusions but I wish the sky-goders would stop telling those of us who do not adhere to their theistic delusions what we believe.  In fact, contrary to what Vavrek claims for me, I know that there is meaning and purpose to our existence - - not in the sense that Vavrek means when he uses those terms, that some sky-god will provide answers in an afterlife and for Vavrek and other sky-goders the meaning and purpose in life is to serve their god, obey authority and await His revelations after death.

No, the meaning and purpose to our existence comes from life itself.  The universe, life on this planet is wondrous, lush, mystifying and amazing, full of aesthetic inspiration and existential feeling.

One need not have Jesus to experience the joy of living.  There is a “sense of amazement, and [a] deep, almost mystical appreciation,” says atheist Phil Zuckerman, a “sweetly, wistfully, mournfully churning” when one sees crocus pushing their leaves out of the ground after a hard winter, the buds on the fruit trees swelling as the weather warms, when one hears a Mozart concerto late at night or sees a magnificent Broadway musical, remembering my grandmother, smelling dirt in my hands as I garden, read a good book, watch the waves break over the cliffs during a storm on the Oregon coast, “act altruistically” or attend an anti-war march.  Meaning and purpose for existence come through these sensations “not to mention a deep sense of the profound mystery that is existence, the beauty that is creativity, and the power that is justice.”

Contrary to what sky-goders claim, being an atheist does not mean that a person does not have morals or that one believes in nothing.  I believe in a lot of things:  single-payer health care for all citizens; the prohibitions enumerated in the First, Fourth and Fifth Amendments; the rights of people to live free from fear and free from want; protecting the environment; the right of marriage for gay people; economic justice fighting racism.  Many of the things in which I believe sky-goders have opposed - - women’s rights, gay rights, the rights of Black people to live as equal citizens.  Many things sky-goders believe in I have opposed; the death penalty; torture; preemptive war; McCarthyism.

I believe, as do secular humanists, “in the potential of humans to solve problems and make a world a better, safer, and more just place . . . reason, science, and rational inquiry . . [a commitment to] democracy, tolerance, open debate, human rights.”

Life and living are far from meaningless.  “Existence,” Zuckerman writes, “is ultimately a beautiful mystery: being alive is a wellspring of wonder, and the deepest questions of life, death, time, and space are so powerful as to inspire deep feelings of joy, poignancy, and sublime awe.  Atheists ask those deep questions; examine themselves; seek answers although I suspect that most of us know we will never find the answers.  It’s enough to ask the questions.  I wish the sky-goders would ask more questions rather than proclaim their hubristic knowledge in the answers.

Prosecute War Criminals

I know this is going to piss off some of my friends but here goes anyway.  I wish President Obama would just get on with it.  “Governing,” wrote commentator Mike Whitney recently, “is more than just gliding from one teleprompter to the next pointing at rainbows and promising Utopia.  There has to be action, accountability, and justice.”  

I’m sick to death of Obama protecting W and Cheney and Alberto Gonzalez and John Yoo and Doug Feith.  These guys are war criminals and Obama needs to recognize that fact and get on with the business of living up to his oath to preserve, protect and defend the constitution.  Title 18 of the U.S. Code, our national laws, “our red-white-and blue tough-on-crime book of books has a little section called 2441 that prescribes prison or death to any American who commits or conspires to commit a war crime, including torture or cruel or inhuman treatment.”  Title 18 “also contains section 2340, which - - like 2441 - - defines torture with clarity and sanity, and prescribes prison or death for those who engage in it, and prison for those who conspire to commit it.”  Feith and Cheney have been thumbing their noses at Obama since January 20^th.  Cheney has given several interviews admitting to authorizing and ordering others to commit torture.  Feith, in a Wall Street Journal column earlier this month, argues “that Spain as no right to put Americans on trial for torture, at least not second-tier officials who provided pseudo-legal justifications for torture and advocated its use, actions that Feith believes should be immune from prosecution, unlike ordering torture or engaging in it.”  

Prosecuting these scum-bags is not a choice or an option.  The attorney General and the President are legally required to prosecute anyone who “engaged in, ordered, or otherwise facilitated torture.”  Bush and Cheney and Feith have all admitted to authorizing torture.  Fortunately, Spain may force the hand of our Justice Department.  Officials here are not doing what they are legally required to do, what the law says they must do, but a courageous judge in Spain is now investigating Yoo, Feith, Gonzalez and three other second-tier conspirators.  This is the same judge who put out a warrant for Augusto Pinochet, the Chilean mass-murderer.  

Unfortunately, the Obama administration is engaged in co-mmissions almost worse than their omissions.  Obama is engaged in putting forward extremist Cheney/Addington/Yoo arguments “in order to shield Bush lawbreaking from disclosure and judicial review.”  Candidate Obama “unambiguously vowed to his supporters that he would work to ensure ‘full accountability’ for ‘past offenses’ in surveillance lawbreaking.”  Now that he is president, Obama has another tune to sing.  He has, as Glenn Greenwald wrote at salon.com, “become the prime impediment to precisely that accountability, repeatedly engaging in extraordinary legal maneuvers to ensure that ‘past offenses’ both in the surveillance and torture/rendition realm - - remain secret and forever immunized form judicial review.”  As Greenwald pointed out, “Obama has repeatedly done the exact opposite of what he vowed he would do:  rather than ‘seek full accountability for past offenses,’ he has been working feverishly to block such accountability, by embracing the same radical Bush/Cheney views and rhetoric regarding presidential secrecy power that caused so much controversy and anger for the last several years.”

Like the criminals who looted the economy, the criminals who looted our constitution, shredded the First, Fourth, and Fifth Amendments, and shattered our national consensus against torture, the criminals who fashioned en-ending war are walking around scot-free.  I want to see a cop on every corner of lower Manhattan and across Washington D.C.  I want regulators snooping through emails and “digging through trash cans to uncover any scrap of evidence that will build a case for investor fraud” and violations of our torture treaties and laws.  I want to see “the Pinkertons . . . swarming the investment houses right now,” swarming over the Bush and Cheney compounds “thumbing through . . . paperwork, overturning filing cabinets and tasering bloated banksters” and smarmy Bush administration slimebags.”

Just How Stupid Are We?

In an email exchange with Rick Shenkman, historian, New York Times best selling author, founder of History News Network (www.HNN.com), who will make a public presentation in Grays Harbor on May Day, Rick told me that we could get copies of his book, Just How Stupid Are We, at our local bookstore to sell at the event.  “Local bookstore?,” I responded.  “This is Grays Harbor, we don’t have a local bookstore.”

As our economy has fallen through the toilet and the state senate produced a budget slashing services for the most needy, I got to thinking about that email exchange and the ramifications for democracy of not having a bookstore in our area - - especially so after reading Shenkman’s book, the subtitle of which is:  “Facing the truth about the American voter.”  Granted “politics in the U.S. [has] come to be dominated by people who make a virtue out of ignorance,” as George Monbiot commented in an essay last November in The Guardian, but as Shenkman points out in his book, a great share of the responsibility for the sorry state of our politics rests with us.  “We have allowed the myth of The People to warp our politics,” Shenkman writes, “limit the choices of our leaders, . . . putting our democracy, and possibly even our lives, in danger.”

Hw did this happen?  “Was it charity that has permitted mankind’s closes living relative to spend two terms as president?, Monbiot asks.  “How did the project” launched by Franklin, Jefferson, Madison, Adams, Hamilton - - “among the greatest thinkers of their age . . . degenerate into George W. Bush and Sarah Palin?”

The situation could not be more dire.  Only “1 in 4 Americans can name more than one of the five freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment (freedom of speech, religion, press, assembly, and petition for redress of grievances.  But more than half of Americans can name at east two members of the fictional cartoon family” the Simpsons and 22 percent can name all five.  Just for the record, I’m a dud because I do not know the names of any Simpsons. 

It gets worse.  “In the most powerful nation on earth, one adult in five believes the sun revolves around the earth; only 26% accept that evolution takes place by means of natural selection; two-thirds of young adults are unable to find Iraq on a map; two-thirds of US voters cannot name the three branches of government . . . .”  “How did so many US citizens become so stupid,” Monbiot asks, “and so suspicious of intelligence?”  How is it possible that people in the state of Washington do not know that a progressive income tax is a fairer system of taxation that provides a more steady stream of income for the operations of government than a regressive sales tax that hits working people and the poor much harder than the rich?  Our legislators know it.  Why do they refuse to act, to put the finances of the state on a more reasonable basis? 

“There are over 42  million American adults, 20 percent of whom hold high school diplomas, who cannot read, as well as the 50 million who read at a fourth – or fifth-grade level.  Nearly a third of the nation’s population is illiterate or barely literate.  And their numbers are growing by an estimated 2 million a year.  A third of high school graduates, along with 42 percent of college graduates, never read a book after they finish school.  Eighty percent of the families in the United States last year did not buy a book,” Chris Hedges wrote recently at commondreams.org. 

Why does it matter that we are so stupid?  “The core values of our open society are disappearing,” Hedges writes, “the ability to think for oneself, to draw independent conclusions, to express dissent when judgment and common sense indicate something is wrong, to be self critical, to challenge authority, to understand historical facts, to separate truth from lies, to advocate for change and to acknowledge that there are other views, different ways of being, that are morally and socially acceptable, are dying.”

No bookstore?  An awful reality awaits us. 

No More Dicks in Congress

I gotta tell ya, when I decided to run for Congress last year I had no idea how our sainted Congressman, Norm Dicks, is beloved around the country - - from our little corner of the Pacific Northwest all the way to, well, take Florida, for instance.  Who could have guessed that our humble, folksy, member of Congress has worked his way into the hearts of common, work-a-day guys in Florida - - working people like Amelia Island, Ritz-Carlton sommelier, John Pugliese.  Amelia Island is in the Atlantic off the coast of Florida near Jacksonville.  For those of us who don’t dine regularly at the Ritz-Carlton, a sommelier is a French term for a waiter who is in charge of wines.  Now waiters in Florida, waiters at the Ritz-Carlton must make a lot of money - - further proof that I may have chosen the wrong profession - - because since the summer of 2005, John Pugliese has given $77,000 to members of the Senate and the House.  Or how about Jon C. Walker, another Floridian, who works at both the Ritz-Carlton and the Amelia Island Golf Club.  He must put in a lot of overtime at both jobs.  At any rate, he still had time to read up on, and, like Pugliese, evidently really come to appreciate the hard work of our Norm.  On 25 May 2006, Pugliese and Walker donated $4,000 to Dicks campaign.  Not long after those donations our Norm told the Seattle Times, “People, if they want to support me, they support me,” while a spokesman for Dicks, George Behan, said he found nothing suspicious about the donation. 

Suspicious?  Why would anyone find $77,000 in donations from a Ritz-Carlton sommelier suspicious?  All in a day’s donations for our Norm.  As it turns out, the FBI and Justice Department prosecutors actually finds those donations suspicious.  It seems that the powerhouse lobbying firm PMA Group, which is closing its doors next week,  is under suspicion for having used “straw campaign contributors” - - sirs Walker and Pugliese for instance, to funnel large sums of illegal cash to members of Congress - - a felony that could carry a minimum sentence of five years.  Senator Patty Murray, who also accepted cash from the Florida Two and Dicks will probably walk away unscathed but their involvement in this shady business is a timely reminder about the corrupt nature of the whole campaign finance system. 

As I mentioned repeatedly during the campaign and as the Seattle Times David Heath wrote recently, “Congressman Norm Dicks has never been shy about accepting campaign donations from favor seekers.”  Between 2001 and 2007 Norm Dicks landed $434,800 in campaign contributions just from military-related contractors and many PMA clients -- businesses for which he then put earmarks in the federal budget.  The list of companies involved in this disgusting legalized bribery reads like a who’s who of the military-industrial-congressional complex:  Boeing, $49,500; Science Applications International, $27, 750; Lockheed Martin, $27,000; General Dynamics, $26,500; Raytheon, $21,000; Northrop Grumman, $20,000; and on and on and on. 

This system of contributions for earmarks is a betrayal of the public trust.  No member of Congress should ever accept a campaign contribution from an individual or a company or a lobbyist for a company that receives federal funding.  That’s bribery and it should be illegal.  We must establish a system of public financing to destroy the influence of dirty money.  

I’m not sure why Democrats keep supporting our Norm who has been in Congress way to long.  “We have to be loyal to what we believe,” the comedian Bill Mahar said recently, “not to people.”  

Obama as Marxist-Socialist

A couple weeks ago I mentioned that two charges hurled at President Obama were driving me crazy - - class warfare and Marxist Socialist.  I dealt with class warfare so now I’d like to turn my attention to the charge that Obama is a Marxist Socialist. 

You’d think, to hear the corporate media, Republicans and conservatives tell it, that the Obama administration is beginning, as Lenin once said,  to construct the socialist order.  “We are all socialists now,” shouted Newsweek not long ago.  “ We are creating ‘socialist republics’ in the United States says Mike Huckabee, adding, on reflection, that ‘Lenin and Stalin would love this stuff.’”  “European socialism transplanted to Washington,” proclaimed Newt Gingrich.  SOCIALIST, said McCain and Palin. Of course all of the shouting is done with, as socialist Billy Wharton wrote in the Washington Post, “the hysterical tone of a farcical McCarthyism.”   “Conservatives have never bashed socialism because its specter was actually stalking America,” Harold Myerson wrote recently, rather, they’ve wielded the cudgel against such progressive reforms as free universal education, the minimum wage or tighter financial regulations.  Their signal success is to have kept the United States free from the taint of universal health care.” 

Take it from me, from a person who is a socialist, and said so, proudly, in this community for years, Barak Obama is many things but socialist is not among them.   Don’t get me wrong, I’m enjoying the new found attention being paid to socialists and our ideas and the opportunity to have a seat at the table again after decades of inattention.  But socialists know that Obama is not one of us.  “Not only is he not a socialist,” writes Wharton, “he may in fact not even be a liberal.  Socialists understand him more as a hedge-fund Democrat - - one of a generation of neoliberal politicians firmly committee to free-market policies.  Like his predecessor Franklin Roosevelt, Obama is in the unenviable position of having to save capitalism from itself and to do so he is employing some, and I emphasize some, left of liberal solutions.  He has to.  The proponents of free-market capitalism have, perhaps, struck a mortal blow at themselves.  They have blown up capitalism and taken most of the known world along. 

What would a socialist propose for real revolutionary change?  Here are a few items proposed by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in the Communist Manifesto. 

1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.
2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
3. Abolition of all right of inheritance.
4. Centralization of credit in the hands of the State, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.
5. Centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State.
6. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State
7. Free education for all children in public schools
8. In short, the Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things. . . . They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.  Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution.  The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains.  They have a world to win. 

Now perhaps I’ve missed something but I don’t recall Obama issuing a rallying cry for proletarian revolution.  His efforts so far have been tepid and half-hearted.  Perhaps more is in the offing.  “Opportunity is there,” wrote Alexander Cockburn on Counterpunch.org, “to be seized from the jaws of capitalism’s shattering reverses. This is a chance richer than the opportunity offered and annulled in the mid-70s.  Circumstances will in all likelihood push Obama’s government to the left, just as they did FDR when orthodoxy failed.”  Almost certainly we will not end up with socialism but as Cockburn says, “the left should not be shy about pressing the challenge out of some misguided notion of preserving a polite progressive consensus.

 

Religion as News

A couple weeks ago, John Stewart pulled back the curtain on the wizards of the Ozians at the cable business channels revealing, to mix the metaphore, that the emperors had no clothes.     “They were part of the broken system,” commented Cank Uygur, “There was no journalism going on at CNBC.” 

Last Saturday, in our own little corner of the world here on the Olympic Peninsula, The Daily World,  our local newspaper, proved that “no journalism going on” is not unique to the big city folks.  On the back page of the main section of the paper, in a spot where one usually finds state-wide or national news, The Daily World ran a story with the headline, “It’s Lent - - So What?  So What, indeed!, under the byline Faces of Faith, Dale McQueen.  To the left of the McQueen piece the paper printed information from the stock market from Friday and to the right a story headlined, “Suspect had a knife at police station,” from Perugia, Italy. 

Now, the last time I checked, a story about how “we prepare our hearts, minds and souls for the sacred observances of Christ’s death on Good Friday and his resurrection on Easter,” did not qualify as news.  Since when does a celebration of belief in a deity, concocted in the Bronze age, that arose out of primitive ignorance and superstition, qualify as news?  The only thing crazier than the belief itself, is, as Dennis Rahkonen wrote recently, “to believe said deity created us, governs our affairs, and deserves our blind obedience.” 

A quick glance at the most recent studies about religious belief in the United States should give the editor at The Daily World pause the next time he wants to publish this religious opinion as news.  

According to the latest research, you are “certainly friends with at least one atheist, agnostic, nonbeliever, skeptic, or unaffiliated humanist, whether you know it or not.  Your friend certainly endures prejudice and unequal treatment, whether you know it or not.  And your friend is roughly as decent, good, loyal, honest, courageous, and generous as your other friends, and you know it.”  In Grays Harbor County 30 percent of us are atheists, agnostics unbelievers, people who don’t care or want to know, undecided or just plain have no opinion.  That amounts to a significant number of people. 

To have our local newspaper print religious propaganda masquerading as news is insult added to injury.  “Those who get along without God are noy lynched or stoned in this country,” David Swanson wrote recently, “but neither do they have equal rights or acceptance.  They encounter prejudice and cruelty on a personal level often.”  We saw our taxes used to establish an office in the Bush White House pushing religious-based initiatives and now President Obama has not only continued that unconstitutional program, he has enlarged it.  All around the country we see “religious based, pseudo-science imposed” on children in schools.  While there are, according to Swanson, “probably 20 atheists in Congress,” only one member has the courage to admit his position.  I’m convinced that President Obama is an atheist but he made a pragmatic political calculation, years ago, recognizing that no open atheist could be elected to office, to find himself the most politically advantageous church and join it.  Unfortunately that decision later came back to bite him when the remarkable Reverend Wright became a political liability. 

Since, as Frank Rich pointed out in the New York Times, the almighty has fallen significantly - - organized religion being “in a dead heat with banks and financial institutions on the confidence scale,” I’d like to make a suggestion to The Daily World:  keep you religion page if you must but please, please don’t try to pass off any more religious stories as news.  It really turns off those of us who do not hold religious views and also read your paper.