Pat Political

A bomb in Barre, Vermont!

Horrific news-- A bomb was exploded early Monday morning in Barre’s Highgate Apartments, destroying five automobiles.

The people who live here are among our most vulnerable-- good families in need of housing at an affordable price, who are working responsibly to bring up their children to be good citizens.

I have had the pleasure of working with their community organization through a summer program my church and others support, and know these people well.

This is terrorism by any definition.

President Bush, if the war against terrorism is to brought to the enemy, then let’s start right here in Barre!

Freedom for the press?

Judith Miller is going to jail. Matthew Cooper is not. Is this of any real importance to any of us?

Yes, indeed it is. This is not a question of freedom of the press or reporter privilege. It is about whistle blowing-- when someone in a position to know that something bad is going on decides to leak this knowledge to the rest of us.

No incumbent government, Republican or Democrat, likes a whistle blower. Neither does any well established business.

But the public always gains from such information.

And we the public should insist that all our whistle blowers themselves and the reporters who pass on their information should be protected from attack by any government or business whose nasty secrets are being revealed.

Vermont is not one of the thirty-one states which provides statutory protection for whistle blowers. And in the Miller/Cooper case the federal government is attacking their efforts to shield their sources. Maybe we had better tell our legislators, state and federal, that we want them to enact law which will protect this important public function.

Bush's Tuesday Speech

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President Bush has a major marketing speech to make on Tuesday

Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois did not owe an apology to the county for his remarks about Guantanamo. The Senator was speaking for people like me. There is no one who does not support our young people who are doing the actual fighting. What I cannot support is how the Republican leadership is waging this war and expending more and more of their lives. There were too few troops used in the initial invasion and now we are facing the high cost of maintaining our troops because of Rumsfeld’s expensive privatizations of traditional army functions. But what is perhaps worse than the botching of the invasion is how we are labeling and treating combatants.

It is Senator McCain who owes the apology both to Senator Durbin and to every disturbed and upset American like myself. And I am deeply ashamed for him that he has found it necessary, he a veteran himself, to follow the Bush Republican line of attack, to be just like Carl Rove.

The President will no doubt say that our enemies are targeting innocent civilians and that this is against the rules of war.

Regrettably this is not true.

WWI was the last modern war fought mainly as army against army. In WWII modern war became directed primarily against ‘innocent civilians’. Although the Germans began this change in warfare with their bombing of London early in the war, it was our country which really finalized it with our fire bombing of Dresden and Berlin and later with the atom bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Neither Japanese city had any sort of military target to justify these bombs, only millions of ‘innocent civilians’. The number of people who died in the attack on the World Trade Towers is not even 1$ of the number of civilians we consigned to death with the atom bombs. The Germans have apologized for their atrocities, but we have never apologized to Japan for ours.

There was also a change in our country’s attitudes toward combatants which began during WWII.

Almost none of us disagreed with the characterization of Hitler as “evil”. And later it was also easy to call the Communism of Stalin “evil.” You will recall it was during the Cold War of the fifties that it seemed important to add the phrase “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance to point out that we felt ourselves to be on the side of God.

And so it has been fairly easy for us to allow President Bush to call every single person or country which is against us in any way as “evil” or “terrorist”. No one can make peace with “evil”. This must mean that President Bush sees us locked in an endless struggle, perhaps with a still another as yet undesignated “evil” enemy.

And anyone who is ‘evil’ or ’terrorist’ is sub-human, does not have to be treated with any sort of decency or rule of law. You will recall that Pvt Graner stated during Lyndie England’s trial he did know he was doing anything that was against the law. We ought to have learned from our ugly history of slavery not to treat anybody, no matter how terrible the crime, as less than human.

No doubt the President will be urging us forward in our mission to bring democracy to Iraq. This has been the one selling point for the war which has not been proven false. It is the ugliness of his designation of all who oppose us as sub-human that the President will have to work hardest to justify.

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Iranian election

The Iranian election result which was announced today is as much a vote against the USA as it was for the so-called hardliner.

What we don’t want to see is that it is American business which is so disliked, not only by the Muslim world generally but by many in Europe as well.

And what’s to like about it. Business our style operates without any sense of responsibility either to the community from which it makes its money or to its employees.

If we really want to win the ’war against terror’, we will force American business to stop thinking of itself as a community separate from the rest of us and make it become part of every community in which it operates, sharing in the cost of community infrastructure-- health and education and water, sewers, roads, etc.

Our private armies

A lot of attention is being given lately to the private security armies in Iraq and the high degree of privatization of army functions generally. I have actually heard it stated on NPR news that private organizations were responsible for interrogations at Abu Ghraib. Here is clearly the reason that no one higher than a Specialist has been charged with crimes against detainees.

Why not?

Because the Congress of the United States has no authority over any of these private organizations.

Only the owner businesses have any control.

Anyone who believes that the Second Amendment is important ought to be running scared about this.

Another point is that the use of private firms to perform what used to be army functions is that this is making our army much more expensive for us taxpayers than it used to be. And we don’t want to forget that fully 25% of the money allocated for rebuilding Iraq is going to support these private security armies.

We need to restore the citizen based army we have had until Donald Rumsfeld worked to change it.

We also need to face the fact that if we are at war-- and I have not heard President Bush state otherwise-- we need to start up the Draft.

Now I know that the Draft became very unpopular during the Viet Nam years. But this was another “bad” war in which we should not have become embroiled. I go back to WWII when the Draft provided an equal opportunity for all to participate in the defense of our country. Right now who is being pursued as a candidate for our volunteer army is someone with strong financial need. Why should not the Bush twins or any young people attached to our Federal Congress be given the equal incentive to become part of our active defense.

More on Memorial Day

I listened Sunday night to the radio broadcast of the Concert on the White House lawn, and for a brief moment I had hope that this was going to be an evenhanded celebration of the sacrifices of both the soldiers and their families.

Yes, the suffering of families in the current conflicts were told. And the best part of the evening was the statement of a recent Iraq war widow about her pain, her difficulty in finding other widows with whom to share their difficulties, and her determination that these women shall not be forgotten. I hope she stays with this. We need an organization called Widows and Widowers of Foreign Wars alongside the long standing Veterans of Foreign Wars.

But for previous wars there was little or no mention of the sacrifices by mothers and widows. What we were given was dramatic presentations of war history accompanied by truly soul stirring music. Speeches by Colin Powell and our present chief general were the usual cant. Essentially in order to highlight the sacrifice of our soldiers we glorify war itself.

When Memorial Day becomes a day of national mourning for the ugly horror that war is, I shall indeed celebrate it.

How they plan to stay in power

Why are the Bush Republicans so sure that they will retain their control of our government and how do they plan to do this....

I offer two quotations which go to the heart of these questions.

...we provincials...are not beguiled by the notion that the fate of mankind and of human culture lies wholly in our hands...The Americans certainly do (enjoy some such delusion) for they are natural-born crusaders, forever in the right, even when they are least aware of what they are crusading about. (Quotation from Canadian author Robertson Davies’ book Murther and Walking Spirits, pp 277-278.)

Should any political party attempt to abolish Social Security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes that you can do these things.  Among them are a few Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid. (These are words spoken by President Dwight D. Eisenhower-- a good Republican President-- in 1952, and are quoted by Anne Abrams in her Letter to the Editor published in the Times Argus on May 21st, 2005.)

This tiny splinter group of Texas oil millionaires is now close to taking control of all three branches of our government.

The division of our governmental structure into three branches was meant to prevent this from happening. The founders of our country were determined to create a government which could never tyrannize over an individual or a state. They knew that a majority in power could be as much a tyrant as any dictator.

How have the Bush Republicans done this?

They have allied themselves with Southern Fundamentalist religious sects. These groups now believe that the South has finally won the Civil War and they are now ramming their version of Reconstruction down all of us just as thoroughly as we in the north rammed ours down them one hundred and forty years ago.

But first and foremost our President and Vice President are business men. And business today believes absolutely in the power of marketing. Anything can be sold to the American public provided it is properly presented. And they have the incredible success of TV advertising in the latter half of the 20th Century to prove this.

The Afghanistan war seemed the obvious and proper outcome of 9/11.

But the invasion of Iraq required marketing. They tried fear marketing at first-- weapons of mass destruction, Iraq’s connection with terrorists. This didn’t work. Too many people understood that both assertions were untrue.

And so they are now relying on the idealism of Americans, our belief that we have something of worth to offer the world.

They are marketing everything they are doing as being part of our helping spread democracy to the rest of the world. And we are nearly all of us happy to follow along and say how wonderful this is whether we color ourselves Red or Blue.

And this is why I like Davies’ description of us so much-- We will still go right along with the crusade even if we may find ourselves a bit confused about why democracy for the rest of the world seems to include the rights of all humans while democracy as it is practiced here at home means the will of the present Republican majority.

Filibuster debate

The most frightening part of the debate over the filibuster is the conviction of the Bush Republicans that they will never again be in the minority.

Education and power failures

Saturday we had three separate periods of power failure plus a number of power dips throughout the day. Not a good day to turn on the computer and blog. But the flip side was a whole series of delightful phone calls, which I would have pretty much have missed had I been doing what I wanted to do. And Sunday I had some very nice company. One of the bonuses of imminent surgery is that one gets paid attention to, and I have been reveling in it....

But any power failure is a sharp reminder of how distorted our values have become.

No CEO has the ability to do the line work needed to fix whatever problem was causing the trouble Saturday and yet we regard any CEO as more important to society than the lineman who could. Indeed because this country has for so long given business a disproportionately high position, we tend to give any administrator the highest ranking. I recall clearly hearing the husband of one of my cousins speak of how well he could keep the scientists who worked for his company in line because of his business training.

The reality is that the most important people to society are the people who provide us food-- farmers. The next most important people are those who understand whatever infrastructure is in place and how to keep it working-- the water, the sewage, the garbage, the electricity, the phones, the roads and bridges, buildings both private and public, and-- I’m happy to hear people beginning to speak of this as part of infrastructure-- health care.

Yet our present educational system tells young people that the most important of them are the ones who will go on to college and most of them will go for some sort of business training. Those poor souls who can’t make it to college are told they can take the inferior type jobs described above.

Does this reversal of values bother you as much as it does me....?

It's been a while...

Sorry to have been so long without a post. Health problems which should be resolved by surgery on April 26th have been leaving me little energy. But there’s a lot I want to say and four days to do some posting, so here goes.

I’m told that Nature looms ugly on all sides. The East coast will disappear in a tsunami caused by the explosion of a volcano in the Canary Islands. Most of California will vanish in a tsunami when a super volcano under Sumatra goes. And the middle of the country is threatened by overdue action from a big one under Old Faithful. And what can all our technical prowess, our certainty that we have nature under our control, do to help us? Not a thing..

So what to do? How about what all the rest of life on the planet is doing-- live one day at a time as best we can until something comes along to stop us...

When I get my mind off volcanoes, what really bothers me most is that everyone talks as though fossil petroleum is a good thing and we need to find more of it at cheaper prices.

Oil is poison. It and the many chemicals derived from it have polluted our land, water, and air. We live in a sort of chemical soup and it is no surprise that our over loaded immune systems are breaking down and gifting us with a plethora of immune system failure illnesses, the cancers, MS, rheumatoid arthritis, etc., we see in more and more young people. We pass all sorts of laws against smoking but don’t think twice about riding our children to school in busses loaded with carcinogenic diesel oil fumes. I’ve never had anyone to whom I talk about this dispute it, but at the same time I’ve never seen any negative statement about oil in any form of public media. It’s almost as though there is the same taboo surrounding oil that there was around sex before Freud.

What is needed is a break away from oil as our primary source of power to biomass. Wind power is excellent where it can be utilized safely and sensibly but does nothing for the health of the planet itself. Biomass both takes from and gives back to the earth. Corn and soy are both proposed by agribusiness to be the base for a vegetable diesel oil and ethanol industry. But both require so much input of energy by way of fertilizers that the energy gain from these crops is actually negative.

Nature has offered mankind a true miracle crop and we are the one nation on the earth insane enough to deny ourselves its benefits. I am, of course, talking about hemp. And, no, you can’t smoke it. In fact if marijuana is grown anywhere near hemp, the THC content of the marijuana will be degraded. No other plant offers the range of products that hemp can provide-- from food to fabric and paper to diesel and ethanol fuels to plastics. It essentially grows like a weed, requiring little cultivation energy and is simple to process. Colonial farm wives easily produced everything but the very modern fuel and plastic applications. It offers very little of interest to big business except possibly as a base for plastics but a great deal to small local business. And the ecological benefits for the land are beyond measure.

Fortunately there do seem to be more and more people ready to push for some action. The legislatures of North Dakota, New Hampshire, Oregon, and California all are considering bills which will make it legal within their states for farmers to grow hemp. You can check www.votehemp.com for more on this.

And-- a further thought on the possibilities of hemp-- we are always bemoaning the difficulty of getting farmers in Columbia and Afghanistan to stop growing drug crops. Maybe if we could offer them hemp which would give them so much more, they’d be interested....