- “Wasn’t That A Time”
Lyrics by Pete Seeger

I’m not sure just when we lost the right to call ourselves a “free” nation.  It almost began when Joseph McCarthy began seeing a communist around every corner, but most Americans managed to survive that inquisition.  Perhaps it was when we first sent observers to South Vietnam; or perhaps it was when we allowed four students to be killed at Kent State with no one held accountable.  Certainly, it was no later than some time during the Nixon administration.

We thought we had bought ourselves a reprieve when Nixon was forced from office, but we were wrong.  The growth of the American military industrial complex has led us to see some form of warfare as the solution to every problem.  We wage “the war on drugs,” “the war on poverty,” “the war on terror” and, worst of all, real wars around the globe from Vietnam to Nicaragua to Iraq to Afghanistan.  Our military might stretches around the world, whether anyone else wants it there or not.

In 1776, our grievances against King George were read aloud in Philadelphia:

• He has kept among us, in times of peace, standing armies without the consent of our legislature.
• He has affected to render the military independent of and superior to civil power.
• He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his assent to their acts of pretended legislation:
  • For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:
  • For protecting them, by mock trial, from punishment for any murders which they should commit on the inhabitants of these states
  • For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of trial by jury:
  • For transporting us beyond seas to be tried for pretended offenses:
• He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burned our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.

Now, we have become King George.

He has kept among us standing armies.

Around the world, the United States maintains over 700 military bases in over 120 countries.  In earlier centuries, as the British Empire grew, you could trace the spread of British imperialism by counting the number of British colonies; today, America’s version of the colony is the military base.

In Japan’s southern prefecture of Okinawa, the citizens want us to leave, but we refuse to go.

For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of trial by jury.

Bush administration officials have admitted that many detainees locked up in Guantánamo Bay were innocent men swept up by U.S. forces unable to distinguish enemies from noncombatants.  There are still innocent people there, some of whom have been there more than seven years.

Of the Guantánamo detainees who have been able to obtain a habeas corpus hearing, over 70% have been found to be wrongfully detained - after years of being held in a cage without having charges brought.

Members of the Bush administration, including the former President himself, have admitted the U.S. realized many detainees held at the U.S. military prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, were innocent but nevertheless held them in hopes they could provide some form of intelligence.  It did not matter if a detainee was innocent or not.  Our government’s attitude has been that because he lived in Afghanistan and was captured at or near a battle area, he must know something of importance.

For transporting us beyond seas to be tried for pretended offenses.

Despite George W. Bush’s protestations that “torture is never acceptable, nor do we hand over people to countries that do torture,” evidence of torture inflicted on those rendered by the CIA to countries like Egypt, Syria, Morocco and Uzbekistan, has been detailed in official government documents.

He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burned our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.

Vietnam

Between 1962 and 1970, millions of gallons of Agent Orange were sprayed across parts of Vietnam.  First it killed the rainforest, stripping the jungle bare.  Then it spread its toxic reach to the food chain leading to a proliferation of birth deformities.

In a small commune in the Cu Chi district, which was heavily sprayed with Agent Orange, twenty-one-year-old Tran Anh Kiet suffers with twisted and deformed feet, hands and limbs, and his attempts at speech are confined to plaintive and pitiful grunts.  He is an adult stuck inside the stunted body of a fifteen-year-old, with a mental age of around six; he has to be spoon fed by his family.

According to Red Cross records, 150,000 Vietnamese children like Kiet suffer from birth defects that can be readily traced either to their parents’ exposure to Agent Orange during the war or to the consumption of dioxin-contaminated food and water since 1975.  The Vietnam Victims of Agent Orange Association estimates that three million Vietnamese were exposed to the chemical during the war, and at least one million suffer serious health problems today.

Iraq

After more than seven years of American occupation, Iraq has, effectively, split into two countries with the very real possibility of a third breaking off.  Despite our declarations of having successfully exported our precious democracy to Iraq, Iraqis have no effective government.

Today, in Iraq, it is very hard simply to get clean water, and the number of citizens with access to safe drinking water has decreased significantly since the U.S. occupation.  The New York Times reported that in Fallujah, after spending over $104 million, we are leaving the citizens not only without effective water treatment but with a boondoggle that “American officials acknowledge that the system may emit a foul odor if it ever does become functional.”

After more than six years of work, expenditures of more than $104 million and without having brought water into a single house, American reconstruction officials decided to abandon the troubled, only partly finished system leaving Fallujah without an of effective sewage treatment system and some of the Fallujah’s busiest streets lined with open trenches.

Iraqi agriculture is collapsing or has collapsed in many places.  As a result, many people have moved to the cities to try to find non-existent work.  There, they live in squalid squatter camps and try to survive.

Fear and Aggression

For over 30 years, the United States’ military, urged on by our civilian government, has been increasingly encroaching on the lives and rights of both American citizens and citizens of other countries.  Since 9/11 our government has encouraged us to live in fear and has used that fear to usurp many of our basic rights while simultaneously escalating our military initiatives abroad.

We should have learned the lessons of Vietnam – that the United States cannot win the hearts and minds of an indigenous people through military force; that we cannot instill democracy at gunpoint.  Instead, we ignored that lesson and we now find ourselves sinking more and more deeply into the fetid quagmire of Afghanistan with not the slightest clue of how to get out.  The counterinsurgency zealots in the military want more troops sent to Afghanistan, and they want the President to completely scrap his already shaky July 2011 timetable for the beginning of a withdrawal.

We’re like a compulsive gambler plunging ever more deeply into debt in order to wager on a rigged game.  In the process, we’ve mortgaged the future of our children by taking long term loans to try to stave off another Great Depression and to try to corral the escalating costs of a runaway healthcare system.  Instead of using the money we’re spending on foreign military junkets to help fix domestic problems, we’re shutting down essential services, emasculating our educational system and ignoring our decaying infrastructure.

There is no victory to be had in Afghanistan, only grief.  We’re bulldozing Detroit while at the same time trying to establish model metropolises in Kabul and Kandahar.  We’re spending endless billions on wretched wars, but we can’t extend the unemployment benefits of Americans suffering from the wretched economy here at home.  Worst of all, we’re inflicting death, dismemberment and the suffering of post traumatic stress disorder on thousands of innocent American young people.

We can wish this were nothing more than a nightmare.  But the difference between what is happening and a nightmare is that you wake up from a nightmare and it’s over.  This is all too tragically real.  This tries the very essence of our souls.

The corporate greed littering the twenty-first century landscape can only be rivaled by that demonstrated by the robber barons of the late 1800’s.  But even those businessmen and bankers who dominated industry and amassed huge personal fortunes, typically by anti-competitive or unfair business practices, had nothing on the perverse audacity of the current crop of corporate criminals. 

The key tenet preached at the Church of the Bottom Line is that profit is everything.  The Church teaches there is no tempering grace that must be observed in pursuit of the Almighty Dollar – no social responsibility, no environmental safeguards and, above all, no compassion.  The sole means by which corporations can attain Eternal Grace is by building a gargantuan balance sheet that will enable the select few heads of the corporation to make off with obscene quantities of wealth wrested from the hands of the more Common People.

The latest evidence of corporate criminality is, of course, the BP oil spill.  The apocalyptic vision of this self-wrought hell, the greatest environmental disaster in U.S. history, is the creeping ooze of black, ungodly wall of unstoppable darkness slowly, inexorably invading the pristine waters and the majestic shorelines of the Gulf of Mexico.  Before the summer is out, it will be making its way up the Atlantic seaboard.  The fantastic, reeking horror of this manifestation of Black Death visited on the environment by BP is spreading like a fast-growing cancer into the liquid womb of Mother Nature herself.

It’s not just the incredible photographs of the spill that are, in turns, heartbreaking, stunning, otherworldly and downright Satanic in their abject revulsion.  It is not the statistics that tell us how many millions of gallons might ultimately be spilled.  Nor is it the frightening horror of just how this unprecedented catastrophe might affect the fragile food chain and distress the ocean’s ecosystems at their very root levels.

The heart wrenching tales of livelihoods lost, industries destroyed, coastlines ravaged and wildlife killed are enough to poison the soul for as long as we wish to wallow in that murky state of fatalism and doom.  The picture is nothing but bleak.

But the most disturbing reality comes when we begin to understand that, at a very core level, we all have a shared responsibility in the creation of the foul demon that has been unleashed because of our rapacious need for cheap, endless energy.  The monster we have released is of a scale and proportion we can barely even fathom and would do justice to any of the Beasts described in Revelations.

If we are honest, no matter our politics, our religion, our income level or our mode of transport, we must see this beast of creeping death and begin to understand that is us.  The spill is many things, but more than anything else it is a giant, horrifying reflection of the cancer of corporate greed we have refused to cut from the body politic.

For this disaster, we cannot blame an “act of God,” as we would for a hurricane or a tsunami inflicted upon meager humankind by an angry deity who decides to punish us for being too war-like, too violent or, perhaps, too naïve.  This is not a retribution in which He suddenly decided He’d better kill some of us lest we forget who’s in charge.

This is not a 9/11 for which we can blame terrorists.  The situation in the Gulf is not the result of a coven of foreigners who spout hatred of our Satanic ways while secretly envying our Hummers and McDonald’s.  Nor can we blame the spill on some nefarious conspiracy secretly wrought by devious agents in black helicopters designed to destabilize the world’s economy and induce universal mind control — unless, of course, you’re getting a little desperate and don’t get out much, in which case, you absolutely can.

Surprisingly, we have yet to hear Pat Robertson or any of his cult of apocalypticans blame the gays, or voodoo, or Islam, or reality TV for what’s happening in the Gulf.  Nor have TV evangelists sent out the message that if we send them vast contributions they will be able to persuade God to stop the Black Death coming from the floor of the Gulf.  But then, oil is completely non-denominational.  It mocks all religions equally — except, of course, the only one that really matters to the corporate criminals, capitalism.

That this is one of the more universally damning disasters of our time is evidenced by the simple fact that no one really seems to know how to respond to it.  Right Wing Imperialists are abandoning Sarah, Queen of “Duh,” Palin’s “drill baby, drill” mantra faster than rats departing the Titanic.  And just as suddenly, the incessant Republican wails for more oil exploration, more drilling, more tax cuts for oil conglomerates are beginning to reek of death and destruction, the likes of which the country has never seen.

At the same time, hardcore Leftists are demanding the immediate imprisonment and/or execution of every BP employee worldwide, as though BP is somehow different from any other oil titan currently engaged in raping the planet.  Hardcore lefties would appreciate Obama’s using the disaster as a surefire excuse to instantly change the entire course of energy history by immediately shutting down every off shore oil well, handing every American a bicycle and installing solar panels in the Whitehouse.

The problem, of course, is that, as surely as oxygen is necessary for our survival, oil is woven into every aspect of American life.  A full 30 percent of domestic transportation fuel comes from the Gulf and shutting down a fraction of those wells would further devastate our already battered economy.  Petroleum and coal power the very energy plants that deliver the electricity that charges our iPhones, through which, of course, everyone can Tweet angry complaints decrying the government’s failure to have Jack Bauer don a wet suit, dive into the Gulf and, single-handedly, stop the filth spewing from the hole we punched in the ocean floor.

The lesson to be learned here is that BP is behaving no better, or worse, than any other corporate spawn of Satan would in a similar situation.  Anyone who doesn’t think every oil company on earth is right now kneeling before Beelzebub in gratitude that it wasn’t one of their own wells that exploded hasn’t been paying attention.

That said, one has to ask, is it possible to begin to think our darkest disaster in a generation could somehow ultimately improve our attitudes, change our behavior and begin to put the brakes on our violent treatment of the planet?  As someone recently noted, the BP spill isn’t Obama’s Katrina so much as it should be Big Oil’s Chernobyl.  If we have any sense at all of social and environmental responsibility, a disaster so appalling and devastating should alter forever the way in which the oil industry is managed and put our energy policy on the course it should have taken beginning in 1973.

But, are we even capable of such a shift?  Is there any silver lining to be found in the black and grease spreading across the Gulf?  Perhaps the most imperative question of all is, if we can produce a demon of such extraordinary scale and devastation, can we not also somehow create its exact opposite?  And can we use what has happened in the Gulf as a learning experience alerting us to the dangers posed by preying, unchecked corporate greed?

Whether or not he will reign as the darling of the Tea Party in November, we’ll have to wait and see.  In the meantime, though, everyone seems to have spent the past several days talking about Rand Paul, the proud Tea Party candidate and Republican nominee for the U.S Senate, who prevailed in the Kentucky Republican primary against a candidate groomed and mentored by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. 

Within forty-eight hours of his victory, Paul found himself deep in sewage after an appearance on MSNBC’s “Rachel Maddow Show” in which he suggested he did not agree with certain parts of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  This followed his interviews on National Public Radio and MSNBC in which he said that while he opposes racial discrimination, he thought a lot of problems could be handled locally instead of through the weight of the federal government. 

The problem with Paul and his Tea Party cronies lies in the message he sounded when he kicked off his general election run by announcing that he had a “message from the Tea Party” to “take our government back.”  From his post-primary victory posturing, it appears that Paul and the Tea Party apparently mean they want to roll back established federal protections that ensure all Americans are treated as equal citizens.

Paul ‘s trashing of modern federal civil rights laws has not been confined to the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  He has also stated his opposition to the Americans with Disabilities Act, positioning himself, and the Tea Party, in opposition to federal law that ensures individuals with disabilities have the same right to participate in American life as able-bodied American people.

Paul and the Tea Party like to portray themselves as fighting for the Constitution, but more and more evidence makes it clear they only care about the parts of the original Constitution that limited the powers of the federal government.  In their rush to extol states’ rights, Tea Partiers and Paul consistently ignore the rest of our most fundamental legal document, particularly the amendments to the Constitution that have made equality and protection of basic civil rights fundamental constitutional values. 

The issue over states’ rights was put to rest at Appomattox in 1865.  Since that time, amendments to the Constitution have secured the right to vote to all Americans, made our system of government more democratic, and have given the federal government the power to protect the liberty and equality of all Americans.  Today we rightly celebrate these amendments as a core part of our Constitution.  Rand Paul and the Tea Party should be celebrating the Constitution in its entirety, not just the portions that support their narrow views.

Federal laws such as the Civil Rights Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act find support both in Article I of the Constitution, which gives Congress the power to regulate interstate commerce, and in the Fourteenth Amendment which gives Congress power to enforce the liberty and equality of all citizens.  Paul and the Tea Party would have us return to a time when African Americans were second-class citizens routinely denied access to the full range of opportunities we now take for granted, to a time when lynchings, the Ku Klux Klan, barriers to voter registration and Jim Crow laws prevailed through a significant portion of the United States.  

Paul and the other guests of the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party are apparently more concerned with ensuring protection for business owners who desire to discriminate against African Americans and others than in eradicating discrimination.  In the Tea Party’s view of the Constitution, Congress should have no right to stop business owners – whether they run a luncheonette, bar, or other private establishment – from discriminating on the basis of race; they should be free to run their businesses as they wish.  If African Americans or other groups are discriminated against, that’s just too bad for them. 

This is a disgraceful argument that has no basis in the text, history or original meaning of the Constitution.  If, as they profess, Tea Partiers truly care about the Constitution then they must care about the entire document, not just the portions that support the narrow-minded America they desire.  The Tea Party does not understand that central to our constitutional order is Congress’ broad authority to ensure equal treatment of all Americans.

When Alice encountered the Mad Hatter at his tea party, he was stuck forever at 6:00.  Rand Paul and the Tea Party are stuck somewhere in the 18th Century.

I doubt that in the history of mankind there have been more lies disseminated faster and more furiously than in the two years since Barack Obama announced he would be seeking the Presidency.  I, personally, have reached the point at which I find it not only boring and irresponsible, but downright loathsome.  I believe there are three key factors at play here:

1. There is a vocal right-wing racist element in our society that wants to believe anything disparaging about Obama, no matter how ridiculous, simply because he is black.  They are willing to not only distort the truth but lie and attempt to bend facts to fit their nonsensical theories.
2. There is still a large segment of the population who is willing to regard anything they see on the Internet as being true, so long as it comports with their personal pre-dispositions.
3. The Internet has rendered fact-checking, responsible journalism almost moot in today’s world.  There was a time when a reporter either in print, on the radio or on TV was held accountable for reporting only what could be substantiated.  If they didn’t report what was truthful, they could find themselves publishing a retraction, losing their jobs or even facing a libel suit.  Today, the Internet allows virtually anyone to say anything they want regardless of the level of its veracity without being held to account.  And this lack of accountability in truth has spilled over into both radio and TV.

A friend recently sent me a link to a YouTube video, entitled Obama Admits He Is A Muslim and asked what I thought of it.  If you are so inclined and want to waste ten minutes of your life that you can never get back, you can watch the video by clicking on the picture below. 

www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCAffMSWSzY

The bottom line is this video is another of the multitude of abrogations of the truth by which we now find ourselves repeatedly assaulted. 

To begin with, the “writers, producers, editors and publishers” of the video entitle it, “Obama Admits He is a Muslim,” yet they include one of those “legal indemnification” blurbs that go by so quickly you can only read it if you can pause the video at just the right point. 

This is what they flash on the screen at the start of the video - “Legal Disclaimer: The writers, producers, editors, and publishers of this video are not stating, claiming, or implying that Barack Hussein Obama is a Muslim, or that Obama himself claimed or admitted to being a Muslim.  Rather the writers, producers, editors, and publishers of this video are only examining the evidence surrounding the rumor that Barack Hussein Obama might be a secret Muslim.”

So, my first question to these jokers would be, “If you are only ‘examining the evidence surrounding the rumor that Barack Hussein Obama might be a secret Muslim,” how can you justify entitling your video, “Obama Admits He Is A Muslim?”  An examination of evidence, by definition, is supposed to be a non-biased review of facts, yet the title of the video clearly indicates the producers already have a point of view and the whole point of the video is their attempt to convince the viewer that they are right.

I viewed the entire video and, despite its title, not once did I ever hear Obama say, or even imply, he is a Muslim.

It was blatantly obvious that whoever put the video together edited a number of different videos and put them together in such as way as to make it appear Obama was saying something he was not.  There were also numerous points at which the video was cut off in mid-sentence so that, syntactically, the completion of the sentence is left to the viewer to infer that Obama was admitting to his Muslim faith.  If Obama had actually said he is a Muslim, though, I’m certain the editors would have left that footage in the video.  So it is reasonable to assume Obama did not complete the sentence(s) as the video producers would have us believe.

But in the worst case, even if Obama were a Muslim, the only reason to vilify him for it is because we fear that which is different, that which we do not understand.  We did not judge George W. Bush on his attendance at a Protestant church or on his participation in prayer breakfasts; we judged him based on his miserable performance as President of the United States.

John Kennedy was only narrowly elected President because we had never before had a Catholic President and many people held that against him.  Yet, in three short years he proved to be one of the greatest leaders this country has ever had.

We also need to consider that, unlike Bush, Obama understands that making progress with the Middle East means we, as a nation, have to have an understanding of Islam.  To the Muslims of the Middle East, their religion is much more central to their everyday lives than is the religion of most Americans.  One of our greatest failures in dealing with the Middle East is our lack of this understanding, just as our greatest failure in Vietnam was our failure to understand the thinking and way of life of the people of Vietnam.  We Americans tend to assume everyone naturally sees the world as we do.

The purveyors of this video, along with many right-wing know nothings, seem to have a real problem with Obama quoting from the Koran.  Well, I’ve quoted Confucius and I’ve quoted Karl Marx; I don’t think that makes me either a follower of Confucianism or a communist.  In fact, the Koran contains some of the most beautifully written philosophical teachings on pacifism in the world.  But just as with the  Bible, if you hunt hard enough, you can find a passage that, taken out of context, will support just about anything you want to believe.

Finally, I believe anyone who decries Islam is nothing more than a religious bigot.  This video, and many others I have seen like it, want to equate “jihad” (and in their case jihad = terrorism, which in the Koran it does not) with Islam.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Muslims who use the Koran to justify violence are just as bad as the Catholics who used the Bible to justify the inquisitions of the Middle Ages and the Southern bigots who used the Bible to justify segregation, acts of violence against the Negro and, ultimately, the KKK.

Too many people in this country only believe in “freedom of religion” so long as we believe as they believe.  Somewhere between 1776 and 2009 we lost sight of the tolerance that was supposed to be the bedrock of our experiment in democracy.

When it comes to national spending, we are in sore need of straightening out our priorities.  We hear the anger and frustration over the stimulus package, healthcare and Wall Street bonuses, but I recently came across a couple of sobering figures that show just how out of whack our government spending really is.

My premise, and I don’t think there is anyone outside the Wall Street environs who will disagree with me, is that the job situation in the U.S. passed critical a long time ago and hasn’t shown any signs of getting better.  Washington and Wall Street may tell us the economy is recovering, but try telling that to the family who lost their home sometime in the past two years, or to those whose unemployment benefits have run out and are still out of work, or even to those who are drawing unemployment benefits but can’t find a job.  The problem is staggering.

Worst of all, it is not expected to go away for at least two more years, if then.  Although I remain a passionate supporter of President Obama, I am extremely disappointed in his failure to address the rebuilding of our national infrastructure and, in the process, putting people back to work doing that rebuilding. 

We hear repeatedly the problems with the National Debt, the cost of healthcare reform and the economic burden the stimulus package has placed on our children and grandchildren.  But no one talks about taking from the sacred cow of the American budget, the American Military, in order to help address any of these issues.  Why in the world are we continuing to spend nearly a Billion dollars a month in Iraq and Afghanistan when there is no credible evidence (I don’t consider Dick Cheney’s statements to the contrary as credible) that these efforts are doing anything to secure our safety?

On the contrary, there is significant evidence that our involvement in these two countries has done much to alienate large portions of the world’s population and has provided a powerful recruiting rationale for those who seek to perpetrate another 9/11 on the West.  Why haven’t we considered using the money we are blowing up in Iraq and Afghanistan to address our failing infrastructure and our jobless situation at home?

Over the weekend, Bob Herbert, addressing the need to rebuild our worn out road system, wrote in the New York Times, “The Federal Highway Administration has estimated that every $1 billion of investment in the Federal Highway Aid program generates 42,100 full-time equivalent jobs.”

I decided to try to contrast that with the number of military personnel serving in Iraq and Afghanistan that can be employed for $1 billion.  A recent study by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Analysis, a Washington-based think tank, concluded that the cost for a single soldier to fight in Iraq or Afghanistan is $775,000 per year, and increasing.   This means that for $1 billion we can either employee 1,290 soldiers to fight in two meaningless wars, or we can employee 42,100 people to re-build our roads.

Furthermore, according to a 2007 article by the New Statesman, America won’t simply be paying for Iraq and Afghanistan with today’s dollars and with dead soldiers.  The Pentagon attempted to silence economists who predicted that several decades of after-service care for the wounded from these two wars will amount to an unbelievable $2.5 trillion.  Kinda makes the economic burden we’re passing on to our grandchildren because of the stimulus and healthcare pale, doesn’t it?

Now, I’m not so naïve as to presume the problem is really this simple; nor do these few facts begin to cover the myriad of intersecting issues with which we need to deal.  But, to my simple mind, it would make a whole lot of sense for us to take a hard look into making some trade-offs.