The Populist Review

The Truth About Brownback

   Sen. Sam Brownback made his candidacy official yesterday with a simple announcement that caught no one off guard: "It is with sincere humility and a determination to do good that I declare my candidacy for President of the United States." He now becomes the first of three likely candidates for the Republican nomination, Sen. John McCain, Rudy Giuliani, and Mitt Romney, in a field that's sure to grow more crowded. But how much "good" has Brownback actually done in his years in the Senate...and for whom?

  He's certainly gained considerable media attention these last few weeks with his opposition to Bush's troop surge. And he's one of the few senators who can honestly say he voted against the war (not even Hillary can say that). But beside his purported opposition to Iraq, Brownback has the most abysmal voting record we've seen in years. And he's surely no friend to the average American voter.

   He voted against holding bankrupt companies accountable for their workers' pensions. He voted against extending federal health insurance to U.S. Steel workers. He voted against protecting textile workers from international trade agreements. He voted against providing mortgage assistance or wage insurance to workers who lose their jobs due to international trade agreements. And he voted against assistance for manufacturing employees who lose their jobs through outsourcing.

  And why is there so much outsourcing?

   One reason is that Brownback voted special tax breaks for companies who operate their businesses overseas. He voted similar tax breaks to companies that move their operations overseas. At the same time, he voted down tax breaks for companies who bring their operations here. He voted down an amendment to force offshore companies to spend their profits in the U.S. (creating jobs or funding pensions). He voted against a measure to force federally-funded contracts to be performed in the U.S., and voted against a measure to provide assistance to displaced workers by reducing tax cuts for people who make over $1 million.

   Indeed, Brownback's record shows him to be no friend of the poor.

   He voted against an exemption for victims of identity theft in bankruptcy cases. He voted against a measure to limit collections from credit card companies who refuse to waive fees and interest for their customers in credit counseling. He voted against an amendment restoring $1.5 billion for Medicare and Medicaid.

   And since he's positioned himself against the war, just what is his record on Iraq?

   He voted down attempts to get Bush to submit cost estimates for the war or even a plan for his so-called "reconstruction." He voted down attempts to make it a crime to illegally profit from contracts connected to Iraq or Afghanistan. He voted down an amendment to pay for the war by eliminating tax cuts for those making over $1 million. He voted down a measure to prevent private contractors from interrogating prisoners. He voted against a measure providing our servicemen in the Reserves and National Guard with the same equipment our full-time soldiers have. And he voted to extend the tours of duty for part-time military personnel.

   With regard to our election process, Brownback isn't concerned.

   He voted against a measure to improve the reliability of our nation's voting systems. He voted against a measure to allow voters the opportunity to examine their punch-card ballots. He voted against an amendment to examine the error rates in vote-counting machines and voted against a measure to reduce fraud by requiring signatures at polling places. He also voted against restoring $1.5 billion to the budget to overhaul our election process.

  In his eyes, our electronic voting system is working just fine.

   Of course, Brownback does have a few things going for him. He's Catholic, which gives him an "in" with 25% of the population. He's virulently anti-abortion, which endears him to Evangelicals. And he has an anti-war image that may snag a few moderates and uninformed liberals.

   But the truth about Brownback lies in his voting record. That voting record shows a candidate who's consistently rallied against the poor, the sick, the elderly, the disenfranchised, and the working class in favor of corporate big-wigs, more secretive government and war profiteering. If Brownback's "determination to do good" is anything like his voting record, we suggest his supporters take another look.

                                                

Andrea Hackett is an freelance journalist, founder of the Las Vegas Dancers Alliance in Nevada, and editor of the Populist Review. She may be contacted at andreahackett@cox.net

The Ascent of American Fascism

   The 60 Minutes interview last Sunday with Dick Cheney and his babbling sidekick, George, confirmed what many Americans have already suspected: that our political system has been usurped by a malevolent duarchy. As if to underscore that fact, Dick Cheney, speaking for Bush while demeaning our electoral process as a “poll,” insisted, “this president does not make decisions based on public opinion.” He further asserted his contempt for American traditions by dismissing our elected representatives, referring to the anti-surge resolution being considered by Congress as a meaningless verbal exercise and declaring that Bush has the sole authority to send troops to Iraq regardless of their opinion. Such arrogance in the face of abysmal support can only be seen as a eulogy to representative government and a declaration of accession by the Executive Branch―a chilling consideration by anyone’s measure.

   Yet, as historians may well recall as they mull our descent into tyranny, the roots of our constitutional crisis can be traced to the days of Adolph Hitler when a powerful elite in America financed a political vision far different from the one we learned in school. That elite included such notables as George Herbert Walker (W’s great grandfather) and his son-in-law, Prescott S. Bush (W’s grandfather), and it included such Nazi collaborators as W. Averill Harriman, the presidential advisor who paved our way into Vietnam, and John Foster Dulles, the former Secretary of State who ratcheted the Cold War after sneaking his Nazi riches out of Berlin. And when the war was over, and our servicemen returned to forget the horrors they’d witnessed overseas, many of these same players were instrumental in driving their Nazi vision into the American political mainstream, using fear and the fortunes they’d amassed to uproot our populist traditions.

   None of this is new, of course. It’s all well documented, almost hackneyed, and could well have been accessed by that segment of the public who found it easier to get their news from FOX Television in the last two elections. Nevertheless, in light of our waning constitutional grip, we think it fitting to reopen the issue of the Bush family’s complicity in international fascism, if only to reconcile our collective naiveté. So, let’s review.

   In 1918, following the U.S. entry into the first World War, Samuel Prescott Bush (W’s grandfather) was given a sinecure on the US War Industries Board as Director of the Facilities Division under Bernard Baruch (advisor to Woodrow Wilson), and Clarence Dillon, a Wall Street private banker. Bush’s principal mission was to direct arms sales to Remington Arms, owned by Percy Rockefeller (John D Rockefeller’s brother) and run by his man, Samuel Pryor.

   The following year, George Herbert “Bert” Walker (W’s great-grandfather), a mid-west power broker renowned for his international contacts, formed a private bank with Averill and “Bunny” Harriman, and Percy Rockefeller. That bank was called W.A. Harriman & Co.

   Meanwhile, a young Prescott Bush was back from the war and going nowhere―that is, until he met Bert Walker’s daughter. Their union rocketed Prescott from a minor executive at a railroad equipment supply house to vice president of W.A. Harriman & Co., the largest private bank in the world.

 

   Small wonder the Bushes embrace the sanctity of marriage.

   

   In 1920, Walker and Harriman somehow gained control of the German shipping line, Hamburg-Amerika―whose assets had been confiscated by the U.S. after WWI― through a William Cuno (who later became a heavy contributor to the Nazi Party) and Max Warburg of the line’s banking firm, M.M.Warburg. Also involved in the deal (not surprisingly) was Rockefeller’s representative, Samuel Pryor. The shipping line was deceptively renamed the American Ship & Commerce Corp. and Pryor was placed on its board of directors. Harriman and Walker now controlled half of the largest shipping line in the world and dominated the other half through the auspices of the Anglo-American occupation of Germany. Their next step was to foment hostilities.

  In 1922, Harriman established a branch of the W.A. Harriman Bank in Berlin under Walker’s presidency. It was at that time he met the German industrialist, Fritz Thyssen, who began donating heavily to the Nazis. According to government records, Thyssen and Harriman agreed to set up a bank for Thyssen in New York, the Union Banking Corp (UBC), that would link Thyssen’s bank in the Netherlands and provide funds for Hitler’s insurgency. Thus, the UBC, as aptly described in Tarpley and Chaitkin’s book, “George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography” (read it here: http://www.tarpley.net/bush2.htm ) became Hitler’s de facto bank in New York.

   Soon afterwards, funds began pouring back and forth between New York and Thyssen’s bank in Holland and into the coffers of Hitler’s militia. The war profiteers, anxious to usher more profitable times, were up to their necks in intrigue.

   It’s instructive to note that Fritz Thyssen was no run-of-the-mill industrialist. He was the single most important financier for Adolph Hitler (as confessed in his book, “I Paid Hitler”). And it’s no stretch to say that without Thyssen’s money, Hitler might never have come to power. And of course, without Hitler, there might never have been a Second World War.

 

   Not good for the arms business.

 

   In 1926, as mentioned above, Prescott Bush became vice president of W.A. Harriman. That same year, he, Harriman, and Dillon established the German Steel Trust (GST) with Thyssen and Thyssen’s partner, Friederich Flick. The GST later provided the Third Reich with much of its explosives, steel plate, wire, pig iron, pipes, and tubing (materials that would later be used for such projects as the Atlantic Wall and the 155mm cannons that rained death on our servicemen on the beaches at Normandy). The GST was directly linked to George Bush’s grandfather’s bank in New York and was presided over by Albert Voegler, another German industrialist who paved the way for Hitler’s ascent (and, incidentally, Voegler also held a directorship on the Hamburg-Amerika Line).

 

   Funny how it all links together, eh?

 

   Thus, Bush, Walker, and Harriman were now in direct partnership with Flick’s zinc, steel, and coal conglomerate in Germany and Poland. Together they owned a third of his sprawling empire and renamed it the Consolidated Silesian Holding Co.

   Between 1930 and ‘31, as admitted at Nuremburg, Thyssen arranged with Rudolph Hess for the transfer of 250,000 to 300,000 marks to the Nazi Party through his bank in Holland. During that period, W.A. Harriman merged with the Anglo-American investment house, Brown Brothers, to create Brown Brothers Harriman. Prescott and two Harriman brothers were made senior partners along with Thatcher Brown and Montagu Norman, the notorious Nazi sympathizer. Brown ran the London office while Prescott ran the New York office. Montagu Norman, who often stayed with Prescott when he came to New York, was not only an ex-Brown partner, but his grandfather had led the company during the American Civil War at a time when they were shipping three quarters of the slave cotton to British mills.

 

   Clearly the group had a lot in common.

   

   By 1932, Hitler’s SA and SS troops numbered nearly 400,000 and questions began to surface as to how this madman could have obtained financing. Yet, even as the German government battled his brown shirts in the streets, the Hamburg-Amerika Line was funding propaganda to thwart their efforts.

   In 1933, the efforts of the Nazi financiers paid off and Hitler came to power. That year, Prescott sent Max Warburg to represent the American Ship & Commerce Line on the Hamburg-Amerika’s board of directors. Prescott and Max were old buddies and Warburg was a close friend of Montagu Norman. He was also an executive at Hitler’s Reichsbank. His brothers had run the Kuhn Loeb investment bank that brokered Harriman’s buyout of the bankrupt Union Pacific Railroad back in 1890 when Sam Bush was still head of the Buckeye Steel Casings Co. And he was also a close advisor to Hitler’s Economics Minister, Hjalmar Schacht. Schacht and John Foster Dulles (the man for whom Dulles Airport is named), worked closely to arrange an agreement whereby all trade between the United States and Hitler’s Germany would be funneled through the Harriman International Co. under Oliver Harriman.

 

   It’s nice work if you can get it.

 

   The Dulles’ family ties to Nazi Germany are almost too numerous to list. Two Dulles brothers, partners at the law firm, Sullivan & Cromwell, acted for I.G. Farben, the company that developed Tabun, the nerve gas used by the Nazis. They assisted SKF, a company that supplied 60% of the bearings used by the Third Reich. They acted for the Shroeder Bank which offered Hitler financing before he assumed power on condition he break the trade unions. Allen Dulles, who became the first director of the CIA and sat on the whitewashing Warren Commission, set up business deals between the Nazis and Bush-Harriman-Rockefeller, and sat on the boards of both Standard Oil (Rockefeller) and I.G. Farben. He also set up the notorious BND, Germany’s intelligence-gathering apparatus after the war, with spymaster Reinhardt Gehlen, Hitler’s intelligence chief on the Eastern Front. It was Dulles who recruited Nazi butchers like Gehlen for what soon would become the CIA.

 

   Is it any wonder we’re in the mess we are today?

   

   In 1933, a North German company, Lloyd Co., merged with the Hamburg-Amerika Line. The American Ship & Commerce Co., who owned the Hamburg-Amerika Line, installed a long-time Harriman executive, Christian Beck, to head North American operations while Emil Helfferich, a high-ranking Nazi, presided over the newly-merged company, Hapag-Lloyd. All shipping was accompanied by Nazi guards. The following year, Samuel Pryor—still at Remington where Rockefeller put him―entered into a cartel arrangement with I.G. Farben. Thanks to his efforts, Nazi troops by then were all well armed with American guns.

   After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the Trading With The Enemy Act was enacted and Hapag-Lloyd’s property was confiscated by the government. The stock shares of Union Banking Corp were also seized, and the list of shareholders read like a Who’s Who of Nazi financiers: Prescott S. Bush (director and largest shareholder), “Bunny” Harriman, Cornelis Lievense (president, responsible for all New York banking finances for the Nazis), H.J. Kouwenhoven (director who helped establish UBC as a conduit to Fritz Thyssen, managed the Netherlands office during the Nazi occupation, and served as the director of the German Steel Trust) and two other associates of Bush. Other UBC companies were also seized, including the Seamless Steel Equipment Co. (long managed by Prescott Bush and father-in-law Bert Walker), the Holland-American Trading Corp. as well as Nazi interests in the Silesian-American Corp.     

 

   Okay, okay, wait a minute. Maybe George Bush’s ancestors were involved with the Nazis. But does that make him a Nazi sympathizer?

 

   Not necessarily. It’s a question of, well…family values. The Bush family has consistently demonstrated a contempt for human liberty whenever it stood between them and a profit, and whenever that liberty threatened their financial interests or the interests of their wealthy friends. Just look at W’s dad.

      George Herbert Walker Bush left Yale and entered Brown Brothers Harriman, just like his father. He then entered Dresser, which produced the incendiary bombs dropped on Tokyo and pumps for the Manhattan Project. Dresser later merged to become the logistical giant we know today, Halliburton.

   Bush was also involved with the CIA from its earliest years. In 1953, he formed Zapata Petroleum which became a front for the Nixon-Dulles Bay of Pigs invasion (indeed, the failed CIA invasion of Cuba was dubbed Operation Zapata). His Zapata Offshore had oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico and South America (as well as the Middle East) and it’s been suggested they were used as a cover for CIA arms and drug smuggling operations (strongly suggested).

   In ’54, when the CIA staged their coup in Guatemala, toppling the democratic government for requiring United Fruit to sell its unused land to starving peasants, an endless series of U.S. interventions began. Governments audacious enough to request their land were denigrated as dupes of the Kremlin. And when the Brazilian ambassador asked Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles (who just happened to be a former attorney for United Fruit) if, in fact, he had proof that Guatemala was a Soviet satellite, Dulles answered curtly, “We don’t have that proof, but we’re proceeding as if it must be so.” And when Kermit Roosevelt, the CIA agent who carried out the coup in Iran that same year, briefed Dulles about his activities, “Dulles smiled.” And why not? A new America had emerged. An America poisoned by Nazi collaborators like John and Allen Dulles and a network of like-minded sympathizers. An America that was now in the business of murdering democratically-elected officials overseas who challenged her rapacious elite. Is it really a stretch to imagine that policy extending to domestic politics?

   The connection between Bush and Edwin Pauley is especially telling. Pauley had been a Dulles spy in the Roosevelt and Truman administrations. With the fall of Nazi Germany, Truman made him U.S. representative to the Allied Reparations Committee, which put him in a unique position to negotiate the Yalta reparations to the benefit of Dulles’ wealthy clientele. He was also in a unique position to distract the Soviets long enough for the Dulles brothers to sneak their ill-gotten Nazi gains out of Berlin. And his efforts didn’t go unnoticed. After successfully keeping the Nazi riches in Nazi hands (Dulles), Pauley was sent to Japan to do likewise.

   In 1958 he founded Pauley Petroleum with Howard Hughes and expanded his offshore oil production to Mexico. And in Mexico he laundered CIA money and created slush funds for campaign contributions through the country’s oil monopoly, Pemex, and pumped oil for pennies on the dollar. In fact, it was Pauley who originated the use of Mexican oil fronts for the slush funds that Richard Nixon used for his dirty deeds―a fact Nixon tried to hide by invoking “national security.” And who was Pauley associated with? He was associated with Bush through Zapata and Pemago Oil in 1960 (which, too, served as a front for the Bay of Pigs) and through deals he cut in Mexico. In fact, it was those Mexican deals that rocketed Bush into the political limelight and established him as a protégé of Richard Nixon.

   In 1964, when Bush lost his bid for the Senate, Nixon was there. And in 1972, when Nixon surrounded himself with only his most devoted loyalists, he instructed John Ehrlichman, “Eliminate everyone except George Bush. Bush will do anything for our cause.”

 

   Interesting choice of words, wouldn't you say? "Cause?"

 

   As head of the Republican National Committee, Bush was instrumental in pressing “ethnic émigrés” into service for that “cause” through the Republican Party’s National Heritage Groups Council. That council included a number of genuine pro-Nazi, anti-Semitic organizers, including various Nazi émigrés brought into the United States by the Dulles brothers. One of them, Lazlo Pasztor (who served in the pro-Nazi Hungarian government embassy in Berlin during the war) became a leader in Bush’s ethnic outreach arm, The Coalition of American Nationalities, during his presidential campaign.

   Indeed, one of the main concerns for those in the inner circle when Nixon’s tapes were uncovered, was the chance that Nazi skeletons would be discovered in the Republican closet. There was also the distinct possibility that references to JFK’s assassination would incite a call to reopen the investigation and expose those same individuals. No doubt, this was on his mind when Bush advised Nixon to resign. And when he agreed, Nixon took his tapes with him, leaving historians to fill in the blanks.

   As to our current Bush, the parallels to Hitler are compelling notwithstanding his IQ and seeming inability to complete sentences. Hitler was appointed in 1933. Bush was appointed by the Supreme Court. The Nazi’s burned the Reichstag to seize control by creating an emergency. 9-11 created a similar emergency, and evidence points to foul play. Hitler was granted emergency powers as a result of the Reichstag Fire. So, too, was Bush granted emergency powers through the so-called Patriot Act. Concentration camps opened just after Hitler’s rise. CIA camps were opened overseas just after Bush took office. The Gestapo was formed. So have all intelligence-gathering agencies in the U.S. been subsumed under military tutelage.

 

   The signs are as blatant as they can be. The question is, is anyone listening?

 

   Nefarious forces have always been at work in American politics. But those forces have become so entrenched in the national mindset lately that we find ourselves excusing things like torture and secret prisons, or yawning at the television when we hear that our mail will opened or our phone calls tapped because we belong to a church group or animal rights organization or some other collective that someone, somewhere considers a threat. This challenge to our fundamental system of government must not be met with complacency. Congress must act to assert its control over the Executive Branch. If not, our fate may be no different than that of our overseas brethren. And historians will be left to shake their heads.

                                                   

Andrea Hackett is an freelance journalist, founder of the Las Vegas Dancers Alliance in Nevada, and editor of the Populist Review. She may be contacted at andreahackett@cox.net

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http://www.modernhistoryproject.org/mhp/ArticleDisplay.php?Article=BushCh01#WarIndustry 

 

http://72.14.253.104/search?q=cache:737VQI0RYscJ:emperors-clothes.com/articles/randy/swas5.htm+George+Herbert+Walker+Bush,+Nazi&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=2

http://www.spectrezine.org/resist/bush.htm

http://www.spiritone.com/~gdy52150/timeline.html

http://demopedia.democraticunderground.com/index.php/George_H._W._Bush

A Viable Alternative to The Surge

  Bush is prepared to ask Congress for $5.6 billion to fund his troop surge and an additional $1.2 billion to fund a “jobs program” in Iraq with the claim that his detractors have no viable alternative to that plan. Yet, while that may be true of some members of Congress who feel our continued presence in the Middle East is unequivocal, it’s certainly not true of us here at the Populist Review. And to prove our point, we've compiled a list of alternatives to expanding the war and recommendations on more productive ways to spend the money. So, here goes.

  First let’s look at a few theories surrounding our involvement in the Middle East. The first and most prevalent theory on Iraq is that our leaving would create a power vacuum which would be filled by anti-American terrorists, extending their base of operations and giving them total control over the country’s oil resources. Maybe so. But who exactly benefits from having international conglomerates control Iraq’s oil production? The American people? If Iran were to sweep in today and take control of Iraq’s oil fields, would Americans be stricken by higher gas prices? Would we be struck with higher heating bills? Would the price of oil increase to such a point as to threaten our economy? Perhaps. But how would ExxonMobil’s control of the oil fields be any different? And to those who think it would: are the interests of the American people really so aligned with the interests of ExxonMobil and Chevon as to justify our kids remaining in harm’s way into perpetuity?

   We at the Populist Review think not. So, our first alternative would be to pull our troops out immediately. Call it defeat. Call it cut-and-run. Call it whatever you like. But if international conglomerates like ExxonMobil want to steal Iraq’s oil, which it appears they have, they can damn well pay for their own security force. Our troops have sacrificed enough on the altar of corporate greed. It's high time we brought them back home.

   The next theory is the notion that a troop withdrawal would threaten our national security. This is a favorite on both sides of the aisle. But would it really? The answer is yes if you identify your security with the economic interests of Halliburton and ExxonMobil. The answer is yes if you identify your security with the political security of the ruling elite in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, and the UAE. The answer is yes if you identify your security with the security of Israel. The answer is yes if you identify your security with an ever-expanding network of U.S. bases and overseas prisons, and a head-on assault with the Moslem world. But the answer is a resounding no if you identify your security with a reduction in global hatred toward the United States. And the answer is no if you identify your security with a reduction in the fanaticism that’s made anti-U.S. recruitment as easy as selling coke.

   So, again, we beg to differ. Our security has never been more threatened than it is today thanks in large part to this war and our relentless presence. And expanding that presence will only exacerbate the situation. So our second alternative would be to not only pull our troops from Iraq, but to remove our battleships from the region as well. We need bold action to repair the damage done by this administration and a truly new strategy will only be credible if we end hostilities.

   Of course, with all the money we save by ending this war (indulge us, please), we could initiate any number of social programs. Instead of a jobs program for Iraq, we could start a jobs program here at home. Or how about subsidies for small business owners? Or a self-pay national health plan to cover the 50 million Americans without health insurance? We could inoculate every child in America, pay for No Child Left Behind, offer tuition reimbursement to the millions unable to afford higher education. We could provide jobs for the millions of homeless who’ve fallen through the ever-widening cracks in our social programs. Or how about our veterans? Or how about subsidies for free clinics? Or reducing the cost of prescription drugs for our senior citizens? Or funding alternative energy programs?

  The problem isn't a lack of alternatives to expanding this war. It’s finding the political courage to stand up to entrenched corporate interests and their toadies in government, both here and abroad, who have a stake in our continued commitment. Bush’s plan would expand that commitment at the expense of our troops, our prestige, our security, our economy, our people, and our long-held traditions. Our alternative, however radical it may seem with respect to the mainstream debate, would prevent such sacrifices.

 

                                             

Andrea Hackett is an freelance journalist, founder of the Las Vegas Dancers Alliance in Nevada, and editor of the Populist Review. She may be contacted at andreahackett@cox.net

Populist Posters

   No posting this evening. However, new Populist Posters are available for download under our Wallpaper section. Taken from Soviet-era classics, these revolutionary pics are destined to become classics in their own right. Feisty, controversial, and downright subversive, they're the perfect wallpaper for the revolutionary in your life and guaranteed to add a revolutionary flair to even the most left-leaning desktop. Remember: anyone can have little windows or galaxies flashing across their monitor. Hell, that's probably what President Bush has! But it takes real trooper to slap these babies on the screen for the whole office to see. Go ahead. Take a moment to view them. And let me know what you think. Who knows? With the right encouragement, I might post new ones every week!

Bernie Sanders: The Socialist Senator from Vermont

   Of the 100 senators who’ll set foot in Washington next year, only one has consistently voted to limit the power of government and expand individual freedom: Bernie Sanders, the socialist Representative-turned-Senator from the Great State of Vermont. He voted to stop the Patriot Act from becoming permanent, bucking a flag-waving trend that waylaid our dearest rights. He voted to stop the new bankruptcy laws that squeeze minimum payments from families in fiscal distress. He voted to approve funding for alternative sentencing instead of more prisons. He voted to approve human embryonic stem cell research. He voted to require DNA testing for criminals sentenced to death and maintain the right of habeas corpus in death penalty appeals. He supported a constitutional amendment to ensure equal rights by gender and voted against every attempt to limit a woman’s right to choose. He opposed legislation that allowed the government to snoop through people’s private information at casinos, car dealerships, and travel agencies, and voted to restore $98 million to the National Endowment for the Arts.

  Bernie has vowed to continue that fight in the Senate next year when he joins Ted Kennedy on the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee. He's committed to making health care “a right, not a privelege." He’s committed to expanding Medicare “to include prescription drugs and other…products and services.” He’s promised to expand such programs as the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP); Qualified Medicare Beneficiary (QMB), and Specified Low-income Medicare Beneficiary (SLMB). Such dialog, in itself, would be a welcome change.

  But the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee won't be the only committee graced by our friend from Vermont. He’ll also be on Jeff Bingaman’s Energy Committee, where we expect him to fight for an end to taxpayer subsidies for such cash-bloated giants as ExxonMobil, and push for wholesale, cost-based pricing of electricity and natural gas. He’ll be on the Budget Committee, where we expect him to push for a balanced budget and insist on adequate funding for social programs. He’ll be on the Veteran’s Committee, where we expect him to push for more V.A. hospitals and increased benefits for our soldiers. And he’ll be on Barbara Boxer’s Environmental Committee, where we expect him to fight further rollbacks in environmental protections, investigate the EPA’s cozy relationship with a host of polluters--including DuPont, U.S. Steel, General Electric, ExxonMobil, and Ford Motor—and recommend efforts to stem global warming.

 

   Quite a task for a 65-year old ex-carpenter.

 

  Yet of all these decisive issues, it’s the economy that bothers Bernie Sanders the most. “The first thing I want to do,” he said in a recent interview with Mother Jones magazine. “is…end this stupid discussion about how great the American economy is. The economy is not great. The economy is a disaster for the middle class.”

  Indeed it is. And no one knows that better than Bernie Sanders. The son of an immigrant paint salesman, he saw poverty first hand in the tenement slums of post-war Brooklyn. Money was tight. Workers were underpaid. Life was a constant struggle. It was there he learned to appreciate the rigors of the common man. And it was there he vowed to improve their lives.

  Bernie also takes umbrage with the glaring inequities in the distribution and influence of wealth in this country: “Nobody has seriously looked into [big money] since Wright Patman,” he insists, referring to the old Texas populist and anti-trust crusader who chaired the House Banking Committee for forty years. “Patman [investigated the] concentration of bank ownership. We can do things like that—take a hard look at who owns America.”

   

  We can, Mr. Senator. And we should.

 

   We at the Populist Review―and of course his constituents in Vermont, who’ve sent him to Congress fifteen years in a row―find such eagerness refreshing. And we look to Bernie’s next six years in the Senate with similar anticipation. It’ll take a lot of work to repair the damage wrought by this mercenary administration. But in Bernie Sanders we have the makings of a populist champion. We only hope his vision can surmount the centrist mindset of his colleagues.

                                                   

Andrea Hackett is an freelance journalist, founder of the Las Vegas Dancers Alliance in Nevada, and editor of the Populist Review. She may be contacted at andreahackett@cox.net

Bobby's Legacy

   When JFK tapped his brother to be Attorney General, most saw it as a sinecure. Bobby was thirty-five. His legal experience was limited to a year at Justice and a few years as Chief Council to the Senate’s “Rackets” Committee, investigating such organized crime figures as David Beck and Jimmy Hoffa. It was a brash move, but JFK needed someone he could trust. He had narrowly defeated Richard Nixon in the election and Nixon loyalists were everywhere: generals and key figures in the intelligence community with a stake in preserving the Cold War, gangsters employed by Nixon while orchestrating political assassinations as Dwight Eisenhower’s vice president―a tradition carried on by successive Republican V.P.’s―mobsters in business and organized labor resolute on retaining their toehold in commerce and stranglehold on the American worker, industrialists with a stake in expanding their military contracts, Texas oil men with links to foreign nationalists, right-wing extremists hell-bent on destabilizing the nation, and Americans who saw in Nixon’s red-baiting imperative a sanctuary from the fear he created.

   But Bobby rose to the occasion. And in this America of 1960, an America steeped in racism and powerful special interests, with a shadow government whose barbarous methods had been demonstrated in places like Iran and Guatemala, John and Bobby used their collective power to change the status quo.  

  Predictably, Bobby used his office to target many of the same people he had before. “If we do not,” he said in his days at Justice. “on a national scale, attack organized criminals with weapons and techniques as effective as their own, they will destroy us.” And he was right. Syndicates in America posed a virulent threat to our democracy and needed to be stopped. But organized crime had grown so powerful by that time―with the help of J. Edgar Hoover―and had forged so many ties with government officials that it was virtually impossible to stop them. Organized criminals held the key to America’s dirtiest secrets, and with them, the compromised careers of our public servants.

  So, it was perhaps apropos, given the fact that J. Edgar Hoover obstructed any effort to prosecute his criminal associates, that Bobby broadened his focus to include those issues over which he might ply more substantive influence, most notably integration. And in that arena, there was plenty to do. By 1960, blacks in the South, exasperated at what they saw as reluctance on the part of the federal government to enforce existing integration law, took matters into their own hands. Four blacks in North Carolina staged a sit-in at a lunch counter reserved for whites, inciting similar acts of defiance. “Freedom Riders” rode buses throughout the South, exposing the institutionalized hatred that met them at every station. James Meredith defied the State of Mississippi and enrolled in the state university, sparking widespread violence and prompting JFK to send in federal troops.

  But it was Bobby who really defined JFK’s commitment to civil rights. “We will not stand by or be aloof,” he said. “We will move.” And, in a similar comment on those who maligned the cause of integration: “What is objectionable, what is dangerous, about extremists is not that they are intolerant. The evil is not what they say about their cause, but what they say about their opponents.” In hindsight he might have changed that phrase to ”what they do about their opponents," given the fact his assassination, and the assassinations of JFK, Dr. Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and others could hardly be seen as random (the LAPD took twenty years to release their report on the RFK assassination, despite persistent requests. When they did, photos were missing, evidence discarded, key suspects were never interviewed, including a couple seen fleeing the Mayflower Hotel shouting, “We shot him! We shot him!”) The threat of stigma cannot dissuade the inference that powerful forces were at work to silence our leftist leaders.

  Yet it was a measure of his character that Bobby Kennedy risked his life and favor with entrenched special interests to serve a greater good. And it was that willingness to fight for the little guy, to stand firm in the face of bigotry, violence, exploitation, and political expediency that fueled his lasting legacy--a legacy made all the more poignant by the schemes of our current administration.

  And as we look back today, thirty-eight years after his death, at a time when calls for our withdrawal overseas seem almost anachronistic, it’s tempting to temper our image of Bobby Kennedy with sentimentality. But if we do, we miss the passion that captivated our imagination in the first place. Bobby was nothing if not a fighter. His was a true liberalism, battle-born yet founded on a respect for human dignity. And his life embraced the wisdom of that oft-forgotten adage: Liberties are never granted. They’re taken.

                                                

Andrea Hackett is an freelance journalist, founder of the Las Vegas Dancers Alliance in Nevada, and editor of the Populist Review. She may be contacted at andreahackett@cox.net

Are The Democrats Just Plain Stupid?

   First Nancy Pelosi fractures her party’s unity by supporting an ethically-challenged conservative whose only qualification for Majority Leader is his stance on Iraq. Now, Rep. Charles Rangel (D-NY) plans to submit legislation to reinstate the draft. And not just for people aged 18 to 26, mind you, as he called for in 2003 with support from Pelosi’s Murtha―a proposal he voted against himself―but for people between the ages of 18 to 42. And why? To deter politicians from launching new wars.

  Notwithstanding his cryptic logic, or the fact Harlem voters sent him back to the House to extract their kids from harm’s way, Rep. Rangel continued his rant. “If we’re going to challenge Iran and…North Korea…and send more troops to Iraq, we can’t do that without a draft.” Even Lindsey Graham, the conservative senator from South Carolina who holds a colonel’s rank in the Reserves, disagreed. “I think we can do this with an all-voluntary Army…and if we can't…we'll look for some other option.” But Rangel continued undaunted. This morning, he expanded his inference that Congress will back a proposal for more troops in Iraq by declaring his support for Sen. John McCain, whose plan calls for an “overwhelming” number of troops for the region.

  Our question is this: Is this the same Charlie Rangel who voted against our intervention in Iraq and stated after the Iraq elections that Americans “don’t want their children to die for other people’s freedom”? If so, perhaps he should review the history of public sentiment toward conscription before sinking his party two months before taking their oaths.

  At the start of the Civil War, conscription resulted in wild demonstrations throughout the North and turned especially violent in New York where 50,000 people lit fires and terrorized neighborhoods in what came to be known as the New York Draft Riots. Though many factors contributed to the melees, protesters were particularly miffed at the fact that people of means could opt out of the draft by paying a “commutation fee.” This perception still haunts us today, exacerbated by the antics of George Bush going AWOL without reprisal.

  When President Wilson revived the draft in 1917, immigrant and socialist communities in the Northeast responded with widespread resistance. Violence erupted in the South as well, where rural whites and poverty-stricken blacks took matters into their own hands. In addition, nearly 2,000 conscientious objectors refused to cooperate in any way. John Whiteclaim Chambers, in his well-researched chronicle of the draft during World War I, “To Raise An Army”, estimates that between 2.4 and 3.6 million men avoided the draft in 1917 by refusing to register, countering long-held beliefs in the war’s popularity. His estimates explain the imperative Congress felt when it passed the Espionage Act that same year, expanding the powers of Justice to prosecute draft resisters and citizens who failed to register.

   The first peacetime conscription was instituted in 1940 with the establishment of the Selective Service Training Act. At that time, men were inducted into the army between the ages of 21 and 35 and could only serve in the Western Hemisphere or U.S. possessions or territories, a caveat Mr. Rangel might consider if his goal is to curb U.S. adventurism. Even during World War II, our most popular war by far, over 12,000 conscientious objectors refused to serve and were sent to Civilian Public Service camps throughout the United States.

  Following the "War to End All Wars," Congress extended the draft, then let it expire, then revived it in response to the Cold War. When hostilities broke out in Korea―hostilities in which Mr. Rangel participated―Congress extended the draft again by way of The Universal Military Training and Service Act. It was Barry Goldwater, of all people, who proposed ending conscription, the quintessential hawk. But when Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, and our destiny in Vietnam all but assured, the draft was extended indefinitely.

  Thus began the most divisive and unified draft resistance movement in U.S. history. Thousands took to the streets. Thousands more burned their draft cards or refused to register. An untold number fled to Canada. Some even severed their fingers or toes. In November, 1969, a quarter of a million people swarmed the Capitol to protest the draft and the war it supported. In response, an all-volunteer army was instituted in 1973. That volunteer army continues to this day.

  If Rep. Rangel thinks an increase in troop levels will lessen the chance of military adventures, we beg to differ. Massive troop expansions, on the scale he proposes, would only embolden the Executive branch. And with a third of our population overseas, employers would increasingly turn to undocumented workers to fill their positions (not that they need much prodding). We would therefore find ourselves in the untenable position of having citizens dying in far-off lands for non-citizens who’ve taken their jobs.  

   If a manager can’t manage with finite resources he’s not fit to manage. And if our leaders can’t win their unwanted wars with the current all-volunteer army, perhaps they should try diplomacy. The draft has been, and always will be, political suicide for anyone who supports it. One can only hope Rep. Rangel's fellow Democrats will take their cues from the electorate.

                                                 

Andrea Hackett is an freelance journalist, founder of the Las Vegas Dancers Alliance in Nevada, and editor of the Populist Review. She may be contacted at andreahackett@cox.net

Terms of Impeachment

   Paul Weyrich, considered by many to be the architect of the neocon revolution who founded the Moral Majority, the American Legislative Exchange Council―a powerful lobbying group in Washington that generates “model” bills, resolutions, and policy statements to benefit a corporate elite―and the Heritage Foundation, a radical think tank that spawned such Bush appointees as Kay James, Elaine Chao, and Condolezza Rice, once said, “We are no longer working to preserve the status quo. We are radicals, working to overturn the present power structure of the country.” He went on to characterize his neocon revolution as Maoist, saying: “I believe you have to control the countryside, and the capitol will eventually fall.”

   When the Bushies took power, Karl Rove announced to a gathering of right-wing leaders that the president “had asked the Heritage Foundation…to review all the executive orders put in place by President Clinton…and recommend which ones should be overturned.”

    It was clear this administration would be taking its cues from a radical base hell-bent on subverting democracy.

   Six years later our liberties hang by a thread. The National Security Agency, under orders from President Bush, is compiling a database of every phone call made in the United States [USA Today, May, 2006] despite a ruling that declared the warrantless spying unconstitutional. U.S. citizens can be jailed without charge for indefinite periods of time without access to counsel. They can be denied a trial by jury. They can be convicted without seeing the evidence against them. They can be whisked to secret prisons outside the U.S. and tortured to extract “confessions.”

    Six years later, a war based on fabricated intelligence and military policy directed by the subversive neocons at the Office of Special Plans in the Pentagon is on track to cost the American taxpayer an incredible $2 trillion. How these expenditures served the Vice President through his massive holdings in Haliburton is clear to anyone.

    But are these impeachable offenses? Should the Democratic House and Senate start investigations to lay the groundwork for impeaching the President, Vice President, and Attorney General?

   The answer is a resounding yes.

   Article II, Sec. 4 of the U.S. Constitution 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."

  The phrase, “high crimes and misdemeanors” was expanded upon in a report released by the Justice Department in the midst of the Watergate crisis: “Two points emerge from the 400 years of English parliamentary experience with the phrase ‘high Crimes and Misdemeanors.’ First, the particular allegations of misconduct allege damage to the state in such forms as misapplication of funds, abuse of official power, neglect of duty, encroachment on Parliament¹s prerogatives, corruption, and betrayal of trust. Second, the phrase ‘high Crimes and Misdemeanors’ was confined to parliamentary impeachments; it had no roots in the ordinary criminal law, and the particular allegations of misconduct under that heading were not necessarily limited to common law or statutory derelictions or crimes.”

   Damage to the state through the misapplication of funds? Abuse of official power? Betrayal of trust? Can anyone who knows the facts and holds even a passing interest in the preservation of our democracy claim this administration is not guilty of these impeachable offenses?

   And yet there is little hope the Democratic majorities will initiate impeachment proceedings. With a veto-proof House, the prevailing wind leans move toward pushing legislation and changing the course of the war in Iraq, a misguided strategy that ties the Democrats to the president’s unfolding nightmare and ensures their defeat in 2008.

    If our democracy is to survive we must realize that our nation is at a crossroads. If these crimes go unaddressed, and the perpetrators allowed to continue their march toward despotism, tokens like “troop redeployment” and minimum wage increases will pale in comparison to our lost opportunity. The case for impeachment is clear. Democrats would do well to attend to the business at hand before setting their sights on a giddy agenda.

                                                

Andrea Hackett is an freelance journalist, founder of the Las Vegas Dancers Alliance in Nevada, and editor of the Populist Review. She may be contacted at andreahackett@cox.net

What Price, Bipartisanship?

   The president and his lapdogs in the corporate press have gone to great lengths to characterize Robert Gates, Dubya’s choice to replace Don Rumsfeld at the DoD, as a pensive academic, reluctantly leaving his post at A&M University to serve a country in crisis. The administration claims he’ll bring “fresh eyes” to an embattled Pentagon. ABCNews went so far as to call him the “new secretary of defense,” assuming his confirmation even as the president was calling the incoming Speaker of the House, “Congresswoman Pelosi.”

  But who is Robert Gates, and will his confirmation be as smooth as the press presumes?

  Sadly, in deference to a Democratic obsession to appear bipartisan, the answer to question two is probably yes. But the question of who best to run the Pentagon at a time when our military has spread to every corner of the planet―a military with nearly 800 bases around the world―and a time when the death toll in Iraq and Afghanistan has soared by some estimates to over 600,000 souls, is no less crucial. So, let’s take a closer look.

  Robert Gates was well known through the ‘80’s as man with a knack for spinning intelligence. Indeed, it was this knack that fueled his rise at the CIA from career officer to deputy to the presiding director, Bill Casey. According to Melvin Goodman, former CIA and State Department analyst and senior fellow at the Center for International Policy, Gates spun intelligence on everything. From the Soviet Union to the Middle East, from Southwest Asia to Central America, Gates had a reputation for making hard intelligence fit the will of his political masters. And with the Reagan Administration selling weapons to Iran and Iraq and directing an illegal war in Nicaragua, politicized intelligence was a hot commodity.

  It was this knack, along with his role in the Iran-Contra fiasco―a role he denied, perjuring himself before the Senate Intelligence Committee―that led the committee to reject his nomination in 1987 as CIA Director by an overwhelming 31 votes, more negative votes than incurred by any CIA Director since the agency’s inception. Even Barry Goldwater voted against him, a bipartisan stance rarely invoked by the pundits who pine for the lost days of Reagan’s bipartisanship.

   But the Senate’s rejection wasn’t the end of Bob Gates. Dutiful public servant that he was, he went to work on David Boren―then-Democratic chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee―and Boren’s staff director, George Tenet, the man who would later spin the intelligence that led us to our current debacle in Iraq. Gates promised to run the CIA carefully and told Boren he’d work closely with the Senate Intelligence Committee, vetting covert operations and projects around the world. His guarantees worked. Boren eventually bought into the line and Gates was confirmed in a second nomination.

   As Bill Casey’s right hand man, Bob Gates was a busy guy. He wrote the director’s speeches, and supplied him with briefings and testimony. He offered backdated filings to keep Casey out of hot water with the Senate Intelligence Committee, a committee increasingly frustrated with the director’s antics. He was also well versed on the underhanded dealings of the Reagan Administration. He knew they were arming Saddam Hussein. He knew they were arming Saddam’s enemies in Iran through contacts they’d made during the arms-for-hostages swap engineered to topple Jimmy Carter. He knew the proceeds from those sales were being used to fund a war in Nicaragua, a war declared illegal by the American people. But Bob Gates was nothing if not anxious to please.

  When he left his post at the CIA to become Deputy National Security Advisor to the White House under George Bush, Sr., he was called on the carpet by James Baker for undermining U.S. policy through his efforts to serve his master at the NSA. In 1991, in recognition of his unwavering loyalty to political expedients, if not the American public, he was nominated to head the CIA where he served for three years. During his nomination hearings he denied ever having met with the Iranians to secure a weapons deal to fund our war in Nicaragua. Yet two years later, in a report by the Russians, commissioned by Lee Hamilton―Bob Gates’ compatriot on the much-touted Iraq Study Group―it was shown that he did have these meetings and did, in fact, play a role in the illegal weapons deals with Iranian operatives.

  Will these allegations surface in his confirmation hearings? Will Bob Gates come clean about his involvement in the Iran-Contra scheme? Or will the newly-elected Democratic majority sacrifice our demand for change at the Pentagon on the altar of bipartisanship―a bipartisanship negated by this very nomination?

  These questions remain to be answered. But if the Democrats confirm Robert Gates it will set the stage for a continuation of the war in Iraq, notwithstanding their rhetoric on “redeployment” or the findings of the Iraq Study Group. And if that happens, you can bet your last dinar, the tide of the electorate will swell again. The American public didn't vote for bipartisanship at any cost when they cast their ballots on Election Day. They voted for change. That change begins by rejecting this nomination.

                                                 

Andrea Hackett is an freelance journalist, founder of the Las Vegas Dancers Alliance in Nevada, and editor of the Populist Review. She may be contacted at andreahackett@cox.net

Duck L'Orange

Did anyone ever believe George Bush was capable of bipartisanship? The moment the word left his mouth he announced plans to jam his contentious agenda through the lame duck Congress--John Bolton's confirmation, a bill to legalize the National Security Administration's surveillance of American citizens, a federal spending bill that allows the government to deny funds to states that require doctors to perform abortions, energy legislation that preserves the status quo for his friends in the oil and gas industries, a bill on "civilian nuclear technology" that undermines the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty by sharing technological secrets with India, and Vietnam's inclusion in the WTO over the objections of human rights groups and in spite of Hanoi's policy of detatining political dissidents without charge.

But this duck may never get off the ground.

With Lincoln Chafee's announcment to block Bolton's nomination, the political realities of Tuesday's election have come home to roost and an uphill battle for the Bush/Cheney/Gonzales triumvirate is all but guaranteed. Republicans in Congress, regardless of their idealogical sway, will be slow to alienate their constituents back home and the majority across the aisle, especially for a president with abysmal support. A lot of pork comes up for a vote in two years. And the idealogical center looks a lot safer these days to Republicans.

But is this the end of the neocon revolution? Is the carcass of this morally bankrupt administration waiting anxiously to be whisked from the table, or will it lunge at its satisfied guests like a ghoul from a George Romero film? My guess is the latter. In the absence of congressional support, Bush and his cronies will simply defer to Plan B (or Plan 9, if you prefer) and rely on vetoes and Executive Orders to push their agenda. If that happens, the next two years may well be characterized by gridlock and divisive investigations. A far cry from the "course change" inferred by the election results.

Either way, the American people would do well to temper their optimism.

                                                   

Andrea Hackett is an freelance journalist, founder of the Las Vegas Dancers Alliance in Nevada, and editor of the Populist Review. She may be contacted at andreahackett@cox.net