Tannishblog

The Washington Post notes a contradiction between General Patreus’ testimony and actions taken by his commanders in New Halliburton:

A week ago today, Gen. David H. Petraeus started his rounds on Capitol Hill, reporting that security in Iraq was improving to the point that a small number of troops could begin coming home by year’s end.

But 10 days ago, his commanders in Baghdad began advertising for private contractors to work in combat-supply warehouses on U.S. bases throughout Iraq because half the soldiers who had been working in the warehouses were needed for patrols, combat and protection of U.S. forces.

I see a precedence occurring here: Respond to the Cries of the American public, media and congressional pressure to lower troop levels by replacing them with Mercenaries.
That’s right! We’re not supposed to use that word; private security companies don’t like it - it gives them a bad image, or something…

But since the dictionary says:

mer·ce·nar·y /ˈmɜrsəˌnɛri/
–adjective
1. working or acting merely for money or other reward; venal.
2. hired to serve in a foreign army, guerrilla organization, etc.
–noun
3. a professional soldier hired to serve in a foreign army.
4. any hireling.

I can only assume a corporation willing to work in a foreign nation as part of an outside army (albeit from the same nation, but NOT enlisted in that nation’s armed forces), willing to provide tactical and logistical assistance to a national military, can indeed be defined as a Corps of Mercenaries.

So while the quagmire continues and public support wanes, the Administration is orchestrating a bait-and-switch by replacing one set of soldiers for another. All they have to worry about is how to funnel the cost of their Shadow Army into the defense budget. Shouldn’t be too difficult.

Today’s Washington Post reports on the resurgence of Al-Qaida. They haven’t been sitting idle while We’ve been distracted by George Bush’s Excellent Iraqi Adventure. On the contrary; while the American Media has been obsessed with the scene in New Halliburton, our "friends" in Nuclear Pakistan have been harboring terrorists. Remember Bush’s tough talk about nation who would stoop so low?  How we wouldn’t tolerate that? Just another in the long list of little white lies emanating from the White House.

Dodging the U.S. military in Afghanistan after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, al-Qaeda Central reconstituted itself across the Pakistani border, returning to the rugged tribal areas surrounding the organization’s birthplace, the dusty frontier city of Peshawar. In the first few years, Pakistani and U.S. authorities captured many senior leaders; in the past 18 months, no major figure has been killed or caught in Pakistan.

As for the War on Terrorism ™, we’ve had the same luck as we’ve had on the War on Drugs ™ or the War on Poverty ™; bad luck. In fact, I can’t remember American winning a war since Korea. We did win that one, right? It seems the days of America winning all of its wars is long past.

Today, al-Qaeda operates much the way it did before 2001. The network is governed by a shura, or leadership council, that meets regularly and reports to bin Laden, who continues to approve some major decisions, according to a senior U.S. intelligence official. About 200 people belong to the core group and many receive regular salaries, another senior U.S. intelligence official said.

"They do appear to meet with a frequency that enables them to act as an organization and not just as a loose bunch of guys," the second official said.

We’ve been led to believe otherwise:

"Thanks to President Musharraf’s leadership, on the al-Qaeda front we’ve dismantled the chief operators," Bush said. Although bin Laden was still at large, his lieutenants were "no longer a threat to the United States or Pakistan," Bush added.

But then as Keith Olberman noted, the President has been "playing" us.

Six months later, Musharraf was nearly killed in an assassination attempt by al-Qaeda operatives. Shortly afterward, a group of al-Qaeda leaders held a summit of their own in the Pakistani region of Waziristan, where they plotted fresh attacks thousands of miles away in Britain, including targets in London and financial institutions in the United States, according to Pakistani officials.

Many U.S., Pakistani and European intelligence officials now agree that al-Qaeda’s ability to launch operations around the globe didn’t diminish after the invasion of Afghanistan as much as previously thought.

As American’s learned during the Cold War (did we win that one?), a government can get  away with anything once a "clear and present danger" can be seen to exist. As we’ve learned to our dismay during this presidency, the danger need not be real. Repeat after me: "Weapons of Mass Destruction." Very good.

Al-Qaida is a real threat. Perhaps that’s why we let Osama Bin Laden escape into the unruly hills of Pakistan, so our leaders can perpetuate the Cold War mentality among the American people so lucrative to what’s left of America’s industrial base, i.e. the Defense Industry.

So as long as the bullet makers need to sell bullets, America needs a bad guy - a bogeyman - to sell to its voters as a National Security threat. If enough people fear, not leeway is given lawmakers to erode freedom, promote questionable business practices abroad, and to invade sovereign nations. If the people fear enough, America can be morphed into a police state in the mane of Homeland Security. That is not the America the veterans of World War Two we’re dying for.

Let us not forget that the last nation that rallied its people "for the Fatherland," used the same tactics we see today. Zieg Heil!

That’s exactly what I asked myself as I clicked the link at Digg.com. The resulting Wall Street Journal article highlights the emerging netroots efforts surrounding the Republican dark horse Presidential candidate. Not having paid much attention to the Re-thug-lican party, I hadn’t heard of him.

Further along the page of hot Diggs is another mention of Ron Paul, this one from a blogger concerned about America’s emerging governance trend. Here I find an article by the man himself, snipped for rapid propagation. I’ll highlight what caught my fancy:

Our love for liberty above all has been so diminished that we tolerate intrusions into our privacy that would have been abhorred just a few years ago. We tolerate inconveniences and infringements upon our liberties in a manner that reflects poorly on our great national character of rugged individualism. American history, at least in part, is a history of people who don’t like being told what to do. Yet we are increasingly empowering the federal government and its agents to run our lives.

Terror, fear, and crises like 9-11 are used to achieve complacency and obedience, especially when citizens are deluded into believing they are still a free people. The loss of liberty, we are assured, will be minimal, short-lived, and necessary. Many citizens believe that once the war on terror is over, restrictions on their liberties will be reversed. But this war is undeclared and open-ended, with no precise enemy and no expressly stated final goal. Terrorism will never be eradicated completely; does this mean future presidents will assert extraordinary war powers indefinitely?

Is this man the John Galt of our era? Probably not. But he’s got my attention.

So. Alberto Gonzalez is out. People are starting to flake off this presidency like a leper’s skin. Gonzo’s perhaps the flakiest of the bunch.

Perhaps that’s not the best metaphor. Did you ever see cockroaches scatter when the light switches on? The longer the roach light shined, the less Gonzo could remember. Pictures of him last week had him looking like a deer in headlights. But that confounds the imagery.

The spotlight on Alberto must have been too much for the guy George Bush has so much confidence in. Has anyone asked the President about what is he confident? Could it be in Al’s ability to politicize the Justice Department? Or His willingness to take the hatchet?

I’m not saying the Democrats going after this cockroach are enlightened, but the pointed questions are so overdue. We may never get to the bottom of the dung heap people like Gonzalez are sacrificing their careers to obfuscate. And time is running out.

Why should Alberto stay anyway? He’ll be replaced by the next administration in a few month’s time; he’ll not be able to get real work done now that his credibility is in question. What’s the point? On the other hand, why leave? Our “Resoloot” leader will install another hack to continue the deal. If the Democrats screech, as is likely, then the few flakes that are left can cry about obstruction - whatever.

It’s all so stupid, really. One thing’s for sure: none of this, from either camp, serves the American People. That’s a shame.

My favorite righty blogger friend sites an article exposing a Y2K bug data glitch in US temperature data graphs used to project climate change as the Holy Grail of truth to prove her long-held hypothesis that global warming is a scam. I don’t blame her, though. She’s entitled. Most bloggers only rely on sources they are predisposed to agree with to parse their rhetoric. I do it all the time…

What alarms me is how she clearly ignores other signs of climate change. The recently exposed islands in Greenland that, so long covered in thick ice, had always been thought to be connected to the main land mass. The satellite photos of recent large-scale fractures in Antarctic Glaciers. The sinking of small island-states like Trinidad-Tobago. Even the changed migration of Canadian geese, much noted here in Illinois where we both live, is a fact ignored in favor of an irrational belief.

And what about the problem-that-shouldn’t-be-named? No one mentions pollution these days. That shopworn buzzword of the last century is taboo in the tabloids lately. My aforementioned friend lives in a semi-rural small town where, I surmise, she can forget the sight of sunrise over the Kennedy Expressway in all it’s brownish, hazy glory. Nor, I think, can she envision the silt of airliner fuel exhaust that coats my car every evening, as I leave the industrial park that nestles next to O’hare Field. While her neighbors dream of corn fields of ethanol-grade hybrid grain, I awake to the reality of human congestion flavored by addiction to fossil fuels.

Global Warming, as a catch-phrase, has unfortunate connotations. Replacing it with Climate Change is, while more accurate, less visceral, and less likely to get our fat arses out of the easy chair to take action. What needs doing is simply to open our eyes. When we can see for ourselves the thickening of our thin atmosphere from our own collective wastes, then perhaps we can make pollution the center point of a political movement to care for the fragile ecosphere we all rely upon. Only through politics will America take up the sword against our most insidious of enemies: ourselves.

The right may scoff. Let them. When we can gather enough steam to provide purchasable alternatives to old-school technologies, then the market to which Conservatives pray will put out of business whole industries that refuse to ride the forefront of ecological stewardship. When hit in the wallet, they will finally listen. As for the exurbian naysayers; the brown skies will find then soon enough.

The White House proposes a $20 billion arms sale to Saudi Arabia. Can you believe this? The same nation that birthed Osama Bin Laden is offered high-tech weapons and upgrades to fighter jets by the nation that suffered from the same man’s obsessions: Freaking brilliant.

It’s just business as usual for the military-industrial Corporatocracy. "Who?" you ask. (Or maybe "What’s he getting on about?") You know, the people who have the money to influence elections, buy presidencies and profit on war and bloodshed; the people who really run this country. I cannot imagine that the founders of this country - in their worst nightmares - would have imagined the nation they strived so hard to create fall into the role of an unscrupulous gun seller. Kind of give new meaning to "Wild West."

Can our government get more out of touch with the will of it’s people? Can it get more arrogant? More defiant?

Yes. Things can always worsen. But I believe the bottom has been reached. The political pendulum is swinging away from rampant capitalism, pre-emptive aggression, and wanton destruction. We are moving away from the narrow, selfish greed of a well-placed few and steering the the nation back toward a sense of stewardship of it’s people and their needs.

Congress must stop this deal. But even the Democrats in congress will accept this hypocrisy if the American people don’t make a lot of noise against this move. Our unwillingness to cry foul in the face of political idiocy has gotten us into the mess we’re in. Will we, in our silence enable our nation to continue to be the butcher of the world through it’s insistence of selling war material to anyone who will pay?

What kind of future will that bring? There is only one logical end to such maneuvering: traffic in the tools of blood, and blood is the product. Only by a concerted effort of millions of Americans will this cease. Let’s make a new America: one that doesn’t profit from destruction.

Don’t expect congress to do this for us.

The NY Times’ Quote of the Day illustrates how broken our legislative process has become:

"Coal and nuclear count their lobbying budgets in the tens of millions. We count ours in the tens of thousands."
RHONE RESCH, president of the Solar Energy Industries Association

Where there is money, there is corruption. Our government no longer cares about steering the ship of state, nor is it concerned about helping it’s people. It gives no thought to securing a future of any kind, let alone a visionary future like the kind we dreamed during the space race.

The concern of our government, comprised of millionaires and elitists, is to further the padding of their wallets. Our congressmen (and women) are slaved to their own greed, puppets of corporate interests and are sold to the highest bidder. They are commodities in a futures market of votes as volatile as any exchange market on Wall Street. They have lost their way.

And people wonder why so few Americans bother to vote…

Finally, after weeks of testimonies, accusations, hearings and subpoenas, attempts at oversight and retroactive accountability, conservative bloggers have something to crow about. Two cars were found yesterday in London that were crudely rigged for detonation. This is great news for the embattled right. Now, they can get busy bolstering flagging support for a fail mission, stoking the fires of fear and strutting their ideology again. They can echo their Commander in Chief’s word about this age being the battleground for the fate of civilization itself.

Notwithstanding the fact that the two car bombs were identified and defused, were, in fact, crude and bungled attempts, supporters of Neo-Con Artistry now have "proof" of how dangerous the world is and how necessary their pre-emptive aggression. Again can they drive forward a God-given agenda of pre-Armageddon policy so they can have a front seat at The Rapture. Ahh! Sweet vindication!

Using what Al Gore would call “the language and politics of fear” to try to “drive the public agenda without regard to the evidence, the facts or the public interest,” the British Government spins it this way:

British Home Secretary Jacqui Smith said, "We’re currently facing the most serious and sustained threat to our security from international terrorism."

Meanwhile, the feeling on the street was quite different.

Some Londoners seemed unfazed by the news of the botched attacks. “It’s something you get used to, living in London,” said Andrew Fowler, a 39-year-old lawyer sipping coffee at an outdoor cafe near Piccadilly. “And given the stance our government made on the war in Iraq and elsewhere, I think we are just getting used to being a target.”

[…]

“It’s only when I got to work that I realized what was happening,” said Renee Anderson, 32, a New Zealander from her country’s nearby diplomatic mission. “I feel surprisingly all right about it. We all kind of thought, ‘Well, you could be hit by a bus anyway.’ ”

Yeah, the world is a dangerous place. Even more so since the accelerated advancement of American Economic Imperialism so nakedly perpetrated by the Bush Administration. But it’s not more dangerous than ever. London had it worse in the 1940’s, American had it worse in the 1860’s. Life goes on…

It boils down to personal choice: One can cower in fear or get on with life. As long as people advocate a "God and Country" mentality to the exclusion of responsible social politics, the world will continue to be hazardous. How to deal with that is up to you.

My Buddha nature is in remission today. I’m bitter and despondent regarding my blog, the news and most everything else. As a result, the following is an unedited rant. You have been warned.

WTF!?! STFU!!! Whew! I feel better. The state of the nation SUCKS these days. I cannot believe we’ve fallen so far from grace as a country, a people and a culture. It’s disgusting. From the outrageous claims of a rogue Vice President to cronyism and incompetence in government offices, from belated oversight committees trying to sort out truth to political appointees committing perjury when not suffering from selective amnesia, the sorry state of our nations is abysmal.

So what do the news editors offer us? Paris Hilton and Anne Coulter. These two women should NOT be in the news. One is an anorexic, ugly, bleached blonde and spoiled brat drug addict, who would be dead of an overdose in a back alley if not for the privileges afforded by vast wealth. A non-wealthy, non-white person of similar age, childishness and physique would never be paid such attention. Who cares? How is the travails of a immature bimbo newsworthy?

And the other… Anne Coulter is an attention whore. I mean that literally. She will say anything to make money. There are no depths too deep. She makes money being outrageous, controversial, adversarial and hateful. She cannot possibly believe all she spouts; anyone who truly harbored that much sociopathic bile would have shot up a Burger King long ago. She’s a charlatan. The only reason she gets air time is to bolster media’s capacity to sell advertisements. Controversy sells. Outrage sells. Sensationalism sells. Anne Coulter should be ignored. By reacting as Elizabeth Edwards has, by caller her out in prime time, we feed the beast credentials. That’s the worst thing to do. Given that Coulter’s words helped raise cash for the Edward’s campaign, it’s clear political motivations abound on both sides of the issue.

What does this say about a culture that so worships the dollar we will condone any insanity to feed the Demon of Economy. Willow faux-blondes acting out will grab eyeballs for the media to shove adverts at. Money is the core of Ms. Coulter’s behavior; greed. Money is the root of Paris’ problems; unearned affluence. Money is the mechanism by which media outlets force feed un-newsworthy antics to us instead of handling the truly important stories.

But then, Money is behind all of those, too. The Iraq war, unarguably the biggest problem in our world today, is only a business deal. It’s just another phase in American global economic imperialism. But, that’s not newsworthy; that’s not even "news."

On June 19, 1964, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was approved after surviving an 83-day filibuster in the United States Senate. A recreation of the NY Times front page article is available here.

Voting for the bill were 46 Democrats and 27 Republicans. Voting against it were 21 Democrats and six Republicans.

Except for Senator Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia, all the Democratic votes against the bill came from Southerners.

Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona voted against the bill, as he said yesterday he would. The five other Republicans opposing it all support Mr. Goldwater’s candidacy for the Republican Presidential nomination.

[…]

The bill passed by the Senate outlaws discrimination in places of public accommodation, publicly owned facilities, employment and union membership and Federally aided programs. It gives the Attorney General new powers to speed school desegregation and enforce the Negro’s right to vote.

The Senate bill differs from the House measure chiefly in giving states and local communities more scope and time to deal with complaints of discrimination in hiring and public accommodations. It allows the Attorney General to initiate suits in these areas where he finds a "pattern of discrimination, but does not permit him, as did the House bill, to file suits on behalf of individuals.

As for the filibuster, it was the longest verbal blockade in congressional history. Those good-ol’-boys sure didn’t want blacks to vote. If I didn’t know better, I’d think they felt guilty about something and feared the possibility of political retribution caused by a black voting block.

Forty-three years ago, this was. Still we struggle with the same issue. TPM Muckraker notes today notes Hans von Spakovsky, a Republican nominee for commissioner at the Federal Election Commission, has testified before the Senate Rules Committee against allegations that he orchestrated the suppression of vote fraud cases against black voters in various states.

Von Spakovsky blocked a major suit against a St. Louis suburb and two other suits against rural governments in South Carolina and Georgia and halted at least two investigations of election laws that appeared to suppress minority voting, one of them in Wyoming, said Joseph Rich, the former voting rights section chief….

Monday’s letter included the first allegations that von Spakovsky torpedoed suits and investigations over alleged state, county or local laws that diminish the voting strength of African-Americans, Native Americans or other minorities or prevent them from voting altogether.

Von Spakovsky, the letter said, stripped the voting rights section chief of his authority to open investigations of discrimination without his superiors’ approval.

Some things don’t change, even when they should. All Americans deserve the right to vote. What I find notable of the extreme right activists that have our Great Experiment by the proverbial gonads, is their unuttered, unanimous definition of an American: White, wealthy and preferably Christian. Others need not apply.

This world view is as inaccurate as it is anachronistic. In the University of Chicago’s SSA magazine (of the School for Social Service Administration, Vol. 14 issue 1,) an article highlights recent research on multiracial identity and society. (Because I don’t condone the fallacy of "race," I’ll use the phrase "hyphenated Americans.") Such research avenues are new due to the changes made in the 2000 Census when respondents were able for the first time to list all ethnic groups with which they identify.

Some facts from the article: 

• As much as 20% of Americans will consider themselves as hyphenated Americans by 2050.
• Nearly a quarter of the US population in 2002 was immigrants and their children
• In the 2000 census, 2.4% of the population identified with more than one ethnic group, equaling 6.8 million respondents, 2.8 million of whom were under 18.

In the nineteenth century labels such as "mullato" and "mixed-blood" were used not only in attempt to classify the population, but to reinforce class divisions and strata. Now, while we have widened choice and expanded our visions, we still have a long way to go.

"Our people has had a mixed race people for a long time," Ann Morning, an assistant professor in the department of sociology as New York University points out. "But now that the OMB lets poeple mix-and-match in a way they didn’t in the past, sociologists and demographers are picking up the baton and thinking about the context of mixed race. Part of the reason we are acknowledging it now is that in some ways racial classification doesn’t matter. Before, race dictated who you could marry, where you could live, and it was a way to enforce class."

Racial identity is fluid, researchers have discovered, dependant upon social groups and circumstances. Gina Samuels, whose research focuses in the white-black transracial experience, is quoted in the SSA article:

"The one-drop rule says if you have any black heritage you should be identified as black. But developing an identity is more complicated than that. The idea that one racial heritage always trumps another, or that identities are fixed and don’t change, does not reflect how many multiracials develop a racial-ethnic sense of self," says Samuels, who herself is multiracial and adopted. "It is much more complex than just identifying how society views and individual, or the individual simply choosing any identity he or she wishes. It’s the individual and society operating simultaneously, at different force, and one’s daily context that shapes identity across one’s lifetime."

[…]

Samuels also found that people don’t necessarily identify themselves the same way all the time. High school students among African-American friends or family call themselves black, while with their white friends or relatives, they may say they are mixed race. "And what someone calls themselves when they are 10 may be different then when they are 30 or change again at 40," she adds.

So what of the experiences of the millions of multicultural teenagers in America? Learning one’s identity is of paramount importance during the middle school years. This can be difficult for kids of only one ethnicity. Hyphenated Americans must deal with cultural discrimination from many directions every day.

As if to illustrate the problems of acceptance for multiracial children… hard right extremists used the results (of recent research) as ammunition for their arguments for limiting immigrations and interracial relationships. "I was surprised by that reaction. That is exactly what puts these kids in trouble," says researcher Yoonsun Choi, "If people hate me because of my article, that’s okay, I’m misunderstood. But if this is what these kids have to deal with every day, then we have to do better."

Being of one ethnicity or another is not problematic. The desire to promote dominance of one racial group over another, however, is a problem - as with the legendary filibuster in 1964 and the recent allegations of vote suppression and a lack of response by appointees in key government bureaus shows. American history is full of examples of race relations be used to promote the welfare of European descendents at the expense of others. This is a huge black mark in our nations history and in the history of civilization.

I maintain that racial divisions are fictitious. The concepts of race is a tool for suppression which has no basis fact. Recent work in the field of genetics and DNA sequencing support my theory that since we all can interbreed, be must therefore be only one breed of mammal. Mankind can only progress when it removes the chains of outdated societal modes and embrace our true unity. The world is getting smaller, cultures are intermingling in ways unprecedented, strengthening our genome and merging into one race. We’ve always been that. Soon (if we don’t kill ourselves in the process,) humanity will be so mixed as to negate the conceived racial divide for good.

I can’t wait.