Wednesday, May 05, 2004

Posted here Wednesday, May 05, 2004 at 8:43:48 PM     And Andreas's little book: Addicted to War by Joel Andreas. The cost: "In other words, the government has spent more on the military over the last four decades than the value of all the factories, machinery, roads, bridges, water and sewage systems, airports, railroads, power plants, office buildings, shopping centers, schools, hospitals, hotels, houses, etc, in this country put together!" ********

Posted here Wednesday, May 05, 2004 at 8:21:15 PM     Well, it is important to read Friedman in tomorrow's NYT. He goes as far as to suggest Bush needs to fire Rumsfeld and deeply change. Odds? Not favorable. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/06/opinion/06FRIE.html  ********

Posted here Wednesday, May 05, 2004 at 8:11:29 PM     Once things start to move, then the media is sensitized, and more such stories are found. Are Bush days nearly over? EDITOR-IN-CHIEF OF U.S.-FUNDED IRAQI NEWSPAPER QUITS, COMPLAINING OF AMERICAN CONTROL By Lee Keath Associated Press / Boston Globe May 3, 2004 http://www.boston.com/dailynews/124/world/Editor_in_chief_of_U_S_funded_P.shtml BAGHDAD, Iraq - The head of a U.S.-funded Iraqi newspaper quit and saidMonday he was taking almost his entire staff with him because of American interference in the publication. On a front-page editorial of the Al-Sabah newspaper, editor-in-chief Ismail Zayer said he and his staff were ''celebrating the end of a nightmare wehave suffered from for months ... We want independence. They (the Americans) refuse.'' Al-Sabah was set up by U.S. officials with funding from the Pentagon soon after the fall of Saddam Hussein last year. Since its first issue in July, many Iraqis have considered it the mouthpiece of the U.S.-led coalition, along with the U.S.-funded television station Al-Iraqiya. ********

Posted here Wednesday, May 05, 2004 at 7:08:42 PM     I find this essay hopeful, reminding us of an America that can be, because it (sort of) was. http://www.lewrockwell.com/roberts/roberts44.html Neoconservatives Are Anti-American When Bush says that torture is not indicative of American values, he is speaking of the old America, the America of restraint, the America that did not believe that the ends justify the means, a classically educated America that understood that hubris brings nemesis. The new emerging America is Jacobin. Its will to power has cast off restraint. Its inherent and unique virtue gives it the right - Bush says the duty - to exercise unlimited power in the name of enforcing American values elsewhere in the world. The new aggressive spirit of America is embodied in the neoconservative ideology that drives the Bush administration. Professor Claes Ryn describes this new spirit in his recent book, America the Virtuous. It is an imperialistic spirit whose arrogant moral purpose justifies mowing down whatever is seen to stand it its way. Those most imbued with this spirit are trapped firmly within it. If Iraqis resist military imposition of US values, then they must be "thugs and outlaws" deserving to be exterminated for standing in the way of America?s virtue and superior morality. Only evil people would resist the good we are imposing on them. Thus has Bush cast the conflict as one of good vs. evil. Some US soldiers have caught the spirit that Bush has infused into the conflict. If you pay attention to Bush?s speeches, you will see that he is trying to infuse this spirit into the American people. Beware. It is an evil spirit. Because it brooks no objection, it will bring a police state at home and death and destruction abroad, just as the Jacobins brought to 18th century France and Europe. Americans must understand that the neo-Jacobin spirit that guides the Bush administration is anti-American. It is not unpatriotic to resist this spirit. It is the same evil spirit that motivated Deutschland uber alles (Germany over all). Just as the Nazi claim to be the master race trumped all traditional moral standards, the neoconservatives claim that America is uniquely virtuous justifies America?s domination over the rest of the world. Unless Americans stand firm against this spirit, Americans will endure endless wars and great disasters. May 5, 2004 Dr. Roberts is John M. Olin Fellow at the Institute for Political Economy and Research Fellow at the Independent Institute. He is a former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal and a former assistant secretary of the U.S. Treasury. He is the co-author of The Tyranny of Good Intentions. ********

Posted here Wednesday, May 05, 2004 at 5:38:45 PM     Here is an important piece of logic. (the numbers are not precise, but you get the sense).   The median income has increased 20% in real dollars since 1990.   The income of the top one percent has gone up 500% in this period.   The cost of a house has gone up 300%.   Note that means that for the median family the cost of the house is up, or 15 times as much as their income has gone up. But for the top 1% the cost of a house has fallen almost in half!! ********

Posted here Wednesday, May 05, 2004 at 12:20:10 PM     overheard In terms of American Revolutionary treatment of POW's, in at least one instance, Hessian POW's were kept at Monticello by Thomas Jefferson and I believe, from readings on this point, treated as dinner guests or house guests during their internment there. ********

Posted here Wednesday, May 05, 2004 at 12:01:43 PM     From Martha Nussbaum's Upheavals of Thought. (hinting at why humanities  thinking is crucial to strentghten our understanding...) (she is discussing Dante and the perspectives on love). The love of Dante and Beatrice is, then, a love that respects subjecthood *ular manner in which it is mingled here with passivity, with what we might call the romance of grace. To that extent, it recognizes the fact that each person is a distinct individual, having only a single life to live. Is it also a love of the qualitatively particular? It is among the poem's most central concerns to establish that it is. In taking this stand, Dante's Thomistic view argues against the Augustinian tradition, according to which much of the qualitative particularity of persons - their flaws and faults, their idiosyncrasies, their very bodies and their histories - are all incidental accretions from the world of sin, to be disregarded in the context of redemption. Augustine still wishes to maintain that each soul is a distinct individual, a new beginning, having its own life to live.29 And yet, he omits so much of the lives individuals have actually led that we wonder, in the end, whether the integrity of their distinctive individual engagements has been preserved. Here we see a link between the two components of individuality: insofar as our qualitative particularity expresses wnat we have made of ourselves, the distinctive lives we have led, to treat those particular traits as inessential is to fail to respect the integrity of our personal distinctness. Reacting against Augustine's treatment of persons, Dante emphasizes these components of particularity throughout the poem, as he does most strikingly in the scene with which I began. page 572     ********

Posted here Wednesday, May 05, 2004 at 10:43:07 AM     This is an amazin specimen of Bush's thinking, the landscape of concepts.. Secondly, in order to make good decisions, I've got to listen to smart people. I like to be around smart, intelligent, capable people. I like to walk into a roomful of people like Condi Rice -- (applause) -- Dick Cheney or Don Rumsfeld or Colin Powell. (Applause.) I like to tell people the Oval Office is the powerful place. People will stand outside the Oval Office, and they say, I can't wait to get in there and tell him what for. And then they open the door, and they walk in this majestic shrine to democracy, and they're overwhelmed by the atmosphere. And they say, man, you're looking beautiful, Mr. President. (Laughter.) Which means, you better have people around you who tell you the truth. (Laughter.)" Pat of what is interesting is that he clearly is being made aware that he is being portrayed as not talking to even small groups of people in the whitehouse. ********

Posted here Wednesday, May 05, 2004 at 9:41:15 AM     From www.talkingpointsmemo.org -- Josh Marshall But if the cause be not good, the King himself hath a heavy reckoning to make when all those legs and arms and heads, chopp'd off in a battle, shall join together at the latter day and cry all 'We died at such a place'- some swearing, some crying for a surgeon, some upon their wives left poor behind them, some upon the debts they owe, some upon their children rawly left. I am afeard there are few die well that die in a battle; for how can they charitably dispose of anything when blood is their argument? Now, if these men do not die well, it will be a black matter for the King that led them to it; who to disobey were against all proportion of subjection. King Henry V Act IV, Scene I ********

Posted here Wednesday, May 05, 2004 at 9:26:37 AM     A lack of Bush leadership in Mideast media.. here is a very good longish article describing the attempts and the failures. It looks like this never had high profile. And my view is that in the non-conversational follow the chain administration, nothing has high profile. http://www.techcentralstation.com/050304B.html And this excellent description, also from counterpunch Against an impressive amount of warnings, from a wide variety of sources, including the intelligence community, as to the complexity of the Iraqi situation and the high risks involved in letting loose, imprudently, the long-compressed popular dynamics in that country, the Bush administration chose to listen only to a very specific set of "experts": the Pentagon's friends among the Iraqi opposition in exile. The most symptomatic of them in my view is Kanan Makiya-a man who has much been quoted as part of a neocon cabal led by former "Trotskyites" that took the helm of U.S. foreign policy, according to a somewhat phantasmagoric view propagated by both liberal and conservative circles. ********

Posted here Wednesday, May 05, 2004 at 9:18:20 AM     This excellent quote from Counterpunch from C Wright Mills http://www.counterpunch.org/ Bush's Cakewalk into the Iraq Quagmire By GILBERT ACHCAR In an important book first published in 1958 and unjustifiably underrated since- probably due to its title, The Causes of World War Three, referring to the tensest years of the Cold War-C. Wright Mills expressed views the relevance of which should be obvious today. I consider these views central to any understanding of modern U.S. politics. That is why I hope you will excuse me if I quote some of them at length: "[I]n those societies in which the means of power are enormous in scope and centralized in form a few men [in the following sentences, we may now ad: "and women"­G.A.] may be so placed within the historical structure that by their decisions about the use of these means they modify the structural conditions under which most men live." "At the top [of the United States] there has emerged an elite whose power probably exceeds that of any small group of men in world history, the Soviet elite possibly excepted. The middle levels are often a drifting set of stalemated forces; the middle does not link the bottom with the top." "Corporation men move into the political directorate, and the decline of Congressional politicians to the middle levels of power is accelerated. The legislative function often becomes merely a balancing of sovereign localities and partial interests Behind the increased official secrecy great decisions are made without benefit of public or even of Congressional debate." "The leading men of the U.S. government--the political directorate-are neither professional party politicians nor professional civil servants; they are former generals and former corporation men or the hangers-on of the higher business and legal circles. The state in which we live, in its personnel and in its persistent outlook, does indeed appear at times as a committee of these ruling circles of corporation and high military." At the time of his writing, Mills ascribed to these ruling circles a foreign policy based on what he called "crackpot realism." They are "so rigidly focused on the next step that they become creatures of whatever the main drift-the opportunist actions of innumerable men-brings In crackpot realism, a high-flying moral rhetoric is joined with an opportunist crawling among a great scatter of unfocused fears and demands." ********

Posted here Wednesday, May 05, 2004 at 8:23:01 AM     CACI, the security company, deeply involved, has a conference call on line. http://www.shareholder.com/caci/MediaRegister.cfm?MediaID=11843 ********

Posted here Wednesday, May 05, 2004 at 8:11:23 AM     The weekend was spent on personal business. Sorry for the delay. The weekend, in so far as it was concerned with the US and its footprint in Iraq, was horrible. I am sure most of us feel deeply dirtied by this regime, unthinking, unstrategic, unable to understand symbol, feeling, empathy, compassion, and reduces leadership to up and down the chain, no cross conversations, no learning, self absorbed and self righteous.I am beginning to think that we may be at the end of the presidential logic and need to turn to a parliamentary system and an enhanced public ethic. The tendency of the President to become emerial is too strong an inducement. Blair is bad enough, but not enarly as inaccessible, as he has to face parliament nearly every working day. I note in the announcements  about the prison one good thought. Miller was brought in from Guantanamo Bay a month ago to take over the U.S. detention and interrogation operation in Iraq after a report found serious abuses had occurred last year at Abu Ghraib, where Saddam Hussein once had thousands tortured. "I will personally guarantee that this will not happen again in any of the operations we have for detention and intelligence gathering," Miller said after showing reporters round the jail. He said we would ask the Red Cross if it would set up a permanent presence at Abu Ghraib to monitor activities there. http://news.ft.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=FT.com/StoryFT/FullStory&;c=StoryFT&cid=1083180292616 But hey, why not close it? Now, a problem is, Miller, coming from Guantanamo, may not have been a good choice. But what is most on my mind is, how deep will this cut? The world has been moved by this. Will the US, its government, its citizens? I am not wise enough in the dynamics of media and public mood to know. ********