Author: BobHiggins

Photo by Belize.com

Over the last several years as more people, organizations and governments began to take the prospect of global warming and human influenced climate change more seriously there has arisen a kind of 60 cycle background hum over the potential dangers of social unrest, disease, famine and mass movements of populations resulting from such change.

A few days ago while randomly browsing on the web I read an article at the Kansas City Star that sent a quick chill through my bloodstream: “Intelligence director: Worldwide economic crisis top U.S. security threat.
The story, by McClatchy writer Warren Strobel detailed remarks to congress made Monday by National Security Director Dennis Blair, who in a significant break with the Bush administration policy of treating terrorism and weapons proliferation as the greatest threats to national security, gave clues that new focus would center on the potential social unrest resulting from the world financial crisis.

Retired Navy Adm. Dennis Blair said the worldwide economic downturn could spawn political instability across the globe, hamper U.S. allies and drain support for the American-led international free-trading system.

“Time is probably our greatest threat,” Blair said in prepared remarks before the Senate Intelligence Committee. “The longer it takes for the recovery to begin, the greater the likelihood of serious damage to U.S. strategic interests.”

A day later the Washington Post’s Walter Pincus and Joby Warrick quoted Blair (in the same remarks to congress) as saying this:

“Roughly a quarter of the countries in the world have already experienced low-level instability such as government changes because of the current slowdown,”

The only good news in either article was quoted by the Star, with Blair telling the committee that:

“declining oil prices could “put the squeeze” on foreign policy “adventurism” by oil producers Iran and Venezuela.

I think he left out some major “foreign policy adventurers” with his omission of the US and western oil companies but I’m glad that he mentioned declining oil prices. That may tend to aid in the recovery in the short term, although they might, if allowed to continue downward, begin to haunt us by seriously retarding investment in non fossil fuel sources of energy.

As oil prices drop there is less incentive to conserve fuel, and less pressure on government and business to create opportunities for entrepreneurs in the alternative energy sector.

The continuing buzz about the increasing threats of drought, desertification, pandemic disease, famine, food riots, and water and other resource wars due to climate change driven by our profligate use of fossil fuels raises the specter of populations being forced by nature to migrate to cooler, wetter, climes and by economic necessity to move where the money is.

Just when I was considering retirement in Belize I’m discovering that by the time I get there my favorite bartenders will likely be living in Michigan.

At some point, in order to make existing and foreseeable alternate fuel technologies competitive with oil and as yet, non existent, “clean coal,” the price of a barrel of crude is going to have to be stabilized in the neighborhood of $70. (So I’m told by “experts.”)

No one is going to enjoy hearing that, but there it is. The pressure to keep prices in that area is already building and I think necessarily so. There will have to be put in place some system of “carbon credits or swaps” coupled with taxes on the use of fossil fuels in order to drive us where we are beginning to recognize, we need to go.

This process is going to be painful for everyone but the very wealthy and we will probably see a marked reduction in our standard of living over the next five to ten years in order to change the course and speed of this petroleum economy.

We have to move quickly in repairing and restructuring our economy (as well as the world’s), and creating new energy policies that move us away from diminishing sources that we know are becoming more dangerous and obsolete as time passes.

We must also become much more resourceful and local in how we grow and transport the world’s food, while at the same time finding new and more efficient energy solutions for sheltering 6 billion people.

There are some pretty tall orders to fill in our near future and I’m afraid that if we attack them with the same policies and practices of the last thirty years that led us to this precipice we are doomed to a long and possibly final fall.

Whew, I’m worn out just thinking about it, so get to work everybody, do your best and I’ll be watching (and hopefully cheering) your progress from my window seat at a little bar in San Pedro.

I hope the bartenders haven’t left yet.

Bob Higgins
Worldwide Sawdust

There is an ongoing debate over the closing of America’s most notorious detainment/torture center at Guantanamo and the legality and efficacy of using torture to extract “information” from detainees in that and other facilities.

In a piece in this morning’s Washington Post titled Torture? Prosecute Us, Too Richard Cohen leads with this:

“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” So goes an aphorism that needs to be applied to the current debate over whether those who authorized and used torture should be prosecuted. In the very different country called Sept. 11, 2001, the answer would be a resounding no.

Contrary to what has become the accepted noise, “the world” did not “change” on 9/11. Our laws, our treaties and international agreements as well as our values remained. We did not become a “very different country” on September 12, 2001 despite Mr. Cohen’s (and others) claim.

In many ways it is our body of law that binds the past, present and future. The rule of law gives constancy to our “values.” Laws may change but the process of change is, and should be reasoned and deliberate, not an impassioned reaction to the events of the day. That kind of reaction to the passions of the moment is the path of the lynch mob.
If, as is said in legal circles, “big cases make for bad law,” the events of 9/11 and the rapid changes in our laws and public policy that resulted from the reaction to those events gives us the mother of all examples of the aphorism.  An extremely big case led to a series of terrible revisions of our laws.

Among the legion of egregious errors committed by the last Republican administration was the naming of the war that it proposed to fight following the criminal destruction of the World Trade Center, the attack on the Pentagon and the downing of a fourth commercial airliner in a Pennsylvania pasture.

As has been pointed out numerous times “War on Terror” is an unfortunate term which calls for a war on a tactic: terror. You can no more fight a war against “terror” than you can fight a war against “covering fire,” “encirclement” “camouflage” or “surprise.”

Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney and the Goebbelian PR squad in the White House basement used the term “terror” more for its perceived effectiveness in arousing the public than for any accuracy in describing their strategy, or as Bush put it, “strategery.” It was in the Bush White House that the ad boys gave the word a capital “T” and used it as their “brand” for instilling public fear and acquiescence in nearly any act that they chose to carry out over the ensuing seven years.

The attacks on September 11, 2001 involved specific criminal acts, all of which are spelled out in federal and state law and punishable by lengthy prison terms up to and including life in prison. Under federal law, death penalty statutes would apply for the murder of the thousands of victims of the crimes.

When the World trade center was bombed the first time in 1993 the crime was investigated by the NYPD, the ATF and the FBI with the help, no doubt, of other agencies both here and abroad. A thorough investigation by law enforcement professionals resulted in the arrest, conviction and life sentences for the criminals involved.

The Marines were not sent in, nor were the Army and Navy deployed in force and the country did not go to war. Rather than launching a full scale campaign of “shock and awe,” the Clinton administration, in its wisdom, effectively, sent in “Columbo.”

Following the crimes of 9/11 the mindset of our “leadership” was very different; actually, it now seems that the minds were made up before the event, made up in fact even before the 2000 election.

An investigation quickly confirmed the involvement of Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda and it was quickly decided to take on the Taliban and al Qaeda, Afghanistan was never intended to be the main thrust, nor was bin Laden to be the main target.

The public was, quite rightly, afraid after the attacks; I was. (I watched it on TV too) It was a time of fear and uncertainty that called for calm leadership and thoughtful action.

That is not what we got. We got a strutting cowboy alternately threatening the world, boasting of American might, and daring potential adversaries to “bring it on.” He sounded like a drunken Saturday night drugstore cowpoke, cranked up on Jack Daniels, inviting any and all to a session of parking lot gravel dancing. “Mano a mano?”

Afghanistan and the Taliban were bottled up quickly, bin Laden isolated and rendered ineffective (at least temporarily) and the public roared its approval. (Cohen cites Bush’s 92% approval ratings)

But our leadership kept feeding the collective fear and fanning the flames of public passion with manufactured intelligence, imagined alliances, an “axis of evil” cut from whole cloth and mythical “weapons of mass destruction.”

Afghanistan and bin Laden was not enough, it would not serve as the entree to the Middle East that our “leadership” required, and in fact, his capture or death would retard the main goal of this posse. Saddam Hussein was to be the quarry, Iraqi oil the tool, American hegemony in the Middle East the ultimate prize.

Proof, (at least the appearance of proof) was needed to bind Iraq and Hussein with al Qaeda and bin Laden. Proof was needed to tie bin Laden’s ability to acquire WMD to Hussein, to Iran, to anywhere they wanted to make a move.

They spread cash all over Afghanistan, all over Pakistan and all over the Middle East. Wads of hundred dollar bills, five grand here, ten there, were offered for information about al Qaeda members in some of the world’s most impoverished countries, places where the annual per capita income is less than I spend on rum, and they got results.

People turned in cab drivers, personal rivals, enemies, tourists, their wife’s divorce lawyer, you get the picture. Lots of suspects, never mind that they were often told by locals, by advisers, by interpreters that they were collaring the wrong guys, that many of these people were just hapless bystanders who had wandered into the net. It didn’t matter.

It didn’t matter because they weren’t looking for facts; they were looking for “information.” “Information” was necessary to tie Saddam to the “war on terror,” so electrodes were attached, thumbs were screwed, genitals mistreated, people were “extraordinarily hydrated,” and they got lots of “information.”

Hook me up to the Toquemada machine and I’ll confess to anything, any crime, any degradation to make the pain stop, and so will you. In a few days any of us will confess to being responsible for original sin, to make the pain stop.

Did they get facts, sure, cast a net that wide and you’re bound to catch something edible, but I expect that the ratio of facts to “information” is, as they say, “highly classified.”

At what cost did they gather these facts? We’ll probably never know how many average Joes were destroyed, how many families ruined, how many people were murdered as a result of these “enhanced interrogation techniques,” or how many minds were destroyed in the process.

And that is why we cannot “look forward,” we cannot ignore these terrible, willful crimes, these war crimes, these crimes against humanity.

We must answer as a society for the criminality of our leadership by prosecuting them for what they purported to do in our name.

Cohen adds this:

At the same time, we have to be respectful of those who were in that Sept. 11 frame of mind, who thought they were saving lives — and maybe were — and who, in any case, were doing what the nation and its leaders wanted. It is imperative that our intelligence agents not have to fear that a sincere effort will result in their being hauled before some congressional committee or a grand jury. We want the finest people in these jobs — not time-stampers who take no chances.

Is the cop on the street who beats a false confession out of a teenage suspect making a “sincere effort” to enforce the law? Is he saving lives?

Are the “finest people” those who can be persuaded to violate all norms of human decency?

Are those who resist power and insist on following the rule of law, now to be called “time stampers,” “who take no chances?”

Cohen writes:

The best suggestion for how to proceed comes from David Cole of Georgetown Law School. Writing in the Jan. 15 New York Review of Books, he proposed that either the president or Congress appoint a blue-ribbon commission, arm it with subpoena power, and turn it loose to find out what went wrong, what (if anything) went right and to report not only to Congress but to us. We were the ones, remember, who just wanted to be kept safe. So, it is important, as well as fair, not to punish those who did what we wanted done — back when we lived, scared to death, in a place called the Past.

I suggest that blue ribbon commissions are usually hired when whitewashing is felt to be the solution. I think that this is a job for the Justice department and perhaps a special prosecutor.

We don’t need to find out what went wrong, there is a world full of opprobrium focused on our country as a result of these crimes, there is a sea of blood and body parts to attest to what went wrong. There is a universe filled with screams of torment to testify to what went wrong; it is time to find out whom, to what degree and to punish accordingly.

Yes we were scared, I too wanted to be secure but I have never been willing to give up my rights or the human rights of others for my personal safety; so don’t, Mr. Cohen, try to blame this on me or the American people. We didn’t sign on for crimes against humanity.

I’ll leave you with this; I am a Marine veteran of Vietnam; twice a year (as I remember) we were instructed in the Military “Code of Conduct.”

Here is a relevant excerpt:

“It is a violation of the Geneva Convention to place a prisoner under physical or mental duress, torture or any other form of coercion in an effort to secure information.”
US Military Code of Conduct

Fact: Torture is illegal under US and international law.

Fact: We hung German officers and civilians for ordering others to commit war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Fact: We executed Japanese soldiers in WW2 for water boarding allied prisoners.

Fact: We punished our troops in Vietnam for the same offenses.

Leadership must be prosecuted for issuing unlawful orders to their troops which require them to violate our laws, treaties and conventions and the troops they lead are required to differentiate between lawful and unlawful orders whether from superior officers, from a frightened populace or… from a lynch mob.

Bob Higgins
Worldwide Sawdust

Harry Truman in a “bipartisan” moment with Lauren Bacall, a staunch liberal Democrat. This is about as “bipartisan as Harry got.”

Last week was exhilarating for Democrats and, judging by the international media, for people all over the planet who have suffered for nearly a decade from the misguided and often criminal policies of George Bush and his terribly inept administration.

The swearing in of Barack Obama and the departure of the Connecticut Cowboy from our public affairs was something long anticipated, and, after our long dark winter, as welcome as the return of springtime and birdsong, at least in these quarters.
The Republican smear machine however, wasted no time in cranking up to its full powers of bloviation. Their program of attacking nearly every move Obama made and every statement he uttered, began seconds after his swearing in and I’m sure will continue unabated in the immediate future. Here’s hoping that they are afforded every opportunity to quibble and obstruct, to grouse and whine, as a minority party for decades to come.

The moaning and squawking over the slightly bobbled recitation of the oath of office, a gaffe that was meaningless and easily ignored by people who have something other than chowder between their ears, was, in Republican circles, fanned into a twenty four hour cause celebre by the fulminating heads of Fox Noise and soon picked up on the other “open all night,” “all the news that fits,” networks.

The storm so roiled the calm in our national teapot that Obama’s advisers encouraged him to retake the oath, which he did in a private and sparsely attended ceremony in the White House a day later.

All seemed well with the republic until Glen Beck pointed out that Obama had not sworn the oath with his hand on a Bible,” I checked” Beck chirped, “We have never had a president sworn into office without a Bible,”

Beck’s research into the matter was apparently less than skin deep. Ali Frick at Think Progress quickly countered with this:

“Beck is simply wrong. As Slate recently reported, official records kept by the Architect of the Capitol show that Teddy Roosevelt did not use a Bible in 1901; and Lyndon Johnson is rumored to have used “a Catholic missal aboard Air Force One after Kennedy’s assassination.” According to his own letters, John Quincy Adams placed his hand on a constitutional law book rather than the Bible.”

Beck’s investigations didn’t include the “actual Constitution” which clearly states that no religious test for public office shall be required, thereby making the Bible, or any other religious text, token, amulet or magic charm unnecessary. It seems that the “Constitution” so often quoted in Beck’s parallel universe simply doesn’t contain an Article six.

The constitution and strict adherence to the rule of law seemed much on the minds of Republicans this past week, a surprising fact after eight years of their support of a President who famously referred to the document as “just a goddamn piece of paper” and spent much of his two sad terms trampling it underfoot with nearly unanimous republican complicity.

The party that hocked the future of our great grand children to the Chinese, set the world aflame and proved itself completely incapable of anything resembling competent governance during its twelve years of majority now seeks to instruct the new president, who hasn’t yet had time to sort out his new key ring, exactly how things ought to be run.

John Boehner in the House and his counterpart, Mitch McConnell, the replacement for Ted Stevens as the face of irascibility in the Senate, quickly assembled on deck a dozen or so other loose cannon to obstruct the disbursal of the next round of TARP funds and fight against Obama’s stimulus package. Forget the fact that they tripped all over themselves to approve the bailout of banks and brokers under the recent stewardship of jolly King George.

Following their obscene treatment of American automakers and labor they are now delaying the approval of Hilda Solis as Labor Secretary because of her support for American Labor and, worse, her support of the “Employee Free Choice Act,” which corporate America is spending vast fortunes to defeat and I assume  Republicans are opposed to out of something more tangible than conservative principle.

They are the same old Republican Party, prowling the mall like jackals or perched buzzard like on the fences waiting for any opportunity to transfer public wealth to the ruling class, any chance to create greater disadvantage for the working class.

The landscape that Republicans envision when they speak of “America” is one far different than that seen by the average Democrat. I for instance see no beauty in long lines of the unemployed waiting for a job at minimum wage or less. To a Republican that is an idyllic image, warming to the heart.

Harry Truman once said:

The Republicans believe that the power of government should be used first of all to help the rich and the privileged in the country. With them, property, wealth, comes first. The Democrats believe that the power of government should be used to give the common man more protection and a chance to make a living. With us the people come first.

In my opinion Obama would be wise to ride his mandate, to maintain the strong cyber link to the body politic and use it to pressure the Democratic majority in the direction it would travel naturally were it not for the corrupting influence of corporate money. I would urge our new President to lose some of his zeal for the grail of “bipartisanship” and simply take his case to the people, and, like an old fashioned Democrat, govern in their name.

Harry also said this:

“I don’t like bipartisans. Whenever a fellow tells me he’s bipartisan, I know that he’s going to vote against me.”

Bob Higgins
Worldwide Sawdust

Fifty years ago today I was halfway through my sophomore year at WE Stebbins High, an almost completely segregated school in the almost completely segregated city of Dayton, Ohio, a town said at the time to be a southern city that happened to be north of the Mason Dixon line.

The school was “almost completely” segregated because it was located within a good Hail Mary pass of Wright Patterson AFB. I don’t remember exactly the reasons but we were told that because the school received federal funds for students who were military dependents that it had to be integrated.

“Integration” was accomplished by the admission of two young Black kids, The boy was named Sam. I remember because we became friends for awhile until the transparent racist displeasure of my little Quaker Grandmother became thick enough to keep him from dropping by. She wasn’t ready for a black president.

The girl’s name is beyond my atrophied powers of recall. I can see their faces though; both were exceptionally attractive, beautiful in fact, bright, “A” students (National Honor Society), and the son and daughter of Air Force Officers. They weren’t related, although they might have passed for brother and sister (to my eyes) and they knew each other from the Air Base (the Air Force at the time wasn’t a lot more integrated than my high school).

Their presence among the lower and middle class adolescent white children of factory workers, shopkeepers and lower level bean counting managerial types caused no great stir. There were no serious problems (to my eyes) other than an occasional racist taunt, or snub. Civility towards them was rigorously enforced. The powers that be paddled freely and often back then and the sting of that paddle and its humiliation was seldom sought.
I’m sure that Sam and what’s her name saw their experience of being the only “colored kids” among fifteen hundred white kids quite differently than I did but they seemed to smile through it. Again, “to my eyes.”

Dwight Eisenhower was the President at the time, Kennedy, (who would become my boyhood idol, surpassing Chuck Berry) wouldn’t announce his candidacy for another year. Elections in those days were still conducted with a degree of merciful brevity.

“Brown v Board of Education” was only five years in the past; the Civil Rights Act of 1964 five years in the future and Dayton was divided by a river. Black faces were seldom seen east of the river unless on the bus or wielding a rake and although I rode buses frequently I had little contact with and I think, no animosity towards them. In fact, in my budding “beatnik liberal,” barely formed, pre Malcolm and James Baldwin consciousness, I confess to finding them exotic if not damned “quaint”. Please forgive, if you will, my youth and ignorance (and that of my country).

Three years later I would be in the Marines, stationed in North Carolina which was definitely south of the Mason Dixon. I remember distinctly the first time I saw a “Whites only” sign. I remember it taped to the inside of a glass door at a cheap eatery near the base in Havelock. I had heard and read of such things so I was “aware” of them in the abstract but I still cringe today with the horror and embarrassment I felt at the overwhelming “reality” of that sign.

Having sighted the first of these crayoned territorial imperatives I soon became aware of them everywhere. Whites only, colored drinking fountains, walk up windows in the sides of cafes posted with “colored” signs; commerce it seemed was integrated, money changed hands across the racial divide but there was a wall to prevent any mixing at breakfast or lunch of actual people. We weren’t ready.

There was no “river,” no physical boundary, as in Dayton, yet the boundaries were everywhere, carried it seemed, in the minds and hearts of everyone, constantly instilled and amplified by reminders, abrasive edicts scrawled on cardboard or plywood, a ubiquitous ugliness.

A year passed; on November 22 1963 I was driving a jeep transporting a Captain from Camp Lejeune to a chopper base at New River. As we left Lejuene through a back gate we were stopped by MP’s and told to report immediately to our unit, that we were on alert status as the President had just been shot.

In the barracks afterward, watching the news reports from Dallas and the reactions from various regional factions among my fellow Marines I was to discover the depth of the shared ugliness that permeated us all and to get a whiff, a fleeting taste of the ugliness on our shared horizon.

Vietnam followed, in less than a year and a half I found myself along with thousands of others thrust into a racist war in a tiny and largely impoverished third world country where the signs were scrawled not on doors but on the sides of bombs and rockets, racism and empire were promoted and enforced with air dropped leaflets followed by fire and lead. We still weren’t ready.

Bad news, all this blood and death, the foul stench of hatred, of racial, religious and ideological detestation, all the baggage that we carried with us to the domino war, followed us home.

Home, to a maelstrom of protest, home to a country divided, a division as sure as a river but wide as a sea, home to flags waved and flags burned by two vastly different kinds of “patriots.”  

Martin Luther King was murdered in Memphis and the country blazed with a fire that had smoldered beneath the forest of tinder for a century, for two centuries.

If there were any hearts left unbroken by the murders of Jack and Martin they were demolished wholesale by the sight of Bobby Kennedy bleeding out his life on that grimy kitchen floor in Los Angeles.

That June evening I came out of the woods in northern California following a two week backpack in the Trinity Alps. The unimaginable silence and tranquility of those woods was rudely broken by the sound of my old truck and shattered forever when I reached the highway, turned on the radio and heard the news of Bobby’s murder. Welcome back to America.

We still weren’t ready.

Fast forward through the eighties, rebuffed in our resource war in SE Asia we cast about in Central and South America and finding no low hanging fruit with which to gorge the appetite of our ruling class, we turned our eyes eastward again settling on the world’s oil patch as the key to wealth, empire and power.

A series of business friendly, electorate immune presidents and two decades of corporate control finally brought about a perfect storm of conditions that were ripe for the election of the worst president and the construction of the worst government in the history of the republic.

War and more war ensued, with a single crime as excuse for an eight year pillaging of the public treasury and the greatest transfer of wealth from those who need it to those who already have it in anyone’s memory.

Deeply embroiled in two wars to the tune of a trillion dollars and thousands upon thousands of dead and wounded, incomprehensible numbers of homeless and destroyed, after having transformed large numbers of the population of the Middle East into reeling, traumatized vacant eyed refugees, who are probably reconsidering their initial reticence to sign up as suicide bombers, America, at last, set a record for the longest delayed reaction in history.

We, you and I, an impressive percentage of us, tossed out the representatives of the failed and ruinous ideas and policies of the reactionary conservative past and elected a different man, a black man no less, to be our president. Are we ready now?

I was impressed with us on election day as I was with him, but I ask again are we ready to follow this man? Are we ready to do more than follow, but to demand, to pressure, to push and prod him as well as the rest of government at every level and the opposition party to do all that will be necessary to move us away from the corrupt practices and sordid criminal behavior that led us to this nadir in our history?

I hope so. I’ve waited a long time to have something to believe in again, to have an America to take pride in again.

This is my 12th president, I’m not going to get too many more and I hope to hell we got this one right. For the record, I think we’re finally ready.

Oh yeah, for Sam and the lovely “what’s her name,” I hope you enjoy this inauguration as much as I will and I’m sorry about Grandma, she just wasn’t ready.

Bob Higgins
Worldwide Sawdust

The Manhattan apartment building where Bernard L. Madoff lives on New York City’s Upper East Side. AP Photo by Brian McDermott

What crime do I have to commit to get sentenced to house arrest at Bernie Madoff’s Manhattan apartment.

Bear in mind that I’m not a ruthless guy, I’m no more venal than the average Joe, but in spite of a weak resume I am willing to work at this.

I’m advancing in age more rapidly every day and my social security and veterans pensions are being steadily diminished by inflation, fuel prices, governmental and corporate incompetence and criminality.

This economy, cut backs at the VA, and my disabilities have me scratching for beans in my “golden years,” and an extended weekend at Bernie’s (say ten years) is just what I need.

I’m not looking for a handout here, I’m willing to work, within limits. I’ll pick pockets, defraud innocent people of their money, destroy their lives, their futures and the futures of their heirs. I’m an honest guy, what does it take to get remanded to custody in that Manhattan hellhole?

I won’t do violence though, as Muhammad Ali once said of the Vietnamese, “I’ll beat ’em” up, but I won’t kill ’em.

What do I have to do to get sentenced to Bernie’s.

Bob Higgins
Worldwide Sawdust

In an opinion piece in today’s Washington Post Ruth Marcus poses the question:

“Should Bush administration officials be put on trial for crimes such as authorizing torture?”

The answer to that question is a simple and unequivocal “not yes, but, Hell yes, absolutely, yer darn tootin’.”

Bear in mind that I live in a flyover state where many have limited tolerance for carefully parsed, nuanced or constipated prose, preferring instead to “throw it out on the lawn and see if any dogs come up and pee on it.”

Ms Marcus says, less pithily and with a bit more ambiguity, that she is:

“just relieved to have this crowd heading out of office and its policies — on torture, on indefinite detention, on warrantless wiretapping, on overweening executive power — soon to be inoperative.”

I share her delight in the departure of this gang of criminals but I fear that if they do not leave Washington in handcuffs and leg irons aboard a Federal prison bus that the chances of rendering the “policies” stated above “inoperative” are approximately … zero.
Warrantless wiretapping will continue unabated because it is so much more convenient for a zealous prosecutor than petitioning the court for those pesky warrants to gain “legal evidence.”

“Overweening executive power” will not be ceded gratuitously; it must be removed or restricted by action of the legislature and the courts. Prosecution for crimes committed by those wielding such unbridled and constitutionally unlawful authority will be essential in providing the evidence and information needed to enact new legislation or reverse existing “policy.”

As for torture and indefinite detention, do we need more instruction than that provided in our Constitution, in our own established law and precedent or in those established among nations by international treaties to which we are a party and in many cases a principle party?

We imprisoned and/or executed German war criminals after Nuremberg for following many of the same “policies” which were resurrected by the Bush administration in the last eight years. We hung Japanese for waterboarding American and Allied prisoners after the Tokyo War Crimes Trials.

A century ago Teddy Roosevelt had the courage and wisdom to speak out against torture, including waterboarding, by our troops in the Philippines and insisted that those involved be prosecuted and punished. This from a cablegram (hence the caps) from TR sent to the Philippines:

THE PRESIDENT DESIRES TO KNOW IN THE FULLEST AND MOST CIRCUMSTANTIAL MANNER ALL THE FACTS . . . FOR THE VERY REASON THAT THE PRESIDENT INTENDS TO BACK UP THE ARMY IN THE HEARTIEST FASHION IN EVERY LAWFUL AND LEGITIMATE METHOD OF DOING ITS WORK. HE ALSO INTENDS TO SEE THAT THE MOST VIGOROUS CARE IS EXERCISED TO DETECT AND PREVENT ANY CRUELTY OR BRUTALITY AND THAT MEN WHO ARE GUILTY THEREOF ARE PUNISHED. GREAT AS THE PROVOCATION HAS BEEN . . . NOTHING CAN JUSTIFY . . . THE USE OF TORTURE OR INHUMAN CONDUCT OF ANY KIND ON THE PART OF THE AMERICAN ARMY. A Strong President Says No to Torture

Ms. Marcus describes a “renewed clamor for investigation and prosecution” “in some quarters of the left,” a clamor renewed by “the imminent arrival of the Obama administration.”

Personally, I have maintained a continuous “clamor” for several years here in Flyover 45420 as have a legion of others in this “quarter of the left.” The “clamor” as she flippantly calls it is the sound of a sizable fraction of our citizenry outraged by the usurpation of civil liberties, the trampling of the Constitution, the desecration of the very idea of “America” in the minds of the international community and the blatant criminal activities of some “quarters of the right.”

Yes, Cheney stoked the flames recently when he all but dared the incoming administration to prosecute. I hope to see him, along with Addington, Yoo, Rumsfeld, Gonzales and a host of other “public servants” riding off on the gulag express.

Marcus tells us that Obama may not be eager to push for investigations because he has said that he doesn’t want his first term to be seen as a partisan witch hunt but points out that he stated last April: “If crimes have been committed, they should be investigated,…”

She says that she feels, and has written that

“ensuring that these mistakes are not repeated . . . may be more important than punishing those who acted wrongly in pursuit of what they thought was right.”

Remember that we stretched necks at Nuremberg and Tokyo to insure “that these mistakes are not repeated.” I’m sure that many of those necks belonged to people who “acted wrongly in pursuit of what they thought was right.”

Well, they weren’t right, they acted as beasts then, and as we can plainly see, many of those “mistakes” have been repeated during this most recent season of suffering, repeated frequently, repeated boldly and repeated without remorse. The behavior of beasts continues into a new century and we are writing legal opinions in support of it.

She says this:

First, criminal prosecution isn’t the only or necessarily the most effective mechanism for deterrence.

I would like to see that written as a banner headline below the masthead of the Washington Post and distributed to every federal prisoner now in jail for drug possession, tax screw ups, making moonshine, or political dissent.

If federal incarceration is not best for war criminals why then is it imposed on these poor slobs?
If we excuse Robin Hood why do we so maltreat his Merry Men?

She goes on to assert that even the “looming threat of criminal sanctions did not do much to deter the actions of Bush administration officials.” She cites Jack Goldsmith’s “The Terror Presidency” which she says is “replete with accounts of how officials proceeded despite their omnipresent concerns about legal jeopardy.”

I’ll venture a bold guess that nearly every bank robber, car thief, mugger, burglar and stock swindler from the meanest petty thief to Bernard Madoff “proceeded despite their omnipresent concerns about legal jeopardy.”

That is, after all, what makes them criminals, what sets them apart from those of us who are… Not.

If the people at the top of the political food chain cannot be expected to understand and follow the LAW why then should we expect more from the Private in the field or the average stick up artist?

She draws a parallel between not protecting one’s home with strong locks to prevent burglary and the lack of congressional oversight as reason for the growth of executive branch excesses and she is partially right. However, it must be remembered that Congress fell into the hands of the party of “some quarters of the right” back in 1994 and had little interest in overseeing anything but Bill Clinton’s sex life.

Then along came Bush/Cheney who simply lied their way into an aggressive and patently illegal war for which, many feel, they must suffer legal sanctions. If there are members of Congress who knowingly abetted the process/conspiracy they should be prosecuted as well and join their henchmen in prison.

She speaks of the high cost of criminal prosecution :

Fourth, there is a cost to pursuing criminal charges. As appalling as waterboarding is, for example, it was pursued with the analysis and approval of lawyers who concluded, however wrongly, that it did not rise to the level of torture. If government officials cannot safely rely on legal advice, they will err on the side of excessive timidity.

If lawyers analyzed and approved practices that we have executed other human beings for practicing it seems to me that that a second opinion might be called for. If heeding the advice of unsound or incompetent lawyers in the Executive or Justice departments causes you to go from being a distinguished public servant to just another convict doing a stretch in federal stir you deserve the sojourn and the lawyers should accompany you on the cruise.

This, I suspect, will lead to a better class of “public servant” as well as more competent legal talent. A “win-win,” as they say.

The timidity we need fear in the halls of government is the unwillingness to speak truth to power and the Bush administration made timidity and loyalty the first requirements for service.

Prosecution will also, Ms Marcus says, be a distraction from more important pursuits:

Fifth, focusing governmental energy on uncovering and punishing the actions of the past will inevitably drain energy and political capital from the new administration. It would be a better use of the administration’s time to figure out how to close Guantanamo and deal with the remaining prisoners.

She continues :

I am not arguing against any criminal prosecution of any Bush administration official no matter what the facts — I’m just saying that the bar is awfully high. Lying to investigators and covering up questionable activities should be prosecuted because such conduct frustrates the capacity of other government checks to function.

Really bad policies? No question about that. Conscious law-breaking? I’m doubtful — and skeptical, too, that the symbolic benefit of any such prosecution would outweigh the inevitable costs.

If obstruction of justice “frustrates the capacity of other government checks to function,” what is the result of the wanton destruction of the rule of law, the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of innocents, the terrible sacrifice of more than four thousand of our children and grand children and the lifelong debilitation of tens of thousands more.

There can be no statement by the incoming administration more powerfully symbolic in the eyes of the world including our own than to properly investigate, prosecute and punish the crimes of the past, quickly, publicly and according to the law.

Cost? Less than one week of our tragic and criminal misadventure in Iraq

We need to do our laundry, in public, for the whole world to see.

Remember those old front loading washers with glass in the door that you could watch the dirty clothes spin around in?

That way.

Bob Higgins
Worldwide Sawdust

Refs:
Pyrrhic Torture Trials
Waterboarding Used to Be a Crime
A Strong President Says No to Torture

For the last month <strike>I’ve</strike&gt we have listened to an unending series of conservative chowder heads prattle and moan about redistribution of wealth, socialism, Marxism, and the destruction of society by giving government subsidized tuna fish sandwiches to the poor.

When they weren’t whining about Obama being some kind of closet Islamofacist commie they were pontificating about the sanctity of free markets, the evils of big government, the purity of privatization, the miracles of laissez faire capitalism and the horrors of such social tools as unemployment insurance, public welfare programs, food stamps and the minimum wage.

One sight that warms the heart of the average conservative is a long employment line. The vision of hundreds, thousands of job seekers vying for bone crushing, mind numbing labor at spirit crushing wages is a romantic one, the favored fresco on the temple walls of Republicanism.
Now they, themselves are standing in line, hands out in supplication, seeking alms from the same government that they so detest and in fact sought to destroy, from the same people they have misused.

With the nation’s automotive industry hemorrhaging cash, congressional leaders called on the Bush administration yesterday to offer government assistance to the car companies as part of the Treasury Department’s $700 billion emergency rescue program.

The call came one day after General Motors, the nation’s largest auto manufacturer, announced another multibillion dollar loss for the third quarter and said it was running out of money fast. Ford, the second-biggest car company, also reported heavy losses. Unless the government steps in, analysts warned, GM could face bankruptcy, endangering the livelihoods of about 100,000 North American autoworkers and hundreds of thousands of others whose jobs depend on the industry.

“Reid, Pelosi Urge Treasury to Extend Aid to Automakers” The Washington Post

Bankers, brokers, investment counselors, bond salesmen, gamblers, middlemen, scalpers, swindlers, and  all the silk necktie grifters are lining up to feed at the public trough in record numbers.

This week’s hogs at the trough are represented by the auto industry; remember them? Ford, Chrysler, General Motors are at the front of the line for public largess. After decades of mismanagement, shortsightedness and executive suite greed,  they are looking for the government to provide what all their fancy marketing geniuses, high powered MBA’s, creative accountants, and economic wizards couldn’t. A profit.

They build trucks, they call them light trucks, SUVs. Huge, over powered, over weight, gas and diesel guzzling behemoths that clog our highways and streets and fill our planet with their noxious byproducts, our rivers and streams with their poisonous effluents, and our lungs with an expiration date.

I know,  I see them by the hundreds every day. Trucks, running empty, usually hauling one person, a cowboy hat, a soccer ball, a bottle of Grey Goose a cheese ball and a cell phone. Several thousand pounds of overpriced, over financed plastic, steel, and rubber, rapidly lurching and belching their way to McHell at eighteen miles a gallon.

More than three decades after OPEC showed the world the reality of oil, after science and medicine began to point out the long term effects of our addiction to it, and the Japanese showed American industry that the future would require efficient vehicles that the public would buy, they are still building and trying to sell…trucks.

They got 25 billion last month but “gee” they’re still a bit short, “50 billion, more or less ought to cover it, Thanks, guys we really appreciate it, gotta go now, gotta get back to work, making our trucks you know.”

I know that they make cars as well, cars that are modeled on the same principles of inefficiency, profligate waste and 1970s environmental ignorance. I also know that a large segment of the public wants the crap that been marketed to them by Madison Ave, Hollywood, and the auto industry itself. Speed, power and performance, big tires, tractor pulling, tachometer on the hood, chick magnet, death machines. Size matters, it seems.

We need transportation in this country, we need efficient, convenient public transit and light rail systems, and we need affordable alternative energy powered private vehicles. We need to look at transportation with new eyes, the age of the muscle car is gone, dead. Bury it.

In addition to needing transportation we need to get serious about using our ability to communicate by moving large sections of the workforce to telecommuting. There are huge numbers of people who are able to perform their jobs at home, to communicate, hold meetings, conference, decide and disseminate information. Why aren’t we doing it? Why do we insist on continuing to take the mountain to Mohammed, when we have the ability right now and have for years to do the opposite?

Adulthood is on the horizon for America, it will not be welcomed with open arms by everyone, but it must be attained by most and especially government and industry. We must learn to design, build and sell efficiency and responsibility and we must do it today.

One out of every ten jobs depends on the auto industry, making and selling vehicles, parts, repairs, fuel, lubricants, paints, polishes, tires, roads, bridges, traffic control sytems, accessories, gadgets and pine scented air fresheners.

Those jobs will still be available when we are building vehicles and systems that are responsible and renewable, efficient and grown up systems that improve the Earth, or at least lessen the damage and improve quality of our lives.

The need is there, the tools, knowledge and technology are there, where is the will.

Automakers haven’t shown the will to adapt to changing realities in the world by adjusting their products and methods, nor has the oil industry, nor most of industry as a whole. In betting everything on short term profits they have created a long term disaster.

The will must come from the public in concert with their government.

If we are expected to clean up the mess left behind by incompetence, greed and theft we must have a stake in the outcome. We shouldn’t give or loan these yoyos one additional dime.

What must be done, and quickly, is for the people, the government to invest, to buy, large shares in these floundering outfits at bargain prices and exercise control over how they are run, what they produce, how they treat their employees and where the money goes at the close of the day’s business.

Someone make up a term for the opposite of “privatization.”

Hmmm….. Never mind, it just came to me.

Bob Higgins
Worldwide Sawdust

Photo: Some presidents get high schools named after them, others get highways and bridges. What does George W. Bush get? A sewage plant! Through a brilliant plan hatched in a bar, SF voters may be able to name the Oceanside Water Pollution Plant after our current president, George W., in November. dnguyen

In one of the more asinine posts I have read lately the Wall Street Journal today ran an opinion piece titled “The Treatment of Bush Has Been a Disgrace ,” which I recommend to anyone needing a real howler to start the day after the stress and tension of a long and rancorous election season.

Jeffrey Scott Shapiro begins the piece by castigating San Franciscans for naming a  sewage treatment plant after Bush which which calls “one example of the classless disrespect many Americans have shown the president.”

I see a more delicious, if malodorous, whimsical irony in the “tribute” than disrespect or cruelty. But that’s just me.

He decries Bush’s record low approval ratings as if surprised that the public, the world and his own party would run screaming in revulsion from an arrogant and incompetent sociopath who has personally done so much to bring about the death, destruction displacement and impoverishment of so many.

Shapiro’s plaintive cry, “What must our enemies be thinking?,”  has an easy answer from this point of view, his enemies appreciate him somewhat less than his “friends.”

Shapiro’s claim that Bush has been a bipartisan who has “reached out” to his political opponents must come from some parallel reality in Shapiro’s tabloid imagination. There is no room in the mind of George Bush for concepts more complex than “us or them,” or “for us or against us.”

In Bush’s mind the “forces of good” are represented by his “base” the bloated “haves” and the obscene “have mores,” who so desperately want the oil and any other treasure that the “evil doers” are sitting on, and have commissioned young Bush to be the front man in their 21st century neo colonial resource “crusade.”

He claims that Bush’s “bipartisan efforts have been met with crushing resistance from both political parties. “Bi partisan? Not Bush, bi polar perhaps but never bi partisan.

Shapiro believes that Bush was unfairly treated in his manipulation of the judiciary.

[Bush’s] “Supreme Court choice of Harriet Miers alarmed Republicans, while his final nomination of Samuel Alito angered Democrats.

While decrying activist judges he proceeded to stack the supreme court with people guaranteed to take action against laws that have not only been on the books for decades, but have withstood a nearly continuous barrage of legal challenges. His appointments to the court have been purely political but the judicial activism of the right, of the oligarchs and theocrats among Bush’s base is acceptable, the other sixty or seventy percent of the country be damned.

Having warmed to his lament Shapiro keens:

It seems that no matter what Mr. Bush does, he is blamed for everything. He remains despised by the left while continuously disappointing the right.

Yet it should seem obvious that many of our country’s current problems either existed long before Mr. Bush ever came to office, or are beyond his control. Perhaps if Americans stopped being so divisive, and congressional leaders came together to work with the president on some of these problems, he would actually have had a fighting chance of solving them.

Refugees?, orphans?, no, I don’t blame these on Bush, he simply worked overtime to create millions of new ones. Wrecked economy? No, Bush didn’t invent greed, he just enjoyed it so much that he helped to create a regulatory climate where it was seen as less venal and more fashionable, grand theft as the noblesse oblige of trickle down economics. Besides, the taxpayers will replace any shortfall from the bottom up. Creative socialism begins at the top you know and trickles down.

Original sin? No, the radical right pretty much pinned that on Bill Clinton a decade ago.

Like the president said in his 2004 victory speech, “We have one country, one Constitution and one future that binds us.

I’m curious, did he utter that before or after he declared the Constitution to be “just a goddamned piece of paper.” Wasn’t there also something about “one ring to bind them?”

Shapiro attempts to link Bush’s “legacy” with Harry Truman in terms of poll numbers, and because Truman’s stock has retroactively risen in our historical consciousness, he attempts to coattail Gerge W on the waistcoat of Harry S; where are the cartoonists when you really need them?

Not waiting for the laughter to subside, Shapiro charges like the Light Brigade to this stunning close:

The treatment President Bush has received from this country is nothing less than a disgrace. The attacks launched against him have been cruel and slanderous, proving to the world what little character and resolve we have. The president is not to blame for all these problems. He never lost faith in America or her people, and has tried his hardest to continue leading our nation during a very difficult time.

Our failure to stand by the one person who continued to stand by us has not gone unnoticed by our enemies. It has shown to the world how disloyal we can be when our president needed loyalty — a shameful display of arrogance and weakness that will haunt this nation long after Mr. Bush has left the White House.

We, I take that to include me, “lack character and resolve,” have “slandered” and treated George Bush cruelly, have been “disloyal” and are guilty of “arrogance and weakness that will haunt this nation …..” And so on.

In fact, George Bush’s approval ratings far overestimate the man. The fact that he will probably retire to some gated brush pile of a “ranch” to live out his days as an extremely wealthy, carefully protected, moderately amusing if slightly goofy statesman of the harebrained right, and not in the prison cell he has earned for his wretched performance, is testimony to the incredible forbearance of  the public he so mistreated.

WSJ says:

Mr. Shapiro is an investigative reporter and lawyer who previously interned with John F. Kerry’s legal team during the presidential election in 2004.

I suspect that Mr. Shapiro might have written this from a private and padded cell somewhere while recovering from his delusions, and the last statement goes a long way toward helping me to understand the Kerry debacle.

Bob Higgins
Worldwide Sawdust

I voted Friday in Ohio and although at times in my life I have cast an occasional vote for a local Republican candidate, this time I reverted to my roots and voted like an old fashioned straight ticket Democrat. My Grandfathers would both be proud.

It felt good. No, it felt great as if I were striking a blow for freedom.

After eight years of thoroughly corrupt and incompetent government, the unrelieved horror of several nightmarish wars, the near destruction of American constitutional liberties, the

pillage and plunder of our public treasury by wealth bloated plutocrats and oiligarchs, and the almost total loss of our international reputation I just felt safer somehow checking off the “D’s.”
In about sixty hours it will be over, I will have no fingernails and will need to make another trip to the liquor store, hopefully for a celebration. I cannot let myself think of any other possibility.

People in general as well as friends and family have told me that I take this stuff too personally and maybe I do, but I did a tour in Vietnam as a young Marine and have always felt that it helped to reinforce my basic right to criticize my government when I believed that it was destroying my country.

I am a Democrat by background. I am a political liberal by temperament and inclination. I make both statements proudly, without apology, firm in the knowledge that I share my political beliefs with some of the greatest minds since the enlightenment, including many, if not most, of those who designed the republic over which we still contend.

I also know that the fundamentals of those political beliefs are, and have been, shared by a solid majority of my countrymen both now and throughout the course of our history.

In voting exclusively for the “D’s” the other day I could feel myself aggressively marking the ballot, squeezing the pen and firmly pressing the ink into the paper, as if making sure that there was no doubt, that there was no mistaking my intention to wrest control of my country from the avaricious vermin who have so terribly misused it.

After eight long years of watching the denigration and destruction of much of what is good and decent in this country I have been forced during this general election to listen as those who share my beliefs were called traitors and Un-American by the self serving, cheese headed cheerleaders of corrupt capitalism like Sarah Palin and malignantly angry, calcified, geriatric, grousepots like John McCain.

Enough.

In a few months it may be possible to begin to repair our badly crippled country, to start to bridge many of the divisions among its people, to restore its reputation in the international community, to steer it from its current path of colonial aggression and return it to the rule of law.

I have no illusions as to the perfection of all of the leadership of my own party. My trust and faith are in what I know to be the common decency of the motivations of its grassroots and that, if we win this election, in their newly shared knowledge that through their work and their votes they can once again police their own government.

I believe that we can and will in the coming years bring to this country an improved definition of American greatness, one that includes striving for the prosperity, health, and welfare and a common respect for the dignity and decency of all mankind.

Much depends on the next sixty hours and of course, on your vote.

Please do vote, hold the pen or touch the screen firmly and pay close attention to those “D’s”

Bob Higgins
Worldwide Sawdust

Note: The cartoon is the logo of the real Joe the Plumber in Amarillo. Send him some business, I’m told that he’s an Obama guy. If his website takes off because of all this attention maybe he can switch from actual plumbing to an online plumbing advice column. Bob

The month began with Sarah Palin celebrating her campaign’s close identification and long association with “Joe Six Pack,” the mythic every man vision of America that he and they dream that they represent.

Then in last night’s “debate” came “Joe the Plumber,” a guy who claims that he wants to buy a business which “makes” 250k a year and he’s worried about Obama’s tax policies. Who’s next, Joe Bananas, Joe Cool, Joe Mama?

Forgetting for the moment that I have strong suspicions that “Joe the Plumber” is a ringer. Yes, nefarious as it sounds I’m afraid that Joe may be, a not too carefully selected, and poorly rehearsed plant from the McCain camp. He was probably chosen by the same group of desperately drunken political geniuses who trotted out Sarah Palin.
Joe the plumber should probably rethink this entrepreneurship thing if he believes that a business that “makes” 250k a year means that he will have an income at that level. A good plumber working steadily by himself with occasional labor help is doing extremely well to gross a quarter of that.

If he has a fleet, (say ten or so) of trucks and plumbers, journeymen, apprentices and laborers, after subtracting all the labor costs, the cost of running a fleet of trucks, licenses, insurance, workman’s compensation, accounting, professional and trade dues, the occasional legal fee, and a grand old pile of headache and ulcer remedies he might achieve an income of two thirds that figure.

At that level he will remain well beyond the reach of the sinister tax increases that he has been told to fear.

But this isn’t about Joe is it? Joe is just a caricature of what the McPalins and the conservative ruling class they represent, views as a typical member of America’s hands on working class, the beefcake entrepreneur, their delusional “hard hat” wet dream.

I tried to point out in a “loose sally of the mind” last week the error in assuming that any one can predict who Joe Six Pack will vote for, or guess what information and how much information he (or she) will base their decision on.

Joe Six Pack or Joe the Plumber is all over the map politically; he has, at times, been the core supporter of the “New Deal,” an avid participant in the Great Society as well as a reactive member of the “Silent Majority” and the “Reagan Revolution.”

I share a few jars several times a week with several different versions of Joe and Jill and just when I think that I have them figured out they surprise me by doing or saying something that is outside of the character I had assigned them.

Guess the fluctuations of the stock market if you will, come up with a system for roulette or carry water up the hill bare handed, read tea leaves, but leave Joe and his brothers and sisters out of your prognostications; they will only disappoint and embarrass you.

Bob Higgins
Worldwide Sawdust

Related stories:
Different ‘Joe the Plumber’ strikes ‘Net gold
Purging Joe the plumber?