1. If President Barack Obama is re-elected, with the Democratic Party retaining control of at least one chamber of Congress, there probably will be four more years of economic stagnation, high unemployment, increasing poverty and inequality, more wars, erosions of civil liberties and global warming.

2. If Mitt Romney is elected, with the right/far right Republican Party dominating either House or Senate, every particular of the travail afflicting the country today will be multiplied, with emphasis on fulfilling the desires of the 1% at the expense of the 99%.

What else could be expected during the present conservative era? Paul Krugman, the liberal Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist, recently described Obama, whom he supports, as having ruled like “a moderate Republican circa 1992″. Viewing the ultra-conservatives, African American professor and left intellectual Cornell West detected “creeping fascism.”

In today’s society — based on gross economic inequality facilitated by a two-party political system spanning center right to far right and where big money is the decisive factor in the electoral process — an ostensibly democratic election can hardly mitigate the worst of abuses afflicting working people and their families much less bring about substantial reform.

This dreary reality is offset by an important new development. For the first time over the last several presidential elections — when voters are usually cheering exclusively for their candidate — masses of people are protesting in the streets against inequality of income and opportunity, and the class war waged by the wealthy, as well as global warming, ending wars, dismantling NATO and the like. Some unions, too, are not simply backing Obama but protesting on their own against Wall Street’s depredations.

Thirty years of wage stagnation, the growing rich-poor chasm, evisceration of the so-called American Dream and the long, painful effects of the Great Recession are the objective conditions behind the developing political consciousness of many Americans. Like the Roman Catholic church after widespread evidence of priests molesting children, sacrosanct capitalism — the economic holy of holies — is finally attracting public criticism for its crimes and hypocrisy, not yet on a huge scale but growing.

The sudden entrance of Occupy Wall St. last September with an open critique of the substantial excesses of capitalism in American society, following the democratic Arab Spring and Wisconsin uprising, has energized much of the left and progressive forces. Nationwide May Day actions and the 15,000 who demonstrated against NATO in Chicago later in May, among other protests, including civil disobedience, are encouraging harbingers that many more people eventually will take their grievances to the streets and meeting halls, where all social progress begins. If this momentum manages to continue for the next few years it could become a broad and diverse national movement for social change — but it’s still a big “if.”

The political system seems no longer accountable to the public. Several matters of great importance to the American people do not even figure in this year’s election because both ruling parties basically agree  about them and there’s little to squabble about but details. The administration has taken the U.S. up to its elbows in the quagmire of war, so the conservatives cry, “up to the shoulders!” Here are some issues the voters won’t be able to influence at the ballot box:

• President Obama is presiding over U.S. wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen, killing “terrorist suspects” in Somalia and wherever the CIA’s drones wander. May opinion polls show 66% of the American people want the expensive 10-year-old stalemated Afghan conflict to end, and 40% — many of whom want it terminated now — are strongly opposed. Only 27% support the war, 8% strongly. For all the chatter about nearing the end of the Afghan war at the NATO summit in Chicago May 20, Obama, days earlier, announced that he was prolonging the war a decade after his “final” pullout date at the end of 2014. An undetermined number of special forces combat troops, military trainers, and CIA paramilitaries will “defend” the corrupt Kabul government until 2024. American taxpayers will foot the bills — several billion a year. Progressive Democrats in Congress seek to restrain Washington’s penchant for wars, but they are consistently ignored and occasionally berated by the Obama Administration for their efforts.

• Most citizens want cuts in the war budget. But as they go to the polls, the American people will be lugging a military and national security behemoth on their recession-bent backs, costing about $1.2 trillion a year. Rumors of meaningful reductions are illusory. The Pentagon accounts for over half of this amount (about $642 billion for fiscal 2013); the rest goes to Homeland Security, 17 spy agencies, nuclear weapons, interest on past war debts, and so on.

• Global warming is here and getting worse while the White House is opening up new areas to drill for oil and supports massive development of shale-derived natural gas (which requires fracking), “clean” coal (though it does not yet exist), nuclear power, and dirty tar sands fuel. The Obama Administration’s support for alternative non-carbon development is a token tossed to the environmental movement. Meanwhile, the U.S. — which demands to be recognized as world leader — is using its leadership to undermine international progress in fighting climate change. Big business and Wall St., primarily concerned with expansion and greater profits, heartily approve. Like Rhett Butler, the conservatives, frankly, just don’t give a damn.

• Since he has borrowed populist phrases for the election, some of from Occupy, President Obama has finally at least mentioned poverty, inequality and low wages, but he has done nothing about this situation since taking office and will not put forward an anti-poverty program if reelected. The United States is the most economically unequal of the top 20 advanced, industrialized capitalist economies in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). The U.S. also pays the lowest wages to its working class compared with OECD countries. Almost 25% of the American work force receives low wages (about $10 an hour down to minimum wage and below), usually without any benefits or health care. One in two Americans is low income or poor. The poor account for one in seven people. About 47 million Americans require food stamps to eat. Food stamps are the only “income” for six million of them. This has not come about by mistake; it’s the political system’s payoff to the ever-richer plutocracy and its minions.

• The Obama Administration has responded more resourcefully to the Great Recession than the conservative opposition, but it only goes a quarter or half  way in remedial action, which adds to the stagnation and prolongs the pain for the working class, lower middle class and a large sector of the middle class as well. When Obama delivers on the economy — whether in the stimulus, jobs, foreclosures, bank regulations, or infrastructure — it’s always partial and inadequate because the main concessions are made with the power structure up front before the inevitable compromises with the right wing. There’s a difference between talking like a fighter when trawling for votes, and avoiding confrontation as president. Krugman says “we have responded to crisis with a mix of paralysis and confusion.” This is a major reason why over 22 million Americas need but cannot secure full time work.

• President Obama has retained all former President Bush’s many erosions of civil liberties, particularly the onerous Patriot Act, and added many of his own, such as when he approved of indefinite detention for suspects, including American citizens. A unique coalition of liberals and conservatives in the House tried to pass legislation to reject indefinite detention May 18, but the effort was defeated. The U.S., under Obama, is becoming a full fledged surveillance state. Tom Engelhardt writes that “30,000 people [are] hired to listen in on conversations and other communications in this country.”

• Any listing of the important issues that are not part of the election campaign and over which the citizenry has no say must include a foreign/military/national security policy based on exercising world hegemony backed by military power. What’s the “pivot” to East Asia really all about, other than to weaken China in its own sphere of possible influence and cling to world domination? Why has the U.S. been taking steps to bring about regime change in Syria, other than to dominate yet another country and weaken Iran in the process? Why did Obama facilitate a violent civil war for regime change in Libya, other than to gain another oil-rich client state, but this time with an enormous aquifer under its sands which may become more precious than the oil as water supplies dwindle through North Africa? Why did the president get behind the coup in Honduras, other than to dispatch a potentially progressive regime friendly to Venezuela?

Further, why does Obama still maintain Cold War sanctions and a trade blockade against Cuba, other than to win Florida votes in November? Why is Washington supporting the vicious Sunni monarchy in Bahrain which routinely oppresses and attacks the Shi’ite majority seeking equality, other than satisfying the obnoxious rulers of Saudi Arabia? Why is Obama now fighting a war in Yemen, other than to keep the new president, who ran unopposed with strong U.S. support, in his pocket, and to bestow another favor upon the Saudi lords? Why is the administration seeking to strangle Iran, other than to prevent an Iran-Iraq alliance that might compromise U.S. hegemony in the Middle East, especially the Persian Gulf, through which 40% of the world’s oil must pass? And what is the real purpose of the Oval Office’s new “scramble for Africa,” other than establishing a military presence throughout the continent while elbowing China out of the way to grab natural resources, trade and markets.

President Obama blames all his failures in office on the conservatives and the recession, and most Democrats accept this explanation. Even progressive Democrats, well aware of Obama’s abundant shortcomings, will cut him slack for fear of the “greater evil.”

The corrosive impact of far right ideology in America must not be underestimated. But despite Don’t-tread-on-me Tea Party reactionaries and conservative obstruction in Congress, Democrats in the House and Senate remain responsible for many unmet objectives and a weak legislative record. Led by Obama, they would not fight for progressive goals and spent much of the time trying to fulfill the naïve presidential fantasy of “governing like Americans, not Republicans or Democrats.” Once the conservatives understood Obama would rather compromise than fight they attacked full force and virtually paralyzed the Democratic agenda.

The silence of some Democratic politicians toward the erosion of civil liberties, indifference to climate change and support for unnecessary wars — a silence many would have broken had a Republican been in the White House — should subject them to publicly wearing scarlet letters inscribed with a “C” (for craven) around their necks.

Despite the stagnant economy —  the main issue in the election according to 86% of potential voters — the Republican Party’s lurch to the far right and the bizarre legislative behavior of the Tea Party-influenced GOP House majority led by the ineffable Speaker John Boehner seem to have at least evened the election odds. Stranger things have happened in American politics, but it remains very doubtful that the critically important independent voters will swing toward fringe conservatism. This factor, in our view, gives Obama the edge.

In this connection the April 28 international edition of Britain’s conservative magazine, The Economist, wondered “What happens to a two-party political system when one party goes mad?” The article quotes the following from the new book, It’s Even Worse Than It Looks, a product of one author from the establishment Brookings Institute and the other from the conservative American Enterprise Institute: “The Republican Party has become an insurgent outlier — ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science, and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”

Many right wing voters despise Romney, a shape-shifting opportunist whom they distrust, but they will stick with him because Republican leaders and funders insist he has the best chance to defeat the “big government socialist” whom many Tea Partiers scandalously allege conceals his “true” nationality and religion. Those funders, by the way, will see to it that — as opposed to 2008 — the Republicans will spend at least enough money to buy the election as the Democrats, so the race should be close.

Once a moderate Republican, Romney adopted far right positions on most issues to secure the nomination, calling for severe cutbacks in social programs for the poor, unemployed, foreclosed and similarly discarded, among a plethora of counterproductive social and economic nostrums satisfying to the Rush Limbaughs and Michele Bachmanns. Now he’s in a tight bind. It is absolutely necessary to gravitate partially toward the center, where the independent votes are, but he is under considerable restraint from his own unforgiving constituency.

Consistent with mendacious ultra-conservative propaganda, Romney attributes the economic crisis entirely to Obama’s presidency, without suggesting that the Great Recession emanated from the millionaire tax cuts, war spending and the huge deficits of his Republican predecessor (following years of Clinton Administration deregulations of banking and Wall St. that set the stage for what by now had become a “winner take all” economic system.)

Romney’s nonsensical economic speech in Iowa May 15 was an epic self-exposure. While promising to cut social spending, increase the war budget and not raise taxes, he declared:

President Obama is an old-school liberal whose first instinct is to see free enterprise as the villain and government as the hero…. America counted on President Obama to rescue the economy, tame the deficit and help create jobs. Instead, he bailed out the public sector, gave billions of dollars to the companies of his friends and added almost as much debt as all the prior presidents combined.

Virtually every word was a lie, according to an analysis of the entire speech by the Associated Press the next day which pointed out that “the debt has gone up by about half under Obama. Under Ronald Reagan, it tripled.” AP didn’t mention Romney’s political characterization of Obama, but he’s hardly a liberal — as was clear during his first term, and his adhesion to “free enterprise” capitalism is indissoluble.

Romney has been sharply critical of Obama on two of the biggest issues of the campaign — health care and the Afghan war —  despite the fact that his own past positions on both matters were nearly identical to those of his rival. Obama’s health care plan is based on the program Romney implemented as governor of Massachusetts. And despite far more hawkish rhetoric to please the far right during the primaries, the Republican’s views on Afghanistan did not differ markedly from those of Obama. In recent weeks before and after the NATO summit, Romney has hardly spoken of the Afghan war, obviously recognizing that his primary views are anathema to the American people as a whole.

Obama and Romney have agreed on other issues. An article in Grist, April 24 by Lisa Hymas pointed out that  Obama’s “smart growth” initiative — the Partnership for Sustainable Communities — was also created in the mold of a Romney program…. As governor, Romney actively fought sprawl and promoted density. He ran on a smart-growth platform: ‘Sprawl is the most important quality-of-life issue facing Massachusetts,’ he said in 2002…. Under President Obama, the EPA moved from praising Romney’s smart-growth office to mimicking it.” It went into effect in June 2009. Romney also supported abortion rights, environmentalism and immigration as governor.

These “coincidences” are the outstanding ironies of the campaign so far. “Far right” Romney and “liberal populist” Obama have both resembled “moderate Republicans” when in power. Obama will revert to his center-right configuration if reelected, but if Romney ever gets to the White House his constituency will force him to largely govern as an ultra-conservative.

A principal Republican issue in the past several presidential elections has been that the Democrats were “weak on defense,” including in 2008 when Obama opposed the Iraq war, but the right wing has lowered the volume significantly because it can’t work this year.

The Democratic Party, of course, voted for, supported and funded the Afghan and Iraq wars, but Obama defeated pro-war Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination because his critique of the disastrous adventure in Iraq accorded with that of most Democratic primary voters — then turned around when elected and stole the Republican thunder by transforming into a war president. He governs foreign/military affairs as a hawk, juggling several bloody conflicts simultaneously, abjectly pandering to the armed forces and fostering the growth of militarism in American society. A year after the Arab Spring in the Middle East and North Africa, the Obama Administration has launched its own Imperialist Spring in the same region.

Many Democrats voted for Obama in the 2008 primaries because he was considered a “peace candidate” of sorts. A recent article by Atlantic Magazine staff writer Conor Friedersdorf compiled a brief partial account of Obama’s “peace” record:

• Obama escalated the war in Afghanistan, adding tens of thousands of troops at a cost of many billions of dollars. • He committed American forces to a war in Libya, though he had neither approval from Congress nor reason to think events there threatened national security. • He ordered 250 drone strikes that killed at least 1,400 people in Pakistan. • He ordered the raid into Pakistan that killed Osama bin Laden. • He ordered the killings of multiple American citizens living abroad. • He expanded the definition of the War on Terrorism and asserted his worldwide power to indefinitely detain anyone he deems a terrorist. • He expanded drone attacks into Somalia. • He ordered a raid on pirates in Somalia. • He deployed military squads to fight the drug war throughout Latin America. • He expanded the drone war in Yemen, going so far as to give the CIA permission to kill people even when it doesn’t know their identities so long as they’re suspected of ties to terrorism. • He’s implied that he’d go to war with Iran rather than permitting them to get nuclear weapons.”

No matter who wins in November nothing listed above will change, except perhaps for the worse. If Obama returns to the White House, it will be to the same mess the U.S. finds itself in today, along with the wars, inequality and hardship. Should Romney get in it will be a mess on steroids.

Progressive change certainly remains possible in America, although neither ruling party is equipped to bring it about. These parties were not prepared to end the Vietnam war either, or to get rid of Jim Crow, or to implement the eight-hour day, or to allow women the democratic right to vote. But the people organized radical mass movements to fight for these goals and won.

The informal people’s struggles of various organizations that began coalescing early last year, propelled several months later by Occupy’s left critique of inequality, Wall St. and the 1% ruling plutocracy, has the potential to become a mass movement. Many such potentials have come along and faded for various reasons, including some that were co-opted or lost their vision. But such broad and deep movements — as long as they are massive, activist, radical and well organized — also have significantly changed American history. It may be a long, arduous struggle, but that’s the light at the end of this dismal electoral tunnel.

For the 99% of you reading this essay – who are not from Wisconsin – Scott Walker is the latest tea party right wing, uneducated, superstitious nut job bent upon destroying America with a virulent form of conservatism bordering upon fascism. In early 2011, after only days in office, and without running on the issue, Walker threatened to call out the state national guard to ram through reforms to gut public unions. Over coming months, Wisconsin citizens fought back – coming out by the hundreds of thousands in a “Cheddar Rebellion” to protest and occupy the state capitol – and though ultimately unsuccessful, laying the foundation for the Occupy Movement.

Thus began a year of Walker’s war upon the unions, environment, women, education and basic human decency. And Wisconsin’s solid and hard-working people – that respect human rights, political institutions, and fairness – are still fighting back with a recall election this coming June 5th. After nearly a million recall signatures were gathered, Governor Walker could become only the third governor in American history to be booted from office. Ecological Internet and I are based in Wisconsin, and were deeply involved in the original protests.

I had the misfortune of being a college classmate of Scott Walker. Walker attended Marquette from 1986 to 1990, two years younger than I. He was a laughable dork – dumb, full of himself, and authoritarian. Being deeply imperfect myself, nonetheless, I have to speak up on how going to college with Walker showed him to be a piece of work. And that his bad conduct, which began there, and led to a harsh and unjust start to his political life, which remains ugly and dangerous to this day, do in fact indicate Walker remains unfit for office.

Fresh from Badger Boys State leadership conference, freshly shorn of his mullet, and in ill-fitting suits; Scott rolled onto campus in 1986 at 18 already running for office. He was constantly speaking in sound bites, with a false sugary sweetness, about taxes and abortion – the only issues which Scott Walker truly cared about other than his personal quest for power.

To put it politely, Walker was not the sharpest tool in the shed, actually amongst the least sharp. With a C average (if that) and never graduating, I am not surprised to see him making up his own math on jobs when the real numbers don’t suit him. This reflects the utter disdain with which he holds truth, knowledge, education, and anything else that clashes with his absolutist worldview of religious and corporate based rule. As a classmate, he displayed a shocking lack of curiosity, original thought, or interest in topics other than his political ascendency.

Walker’s debut in Marquette student politics as a freshman began by stirring up the campus with a McCarthyite investigation into misspending by the Homecoming committee. Despite the President and Vice-President of student government having already resigned over personal expenditures by a larger group of student leaders from student funds – including myself and others unknowingly – no criminal charges of any kind, and no hard evidence of wrong-doing by anyone – Walker grandstands and leads a student government trial of myself and others, that could have been avoided if he so chose.

Walker lost on all counts, but not before destroying a few people’s reputations, and amassing personal power. Sound familiar? Thus began an over 25 year record of bullying to get what he wants, of being insincere and narcissistic, and political grandstanding at the expense of others¸ all for personal self-aggrandizement, and without an ounce of either personal or political virtue.

Later in his freshman year Walker runs for his first campus-wide office – the President of the resident halls – and is beaten by a hastily cobbled together write-in campaign which I helped organize. Already the campus had soured upon a plastic, dishonest, conniving personality.

During Walker’s student body Presidential campaign in his sophomore year, things only worsen. Initially the Marquette Tribune student newspaper endorsed Walker’s opponent – a progressive activist working on social justice issues in the community – but said both would make a good student body president.

But this tepid endorsement changed after Walker was sanctioned for illegal campaigning on numerous occasions, and brutal personal attacks upon his opponent’s character. Walker distributed a mudslinging brochure about his opponent that featured statements such as “constantly shouting about fighting the administration” and “trying to lead several ineffective protests of his own.”

Meanwhile Walker’s campaign was secretly and systematically throwing out copies of the newspaper that endorsed his opponent. In an unprecedented move, the newspaper retracted itself and declared Walker “unfit for office.” He lost in a land slide and was deeply humiliated by his poor conduct.

Thus began an early pattern of ridiculing those concerned with social justice, homelessness, militarism, and racism. Forget about it, in his corporatist and religious world, such issues are not of concern. To care for others’ needs is unlikely to further his political power grab. Reducing taxes and ruling women’s bodies is all he cared about then, and all he seems to care passionately about now.

Scott Walker shamed himself by the way he acted at Marquette. His campaign was one of the dirtiest in school history. Walker left the university not long afterward. The fact that Walker has refused to release his transcripts, along with information why he left, raises reasonable questions if Walker left school on his own volition, as he claims, or if there was another reasons and he was kicked out.

I wish I could say definitely why he never graduated; it is a closely guarded secret. I believe the general line of thinking – that Scott Walker was caught cheating. Both Walker and Marquette University should end their cover-up of what occurred. Instead Marquette hails Walkers as a “Marquette alumnus” even though he only attended and did not graduate.

I should note that in his junior year, after being pummeled in student politics, Walker seemed a reformed and humbled man, and tried to make amends. For a while he was just himself, and not always conniving to get something with false plastic, creepy insincerity. Indeed, I have fond memories of drinking beers with a more humane Walker, as friendly adversaries. Yet clearly he went back over to the dark side after leaving Marquette, returning to his scorched Earth, divide-and-conquer mentality that got him in so much trouble there, and to this day.

Scott Walker is still unfit for office. During his time as Milwaukee County executive, massive illegal fund-raising went on feet from his office door. In the past year and a half, Governor Walker preemptively threatened not only eerily to call out the National Guard, he threatened to illegally arrest political opponents. He refers to hard working nurses, fire-fighters, cops, teachers, and government workers as union thugs. For months he illegally limited access to the Capitol – the people’s house. Corporate interests were given the keys to the state, and told to go forth and plunder.

And now Governor Walker has sold out the state to the national tea party movement for a 25 to 1 advantage in money for his recall campaign – and is saturating the airwaves with lies, trying to buy the election.

In closing, let me note it is really sad to see a politician taking advantage of the jealousy between those that did not work hard in school, did not get an education, and thus have smaller opportunities; and those that worked hard to build their minds, and now work in professional, yet underpaid public service jobs. His campaign preys upon class jealousy, ignorance and racism in rural areas, kowtowing to the lowest denominator of decency in the populace.

I know a petty tyrant when I see one. Scott Walker is concerned with one thing, power. He has shown time and again that he has a very limited view of the world, and will ram through policies not because they work or he believes in them, but because he is an aspiring tinpot dictator.

Walker seeks to consolidate his power with every move he makes. Everything comes down to a cruel calculus of whether it benefits him personally politically, with no concern regarding the line of victims behind him, or concern with such “socialist” virtues as human rights, economic justice, equity, and sustaining ecology.

Walker’s glib narcissism borders upon sociopathy. If this is the best the right wing nut jobs have, we are in profound trouble as ecosystems, rights, justice, and equity are all rolled back in the interest of low paying jobs and corporate rule. In fact, Walker’s conduct meets all the definitions of a classic fascist – authoritarian, gutting unions and education, scapegoating, threatening violence, vilifying critics, being charming yet falsely charismatic, and commitment to corporatist rule.

Scott Walker is a bad and dangerous man. There is something fundamentally wrong with Walker’s personality that makes him unfit for office – both then and now. That’s my and many others’ conclusion after seeing how abusive and ill-tempered he was then, and how bad of political bully he has become.

Let me be clear – I have not a shred of jealousy regarding my former classmate. I would never want to rule over women’s bodies, dismantle Wisconsin’s prized educational system, sell-out the state with massive tax breaks to out-of-state corporations, or wage war upon tribal rice lands and working families. And I recognize unions – the right to associate with others to organize to sell your labor to the highest bidder – to be a fundamental human right.

I am not fit to be governor, and abhor local politics, focusing instead upon issues of global ecological sustainability. And I was no angel in college, partying too much and a caddish oaf towards women, despite graduating with honors. But I am not running for governor, nor misrepresenting myself like Walker, and certainly not untruthfully taking away others’ rights, while again trying to steal an election, in order to cravenly pursue absolute power.

I don’t know who will win the recall, but I do know that if you are expecting things to settle down if Walker wins, you are going to be disappointed. For his whole life Walker has created crises to then divide and conquer opposition in order to consolidate his power.

Though Governor Walker never attained the Marquette student body Presidency – he has an awful lot in common with one of Wisconsin’s other infamous politicians who did – Senator Joe McCarthy. Have you no sense of decency, Scottie, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?

The grip of this fiction on the American collective mind reflects a conjuncture of causes: the West’s guilt about the Holocaust; the proto-Zionist theology of American evangelical sects; U.S. imperial interests in Middle East oil reserves; and the West’s long-distrust of and contempt for Arabs and Muslims.

Propaganda produced by Israel and the American Jewish establishment inverts reality. This is crude stuff, manifestly false to anyone who would look up information published by a multitude of respected media and human rights organizations. But omissions and outright lies are probably a deliberate tactic: deny, deny … confuse, confuse … Like Israel’s building of “facts on the ground” (settlements, roads, etc.), it gains time; the hope is that Israeli power will eventually be so entrenched in the land of “Greater Israel” that nobody will remember Palestinians ever lived there.

The justice of the Palestinian cause is increasingly recognized in the West, particularly at the grassroots level. This is due, above all, to the courage and persistence of the Palestinians themselves. But scholars—Arab, Jewish, and other—who challenge the deceptive narratives also deserve credit. One such scholar is Gilbert Achcar, a Lebanese-born professor at the University of London and author of several books on the Middle East and U.S. foreign policy.

A smear campaign

The Arabs and the Holocaust: The Arab-Israeli War of Narratives (Henry Holt and Company, 2010), Achcar’s most recent book, is an ambitious attempt to present an accurate history of Arab attitudes toward Nazism, Jews, and the Holocaust. It refutes the story told by pro-Israel zealots, who attribute hostility to Israel in the Arab world not to Israel’s actions, but to Arabs’ hatred of Jews: hatred, they argue, which originated in Islam and flourished with the Arabs’ collaboration with the Nazis during WWII.

The book has been well received by Middle East and Jewish Studies scholars, and Achcar has been invited to give talks on many university campuses. This raised the ire of David Horowitz, founder of the Horowitz Freedom Center, which, according to its mission statement, “combats the efforts of the radical left and its Islamist allies to destroy American values and disarm this country … The leftist offensive is most obvious on our nation’s campuses, where the Freedom Center protects students from indoctrination and political harassment.”

Last November, an article in the web FrontPage Magazine, edited and published by Horowitz, launched a smear campaign against Achcar. Focusing on a presentation by Achcar under the auspices of Middle East Studies of the University of California at Berkeley, the article appeared on a host of kindred websites, such as that of Campus Watch, an organization founded by Daniel Pipes, a main purveyor with Horowitz of Islamophobic material and whitewashing of Israel.¹

Another attack, directed at Achcar’s lecture in the Jewish Studies Department of the University of California at Davis, came from BlueTruth, a blog devoted to “refuting the accusations and exposing the lies that are being told … about Israel, Jews and pro-Israel organizations …” One such lie, to judge by the article, is that Israel was “built on Arab land.”

As someone whose mother and father were murdered in Auschwitz, and who herself survived the Nazis’ barbarous nationalism thanks to the courage of a group of Catholics, Protestants, Communists, and Jews, I find the idea that defending the “Jewish state” supersedes all other human obligations both immoral and senseless. Nothing, not even the Holocaust, justifies Israel’s treatment of Palestinians or the continuing efforts of pro-Israel zealots to show Arabs and Muslims as less than human. Israel and its unconditional supporters are on a path leading to catastrophe not only for Palestinians, but in the not very long run, for Israel itself.

The Arabs and the Holocaust

In his talk at Berkeley, Achcar described the book’s main purpose as deconstructing the image, dominant in the West and Israel, of Arabs as pro-Nazi. Relying on an extensive array of primary sources and historical studies, Achcar presents an “Arab world” with a great diversity of beliefs and opinions, a multiplicity of evolving ideological currents—just as in the West. The many Arab countries are not peopled by an indistinct mass of millions animated by ancestral hatred of the Jews. “The Arabs,” Achcar writes, do not exist “as a politically and intellectually uniform group.”²

The first part of Achcar’s book covers the period from 1933, when Hitler acceded to power, until Israel’s foundation in 1948. At that time, “liberal Westernizers” and Marxists took a strong stand against both Nazism and anti-Semitism. In the various Arab nationalist movements, sympathy for the Axis varied but was overall low, and opposition to Zionism did not translate into hatred of “the Jews.” It is only among “reactionary and/or fundamentalist pan-Islamists” that significant anti-Semitism and support for Nazism were found.

Several recent studies confirm this. For example, Achcar’s book quotes Israel Gershoni, a professor of Middle Eastern History at Tel Aviv University, who wrote that in the 1930s:

the overwhelming majority of Egyptian voices—in the political arena, in intellectual circles, among the professional, educated, urban middle classes and even in the literate popular cultures—rejected fascism and Nazism both as an ideology and a practice, and as “an enemy of the enemy.”³ [a reference to “The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” a view which did create some support for Nazi Germany among Arabs living under the yoke of French and British colonization.]

Those painting Arabs as heirs to Nazism use as “proof” one particular episode: the 1941 Baghdad “pogrom” (the Farhud). In April 1941, Iraqi pro-German nationalists led a coup against Iraq’s pro-British regent. Propaganda by the German legation, reinforced by the presence of the pro-Nazi Mufti of Jerusalem, had whipped up anti-Jewish feeling in Baghdad. British forces invaded Iraq, put the pro-German government to flight, and secured Baghdad, but their troops remained posted on the outskirts. Rumors circulated that the Jews were helping the much-hated British. There followed two days of killing and plunder; about 180 Jews were murdered. The rioters were stopped when Iraqi troops entered Baghdad and reestablished order, killing many of the mob.

Achcar notes that the vast majority of Muslim Iraqis condemned the violence and many protected their Jewish neighbors at the risk of their own lives. Looters from Baghdad’s slums, driven by need rather than anti-Jewish sentiment, joined in the action. With the regent back in power, the Iraqi government granted compensation to the families of Jewish victims.

Achcar’s account of the Farhud agrees with that of several authors, such as Nissim Rejwan, an Israeli writer of Baghdadi origin.⁴ There is little evidence that the Farhud was indicative of widespread and deeply rooted hatred toward Jews in the whole of “the Arab world.” Note that no anti-Jewish rioting occurred in any other Arab country during WWII, despite the calls to jihad broadcast from Berlin by the Mufti from November 1941 on.

In fact, Arabs played a truly remarkable role in defeating Hitler, a fact so carefully suppressed by the French after the war that I did not learn of it in 15 years of schooling in France. As part of De Gaulle’s Free French Forces, Arab troops from French North Africa contributed massively to the liberation of Europe. They fought alongside the Allies from the landing in Sicily in July 1943 to the invasion of Germany in 1945, with great loss of life. For instance, 233,000 of the 550,000 Free French troops landing on the Mediterranean coast in Nazi-occupied France in November 1944 were North African Muslims.⁵

The second part of Achcar’s book traces the rise of anti-Semitism in the Arab world after the founding of Israel in 1948. Western anti-Semitic themes, such as the “international Jewish conspiracy” of the fraudulent Protocols of the Elders of Zion, found their way into public discourse. Achcar does not excuse or minimize Arab anti-Semitism. He deplores the “abysmal stupidity” of these “anti-Semitic ravings or mindless denials of the Holocaust.” But do these ravings indicate an Arab wish to exterminate the Jews, a project they supposedly inherited from the Nazis? These claims are absurd, according to Achcar and many others. Nissim Rejwan, for instance, writes:

Neither their religious culture nor their historical record lends credence to the claim that the Muslim Arabs of today are capable of the kind of historical consummation that found expression in Auschwitz and other Nazi extermination camps … Viewed in anything like the correct historical perspective, the idea of “Arab Auschwitz” is an absurdity.⁶

And, of course, there are parallel ravings in Israeli/Jewish political discourse: referring to Arabs by animal names, calling for their expulsion and annihilation, and so on. See Israeli General Rafael Eitan’s infamous statement: “When we have settled the land, all the Arabs will be able to do about it will be to scurry around like drugged cockroaches in a bottle.”⁷

Achcar writes: “There are more anti-Semites among the Arabs today than among any other population group—for obvious historical reasons” [emphasis mine].⁸ These historical reasons, which are indeed obvious, were they not again and again obfuscated by pro-Israel apologists, include: Israel’s ethnic cleansing of 750,000 Palestinian Arabs in 1948-1949 and its systematic destruction of 418 Palestinian villages to prevent the refugees’ return: creating 300,000 more Palestinian refugees in 1967; a brutal and tyrannical occupation accompanied by continued ethnic cleansing ever since; and atrocities against civilian populations in wars in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and Lebanon.

Contemporary Arab anti-Semitism is not unmotivated, atavistic hatred. It is rooted in anger at Israel’s very real aggressive and destructive policies. Even Bernard Lewis, a historian favored by defenders of Israel, wrote “for Christian anti-Semites, the Palestine problem is a pretext and an outlet for their hatred; for Muslim anti-Semites, it is the cause.”⁹ Remove the cause—that is, end Israel’s ethnocentrism and expansionism—and Arab anti-Semitism would likely fade away.

Achcar shows how Arab anti-Semitism is “reactive” and changeable—dependent on Israel’s actions, its violence, its propaganda (e.g., calling Arabs “Nazis”), and on the particular historical and political circumstances of the various Arab/Muslim countries. It is not “the fantasy-based hatred of the Jews that was and still is typical of European racists.”¹⁰

I surmise that The Arabs and the Holocaust was written with an Arab audience in mind as well as a Western one. The book has been translated into Arabic and it is, among other things, an attempt to build bridges, a call for each side to listen to the other. He writes:

It is faith in human reason that justifies the hope that what counts as truth on one side of the Green Line or, rather, of the separation wall, will not forever count as error on the other.¹¹

In the conclusion, describing “statist Zionism” as “a Janus, one face turned toward the Holocaust, the other toward the Nakba, one toward persecution endured, the other toward persecution inflicted,” Achcar returns to the need for each side to acknowledge the sufferings of the other:

Only recognition of both of Janus’ faces—of the Holocaust and the Nakba—can bring Israeli, Palestinians, and other Arabs in genuine dialogue.¹²

Achcar’s book displays a formidable knowledge of the currents of thought on both sides of the Arab/Jewish divide as well as a brilliant analytic mind. By placing Arab attitudes toward the Holocaust in historical and psychological contexts, he opens up vistas to Western readers beyond the shallow, warped views of U.S. main media. He understands and has compassion for the historical wounds of the Jews. His integrity and openness shine throughout.

Hasbara

The authors of the FrontPageMag article, Cinnamon Stillwell and Rima Greene, seem not to be concerned about historical context. They mix innuendo, distortion and falsehood, quote out of context and misquote, then add in one or another point of dogma. They do not at any point counter Achcar with contrary evidence. Instead, they speak in generalities, e.g., Achcar’s book “masks its outlandish conclusions with scholarly apparatus while confirming the biases of the left-leaning, anti-Israel Middle East studies establishment.”

The “Hasbara Handbook: Promoting Israel on Campus” (hasbara is Hebrew for “public relations, “ or “propaganda”), published in 2002 by the World Union of Jewish Students, gives advice on how to score points “whilst avoiding genuine discussion”: rather than addressing your opponent’s arguments, make “as many comments that are positive about Israel as possible whilst attacking certain Palestinian positions, and attempting to cultivate a dignified appearance”; repeat points again and again, “If people hear something often enough, they come to believe it.” The same tactics seem to be used in the writing of most FrontPageMag articles.

Nakba vs. Holocaust

Stillwell and Greene write: “Achcar concluded by drawing an asinine correlation between the Holocaust … and the ‘Nakba’ or ‘catastrophe,’ the Arabic term to describe the creation of the state of Israel: ‘The Shoah ended in 1945, but the suffering of the Palestinians is never-ending.’”

In fact, Achcar, in his talk characterized the Nakba as “fortunately not a genocide, but what we could call an act of ethnic cleansing.” He went on to say that real dialogue conducive to peace requires

the mutual recognition of the tragedies of each other without putting them on the same plane … because the magnitude of the Holocaust cannot be compared to that of the Nakba… Nevertheless, this does not diminish the importance of what Palestinians have suffered. Not only the ordeal of the Palestinians is continuing … But they went through … the worst kind of experience just recently in Gaza in the winter of 2008-2009.

In his book, Achcar condemns making “no distinction between colonialist usurpation of a territory and the racist extermination of a whole population.”¹³ He quotes Edward Said: “Who would want morally to equate mass extermination with mass dispossession?”¹⁴ But he also states that Palestinian suffering is ongoing, and getting worse.

In fact, it is rarely useful to compare the Holocaust and the ordeal of the Palestinians; it does not help us understand the reality of either. Sixty-four years have elapsed since the Nakba, 64 years during which Palestinians have been subjected to further wars, expulsions, and dispossession. They have been denied political, economic, and human rights. At present, in Gaza, 1.5 million people, half of them children, are imprisoned behind a 25-foot high fence and regularly attacked by Israeli drones and Apache helicopters, killed by fire from tanks and snipers on Gaza’s borders; in the West Bank, Palestinians are evicted from their land to make way for Israeli settlers who harass and kill with impunity; and East Jerusalem is being “judaized,” i.e., emptied of its Palestinian inhabitants.

This is not genocide, but what name is there for it?

Anti-Arab racism in Israel

Stillwell and Greene claim that, unlike anti-Semitism in the Arab world, “’anti-Arab attitudes in Israel’ are neither widespread, [nor] promulgated through state-provided education and other official means.” But all polls of Israeli Jews reveal deep anti-Arab feeling. For instance, the Israel Democracy Institute released a poll in January 2011, which found that nearly half of Israeli Jews would not want to live next door to an Arab.¹⁵ Racism is strongest among the young: the Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper reported that civics teachers around the country were complaining of rampant, virulent anti-Arab racism amongst their Jewish students.¹⁶

Nuri Peled-Elhanan, an Israeli professor of education and author of a book on Israeli school books,¹⁷ thinks “state-provided education” is a main culprit in promoting racism. Interviewed in the Guardian, she said Israeli school books describe Arabs “as vile and deviant and criminal, people who don’t pay taxes, people who live off the state, people who don’t want to develop… The only representation is as refugees, primitive farmers and terrorists.”

She added: “One question that bothers many people is how do you explain the cruel behavior of Israeli soldiers towards Palestinians, an indifference to human suffering, the inflicting of suffering. … I think the major reason for that is education.”

“Other official means” of promulgating racism include laws that are the very foundation of the Israeli state: the 1950 Law of Return and 1952 Citizenship Law, which allow every Jew in the world to immigrate to Israel and become an Israeli citizen. These same laws forbid the return of Palestinians who were forced to flee their homes from 1947 to 1952. This inequity may have made sense to those in the West who lived through the years after WWII, when the horrors of the Holocaust and general acceptance of colonialism blinded almost everyone to the injustice perpetrated against Palestinian Arabs. But it is much past time to look at the situation through Palestinian eyes.

More recent laws show racism becoming increasingly institutionalized in Israel. Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, reports that “the current government coalition has proposed a flood of new racist and discriminatory bills.” One such bill legalizes “admission committees” operating in nearly 700 small towns, allowing them to reject applicants deemed “unsuitable to the social life of the community … or the social and cultural fabric of the town”—for “unsuitable applicants,” read principally “Arabs.”¹⁸

Holocaust denial, Nakba denial

Israel’s recent Nakba Law effectively forbids the public commemoration of the Nakba. Israel lodged a protest when UN secretary-general Ban Ki-Moon used the word in a telephone conversation with Mahmoud Abbas on May 2008, the 60th anniversary of the Nakba. Tzipi Livni, then Israel’s foreign minister, declared: “The Palestinians can celebrate an Independence Day if, on that day, they eliminate the word Nakba from their vocabulary.”

Speaking with her usual icy self-assurance, Livni was essentially telling the Arab minority to shut up about a fact no historian denies, not even Zionist historian Benny Morris, who said: “I don’t think that the expulsions of 1948 were war crimes. You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.”¹⁹ Because she speaks as a government minister of a state with a very powerful military and several hundred nuclear weapons, her pronouncements are alarming.

Livni makes luminously clear that Israel is not a democracy for all its citizens. For the Jews, yes, although the rights of dissenters are increasingly restricted. In effect, “a Jewish and democratic state” is an oxymoron, no matter how much ink has been spent to deny it: a state so defined must privilege the Jews over other citizens. And being Jewish is unlike being, for example, French. One can become French by participating in the country’s communal life for five years, but there is no way to become Jewish and qualify for the Law of Return except by converting to Judaism, or by being “a child and a grandchild of a Jew, the spouse of a Jew, the spouse of a child of a Jew, and the spouse of a grandchild of a Jew.”

Israel: innocent, victimized, maligned …

Gail Rubin J.D. author of the BlueTruth article, waxes indignant at Achcar for describing Israel as a “’settler colonial project’ built on ‘Arab land,’” and “accusing Zionists of ‘ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians.’”

That Israel was built on Arab land, whether bought or confiscated, is undeniable. As for “ethnic cleansing,” Benny Morris, who argued in his early books that the Palestinians had fled because of the war, now concedes the role of deliberate Zionist policy: “I have concluded that pre-1948 thinking had a greater effect on what happened in 1948 than I had allowed for…”²⁰

In any case, no one denies that Israel prevented the return of refugees, a violation of international law. It was Israeli policy to shoot as “infiltrators” Palestinians trying to return to their villages in the night. Hundreds of villages were destroyed to foreclose their former inhabitants’ return.

Arguments about the colonial nature of the Israeli state usually take the form of semantic nitpicking. Sociologist Maxime Rodinson, a French Jew who first broke the taboo against calling Israel a “colonial-settler state,” concludes his remarkable 1967 essay:

… the creation of the State of Israel on Palestinian soil is the culmination of a process that fits perfectly into the European-American movement of expansion in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries whose aim was to settle new inhabitants among other people or to dominate them economically and politically. This is, moreover, an obvious diagnosis, and if I have taken so many words to state it, it is only because of the desperate efforts that have been made to conceal it.²¹

Stillwell and Greene recommend a review of Achcar’s book by “atypical professors” Matthias Küntzel and Colin Meade. The lengthy review²² takes up the themes of Küntzel’s book, Jihad and Jew-hatred: Islamism, Nazism and the roots of 9/11, such as: Islamist movements—al-Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran’s regime—originated in the lethal link between Islamism and Nazism; the Arabs have inherited “eliminatory anti-Semitism” from the Nazis; jihadism and jihadist anti-Semitism are the greatest threats to the world today. According to Achcar, his book is “a fantasy-based narrative pasted together out of secondary sources and third-hand reports.”²³

In Küntzler’s view, responsibility for the Palestine-Israel conflict lies entirely with the Palestinians and Arabs:

… it is not the escalation of the Middle East conflict that has given rise to anti-Semitism; it is rather anti-Semitism that has given rise to the escalation of the Middle East conflict – again and again…. In fact, what we are seeing is the revival of Nazi ideology in a new garb.²⁴

This is yet another version of the myth that Israel acts only in response to Arab aggression. In fact, following the conquest of land and expulsion of its native Arab inhabitants, Israel again and again inflicted great harm on Arabs and Muslims—primarily the Palestinians, but also those living in the border states—through actions that cannot be attributed to Israel’s need to survive. Consider the annexation of Jerusalem, a city sacred to Islam; the occupation of the Palestinian territories and of the Golan Heights; and wars such as that against Lebanon in 2006, supposedly a response to the kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers that resulted in 1,200 Lebanese deaths, almost all of them civilians.

One example provides strong evidence that Arabs have not inherited the Nazis’ exterminatory will. The 2002 Arab Peace Initiative, re-endorsed unanimously by the Arab League in 2007,²⁵ calls upon Israel to withdraw from all the territories occupied since 1967, and for the establishment of a Palestinian state on the West Bank and Gaza Strip, with East Jerusalem as its capital. The Arab countries would then commit to establishing normal relations with Israel and provide security for all the states of the region. Israel is entreated to accept the initiative to “[enable] the Arab countries and Israel to live in peace and good neighborliness and provide future generations with security, stability and prosperity.” The initiative calls for “a just solution to the Palestinian refugee problem,” but expresses support for any negotiated settlement between Israel and Palestinians.

It is difficult to find exterminatory anti-Semitism in all this. Unsurprisingly, Israeli politicians have ignored the initiative.

All signs point to the fact that Israel has never wanted an equitable peace settlement. Israeli governments since Israel’s beginnings, including Labor governments, have all acted to further the goal of a Greater Israel empty of Palestinians.

The how and why of pro-Israel watchdogs on campuses

Pro-Israel propaganda outlets like Frontpage Magazine carry little weight with scholars of the Middle East, but they are significant actors in sustaining the upside-down view of the Israel-Palestine conflict in America. They use intimidation to inhibit free speech on campuses, and poison the well of public discourse.

They advise students to take notes and report on professors, which especially intimidates junior, untenured faculty. They post on their websites telephone numbers and e-mail addresses of departments and faculties which get harassed by angry phone calls and swamped by hate mail.

Pipes and Horowitz encourage confrontation and creating disturbances, followed by complaints that their freedom of speech was curtailed. So here is Gail Rubin’s account of the Q&A part of Achcar’s talk at UC, Davis:

… challenging questions were not welcomed during the Q & A. I was abruptly censored while attempting to establish facts to challenge Mr. Achcar’s skewed conclusion that the Grand Mufti’s anti-Semitism had only a minimal impact on both Jews and Arabs. Professors Miller and Biale angrily told me the questions were insulting and to either stop or leave the room.

In fact, according to Jewish Studies Director, Professor Diane Wolf, Rubin was called on to ask her question, read a prepared script with no relation to Achcar’s talk, and then asked him whether he wasn’t blaming the Holocaust on the Jews. As he started to express that he was shocked and offended, she tried to re-read her statement. At this point, Professor David Biale and others told her to be quiet and Professor Susan Miller explained that in an academic environment, we wait for the speaker’s response to a question. She should leave if she could not abide by those rules. So the questioner was stopped only when she interrupted Achcar to repeat her statement.

In an interview after Achcar’s program, Professor Emily Gottreich, Vice Chair of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Berkeley, commented that if these campus pro-Israel activists were truly interested in engaging in academic dialogue, they would express their disagreements directly to the scholar in a public forum or to departmental chairs or program directors; instead, they appeal directly to donors, who tend to be neither Middle East experts nor particularly well-versed in the rules of academic discourse, to withdraw funding; or they approach university presidents or chancellors with accusations of anti-Semitism and “biased” scholarship.

Campus Watch and Horowitz’ Freedom Center are only two pieces in a large network of pro-Israel pressure groups operating on campuses. The Israel on Campus Coalition includes no less than 33 independent organizations, including the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and Anti-Defamation League (but not Horowitz’ or Pipes’ organizations, whose work may not quite fit the coalition’s image). The coalition works “to engage leaders at colleges and universities around issues affecting Israel, and to create positive campus change for Israel.”

Why this vast deployment of resources on campuses? The answer is straightforward. A recent document by the David Project, dedicated to ensuring that “effective support for Israel thrives on campuses and in our communities,” states: “AIPAC has had a successful track record in building campus ties to future members of Congress and campus leaders.”²⁶ To-morrow’s leaders are on campuses today, so the thinking goes, and they must be reached by Israeli propaganda as early as possible.

Changing Americans’ view of who Palestinians are

Philip Weiss, founder and co-editor of Mondoweiss.net, a website of news about Israel/Palestine, recounts a Skype-mediated “meeting” with youth in Gaza: “Most of the questions were from young men. They were smart but slightly abstract questions … Then Rawan Yaghi sat at the microphone and asked, What can be done to change Americans’ view of who Palestinians are?”

Weiss writes of being overcome with emotion by this “poised young woman wearing wire-rimmed glasses, 18 years old … There was such delicacy to her manner and her question … I struggled against upwelling emotions to answer her question. ‘`This is the biggest question of all, and I don’t know the answer.’”

For all of us living outside the prison of Gaza, this young woman’s question should come as a call to remember the immense harm created by prejudice, ignorance, and demonization. Voices like Gilbert Achcar’s must be heard on campuses and in larger public arenas.

1. Fear, Inc.: The Roots of the Islamophobia Network in America, Center for American Progress, August 2011.
2. Achcar, The Arabs and the Holocaust, p. 33.
3. Israel Gershoni, “Beyond Anti-Semitism: Egyptian Responses to German Nazism and Italian Fascism in the 1930s” (EUI Working Paper no. RSC 20001/32, San Domenico, 2001, p.6.
4. Nissim Rejwan, The Jews of Iraq: 3000 years of history and culture. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1985.
5. Benjamin Stora, L’armée d’Afrique: Les oubliés de la Libération, ‪Volume 692 of Textes et documents pour la classe TDC. ‪C.N.D.P., 1995.
6. Nissim Rejwan, Arabs aims and Israeli attitudes. The Leonard Davis Institute, Davis Occasional Papers, No 77, 2000.
7. “Israel Washes Away the Sins of Former Army Chief of Staff,” Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, January/February 2005.
8. Achcar, The Arabs and the Holocaust, p. 274.
9. Bernard Lewis, Semites and Anti-Semites: An Inquiry into Conflict and Prejudice. Reissued with new afterword. New York: W. W. Norton, 1999. p. 259.
10. Achcar, p. 275.
11. Achcar, p. 273.
12. Achcar, p. 291.
13. Achcar, p. 130.
14. Achcar, The Arabs and the Holocaust, p. 26.
15. “Israeli intolerance shows up on Internet, in Knesset, on the street,” Los Angeles Times, January 23, 2011.
16. Tomer Velmer, “Student’s answer on civics test: Death to Arabs,” YNet Magazine, January 19, 2011.
17. Nurit Elhanan-Peled, Palestine in Israeli School Books: Ideology and Propaganda in Education. Library of Modern Middle East Studies, 2012.
18. “The Inequality Report,” Adalah, March 2011. See also “New Discriminatory Laws and Bills in Israel,” June 2011. Both can be downloaded from Adalah.
19. “Survival of the Fittest? An Interview with Benny Morris,” with 
Ari Shavit, Logos 3.1, Winter 2004.
20. Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited, p. 5.
21. Maxime Rodinson, Israel: A Colonial-Settler State?, New York: Monad Press, 1973.
22. “In the Straightjacket of Anti-Zionism,” on the website of Engage, “a resource that aims to help people counter the boycott Israel campaign.” Küntzel’s book Jihad and Jew-hatred, translated by Colin Mead, was published by Telos Press Publishing (2008).
23. Achcar, p. 169-170.
24. From a talk given at Yale University, “Hitler’s Legacy: Islamic Antisemitism in the Middle East.”
25. Arab Peace Initiative.
26. “A Burning Campus? Rethinking Israel Advocacy at America’s Universities and Colleges,” 2012.

Countering, Democrats will huff that the travails of their dead battery, soft spot, touching turmoil or whatever it is that’s inside their boxer’s shorts or panties is no one’s business, least of all the government, though, of course, the Democrat-appointed Janet Napolitano and her TSA hordes have set up an enduring base next to their exposed, uh, discount toys. Irradiated and propped up by Cialis, they don’t look half bad. Oh yes, they do.

According to Democrats, Obama is a good liberal because he will also send gay men and women worldwide to massacre whoever gets in the way of the oil liberals need to drive their SUVs to anti-war rallies.

According to Republicans, Mitt is a good conservative since he can’t stand Ellen DeGeneres, Johnny Weir, or Barney the Dinosaur, although he will condemn a husband or wife halfway across the globe to commit unspeakable acts for years, while the remaining spouse languishes at home in anxiety and loneliness, to be comforted by some groggy chick at the bar, talk radio, a young cable guy, Jesus, reruns of American Idol or, in the best case scenario, nothing at all.

Republican politicians pretend to cherish the traditional family, while their Democratic counterparts feign that everyone should have a right to a family, but, in fact, neither side cares about anyone’s family, because they are indifferent if not hostile to human connections, period. Propped up by our military-banking complex, both parties support a bankrupting and bankrupted banking system and an endless war policy that destroy families worldwide, including here.

On top of that, they’ve tricked you into being plugged to their various brainwashing machines all day long, so that you’re divorced from your very self, honey. Outside, birds, sunshine and mounds of corpses your tax money murdered, though you wouldn’t know it, because you’re addicted to songs you’ve heard for the billionth time, each, as well as Snookie updates, pixelated pussies, cocks and boxscores.

Outside, a busking violinist says that his life is easier now, since there are so many out-of-business stores he can play in front of, without being shooed away. Outside, a person, male or female, it’s not clear, poses as a horse for tips, as a real horse looks on. Outside, a Vietnam vet drinks mouthwash to get high, while an Iraq vet shows his discharge paper to prove that he is a genuine, disposable piece of fodder, and not just an ordinary panhandler. A pint of Listerine with 21.6% alcohol costs $4.50, compared to a 24 oz., tallboy can of Natural Ice at $1.49, with 5.9 % alcohol, so Listerine is a much, much better value. It’s not exactly Jameson, true, but a few gulps will get you buzzed for maybe five hours. Outside, a man sells Newport cigarettes, “Two for a dollar, two for a dollar. Who’s next? How are you today? Very good to see you. Welcome back, it’s happy Monday. Time to go to work! It’s a beautiful day today, but don’t get used to it. It’s going to rain tomorrow! We all have our own cross to bear, ladies and gentlemen. My, aren’t you lovely today! Yes, you! Welcome back!” If he sells the entire pack in an hour, he will make $3.50. Outside, a man drains a leftover soda fished from a trash can in a well-manicured downtown plaza surrounded by bank skyscrapers.

But inside the screen, and thus inside your mind, all is well, stable and sexy. The recovery is on track, unemployment is steadily going down, and new college graduates are entering an improving job market, with multiple offers even. Inside the screen, what happens in Europe stays in Europe, Detroit is back, California is still the land of milk and honey and, soon enough, we will be amped up by orations of hope, change, forward, believe in America, let America be America and, yes, America can!

In this land of peeling yet persistent illusions, none is more farcical than the Presidential election, for even as it promises renewal, common purpose, focus and hope, and demands a collective soul searching, even, this elaborate and drawn out ritual will deliver nothing more than a new (or renewed) apologist for the same set of crimes against humanity, country and you. If there’s any good to this coming circus, it’s that the empire seems determined to maintain a relative peace until the electoral shenanigans are over. Though it’s itching for new rounds of shock and awesome, y’all, because that’s how it makes its money, it doesn’t want to tip this tottering economy into the mother of all ditches, not when citizens are somewhat focused on how to correct or improve our common lot.

If enough machinists, PhDs and war veterans dumpster dive and share a honey bucket, if whores dally in middle-class suburbs and gas goes to 6 bucks, for example, the country will explode from sea to shining sea, and not just because of well-placed FBI agents. With events quickly spiraling out of control, this election may not go as choreographed, family values be damned.

“These awards by SSU are reprehensible in light of Sandy Weill’s role in bringing about the economic crisis that has seized this nation,” said SSU sociology professor Noel Byrne. “The consequences have been dire for the SSU community of faculty, staff, students, graduates, alumni and their families, in the form of elevated tuition, reduced funding for education, auctioned homes, dashed dreams, burdensome debts, loss of employment opportunities, and resultant tragedies of an array of sorts.”

“The chaos resulting from the financial meltdown has cost us millions of jobs, throwing probably four to ten million people out of work,” added political science professor John Kramer. “Many folks define their lives, their responsibilities, and their worth to their families and to society by their work. When their work is lost, all too often their lives collapse. Their likelihood of dying in the next year increases. Suicide rates increase. More babies are born underweight and more of them die. We know of suicides here in Sonoma County whose proximate cause is loss of a job. Sandy Weill helped to create this vast tragedy.”

This year’s graduation was a disgrace. When it was announced that the Weills would receive an honorary degree, students, faculty, and alumni began organizing a direct action against that dishonorable degree. Occupy activists and other community members joined them, as did groups such as the Living Wage Coalition and the Peace and Justice Center.

With respect for the hard-working graduating students who earned their degrees, the peaceful action focused on educating the 10,000 students, faculty, family members, and friends who attended the two graduation ceremonies. Thousands of flyers documenting Weill’s substantial abuses as the architect of subprime mortgages and consequential foreclosures and evictions were passed out. Dozens of articles appeared in publications around the region, nationally, and even internationally. Radio stations and a television station reported the action on news and talk shows.

Dressed in black, students, family members, faculty, alumni, and others turned their backs in a dignified shunning when the doctorates were bestowed.

Christopher Bowers graduated on May 12 with a master’s degree in counseling. He turned has back on the Weills and later said, “SSU’s administration has had, for years, an incredible lack of accountability to its faculty, students and the community at large. This protest was for those who have had enough of that kind of cut-throat, dehumanizing culture that SSU continues to perpetuate.”

The last issue of the student newspaper, the May 8 Star, ran the banner “Day of Shame at SSU” across the top of the front-page with an article written by the news editor. The opinion page had two further articles, one entitled “Day of Shame: Wrong Place, Wrong Time” by the editor-in-chief. Those articles, as well as others, are at ShameOnSSU.org.

The newspaper appeared on stands Monday; it was soon taken away. A faculty member wrote the following on the faculty email listserve: “An SSU staff member observed SSU employees removing issues of the Star that had front page information on the controversy regarding the honorary degree process. This is truly disheartening.”

An SSU vice-president admitted, “Some newspapers were removed as part of efforts to clean the campus for graduation — something they do every year. I have directed the Facilities Team to return the papers.”

However, another faculty member reported the following: “I remember there being Star newspapers after nearly every Spring semester I’ve worked here. Some years I’ve been able to grab a copy well into July.” Though copies may have been temporarily returned, they soon vanished again.

“The editor of the Star estimates that 95 percent of newspapers have been removed,” wrote the Star’s faculty advisor. “This is unacceptable and a shot across the bow of the First Amendment. These so-called cleaning efforts that included the Star removal are an affront to free speech. The Day of Shame is now. Is this some attempt to cover up our controversies? I join with those who believe in freedom of speech to ask that a full accounting of what happened to these papers be made.”

Activists describe Weill as a “predator,” given the predatory lending practices that he used while CEO of Citigroup, once the largest bank in the world. A billionaire, he has been on Forbes’ Magazine’s list as one of the 100 most-wealthy Americans.

Weill retired and then spent $31 million dollars to buy a vineyard in Sonoma County in 2010. The wine industry is a primary presence of the 1% in our semi-rural county, which used to have a more diversified food-growing agriculture. It is now a monoculture of alcohol farming and industrial wine production.

As full-time residents in this beloved county, activists do not want other predator bankers and corporate managers to follow and retire with their big bucks and think they can move here without consequences. It is their intention to continue dogging Weill and others who think they can buy public education, join the wine industry, and spend the rest of the lives comfortably spending their ill-gotten wealth.

California’s greatness is due partly to its extensive public higher education, which used to be available here. That system is being privatized and corporatized by the 1% to further meet its elite needs, as these bought doctorates reveal.

What makes bailouts toxic is cronyism, the coming together of government and private wealth, the spectacle of Washington doing special favors for its pals in the investment banks.

– Thomas Frank

The outstanding discovery of recent historical and anthropological research is that man’s economy, as a rule, is submerged in his social relationships.

– Karl Polanyi¹

In What’s the Matter with Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America, author Thomas Frank explored American “democracy” and working Americans puzzling proclivity to vote against their economic best interest, which meant voting for the Republican Party. Frank’s latest book, Pity the Billionaire: The Hard-Times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right, segues into the question of how a malfunctioning system that screws the masses manages to perpetuate itself? And why do the masses allow themselves to be screwed by the system?

The economic system is capitalism, and the political system goes hand-in-hand with molly coddling capitalism – even to the extent of bailing it out with a reverse socialism. Here was the hypocritical spectacle of right-wingers who abjure government intervention (favoring instead the rule of the market) dipping into the government coffers to bail themselves out. Frank has a knack for prose; he takes what should be palpable for all and renders it in a highly readable and engrossing fashion. He clearly presents the bailout for the economic rip-off that it was — a rip-off of working people that transferred their hard-earned money to the idle elitist class.

Frank, obviously, is highly critical of neoliberalism and so-called democracy, but unclear is what he leans toward instead. Frank would like more socialism, but would he like socialism as the system? Just how far would he like to deviate from capitalism? As an alternative to the bailout, he mentions nationalization, but does not delve into the pros and cons of a wholesale nationalization. Why?

When the ship of the elitist financial class starts taking on water, why should the common people grab the bails and hand the helm back to the incompetent navigators? This financial shipwreck should have been followed by an unyielding harangue against capitalism, and it should have provided an opening for socialism. Instead, the Right rebounded, and Frank explores how and why.

One major reason why is that the establishment produces a monopoly-media manufactured consent based in the creation and maintenance of its necessary illusions.

Right-wing media “louts” like Glen Beck and Ann Coulter (personages that Frank calls “entrepreneurs of fear”) are given generous space in the monopoly media to vent their petulant bombast while rational arguments presented by thoughtful critics are marginalized or kept out. Thus disinformation and propaganda clogs information channels; the result is myth and lies presented as truth and reality.

Frank exposes much of this, for example, the myth of small business job creation. He skewers the illogic of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, notes how conservatives have mimicked leftist characteristics, and provides “examples of conservatism’s dalliance with error.”

Frank quotes the bathos of George W. Bush: “I’ve abandoned free-market principles to save the free-market system.” Certainly it was not an abandonment of moral principles because the “free market” is without such. Nonetheless, how can one abandon the blatant contradiction of there being a “free market”?

Pity the Billionaire captures vignettes of the inversion and perversion of economic reality along with a lack of compassion by those wedded to neoliberalism. As typifying the entitled capitalist and comprador [coordinator] classes, Frank presents business reporter Rick Santelli. Santelli knows who he serves, and he turned his scorn upon the working class “losers”/victims, such as people who lost their homes to foreclosure. The message was: the system was not to blame for extending the loans; the borrowers solely were to blame for losing out.

The Tea Party movement is a collective example of misplaced wrath, but is the Tea Party wrath any more misplaced than the faith of Obama supporters? And who are these Tea Partiers — some of who, Frank tells, wear ascots?

Frank would like voters to steer clear of the Republican Party, but is the Democratic Party the preferred option? Frank fails to explore or create a space for a politics beyond the duopoly, who he well knows is entrenched in serving the interests of the elitist class.

This was a difficult review to write. Frank’s writing really engages the reader. His logic is compelling; however, at times his application of logic is lacking and leaves one feeling unsatisfied.

Consider the following scenario: If you, as a customer, walk into a store and purchase product A and find it highly unsatisfactory, will you buy product A again or buy product B? If after buying product B, and you find that it is also highly unsatisfactory, will you then return to buying product A or will you consider trying product C? Of course I am assuming that rational customers will look for a product which satisfies them. Is there any compelling reason (besides fear, which is not a reason but an emotion) as to why this same logic should not apply to political choices?

What is the Right is quite well understood. In the United States, the Republicans are the Right. However, what is the Left? What is progressivism? Is it the Democrats? Frank does not consider this; he is focused on the mind-set of conservatives who usually reside within the Republican Party.

Does daylight really fall between the duopoly of the Democrats and Republicans? On some social issues like abortion, gun control, and such, yes. However, on economic issues? Barack Obama has demonstrated (as did Bill Clinton before Obama) that neoliberalism is embraced by the political duopoly.

Frank has been highly critical of Obama’s performance as president; however, in a sense, Frank can be criticized as an enabler of Obama. Frank writes “Nothing has changed,” but one can’t help feeling that he fails to nail Obama on his lie of “Change we can believe in.” Readers of Pity the Billionaire can easily sense that voting Republican would be their undoing, but this sense of undoing does not come across as vitally in expression against the Democrats.

Since Pity the Billionaire fails to mention, for example, the Green Party, Ralph Nader, or another “third party” as an alternative to the political duopoly, one might argue that Frank surrenders to the folly of lesser evilism.² The track record of the administrations of the last five US presidents — Ronald Reagan (Republican), George H.W. Bush (Republican), Bill Clinton (Democrat), George W. Bush (Republican), and Barack Obama — has shown no substantial deviation from the neoliberal agenda; if anything, the agenda has become further implemented. Given that the Democrats and Republicans are both implementing the agenda of the financial elitist class, and given that Frank criticizes both pro-corporate political parties and the corporate-dominated economic system, why then does he not mention turning away from the political duopoly?

Frank can describe in skilful prose the faults and cracks in the system and the contradictions of society. However, can the solution be had within the political duopoly? Pity the Billionaire was ostensibly not meant to provide solutions and neither was What’s the Matter with Kansas?. These two books come across as well-written lamentations, and should the political and economic systems perpetuate, then there is the opportunity for future lamentation.

Yet Frank knows that the system wasn’t always like this. He pointed to the wisdom of the Hungarian historian Karl Polanyi expressed in his opus, The Great Transformation, which cited communalism as a natural condition of humans and rejected self-regulating markets as unnatural. Nonetheless, the Republicans and the Democrats, as desired by big business and financial interests, have undone much of the New Deal regulatory mechanisms implemented by the administrations of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Given this, then how can either the Republicans or the Democrats be entrusted to look after the interest of the masses, the 99%?

If readers are looking for an insightful, piercing, and highly readable critique into the system that fails the masses in society, then Pity the Billionaire is highly recommended. If readers are looking for a promising alternative system, then they are better off reading – despite its very dense prose – Parecon: Life after Capitalism or — the easier to read — Realizing Hope: Life Beyond Capitalism.

1. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957): 46.
2. I have written several articles on the topic of lesser evilism, including: “The Lesser-of-Two Evils,” 19 April 2004; “An Unconscionable Outcome: Chomsky and the Hopelessness of Lesser Evilism,” Dissident Voice, 9-10 October 2004; “The Utter Futility of Lesser Evilism,” Dissident Voice, 24 May 2007; “Evilism: There Is No Lesser,” Dissident Voice, 29 July 2011;

Clearly, thinking outside the box is not how our system deals with serious issues.  When having lunch with fellow educators and arguing about the crimes, especially against the Constitution and on war,  of both the Bush and Obama administrations, my frustration is palpable.

I’ve come to the conclusion that the Republicans enjoy being in the box whereas the Democrats don’t even know they’re in one.

On issues of war and economics, the Republicans and many Democrats I talk with clearly support the idea  that the US is a world economic power and needs to maintain it in any way they can.  They might acknowledge the wrongs committed but see it as necessary.  OK, that’s where dialog comes in.  My partisan Democratic friends, especially in the teachers’ lounge of my school, are simply oblivious to the wrongs or come up with every conceivable way of minimizing it or laying blame elsewhere. The most common response to the economic disaster that we’re in due to Obama’s Wall Street cabinet is that the Republicans won’t let him do what needs to be done. Another gem is that in politics you can’t always get what you campaign on and its corollary, the political climate is not ripe for what you’re asking.

Bush controlled the Congress. Obama is certainly the antithesis. He punted every major decision to them. Whether it be health care or Don’t Ask, President Obama relinquished the bully pulpit for the collaborative approach of having the other arm of government have a role, but in most cases, the only role.  If only President Obama, when he was elected with an American-style mandate, and with a Democrat-controlled Congress, were to have rallied the pro-Single Payer (Medicare for All) populous, a majority of Americans, for universal health care, it would have passed over both Democratic and Republican opponents in Congress.  He simply could have equated the health insurance industry with the likes of Al Qaeda.  Who would have had kind words for, or dare to come out and defend, the insurance industry? If not Single Payer, then at a minimum, a public option would be the law today, paving the way for universal coverage.  But President Obama preferred the box that we’re in. Yes, I’m implying that he falls within the Republican view of the box theory since he earlier sided with the industry by giving them what they wanted, and no public option, as long as they didn’t pull a Harry and Louise on him.

Missing in the dialog is acknowledgment of reality.  “No we’re not in a Police State because we’re not living like under Nazi Germany.”  True, unless you’re an undocumented alien or whistle blower- military or civilian-, where you’ll be tonight or tomorrow is likely known.  The drone war, supported by a majority of ‘progressives’ in America, is just a way of achieving a military solution without requiring the presence of American boots on the ground.  Rachel Maddow’s all for it so it must be the progressive thing to do when it’s done by a Democrat in the White House.  “Why make a case of habeas corpus?  Abraham Lincoln suspended it and thank God for him. I wouldn’t be here today if it wasn’t for him.”

What is the ‘box’?: the capitalist economy. With it comes imperial wars for others’ natural resources (Why is our oil under their sand?); support for military coups against democratically elected governments (Honduras and the Maldives); support for apartheid regimes and theocracies in the Middle East yet mouthing praise for the Arab Spring, as long as it’s in the ‘right’ countries; wages far below needs; reform of health insurance but not health care reform; homelessness and foreclosures when vacant houses, owned by banks and local governments, sit idle; public education under severe attack by both Democrats and Republicans who want to privatize it, bust the unions, and, of course, blame the teachers for not increasing test scores that have no baring of the real learning that is taking place; for-profit prison population booming (especially for the undocumented being prepared for deportation); etc.

Electoral reform is certainly needed to remove the box of capitalism from discussions on solving our problems. As it stands, it is virtually impossible for a variety of Third Parties to have ballot access in every state. There’s too much of a fear that it would cause the demise, in particular, of the Democratic Party. After all, if their platform isn’t marketable and another’s is, then they would go the way of Betamax.  The Republicans can stay as the legitimate 1% Party; the Democrats would do best to merge with them. How can we have electoral reform when states like Virginia require a 10,000-signature petition (not terribly difficult, but onerous) yet require a minimum of 400 in each county? Can you imagine that many supporting a Socialist party in Pat Robertson’s neck of the woods?

Dialog on issues can work as long as there is a recognition of reality and ownership of responsibility for why things are as they are. Without it,  it’s status quo.  Your everyday, typical Republican, on matters of war and economics, needs to see how the system is not working for them, except for those in a minority that it does.  Democratic partisans and Obama die-hard supporters need to truly question their values and principles and objectively see if their party truly stands by it, or equivocates to the point of non-recognition of the principles.  Maybe easier said  than done but the box remains strong, or invisible, as long as thinking remains stagnant.

The U.S. Congress has an approval rating of less than 10%. Greedy, unprincipled billionaires own virtually all of the wealth of the nation, and pay a lower percentage for taxes than the poorest worker. We imprison a greater percent of our population than any nation on earth. We spend more on vicious, unwarranted wars than the 15 top military spending countries combined. We are the greatest purveyor of murder and destruction internationally than anyone else.

Our public school system is under attack, and becoming obsolete. A college degree has become so expensive as to be unavailable to middle class families. The safety net for the old and infirm is being torn asunder. Our immigration policies are so degrading and inhumane that there is a mass exodus from the U.S. by peoples who used to flock here. Health care is a national disgrace, and is fast becoming unaffordable to any person in need of hospitalization. Homeland Security looks more like the German Gestapo every day.

The list of failures and problems facing the country is unparalleled, and the public knows it. Everything from cartoons to serious news shows bemoan the catastrophic decline in this country’s standard of living, and recognize the incompetence and inhumanity of those in power. This is so, even though the public media is little more than a propaganda tool for the oligarchy.

What is the most astonishing fact, though, is that there are no candidates or possibilities for new leadership on the horizon anywhere! Obama is the best of the pack of wolves and thieves who are actively destroying this nation. 95% of those in Congress who are running for re-election are are  certain to retain their status. How in the world is that possible? Any rational person would expect the electorate to throw these pandering,  posturing politicians  out on their keesters, and elect a set of representatives who would radically change the picture. But instead, we are about to re-affirm the failed, dying programs that have transformed this country into a  violent, disrespected second-rate nation. What a contradiction in logic and reality!

What kind of national pathology is causing the electorate to allow the oligarchy to engage in this unadulterated rush to destroy everything of value in this country? Like lemmings, rushing into the sea to commit suicide, the voters will once again endorse the same fools who have immobilized Congress for decades, will do nothing to control a run-away Pentagon, and its maniacal weapons manufacturers, and will accept Wall Street’s unregulated destruction of our wealth and resources. There is simply no rational explanation for the inability of the American people to find alternatives to the elected gangsters who bow to every billionaire that comes before them.

It is apparent that the voting public in the U.S. feels so disenfranchised from the process that it has for all intents left the spoils to the thieves. By abandoning any process by which there can be meaningful change in the policies of this government, the people have accepted the fact that there are no meaningful differences between the Democrats and the Republicans. The wars will continue, the repression will expand, the rich will get richer, and the rest of us are on our own.

Judge not, that ye be not judged.

For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.

– Matthew 7:1-2

Today some ultra-right-wing fluff arrived in my email from someone I know well, and I don’t know if was a big joke (probably it was), but some people obviously swallow this Kool Aid.

I prefer not to quote religious texts, but there is also much wisdom contained therein, and it serves well when it thoroughly contradicts professed Christians of the zealous variety.

The email missive contained an article written by one Marybeth Hicks (who probably would give Ann Coulter a run for sheer outrageousness. Do these women really believe what they write, or are their words just to sustain a livelihood based on pandering to the ignorance or prejudices of their audience?)

Praise from one of Ms. Hick’s admirers is draped over the masthead of her own website: “Fellow moms and dads: It’s time to unite and reclaim the hearts, minds, and souls of our children from socialist indoctrinators! … Marybeth Hicks exposes the Left’s cradle-to-grave campaign to undermine religion, the traditional family, and free market capitalism.”

Hicks begins her piece: “Call it an occupational hazard but I can’t look at the Occupy Wall Street protesters without thinking, ‘Who parented these people?’”¹

Not only is Hicks, the mother of four, judging the protestors, but she is also casting aspersions on their parents; in biblical parlance, something like visiting the sins of the children upon the parents.

I submit that instead of looking askance at protestors and pointing a finger at their parents, Hicks should be lauding the parents and their children who get off their duffs to agitate against injustices and bring about a better society.

Hicks, a self-described “culture columnist,” summarizes the “fairyland agenda” of the Occupy movement by one of their placards: “Everything for everybody.”

Sure, why not? Does Hicks believe in “Everything for the 1%, and crumbs for the masses.” Hicks’s crumbs are obviously much larger that the bird crumbs most people subsist on. Moreover, Hicks’s crumbs depend on her fealty to the whims of the elitists, as is clear from being a columnist for the Washington Post, an agitprop organ of the 1%.

As with any extreme right-winger, their stock-in-trade is ad hominem, slinging mud because they are bereft of facts and coherent argumentation. Thus Hicks writes of a the “pipe-dream platform” of the Occupy movement. Does the culture columnist not realize that Occupy movement is a coalition of different factions and actors within society, that it is anarchistic in not being led by any particular personality, and that there is no specific platform besides a demand for social justice?

Hicks attempts witty prose to smear “the protesters [as being manipulated] like bedsprings in a brothel.”

It is easy to trot out simplistic statements; but where is the evidence or supporting logic? What does Ms. Hicks suggest? Should children, as she implicitly characterizes the 99%, obey and submit to the 1%? Should the activists become passive and accept the status quo maldistribution of wealth and power?

Hicks criticizes the parents of the protestors (as if they are only kids and are not joined by parents and grandparents, but such facts would inconvenience Hicks): “There are some crucial life lessons that the protesters’ moms clearly have not passed along.”

Hicks then reels off “… five things the OWS protesters’ mothers [obviously, for Hicks, mothers are most culpable] should have taught their children but obviously didn’t…” [italics added]

Life isn’t fair. The concept of justice – that everyone should be treated fairly – is a worthy and worthwhile moral imperative on which our nation was founded. But justice and economic equality are not the same…

No matter how you try to “level the playing field,” some people have better luck, skills, talents or connections that land them in better places. Some seem to have all the advantages in life but squander them, others play the modest hand they’re dealt and make up the difference in hard work and perseverance and some find jobs on Wall Street and eventually buy houses in the Hamptons. Is it fair? Stupid question.

Hicks obviously does not get it. The protestors are not asking whether the system is fair; they are protesting for the very reason that it is not fair. So I pose a question to the mother of four: Should people just accept an unfair system? It is also a stupid question. But that is where the thought processes of Ms. Hicks lead.

Nothing is “free.” Protesting with signs that seek “free” college degrees and “free” health care make you look like idiots because colleges and hospitals don’t operate on rainbows and sunshine. There is no magic money machine to tap for your meandering educational careers and “slow paths” to adulthood and the 53 percent of taxpaying Americans owe you neither a degree nor an annual physical.

Who looks like an “idiot”? It is not foolish to toss out platitudes that are easily refutable by anyone beyond the diaper stage?

Ms. Hicks does not seem to grasp that the protestors are also Americans, every bit as much as the elitist 1%. By her logic, “free” schooling from kindergarten to grade 12 should also be eliminated (and, indeed, that looks like the direction education is heading in the US and Canada). The “magic money machine” that she snidely refers to is called “tax.” Workers (and corporations) pay tax, and some of that tax money goes to funding an education system. Progressive taxation is a system that gives government the means to provide everyone some semblance of a chance to attain the knowledge and skills to succeed in the capitalist work world. As for free university education, is there a reason that some European countries can provide free university education, including economically besieged Cuba, to all its citizens and the US (and Canada) cannot? Hicks should talk to the Cubans or northern Europeans about how she can get one of their “magic money machines” for the US. At the same time, she might as well find out about a “magic money machine” for universal health care from those same countries.

These protestors seem cognizant about the “magic money machine” of which Hicks seems oblivious.

Nevertheless, Hicks points out “this obvious fact” to protestors: “… Real people with real dollars are underwriting your civic temper tantrum.”

Is Ms. Hicks is not throwing a temper tantrum? As for her puzzling logic: how is it that real people’s money is funding the protestors? They are protesting because of the unfairness where not all citizens have jobs and money to pay for the basic expenses of life.

Hicks’s third “thing”:

Your word is your bond. When you demonstrate to eliminate student loan debt, you are advocating precisely the lack of integrity you decry in others. … No one forces you to borrow money; you are free to choose educational pursuits that don’t require loans or to seek technical or vocational training that allows you to support yourself and your ongoing educational goals. Also, for the record, being a college student is not a state of victimization. It’s a privilege that billions of young people around the globe would die for – literally.

Your word is your bond. Ms. Hicks, that is why people are protesting — to bind the government to its word. You see, there is something called the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that the United States is a signatory to. Hence it is bound by its signature to uphold the articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. One of these articles is Article 26 (1), which states:

Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages. Elementary education shall be compulsory. Technical and professional education shall be made generally available and higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit.

However, if tuition fees are exorbitant, they pose a barrier to those who merit such an education. Furthermore, students in poverty are pitted in an unfair competition to decide merit. To fairly assess merit, the playing field must be leveled.

Yet, Ms. Hicks seems okay with many students being saddled with gargantuan debts to attain an education. This system of student debt has been called a “swindle,” where student borrowers are “… in a position similar to subprime mortgage debtors is also indicated in the Bureau of Labor Statistics…”²

To blithely state, as Hicks does, that “No one forces you to borrow money…” is just ludicrous. High tuition fees force students without funds to borrow money. And, as she points out in her article, a higher education is the way to a job.

Nonetheless, student loans can be forgiven, and it would, arguably, be good for the economy.”³

Hicks’s fourth “thing”:

A protest is not a party. … You look foolish, you smell gross, you are clearly high and you don’t seem to realize that all around you are people who deem you irrelevant.

This is pure ad hominem, revealing more of the speaker than the target of the speakers mudslinging. It reveals that speaker of ad hominem has no persuasive logic or facts to back her assertions, so instead she cast slurs. Is that how a mother should teach her children to behave?

Hicks blames the unemployed for their joblessness. Obviously the system is fine. Says Hicks:

There are reasons you haven’t found jobs. The truth? Your tattooed necks, gauged ears, facial piercings and dirty dreadlocks are off-putting. … Occupy reality: Only 4 percent of college graduates are out of work. If you are among that 4 percent, find a mirror and face the problem. It’s not them. It’s you.

Yes, and what kind of jobs do the college graduates have? Alan Nasser, a professor emeritus of Political Economy, said, “Most of these jobs will be low paying and will not require a bachelor’s degree.”² How much debt should one incur to get these jobs?

Freedom is obviously another peeve of Ms. Hicks. In Ms. Hick’s ultra-conservative world, people should conform to the dictates of the system.

As for her discombobulated logic, how is it she can support expensive education that forces students to take on onerous debt loads to study and graduate, and then call upon people to go to college to get a job?

What is “off-putting” is people who think it is okay that life is a lottery, that some people cannot receive an equal chance at a good education, that some people are born into the lap of luxury through exploitation of labor, that some people are plunged into poverty through the misfortune of ill health and not being able to afford health insurance, that destitution and homelessness are mere facts-of-life, that racism and discrimination is a fact, and that the monopoly media portrays the unfair system as the best system.

If people had always capitulated to such weak-minded nonsense, then slavery would still exist in the US; workers would have no right to organize for workplace safety, fairer pay, shorter work weeks, overtime pay, worker rights, etc.; women would be stuck in the kitchens without the vote; and Indigenous peoples (the rightful custodians of the land) would be marginalized to reservations.

But all of this doesn’t matter because Ms. Hicks can always trot out her truism: Life isn’t fair.

However, that makes for one hell of a good reason to protest.

Many of these “things” are honor bound by signature of the government to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights — for example,

Article 23.
•(1) Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment.

and

Article 25.
•(1) Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.

As Hicks stated: “Your word is your bond.”

Amen.

1. Available at Merybeth Hicks, “Some Belated Parental Advice to Protesters,” Town Hall, 20 October 2011.
2. Mike Whitney, “The Student Loan Swindle,” Dissident Voice, 21 October 2011.
3. Who would foot the bill [for student debt forgiveness]? … there is one deep pocket that could pull it off—the Federal Reserve. In its first quantitative easing program (QE1), the Fed removed $1.3 trillion in toxic assets from the books of Wall Street banks. For QE4, it could remove $1 trillion in toxic debt from the backs of millions of students.

   The economy would only be the better for it, as was shown by the G.I. Bill, which provided virtually-free higher education for returning veterans, along with low-interest loans for housing and business. The G.I. Bill had a sevenfold return. It was one of the best investments Congress ever made.” Ellen Hodgson Brown, “QE4: Forgive the Students,” Dissident Voice, 21 October 2011.

Who decides what the American public focuses its attention upon on a day-to-day basis?

With this nation at war with innumerable countries, with habeas corpus being tossed into the waste bin, with self-confessed torturers having their crimes swept under the carpet, with environmental extremes becoming self-evident; why is anyone in this nation concerned about what moron the Republican Party is dating at the present moment?

When was the last story about the nation’s loss of habeas corpus presented on any of the national media outlets?

Let’s put it into the immediate perspective. Another Republican boob has threatened the choices of women in this country. This happens every time the GOP is allowed the microphone. Suddenly 95% of discussion is taken over by controversy over who pays the premium to a private insurance company. Virtually everyone focuses on this. Thousands of articles are written.

This is a distraction.

It’s the same song played over and over. Screaming about the distribution of pennies while habeas corpus disappears, drones assassinate indiscriminately, torturers conduct coast-to-coast book tours, and more and more this country becomes a 21st Century fascist state.

Barack Obama has shown that the President of the United States can order the torture of defenseless prisoners and never be punished. Democrats have ordered the execution of at least one American citizen with no due process. Drones launched by American forces attack Pakistan citizens on a daily basis.

And yet thousands of articles are written about Rick Santorum? Where the hell are your minds, people?

Pathetic.

With an incumbent President who appears to be a pretty good bet of being reelected, why is the focus of the nation on everything except what the President is actually doing? Where are legitimate critics of this administration broadcast in the national media?

What is presented in the media as being legitimate criticism is mostly the babbling of the right wing fringe. Obama’s team inoculates the President by having any and all critics portrayed as nut jobs and/or racists. This is wonderful if all that matters to anyone is having the present Democrat reelected. Habeas corpus can go to hell. Torture can become the rule of the land. American forces can assassinate anyone at will as long as the current President is reelected.

Disgraceful.

This country has gotten the cart so far in front of the horse it’s ridiculous. Money is a tool. Money is a way to facilitate the transfer of goods. Do any of you seriously believe that if the fools of the Republican or Democratic Parties had all the money in the world that they would actually know what to do about anything?

One of the major failures of the current Democratic Party is their refusal to shape the conversation of America. For the past thirty years Democrats have only responded to Republican attacks. Health care? Let’s use Bob Dole’s plan. War? What does the GOP want to do? Jobs? How can we help Republican donors?

There has been no discussion regarding where this country wants to be two, three, five, ten, one hundred years from now. There has been no discussion on how many drone attacks should there be tomorrow in Pakistan. There has been no discussion on why twenty percent of every dollar spent on health care should go into private pockets which only encourages increasing the price of all medical services.

Is the Democratic Party a strong political voice or does it have the personality of a battered child, only wishing to please its batterer?

Habeas corpus gone. Torture back.

Vote Democratic or Republican?  Only if they start waterboarding voters. Which would probably be O.K. with both parties.

Come election night I would be overjoyed to see Obama lose and equally overjoyed to see the Republican candidate, whoever it is, also lose.  I cannot see how either Romney or Gingrich or even Ron Paul could possibly offer what is truly needed to fix the root causes of all the dysfunction, corruption and despair with the US political and government system.  And Obama?  Nothing but slickness instead of results.

Here is a central, common deficiency: No major presidential candidate has come out with strong support for any of the constitutional amendments critically needed to truly reform our system.  More than ever, after so much failed government, a whole lot of Americans are ready to support amendments that would, for example, mandate term limits for members of Congress, remove all private money from federal elections, require a balanced federal budget, and revitalize the constitutional requirement for Congress explicitly declaring war.

With one or two billion dollars spent on campaigning for this presidential election cycle the real winners will be all the media companies and army of campaign advisors and consultants getting all that money.  With the media and pundits focusing on the election the public has been robbed of real in depth news coverage of countless issues and situations worldwide that we should be far better informed about, especially to better understand exactly what public policies we should want from the president and Congress.  The mainstream media that treats the presidential campaigns like sporting events has become as superficial as the presidential candidates.

There is only one scenario that could make me enormously interested in the presidential election outcome.  With relatively little media attention to it, few Americans know about the Americans Elect national effort that will place a presidential candidate on every state ballot.  The candidates for president and vice president will result from a lengthy process conducted on the Internet involving millions of Americans that have signed up to be part of that process.  True, those two candidates that cannot have backgrounds from the same political party, but they may turn out to be somewhat familiar to us because of their past political efforts, though neither will be the same as those on the Democratic and Republican tickets.  For a fair analysis of this innovative process read what John Heilemann has said in New York Magazine.

Considering the widespread and deserved disgust among Americans with both major parties, there is a decent chance that people like me will be strongly motivated to vote for the Americans Elect alternative ticket.  It definitely will be a vote against both major parties.  If millions of Americans make this choice, then I will be overjoyed and so should you.  Why?  Because it may be the most important historic event that could motivate actions to get us genuine reforms of our political and government system.  The Americans Elect ticket does not have to win, just show the Democrats and Republicans how much they are both being rejected.

For this scenario to occur, however, people must stop thinking about the “spoiler” fear that both major parties promote.  Democrats want people to fear that a vote for the Americans Elect ticket will cause the Republican ticket to win, and vice versa.  In truth, by voting for the Americans Elect ticket we the people have the most important electoral choice to fix our broken system.  Think of it as an electoral revolution.  The imperative is to stick with your fundamental belief that in the end it really does not matter whether the Republican or Democratic presidential candidate wins, principally because elite rich and corporate interests will still prevail.  This means that the vast majority of Americans will continue to get screwed: The top one percent will still own and control our nation under either a Republican or Democratic president.  Keep remembering that both major party candidates have lied repeatedly, will keep lying, and will never implement whatever they have promised they will do to reform the system.

My best advice to you now: Stop wasting your time on following all the nonsense about the Republican primaries and later about the main campaign from both major party candidates.  Don’t let yourself be manipulated.  Instead, sign up at Americans Elect and join the 2.4 million Americans who have already joined the process to give Americans a true alternative to both major parties.  Note that 80 percent of people have said they are ready to support an alternative presidential ticket this year.  Will they put their votes where their words are?

At some point it will become necessary to mount a national demand that the Americans Elect candidates be allowed to participate in the pre-election national televised debates and also to demand that the mainstream media give equal time and attention to them.  If we are to convert our current delusional democracy into a genuine one, then the most patriotic and courageous thing to do is to support the Americans Elect effort.

Nothing appears more surprising to those who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye, than the ease with which the many are governed by the few.

— David Hume (Essays)

We’re being tested.  Republican politicians and pundits are busy testing the American public, trying to assess how ignorant and distracted we are.  While they already have a pretty good idea, they’re determined to get a precise reading.  Testing is vitally important to these people because, if the United States is to be turned into a plutocracy, our collective ignorance is an absolute necessity.

Republicans are aware that most of us don’t pay attention to stuff like history, government, and public policy.  They’re aware that basic facts and principles tend to elude us.  Some of that stuff is trivial, some isn’t.  Many don’t know that the population of the U.S. is almost 312 million, or that we have 535 congressmen and senators, or that women weren’t allowed to vote until 1920, or that state legislatures, rather than citizens, chose our U.S. senators until 1913 (with passage of the 17th amendment).  Some of this stuff is trivial, some isn’t.

Republicans already know that many middle and lower middle-class Americans don’t want to raise taxes on the rich because they’ve been conditioned to believe such a move represents the redistribution of wealth, and smacks of socialism or communism.  Despite the fact that Barack Obama would have been considered a “Rockefeller Republican” in 1974, people can still get away with referring to him as a “socialist.”  That’s because we’re being tested.

Although many people (including billionaire Warren Buffet) think it’s eminently fair to raise taxes on the rich, many still oppose it.  You ask people (I’m speaking of regular working people) if they think taxes on the rich should be raised, and a significant percentage will say no.  But when you ask if they think taxes on the rich should be lowered, they will also say no.

Apparently, they believe the tax structure is perfect, and that the rich are paying exactly what they should be paying.  But when you ask what that amount is—when you ask them to cite the highest tax rate—they can’t.  They haven’t a clue what it is.  They don’t realize that, at 35-percent, the marginal rate is the lowest it’s been in many decades, and that to be taxed at the maximum, you have to earn more than $379,150.  And that’s why we’re being tested.

We all remember, some time ago, hearing about that Tea Party delegate holding up a placard with the words, “Keep the government out of my Medicare!”  While the irony and ignorance revealed in those words were gist for much nighttime talk-show hilarity,  they were also terrifying.  That bizarre message revealed that we have people out there who approve of, and depend upon, government programs, but have no idea the government provides them.

I have a friend who describes himself as a “libertarian independent,” and who believes that there’s a good chance the 1969 moon landing was, in fact, a hoax.  Although he considers himself a genuine patriot, he hates the government and believes that virtually every elected official in Washington is a liar and a thief.

During a phone conversation, I pulled a prank on him.  Knowing how suspicious he was of political intrigue, I invented the story that the U.S. government had a secret plan to take us off the dollar, and put us on the yuan, China’s unit of currency.  I told him the plan was supposed to be top secret, but word had leaked out.  He became instantly energized by this news.  He was simultaneously outraged, inflamed, excited and utterly focused, as it reinforced every suspicion he’d ever had.

But when I confessed that I’d just made it up in order to demonstrate how gullible he was, the prank backfired.  Instead of taking a moment to step back and re-assess his personal biases, he said it didn’t matter that I’d made it up, because “it’s something that probably is being considered anyway.”  We’re all being tested.

In recent years, particularly since the onset of the Great Recession, it has become clear to many Americans that their country is composed of two different societies with clashing interests — a very small minority in possession of great wealth and power, and everyone else, with some getting by and many falling by the wayside.

As a consequence, large numbers of people now perceive to one degree or another that big money not only manipulates most elections but influences a great many of the politicians and bureaucrats who craft legislation and execute the policies of the U.S. government. Awareness is spreading that crony capitalism —the corporations, banks and Wall Street — controls the economic system which shapes the political system where decisions are made.

But the beat goes on, of course, until mass consciousness transforms into mass action.

In domestic politics, 2012 opened with the Republican Party’s three-ring circus in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, the initial contests  to select a presidential nominee. On display is the most bizarre collection of clowns in recent political history. At this stage the battle is between Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney, who is still favored for now. The struggle within the GOP between ultra right and ultra right “lite” will be determined soon, signaling the start of the best election money can buy.

Which ever party wins in November — and we think President Barack Obama will be reelected — the contest is not between right and left but between right/far right and center right. No matter what the result, progressive change will not be the product. The best outcome might simply be keeping the crazies at bay.

In international affairs, the year opened with U.S. cannon shots aimed just above the heads of America’s multifarious enemies, identified as being mainly in Asia and the Middle East, warning them not to mess with Uncle Sam, as though they were about to.

As the shots reverberated, the American people were told:

Good morning, everybody. The United States of America is the greatest force for freedom and security that the world has ever known. And in no small measure, that’s because we’ve built the best-trained, best-led, best-equipped military in history — and as Commander-in-Chief, I’m going to keep it that way….

These “reassuring” hyper-nationalist words from the Commander-In-Chief were expressed January 5 during a visit to the Pentagon to explain Washington’s dangerous new war policy. A secondary purpose of the plan is to facilitate Pentagon spending cuts in the next decade, but future allocations will not drop one penny below George W. Bush’s bloated war budgets.

Abruptly, the U.S. is supposed to be confronted with a “threat” from China, necessitating that the Pentagon surround that country with even more of its far superior  weaponry, more troops, battle fleets heading in closer proximity, surveillance aircraft, space weapons and long range nuclear missiles.

All this is part of Obama’s recent “pivot” to Asia, as though we ever left, the main goal being to weaken China within its own natural sphere of interest in order to secure Washington’s need to remain global top dog. China is no military threat to the U.S. today or in the future, given the Pentagon’s two-decade head start in all the technologies of conflict, and the fact that America’s war budget is, and will remain, many times that of China.

In addition, there seems to be an imminent “threat” to our way of life from Iran, as well as the continuing “threat” to U.S. democracy from some poor tribes in Afghanistan.

Actually, according to “Sustaining U.S. Global Leadership: Priorities for 21st Century Defense,” the document explaining the new war plan, the U.S. faces additional “threats” throughout the world, specifically including (aside from those mentioned): Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, and  “elsewhere” (our guess is Africa, where Obama’s already inserting troops). Primary regions to worry about, says the Pentagon plan, are South Asia, Middle East, Asia-Pacific, Northeast Asia, Eurasia, Southeast and East Asia, plus future, unforeseen demands.

Despite all these “threats,” which are largely invented to justify war spending and keep the American people supportive of the militarism that now pervades our society, Obama twice mentioned in his speech the “tide of war” is receding. But if that is true, why station 40,000 troops in countries around Iraq after withdrawal? Why deploy attack-ready bombers and Navy aircraft carriers near Iran? Why keep nearly 100,000 troops in Afghanistan and make demands on Kabul to allow thousands more to remain indefinitely after the planned “withdrawal” in 2014?

The U.S.-Israeli crusade against Iran may result in an attack this year. The New York Times reported January 12 on an “accelerating covert campaign against Iran consisting of assassinations and bombings. The campaign, which experts believe is being carried out mainly by Israel, apparently claimed its latest victim January 11 when a bomb killed a 32-year-old nuclear scientist in Tehran’s morning rush hour.”

On January 14, Iran charged the U.S. and Israel were behind the scientist’s murder. That same day the Wall Street Journal reported that the White House was worried that Israel will attack Iran before the U.S. gives a go-ahead. But four days later the Times reported Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak declared “any decision on a possible pre-emptive military strike on Iranian targets was ‘very far off.’” Stay tuned, the year’s just started.

The American people are supposed to be safer this new year because President Obama just signed into law the National Defense Authorization Act allocating $662 billion in military spending in 2012 (plus an equal amount for other “national security” purposes in other budgets).

Civil liberties groups criticize the Pentagon bill because it also authorizes an “indefinite detention” clause that is one more step toward a police state. Obama’s civil liberties record is worse than that of his predecessor because he retained Bush’s excesses and added his own.

A few days after Obama’s bragging about the “best-trained” military, the Pentagon and the secretaries of defense and state were forced to publicly apologize in the wake of an international uproar over circulation of a video showing four U.S. Marines jovially urinating on the corpses of Taliban suspects. A couple of days later a U.S. military legal officer recommended that PFC Bradley Manning face a court martial for transferring documents including evidence of U.S. war crimes to the whistle blowing website WikiLeaks. And so it goes, day by day into 2012.

Washington maintains that the Great Recession ended in June 2009 and the economy is on the mend. Stock prices are up, corporate profits are zooming, and the wealthy are exhausting the nation’s supply of money bags.

The corporations, banks and Wall St. have been abundantly helped through the tough times by the Obama Administration, but little help has trickled down to average working families. Recession conditions will continue in 2012 for much of the “bottom” 80% of the U.S. population, including high unemployment, more foreclosures, and stagnant wages. Half the families in our Land of Opportunity are low income or poor.

Early in January, the new Pew Research Center survey of 2,048 adults contained a most unusual result. It found that 66% of the people in our “classless society” believe there are “very strong or strong conflicts between the rich and the poor” in the U.S. This is big news, evidently based on growing comprehension of what are, in fact, class differences.

The top 1% now possess more than 50% of all privately held assets in the U.S. (Assets are everything you own including cash, car and house minus debts.) The top 20% possess 85% of all assets. This means the bottom 80% of the people have accumulated only 15% of the assets (including the bottom 40%, who have no assets at all because they owe more than they own).

However, there is one aspect of our system that is said to prove beyond doubt that all Americans — rich and poor alike — are actually equal in our society where it really counts. We speak of each citizen’s right to vote in the quadrennial selection of a Commander-in-Chief, known popularly as the presidential election.

President Obama has transformed his rhetoric into that of liberal populism for the duration of the campaign. He now talks about having government intervene to help reduce inequality and help build a more “equitable” society, not that it’s going to happen. He now even tut-tuts about crony capitalism.

Obama sure sounds even more progressive than when he was a “change-we-can-believe-in” candidate in 2008. This was before governing as a center-right patron of the ruling establishment for the last three years, ignoring poor, low income and minority Americans as though they didn’t exist, initiating a completely failed program for the millions who have been foreclosed, and changing little to nothing, even in his first two years when the Democrats controlled the House as well as the Senate.

Probable opponent Romney has undergone a similar opportunist transformation in the opposite direction in order to obtain the GOP nomination. He’s now campaigning as a right/far right populist this year after governing Massachusetts as a health care moderate conservative and who earlier supported abortion, and gun control, among many flip-flops. Gingrich has always been an ultra-reactionary hypocrite going back to the early 1990s in the House, and hasn’t seen the need to adopt a new persona for 2012.

The main reason we believe Obama will be reelected has nothing to do with his record as president. It is that the Republicans have gone so far to the political right, and have acted like such obstructionist buffoons in Congress, that the crucial independent vote will lean toward the center-right. The Democratic leadership hopes Gingrich becomes the candidate because he’ll campaign as a far rightist while they fear Romney may moderate some of his rhetoric. But even so, Obama’s nearly $1 billion war chest should finish him off.

Assuming Obama does return to power, we know now, as in the 2008 campaign, that a “liberal” will not be occupying the Oval Office for the next four years. The pro-99% rhetoric will stop at the second term White House door.

American politics is quite different today than when the Democratic Party adopted a center left configuration for a few years in the 1930s and 1960s. However, in terms of the gradations of political “evil,” the center right is a “lesser evil” to the right/far right, given the two conservative options for electing a president offered the American people by those who run the show, though it’s a dismal commentary on democracy.

In the present era it is certainly legitimate to worry about the direction American politics is heading domestically, coupled with a probable global future of more wars, more poverty and environmental disaster. We worry deeply about the problems that will confront our, and all, today’s children and grandchildren.

However, we retain unshakable confidence in what the masses of people can accomplish under difficult conditions when they become united, organized, disciplined and committed to the struggle for a better, equal and cooperative society, and a peaceful, environmentally sustainable world.

This option for substantive transformation beckons. It is the objective requirement of our times if we are to avoid a catastrophe down the road. A decisive turn to the left is essential and possible. It could revolutionize society and change the world to benefit all the people.

Watching the Republican debates is like going to a Klan rally without the sheets.

— Barry Willdorf (attorney and author)

Watching the Republican candidates describe the various methods by which they would destroy the U.S. government is certainly an illuminating exercise, regardless of which clown leads the pack. It is one thing for the Koch Brothers, Sam Walton, or others of their ilk to suggest that the government and public would be better off if corporations were not taxed at all; such a comment is obviously self-serving nonsense. Indeed, if they had their way, they would do away with any limits whatsoever on their power, wealth or authority.

Yet, for electoral candidates, who are confronted with the economic crises facing this nation and the world, who are witnessing the worst depression in 65 years, and who are faced with unparalleled unemployment and financial stagnation — for those candidates to parrot the wish-list of corporate billionaires as if their recommendations are anything but ludicrous is simply mind-boggling.

If you were to put the entire Republican Party in one room together, it would not be possible to assemble a single intelligent brain from the entire lot. Do they really believe the garbage and pap they utter in the media?

Take some examples of their proposals:

1) Stop funding education. Why teach children subjects such as literature, humanities, art or other disciplines that they will not be able to use when they graduate and go to work for slave wages at businesses and mega corporations?

2) Cut Welfare, Social Security and Medicare. These “socialistic” programs cater to laziness and constitute unwarranted charity.

3) Continue to fight imperial wars throughout the Middle East — only escalate those battles with the use of nuclear weapons. Expand U.S. hegemony throughout the world to bring democracy to the “savages” and “fools” of other nations.

4) Get rid of those pesky unions that require corporate billionaires to pay ugly, unfair expenses like the minimum wage, and prevent bosses from firing any employees they want to get rid of for any reason.

5) Deregulate the entire economy so that corporations can pillage without fear of fines or limitations concerning the destruction of the environment or the unlimited expansion of their economic empires.

6) Outlaw abortion. An unborn fetus has more rights than the woman carrying the child.

7) Oppose any form of single-payer or universal health care. Simply let the sick, old and disabled die, as an indication of God’s will.

8) Religious fanaticism is a virtue; it is patriotic and appropriate. Being Christian is a mandatory prerequisite to being “religious.”

The list of atrocities and absurdities is endless and unfathomable. An intelligent enemy of the U.S. would sit back and take whatever steps it could to ensure that Republicans win the next election. Nothing could do more to destroy this nation than to support the various proposals spewing forth from the mouths of these candidates.

What is perhaps even more tragic than that prospect, however, is the fact the Obama, and the Democrats appear to be uniting around the very programs set forth above. There is no sane party for rational Americans to support. If it were possible to find some place to flee to that would be safe from attack by the U.S. within a few short years, Americans would leave in droves.

Compared to the Republican agenda, Alice in Wonderland doesn’t seem like a child’s fable at all.

[At Bain Capital] We got money from other people and we would use that to help start businesses or sometimes acquire businesses that were in trouble or not doing so well and then try and make it better or get the businesses to grow.
– Mitt Romney, Republican presidential candidate, former governor of Massachusetts and former venture capitalist and corporate raider (January 8, 2012)

I like being able to fire people who provide services to me.
– Mitt Romney, January 9, 2012)

They [the corporate raiders] apparently looted the companies, left people unemployed and walked off with millions of dollars,” Mr. Gingrich said. …“if somebody comes in, takes all the money out of your company and then leaves you bankrupt while they go off with millions, that’s not traditional capitalism.
– Newt Gingrich, Republican presidential candidate and former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives (January 8, 2012)

I think people who don’t serve when they could and they get three or four or even five deferments –– they have no right to send our kids off to war … I’m trying to stop the wars, but at least, you know, I went when they called me up.
– Ron Paul, U.S. Congressman and Republican presidential candidate (January 7, 2012)

In current American politics, money and wars of aggression abroad seem to rule the day. When a candidate’s fortune turns sour, the natural reflex is to spend $millions in negative ads to destroy adversaries and/or to issue hawkish policy statements with the promise to start new wars abroad and even to rekindle old ones.

The motto seems to be that “If you destroy me with your negative ads; I will destroy you with mine.” This is truly amazing.

Lobbyists have always played an important role in U.S. politics, but with the floodgates of money presently wide open, their work has been considerably facilitated. Indeed, since the U.S. Supreme Court’s (5-4) January-20-2010- decision to allow unlimited amounts of money to be spent by corporations or labor unions during elections under the specious pretext that such legal organizations are “people”, money rules unimpeded in American politics. This has the more or less unanticipated consequence of raising negative campaigning to a new level, to the delight of corporate media which rake in hundreds of $millions in political advertising or propaganda. Can democracy survive such an onslaught of money? This remains to be seen.

As for the U.S. presidential candidate Mitt Romney, for instance, during the recent primary campaign in the state of Iowa, he was confronted with a sudden surge of popularity of one of his opponents, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich. Romney’s camp and its allies went to work and pumped more than $2.8 million in a TV air deluge of negative ads against candidate Gingrich, arguing that the former Speaker had “more baggage than the airlines” and spelling out a series of flaws in Gingrich’s long political career. Sure enough, Newt Gingrich soon plummeted in the polls in Iowa and even nationally. He finished a distant fourth (13.3%) in the Iowa Republican Caucus (U.S. Presidential Primary) of January 03, 2012, while Republican candidate Romney squeezed by to finish in 1st position.

In retaliation, the Gingrich’s camp has opted to turn the tables on candidate Romney for the New Hampshire and South Carolina primaries and has tried to picture him as the Wall Street movie villain Gordon Gekko. Indeed, thanks to a “super PAC”, supposedly financed by casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson, who is reported to have poured $5 million into Mr. Romney’s campaign, it intends to pump some $3.4-million into new television ads in order to picture multi-millionaire candidate Mitt Romney as a cold-blooded capitalist raider who made his fortune on the back of workers when they were fired en masse, after Mr. Romney’s private equity firm, Bain Capital of Boston, gorged itself on financially stressed companies. Mr. Gingrich has even suggested personally that Mr. Romney’s company was comparable to “rich people figuring out clever legal ways to loot a company.”

And there you have it, negative campaigning at its best!

Negative ads, whether they are based on facts or on fabrications or on outright lies, can be very effective politically because they raise doubts in the mind of undecided or hesitant voters, even though some voters may be repulsed and turned off by them and this could translate into lower voter turnout. Nevertheless, the more distracted people are, the more they tend to remember negative information better than positive one. Therefore, for those who have no scruples in relying on such tactics and who have the means to pay for them, negative campaign ads have a triple advantage: First, they are a good way to change the subject and steer the debate away from one’s own failures; secondly, they place adversaries on the defensive, forcing them to spend time and money to try to refute the attacks; and, thirdly, they dispense the attackers from clearly spelling out their own positive political agenda beyond generalities and pious slogans. Negative ads maybe a curse for democracy but they work for those unethical politicians for whom power is the only thing that they yearn for in politics.

But negative campaigning or smear campaigns cost a lot. Indeed, they have to be researched and produced and, above all, they must to be aired in the mass media, especially on television. Historically, negative campaigning has always existed. However, modern means of communication and the concentration of national wealth in relatively fewer hands have multiplied its influence. Indeed, in the modern free-for-all electronically based U.S. politics, it can be said that those with the most money and with fewer principles have a decisive, if not an insurmountable advantage in winning elections. In the U.S., and especially with the benediction of a majority of judges on the current Supreme Court, so-called “super PACs” can accept unlimited donations for purposes of supporting or attacking candidates, thus placing the political game clearly in the hands of people or corporations or labor unions with the most money. Money has thus become the principal
deciding factor in American politics.

The current campaign is a clear demonstration.

It’s hard to assess how much praise Obama deserves for making these moves.  On the one hand, appointing members to the NLRB ain’t exactly a landmark achievement.  After all, presidents have been appointing board members since 1935, when the NLRB was first established, so the “presidential act” of picking suitable people (it used to be three, until the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act expanded it to five) to fill out the roster shouldn’t be gushed over.  It’s his job, isn’t it?

On the other hand—given that the Republicans despise any agency with the power to regulate business, given that they’ve fought for 75 years to defang the NLRB, given that they’ve purposely tried to keep it understaffed (aware that two members don’t constitute a quorum and, therefore, don’t have the authority to issue rulings), and given that, even with a 53-47 senate majority ready to approve Obama’s appointees, they’ve threatened to filibuster any nominee—it was a bold move.  Bold, necessary, and, let’s be honest, way overdue.  Credit goes to organized labor for keeping the president’s feet to the fire.   That reported $400 million they donated to the Democrats in 2008 finally bought them something.

What the Republicans characterize as “interfering with” and “restricting” business, the NLRB views as providing employee safeguards—safeguards expressed in our federal labor law. For example, when people get fired illegally for engaging in union activism, or when a workforce formally requests a union election but is denied, or when the management negotiating team refuses to bargain in good faith—that’s when the NLRB (in principle) comes to the rescue.

Although congressional Republicans are already threatening legal action and issuing hysterical statements (Wyoming Senator Mike Enzi referred to the appointments as a sign of the White House’s “contempt for America’s small businesses”), there’s not much they can do about it, which means the NLRB, at least through 2012, is going to have a fair amount of latitude in addressing workers’ rights.

And one major area of concern will be union membership drives.  According to surveys, upwards of 60 percent of American workers have expressed an interest in joining a union, attracted by across-the-board advantages in union wages, benefits and working conditions.  But national membership stands at barely over 12 percent. While part of that differential can be traceable to the unreliability of surveys, the real culprit is management’s ability to keep its employees from joining up by using its two favorite weapons:  stalling and intimidation.

There are hundreds (thousands!) of documented cases of companies illegally attempting to dissuade their workers from joining a union.  They threaten, they lie, they bully, they bribe, they spy, they hire outside agencies to assist them.  I knew a retired woman who, on a whim, decided to take a part-time job at Wal-Mart to augment her pension.  She said she was blown away by the level of anti-union propaganda.  As a new employee, the first order of business was being shown a 45-minute movie on the evils of labor unions.

Without the FDA (Food and Drug Administration, formed way back in 1906), one can imagine the sort of liberties that would be taken by manufacturers looking for shortcuts and angles.  The same applies to the NLRB.  Without the labor board acting as a clearing house for employee complaints, there would be no workplace justice.  Without the NLRB, we would see the rise of “employer tyranny.”   Indeed, many would argue that we already see it….even with the board.  Clearly, it’s an uphill battle.

There are a number of reasons for this conclusion:

1) Obama has never stood upon principle when the issue of personnel and appointments are concerned. He abandoned Van Jones; same for Shirley Sherrod; same for Elizabeth Warren; same for Justice Liu, currently of the California Supreme Court. All the Tea Party has to do is criticize a potential candidate as being too far to the Left, or too “socialistic,” and Obama runs for the hills. It is quite likely that he will end up appointing a milk-toast liberal who will make little difference when push comes to shove.

2) The U.S. Supreme Court, with Scalia, Thomas, Alito, Roberts and Kennedy, will not be a progressive force for needed social change for a decade or more. With a middle of the road associate of the sort that Obama might appoint, it will at best, be a force for little or no change in the foreseeable future.

3) The U.S. Supreme Court plays a rather insignificant role in changing the important policy decisions that confront the American people. It is true that a right-wing court can rule for George Bush over Al Gore, or for corporate “personhood” over corporate responsibility, or for the legitimacy of a police state or a military empire, instead of for working people. But, ultimately, it is the Congress, owned, bought and paid for by the corporate oligarchy, which makes the laws, overrides “bad” Supreme Court decisions and defines the context within which laws and lawsuits are defined. An “unpopular” court decision can be overturned in a week by a hostile Congress. A disenfranchised public cannot force a group of millionaire politicians to do what is right for the people, without more power and influence than currently exists among the 99% of this country.

4) Historically, the Supreme Court has played a conservative and pro-corporate role regarding the social issues of the day. While the William O. Douglas, Hugo Black, and Earl Warren courts made significant inroads into the areas of protection for those accused of crime and in support of civil rights activists, it was the mass movements of those decades that laid the foundation for those decisions. The Court was not defining or creating a new consciousness; rather, it was merely reinforcing the social trends taking place in the society. The reactionary politics of the American ruling class pose an insurmountable obstacle to the current Supreme Court’s ability to support progressive social change and public control over our economy and resources. While the Occupy Movement, for example, has had a significant impact in educating the American public as to the abuses imposed upon us by the corporate oligarchy, in reality, there is no unified, organized opposition to military/corporate domination of life in this country.

5) The Hobson’s choice of electing Obama because of the minimal impact he will have on future Supreme Court decisions is a ridiculous one. This President has appointed Wall Street hooligans to run our economy. He has waged the most vicious, unwarranted wars in our nation’s history against defenseless Muslims. He has pandered to and empowered an oil industry that is destroying the environment and resources of the entire world, while doing nothing to regulate or control them. He has consistently helped the rich at the expense of the poor. The suggestion that a potential appointment to the US Supreme Court would justify four more years of abuse from this President is nonsense. Any potential court appointment would be a meaningless token in the context of the harm this President is causing. It is similar to a Wal-Mart offer to give customers a $10 rebate on items that are massively overpriced to begin with.

6) There are other marginal advantages to having an Obama in the White House, rather than a Repub: a) the veto power will be exercised more humanely with a Democratic President than a Republican one; b) appointments to various congressional committees and offices will be more diverse than anything the Repubs are capable of; and, c) visitors to the White House will be more likely to represent the world’s peoples than are the white-sheeted candidates the Repubs are likely to court. But the major direction of the country; namely, away from democracy toward imperialism; the concentration of wealth; the destruction of quality education and meaningful human services; and, Klu Klux Klan patriotism rather than just immigration laws — those all are squarely in the hands of the Repubs, whether they be fronted by Obama or a GOP mouthpiece. Until those directions change, the vote for either party is long-term suicide with continued oppression and war.

The next time someone says that the Repubs and the Democrats are the same, BUT the Democrats will make better Supreme Court appointments, think twice. You are getting suckered by a false premise.

The issue does not end here, however, because inevitably the next question arises: When is it inappropriate to choose “the lesser of two evils?”

If a rational human being were asked in 1928 Germany, “Which one of these people do you support: Eichmann, Hitler or Himmler?”, very few people would be likely to choose which of these monsters should be spared and which supported. Most intelligent people would say, they are all horrible excuses for human beings, and good citizens should not support any of them.

What if one is more likely to be nice to Gypsies, or sympathetic to the idea of women’s emancipation or equality with men, or interested in saving the forests? Does an intelligent person say “I’ll support a, or b, or c, because of one or several of these factors?” Or is one left with the realization that the evil done by these “leaders” outweighs any positive act that they might do, regardless of how much better their “constructive” ideas might be?

The people of the world are watching their environment destroyed, their economy hijacked, their future despoiled by wars and poverty. The fact that Obama might appoint a lukewarm liberal to the Supreme Court instead of a Bush-style reactionary means nothing.

1. Ideology.  The dynamic that exists between management and labor hasn’t changed since the Industrial Revolution.  Despite those catchy slogans about “synergy” and “team-building,” people who earn a wage and people who pay a wage don’t necessarily want the same thing. They want different things, divergent things.  One wants a larger slice of the pie for themselves and their families, the other wants to keep the whole pie.  Hence, workers collectives.

2. Numbers.  Despite the hand-wringing over declining union rolls, there are still (as of 2010, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics) 14.7 million union members in the country.  That’s twice the population of Israel.  On November 15, 1969, when an estimated 500,000 people participated in an anti-war demonstration in Washington, D.C., it was billed as a historical turnout.  Think what 14 million could do if mobilized.

3. Citizens.  Those “heroic” workers in the community—cops, firemen and nurses—are going to step up to the plate and remind the public that unions aren’t the horrible monsters the Koch brothers and Mitch McConnell wing of the Republican Party make them out to be.  They’re our neighbors, our friends, our benefactors.  Demonizing the firefighters and nurses is a tactic that’s guaranteed to backfire.

4. Exposure.  The drive to privatize public schools will fail. In fact, those grandiose promises about how brilliantly for-profit charter schools are going to perform, and how charter schools will be the educational template for the future, have already been exposed as false.  Make no mistake:  privatizing the public schools wasn’t undertaken to help America’s students; it was undertaken to make money for a few early-entry entrepreneurs.

5. Politics.  Obama will win re-election (Get serious.  Who’s going to beat him….Romney?) and, as a lame duck president with nothing to lose, Obama will surprise and delight his earlier detractors by making the “Reinvigoration of American Labor” the centerpiece of his second term, proving that those inspirational promises he made on the campaign trail in 2008 weren’t just empty rhetoric.

6. Merger.  Without a clear agenda or recognized leadership, the Occupy Wall Street movement will fizzle out.  The volunteers who fueled that noble experiment will come to the realization that the only institutional opposition to corporate America is organized labor.  The OWS faithful will embrace the AFL-CIO, and together they will go on the warpath. A coalition made in Heaven.

7. Opportunity.  Fast food and retail workers will be the target of the next big membership drive.  Not only are these workers underpaid, underappreciated, and fed up with being marginalized, the jobs they’re doing just happen to be jobs that can’t be shipped to another state or overseas, so those tired old management threats can’t be used against them.  They’re ripe for organizing.

8. Patriotism.  America will inevitably realize that, unlike Wall Street bankers and corporate CEOs, union members are our true patriots.  Union workers not only earn every nickel in these United States, they spend every nickel here as well.  Unlike “situational capitalists,” America’s unions don’t root for the success of foreign economies (to the detriment of our own).

9. Culture.  Conservative Republicans will wake up and realize that, across the board, union members tend to be fairly moderate when it comes to social and cultural issues.  Despite being linked to the Democratic Party, organized labor isn’t the radical, godless hotbed the evangelical right pretends it is.  That phony liberal stigma will collapse like a house of cards.

10. Money.  This time around, labor will take the reported $400 million it spent on getting Obama elected in 2008, and spend it all on congressional and senatorial races, winning decisive majorities in both chambers, gaining chairmanships of all the committees, and eliminating the threat of Republican filibusters.

And that’s how labor will get its groove back.

You are part of an unbroken line of heroes spanning two centuries — from the colonists who overthrew an empire, to your grandparents and parents who faced down fascism and communism, to you — men and women who fought for the same principles in Fallujah and Kandahar, and delivered justice to those who attacked us on 9/11.

The most important lesson that we can take from you is not about military strategy –- it’s a lesson about our national character. Because of you, we are ending these wars in a way that will make America stronger and the world more secure.

— President Barack Obama, Address to Troops at Fort Bragg, December 14, 2011

The lies of war are forgotten as easily and readily as the wrappings of Christmas or the resolutions of a new year.  Like a child still in diapers, the lessons of war must be learned again and again until finally they are taken to heart.

The lies of the war in Iraq are so easily buried that six out of seven Republican candidates for president of the United States have publicly pledged to go to war in Iran based on the identical unsubstantiated claims that led us to war in Iraq.  The lessons of that ill-fated war, the largest strategic blunder since Vietnam, are so readily put behind us that even before that colossal disaster officially ended, six of seven Republican candidates pledged his and her allegiance to the same neoconservative brain trust that guided us into the snake pit.  And the White House is not far behind.

Those of us who remember the war in Vietnam and the years we committed to ending it will find the bipartisan rationalizations of the Iraq War all too familiar and profoundly disturbing.

The lie that drove the Vietnam War was the Domino Theory:  If we lose one nation to the red menace of communism, then we will lose them all.  On that basis, three generations of western powers (Britain, France and America) chose a little country on the doorstep of China as their playground of war.

It required over three million lives to prove that a child’s game was not a legitimate basis for a foreign policy.  It only made sense because it fit on a bumper sticker and because our leaders were dominated by military minds in search of power, glory and the spoils of empire.

The great postwar lie of Vietnam was that we lost the war because we were never fully committed.  The politicians in Washington held our generals back.  Between 1965 and 1968 we dropped over a million tons of missiles, bombs and rockets on North Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia but we were never fully committed.  We sprayed 12 million gallons of the deadly chemical defoliant Agent Orange over wide swaths of Southeast Asia but we were not fully committed.  At the height of the war in 1968 we deployed over half a million soldiers, including the first conscripts since the Korean War, but we were not fully committed.

Short of nuclear bombs, we were as committed to that unjustifiable war as any nation could have been yet the lies of war survive.  The lies of war take on mythological characteristics and believing them becomes a ritual of patriotism.

Little wonder we commit the same strategic mistakes, the same errors in judgment, the same acts of criminal inhumanity, the same ultimately desperate and self-destroying measures over and over again.

In the wake of Vietnam, America’s leaders were confined to small-scale interventions until George Herbert Walker Bush, former Director of the CIA, conspired to wage war in Iraq.  Though the Gulf War was short-lived, its military success inspired President Bush to announce: “The specter of Vietnam has been buried forever in the desert sands of the Arabian Peninsula.”

Forever was not a long time as his eldest son was to initiate two wars that brought the specter of Vietnam back into focus.  One was the ongoing ten-year war in Afghanistan and the other was a return to his father’s war in Iraq.

Few will recall the lies of the father but the lies of the son are too fresh to be so soon forgotten.  They include not only the infamous weapons of mass destruction but also the later claim that virtually all the world believed the lie.  For the record, we lost our appeal before the United Nations Security Council to justify military action on the basis of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.  The International Atomic Energy Agency thoroughly debunked our claims and the measure was withdrawn when it became clear that the Council would vote overwhelmingly against our cause for war.

Members of the Bush administration falsely claimed that Saddam Hussein was a party to the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001.  They falsely claimed that Iraq harbored and worked with Al Qaeda operatives.  These claims were so clearly and demonstrably false that even President Bush was forced ultimately to disavow them.

The lies of war had served their purpose.  Once the first bombs lit up the Baghdad skyline, supporting the war became a matter of patriotism.

The next lie was that our actions had nothing to do with Iraqi oil and everything to do with establishing democracy in the Arab world.  That lie was exposed when our first action was to protect the oil fields.  Well before an Iraqi government could be established we contracted Iraqi oil to the highest corporate bidders.  Mission accomplished.

The lies of war are really not that difficult to detect.  It only requires an open mind, an appetite for facts, and a willingness to think.

The lies of the Iraq War will survive unless those of us who witnessed them, from the soldiers who sacrificed to the citizens who supported and opposed them, unless each of us vows to accept the truth and pass that horrid account forward to future generations.

We can be grateful that a president elected largely on the promise of ending the Iraq War has officially done so, though we remain mindful that thousands of American-hired mercenaries remain behind to guard the largest diplomatic embassy on earth.

We understand at our stage of development that a president cannot apologize for the harm done in the name of our nation.

We understand the wisdom of separating the war from the warrior.

We know the president cannot inform our soldiers that they were fighting the wrong war for the wrong reasons.

But when the president announces that we have created an opportunity for the Iraqis to thrive and prosper as a democratic nation, he is not only being disingenuous; he is perpetuating the lies of war.  When the president declares that our fight in Iraq was for Iraqi freedom and international justice, he is paving the way for another unjust war in America’s future.  He is attempting to bury the specter of Vietnam.

Leaving Afghanistan for another day, we should all agree that the Iraq War was wrong from its inception.  It was never about democracy.  It was never about justice.  It was always about oil and strategic advantage.

Wrong is wrong.

I don’t mind receiving Christmas cards or being wished a “Merry Christmas” from friends, clerks, or even in junk mail trying to sell me something no sane person should ever buy. My wife and I even send Christmas cards, with messages of peace and joy, to our friends who are Christians or who we don’t know their religion.

I like Christmas music and Christmas carolers, even if some have voices that crack now and then, perhaps from the cold.

At home, from as early as I could remember, my family bought and decorated a Christmas tree, and gave gifts to each other and our friends. Usually we put a Star of David on the tree, undoubtedly an act of heresy for many Jews and Christians. We learned about Christmas—and about Chanukah, the “feast of lights,” an eight day celebration of joy and remembrance of the rededication of the Temple of Jerusalem at a time when it seemed as if a miracle had saved the Jews from darkness during the Maccabean revolt in the second century BCE.

This year, my wife and I have a two-foot tall cypress tree, decorated with white felt angels, glittered silver tin snowflakes, and small white LED lights, a gift from a devout Christian. We weren’t offended by the gift; we accepted it and displayed it on a table in our dining room in the spirit of friendship. In Spring, we’ll plant the tree in our backyard and hope it grows strong and tall, giving us shade and oxygen, perhaps serving as a sanctuary for birds, squirrels, and other wildlife.

What I do mind is the pomposity of some of the religious right who deliberately accost me, often with an arrogant sneer on their lips, to order me to accept their “well wishes” of a “Merry Christmas.” Their implication is “Merry Christmas—or else!” It’s their way of saying their religion is the one correct religion, that all others are wrong.

Although I try to understand and tolerate other beliefs, the extreme right doesn’t tolerate difference or dissent.

Right wing commentators at Fox News are in their final week of what has become a holiday tradition of claiming there is a “War on Christmas.” The lies and distortions told by these Shepherds of Deceit, and parroted by their unchallenging flock of followers, proves that at least in this manufactured war, truth is the first victim.

The Far-Right-But-Usually-Wrong claim that godless liberals are out to destroy Christmas, and point to numerous examples, giving some facts but never the truth.

They are furious that many stores wish their customers a “Happy Holiday” and not a “Merry Christmas,” unable to understand that sensitivity to all persons’ religions isn’t some kind of heresy. The ultra-right American Family Association even posts lists of stores that are open on Christmas, have their clerks wish customers a “Happy Holiday,” and don’t celebrate Christmas the way they believe it should be celebrated. (Of course, the AFA doesn’t attack its close ally, the NRA, which on its website wishes everyone “Happy Holidays.”)

Because of their own ignorance, they have no concept of why public schools may teach about Christmas or even have students sing carols but can’t put manger scenes on the front lawn. Nevertheless, the Extremists of Ignorance and Intolerance parade the Constitution as their own personal shield, without having read the document and its analyses, commentaries, and judicial opinions that define it, and can’t understand there is a strict separation of church and state. The Founding Fathers, especially Franklin and Jefferson, were clear about that. They were also clear that this is a nation where a majority of its people profess to be Christians, but it is not a “Christian nation.” There is a distinct difference.

The ultra-right—some of whom stanchly believe Barack Obama is not only a Muslim but wasn’t even born in the U.S—follow the guiding star of Fox to wrongly claim that the President Obama hates Christianity so much that he won’t even put up a Christmas tree but calls it a “holiday tree.” Perhaps they were too busy imbibing the bigotry in their mugs to know that the President and his family helped light the National Christmas Tree near the White House, wished Americans a “Merry Christmas,” and even told a bit about what Christians believe is a divine birth.

When confronted by facts, these fundamentalists point out that the Puritans, the ones who fled England for religious freedom, demanded adherence to a strict code of Protestant principles—and if it was good enough for the first American “citizens,” it’s good enough for the rest of us. What they never learned, obviously, is that the Puritans banned Christmas celebrations, declaring them to be pagan festivals.

If the Fox pundits, leading their sheep into the abyss of ignorance in a counter-attack in a war that doesn’t exist, would take a few moments to think before blathering inanities, they might realize that the man they worship was called “the Prince of Peace” not “the General of War.”