The Frankfurter School

You need to understand what is going on in Congress with FISA.  Democrats and Republicans are uniting to pass legislation that will allow our government to spy on us without any oversight, and to give immunity to the telecom companies that helped them in order to keep details of the programs from ever coming out in court.  The only reason that this hasn’t already happened is that a coalition of bloggers, journalists, the EFF and the ACLU, have continued to raise hell about this insane assault on the Bill of Rights, and have mobilized a sizable constituency to write letters, call Congress, and run ads in key Congressional districts highlighting key Congressmen and their role in this travesty.  Each time, Democratic leadership in Congress has moved the goalpost, thinking that we all get tired of those nagging emails from moveOn or the ACLU, and that if they delay the vote we’ll stop paying attention.  They tried this tactic several times, but ultimately an amazing and committed group is growing more and more organized and committed.

Nixon used the FBI to spy on ordinary Americans.  All Americans, Democrats and Republicans, agreed this was bad so Congress passed laws in the 1970s to make this explicitly illegal.  Because the President kept using the threat of foreign operatives as cover to spy on ordinary Americans, Congress specifically established a secret court that could review classified information and give warrants for wiretapping in 24-72 hours, sometimes retro-actively if there was a really dangerous Russian spy that needed immediate action.  Thus the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) was passed in 1978.  The act has been updated and modernized to keep up with technology, in the 90s, and again as part of the PATRIOT ACT in 2001.  The government has all of the tools it needs to do its job.  The failure of intelligence that led to 9/11 was not caused by us not having listened to the right things, it was caused by us not knowing what to do with the information we did have, and not taking it seriously at the highest levels of the administration.

The Bush Administration began spying on Americans and paying large sums of money to the major telecom companies to essentially vacuum up all of our telephone calls, text messages, emails, faxes, and browser histories.  We know that AT&T built a special room that funneled information to the government and allowed them to access anything they want at their pleasure without a warrant or any oversight whatsoever.  We also know that Qwest refused to cooperate because their attorneys deemed the governments request illegal.  When parts of this program were made public by the New York Times, and a coalition of civil liberties groups like the ACLU and electronic privacy advocates sued the telecom companies for violating their constitutional rights.  The Administration moved quickly to have Congress act to make their activities legal, and to give “immunity” to the companies that broke the law in complying with the administration’s requests.  Meanwhile, Congressional hearings were stalled and ignored by the Administration, using dangerous claims of executive authority to say that Congress does not have the right to investigate these activities.  The lawsuits became the only hope of forcing the telecoms to reveal the details of the program, which is why “immunity” was so crucial — to stop the lawsuits from moving forward at all and revealing the still-secret details of the Administration’s domestic spying programs.

The Administration and the powerful telecommunications industry have had a great deal of help from Democrats in protecting their illegal activities, covering their tracks, and allowing the United States to become just like the Soviet Union or East Germany in its abilities to surveil its own citizens without any reason, oversight or limitation.  The list of powerful Democrats who have helped try to pass the Bush/Cheney wish list include: Harry Reid, Dianne Feinstein, Jay Rockefeller, Nancy Pelosi, and Steny Hoyer.

It looked like this issue was settled this winter when House leadership defied the Senate leadership and the Administration and in the face of threats and scare tactics, said the law was sufficient as it stood.  After that fight was “won” an amazing thing happened.  The Administration started looking for a “compromise.”   Yes that’s right, after we gave and gave and gave and held out for the bare minimum of protection we could solidly keep, after we were told that the any compromise on their full bill would cost us American lifves, after the battle was won, then the Administration started looking for new ways to win, and calling it a “compromise.”  And now they have found it.  And once again, they’re counting on us not paying attention.
TAKE ACTION NOW!

• CALL YOU CONGRESSMAN/WOMAN.  Say you’re opposed to warrantless wiretapping and you’re opposed to retroactive immunity for the telecoms.

• JOIN THE ACLU.  They are truly doing the lion’s share of the work here.

• JOIN THE CAMPAIGN AT FIREDOGLAKE.COM: they are leading the coalition of bloggers who are reporting on this story, because, big surprise it’s not being covered in the corporate press.

• GIVE MONEY.  See the link to the right of this post under “take action.”

Disaster scenes in our own country are becoming all too-familiar to Americans. The dramatic photos show people forced out of their homes seeking shelter, massive property destruction and often death. The recent pictures coming out of Iowa City last week call up memories of Hurricane Katrina but with an all-white cast of characters. These weather-related disasters cannot be definitively linked to global warming, but they are the results that models of global warming have predicted, and the “debate” over the issue roils on. What is missing from the public discussion, however, is the idea that it is not weather alone that has caused the magnitude of the destruction. Levees failed in Iowa City too, ones that the Army Corps of Engineers identified as faulty in 1993. Our country’s infrastructure is unfunded and unsafe, and is the direct result of “trickle-down” economics ushered in by President Reagan, and then universalized by the “socially liberal but fiscally conservative” Clintons in the 1990s.

Since 1980, fiscal conservatives have pretty much won the battle of ideas with a simple formula of “government = bad” and “you work hard and should get to keep all your money.” What this ingenious marketing campaign did was to convince Americans to allow the 25-year dismantling of the entire regulatory system and public infrastructure in the United States, so proudly built during the New Deal. The very very wealthiest Americans have gotten wealthier by several orders of magnitude, but the merely well-to-do (on down) have not seen their taxes become substantially lower. The overall impact has been to leave this country with a welfare system that was taken away from people and handed to corporations. In the collapse of our infrastructure lies opportunity for growth, privatization, and profit for a select few. In its wake lies broken levees, collapsed bridges, collapsed mines, fallen cranes and contaminated food.

A new narrative needs to be created to re-build the society that we had for most of the 20th Century, in which government played a necessary role in protecting us from harm, whether it comes from nature, neglect or profit. When we focus only on the individual being responsible for himself, many may live well, but at much greater cost to their neighbor. When we make sacrifices for our common good, we all live richer lives.
Weather is random and unpredictable, but only when and where it occurs. The consequences on real people of weather disasters are largely preventable or at least can be greatly mitigated. We are going to see climate change and disease bring ever-greater numbers of casualties closer and closer to home. We need to stop seeing them as random acts and make all of the appropriate causal connections, not just by dutifully recycling and buying hybrids, but by changing the way we think about the values that our society is built upon. We are much better suited facing our problems together than as individuals and must connect that narrative to everything that we do.

Tim Russert died today, which is front page news on all the networks and papers. My condolences to his family for the loss of a loved one. For the rest of us, I can only hope that his removal will allow a real journalist to occupy the position that he wasted for so long.

Tim Russert was exactly what is wrong with America. He is the consummate Washington establishment journalist, exactly who Scott McClellan was talking about when he said that the press acts like a bunch of lapdogs eating the lies they get tossed like a bone.

During the Scooter Libby/Valerie Plame testimony before Congress, in which it became clear that he was a player and an insider, a trader of information, he testified under oath that he considered everything that anyone in power told him to be “background” and “off the record” unless he was explicitly given permission to print it. No wonder he was beloved by so many, he took the role of “journalist” and used the job description of “publicist” to do it. And that’s how our democracy gets dismantled when no one is paying attention.

The obituaries remind me of the death of Richard Nixon, with people falling over themselves to praise this unworthy man, as if his “preparedness” and “wit,” his genial manner, or his love for politics made him a good journalist.

Let me be clear: the reason that Bush is in office, that we are at war, that the economy is in the toilet, that our civil liberties have been destroyed, that we torture people and spy on our own citizens, is because of the failure of our corporate press to report facts and truth, in favor of merely restating “partisan” talking points and giving them equal uncritical weight. Tim Russert perfectly exemplified this; he completely abdicated his responsibility to report facts, truth and ask tough questions to people in power. Even Dick Cheney considered him part of his personal message machine. Tim Russert should be made to spend eternity with the Founding Fathers, so he can forever be dogged by Washington, Jefferson and Adams, who can lecture him for into the hereafter on liberty and freedom, and the duty of educated men in power to preserve our fragile democracy.

If you haven’t watched the HBO movie “Recount” yet, you should. It is a painful, sometimes funny, and fairly accurate reminder of the chain of events that led to the installation of George W. Bush as President in 2000. I will never forget the horror with which we all watched the events unfold at the time, powerless to stop it, but with the natural disappointment and acceptance of supporting the losing side in a tough battle. Eight years later, a real clarity is possible to achieve, through hindsight and dispassionate historical examination. A fresh look at the facts and events reveals one thing very clearly: a well-planned and forcefully executed coup d’état occurred in the United States of America.

After watching the film, I came across a report on touch screen voting by Dan Rather on his HDNet news show that provided new information that I had never before seen reported: the paper ballots that led to thousands of disqualified votes had been altered by Sequoia Voting Systems to cause them to malfunction and create “hanging chads.” The shocking story comes at around forty minutes into the broadcast, as employees of the company explain how they were instructed to “short” the ballots for Palm Beach county to account for “humidity,” which was then demonstrated to create problems like hanging chads.

After considering the information in this account, and a review of the facts provided by the docu-drama “Recount,” the chain of events looks like this:

• Pre-election polling indicated that the race would be very close and that a victory in one swing state could decide the election.
• the brother of the Republican candidate for President, Jeb Bush, was the governor of Florida, and the state co-chair of the Bush Presidential campaign, Katherine Harris, was the official in charge of overseeing the election
• months before the election, Katherine Harris disenfranchised tens of thousands of democratic-leaning voters, by hiring ChoicePoint, a Republican-owned data company, to purge voter registration lists of all names that were remotely similar to lists of people who had been convicted of felonies.
• paper ballots were manufactured below normal standards to ensure that chaos would reign in certain (democratic-leaning) districts, throwing the election into the hands of state officials.
• the FOX News employee responsible for looking at data and making the official call to award a state to a candidate was named Bush, and was the cousin of the candidate. FOX called Florida for Bush, the other networks immediately followed, and Gore was on the defensive for the next 30 days fighting the perception of being a “sore loser”
• the US Supreme Court stepped in to halt the Florida court-ordered vote count, and Republican appointees to the court wrote the only decision in the entire history of the court that was not meant to set precedent or ever be referred to again effectively handing power to the son of the man who was either Vice President or President when 5 of them were appointed.
• when the votes were later counted and totaled by a consortium of news organizations, Gore was shown to have won the state of Florida

coup d’état:

(Merriam-Webster) a sudden decisive exercise of force in politics.

(American Heritage) The sudden overthrow of a government by a usually small group of persons in or previously in positions of authority.

(Wikipedia) the coup d’état is a type of political engineering, generally violent (hence “strike”, “blow”; French “coup”), but not always, yet differing from a revolution (by a larger, armed group to effect violent, radical change to the political system) in that the change is to the government, not the form of government.

On Dan Rather’s excellent news show for HDNet, “Dan Rather Reports,” he tackles the kind of investigative reporting that used to regularly grace the network evening news, but would never pass muster at any of the networks now for fear of offending an advertiser.

In this piece, Rather makes a case that the new Boeing 787 Dreamliner faces safety concerns that the FAA is ill-equipped to monitor, and that the company itself may be minimizing at great risk to travelers.

A story like this one, critical of a major corporation, can only be done by a news organization that is not owned by one of the six major media conglomerates.