The Senate and House have been in the hands of Democrats for the worst of the occupation, which has occurred since January 2007.
The one thing we know about Iraq is that each year is worse than the one before it. At least 80 percent of Iraqis have always said that the violence would go down if the United States got out. And here Bush and Cheney are not alone in their arrogance. A great many Americans assume that the Iraqis must be wrong about their own country. And why? Well, because the same lying chicken hawks who told us about the stockpiles of WMDs and ties to 9-11 and robot planes attacking us in 45 minutes and risks of mushroom clouds say the Iraqis are wrong. Who are you going to believe, the people who live there or the people whose own defense is that they have accidentally gotten everything catastrophically wrong so far?
Our representatives in Congress and our candidates for president are so opposed to the occupation of Iraq that, rather than funding a withdrawal, they are now proposing to fund the continuation of the occupation, as is, for the rest of Bush and Cheney's terms plus a big chunk of the next administration / Congress.
This started me thinking about some of the things I strongly oppose and how I could better express my opposition. I've decided, in fact, to get a new mortgage on all the equity we've got in our house, and at the same time to max out three credit cards. I'm going to take all the money and donate it in equal shares to: Exxon, Halliburton, Blackwater, and four different health insurance companies.
Already I feel so much better! I may not have put an end to Exxon, but I've expressed my opposition to it in the clearest possible terms, by ruining my family for generations in order to give Exxon money. That ought to be worth something in my next campaign for head of household. And, in case I decide to oppose anything else in the future, I'm looking into the possibility of stealing a huge amount of money from a charity organization near my home.
The genius of our congressional leaders has inspired me. I wonder if you truly grasp the brilliant complexity of their latest maneuver. Not only can they guarantee the funding of more slaughter for more months this way, not only can they move the goal posts so that defunding the occupation by refusing to bring it up or voting No or filibustering is completely off the playing field, not only can they kiss up to the television networks and war profiteers in such an abject manner that they are guaranteed another masochistically thrilling ass-kicking, but - and this is the true genius of the move - they can boost the plausibility of an election theft by an insane senator from Arizona who will fund the occupation for 10,000 years without himself even realizing that he "opposes" it!
Genius.
And yet there remains this fringe leftwing moonbat group consisting of about 80% of Americans who oppose the occupation of Iraq in the ordinary sense of not wanting to waste trillions of dollars keeping it going. And, remember, the true cost of the occupation includes interest, care for veterans, the increased price of oil, and other major elements placing the total in the trillions according to the calculations of Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes.
And yet, what can we do? We're pretty helpless, right, we poor hundreds of millions of Americans who are still sane - we don't have any power, do we? They beat us at every turn, don't they? Our best hope is to turn the Democratic Party into a close approximation of the Republican Party in hopes of winning like they do, right, and then after the elections when we aren't needed anymore somehow turn the Democratic Party back into something else again - something we actually like, something people would actually vote for.
Are we so helpless as all that? Aren't we the people who created the single biggest day of global protest prior to the invasion? Didn't we block the legalization of the invasion at the United Nations, making the invasion the supreme international crime? Didn't we force the Cheney-Bush gang to come up with a pile of lies to justify the invasion? Didn't we expose those lies? Didn't that help forestall an invasion of Iran, at least so far (although it's a safe bet some of that $178 billion will be misappropriated if they still decide to do it)? Didn't support for the war and the president plummet just behind awareness of the lies that we exposed? Aren't we in touch with each other and our allies around the world through the internet, informing people that Americans do not support the slaughter? If you think we have no power, consider this. Last week, Senator Hillary Clinton gave the peace movement credit for her defeat. She hasn't conceded, but mathematically it's over. She was speaking specifically about her losses in caucuses, when she disdainfully referred to us as "the activist base of the Democratic Party." According to Clinton, these activists "turn out in great numbers. And they are very driven by their view of [my] positions, and it's primarily national security and foreign policy that drives them. I don't agree with them. They know I don't agree with them."
In 2006, we elected a new Congress to end the occupation of Iraq. Even the corporate media understood and admitted that. We gained enormous strength through that effort, which was primarily accomplished by the peace movement, not by electoral campaigning. But the so-called leadership of the new Congress immediately announced that it would never use its power, the power of the purse, to end the occupation. And huge segments of the peace movement shrieked in terror, crawled quietly into abandoned voting booths, and stood crowded in there shaking and shivering for the past year and a half. Some made their position opposition to escalating the war, after having just won a landslide demanding the de-escalation of the war. If 2008 ends, and Congress has done nothing to end the occupation of Iraq, the power we gained by electing them to do so in 2006 will be gone. If we cannot hold elected officials to their commitments, why should they bother even making them next time?
We don't know who the next president will be or who will be in the next Congress, but we do know that whatever the answers are to those questions, the occupation of Iraq will not end unless we push for it. And we know that it takes time to build momentum and awareness in a push for change. If we keep shutting down our movement for a year or more every two years, we will never win. If we keep pushing forward as citizens rather than as the pawns of one political party, we will win. We might even win right away. We might not win for a long time. But we will certainly win sooner than if we pause in our work.
We must continue to push Congress to listen to us even when there is an election within two years. (Guess what? There is always an election within two years.) And we must continue the crucial work in high schools of counter-recruitment, at which activists in many school districts have been very successful.
We should bird-dog Obama until he gets it right, not in order to defeat him but in order to push him to positions that will make possible a landslide. I don't know how many of you have noticed how votes have been counted in US elections in the past seven years, but I am convinced that Obama can only take the White House with a landslide. A narrow victory won't work.
One way to get a landslide would be for Obama to lead a filibuster against the occupation funding. He could still fund a withdrawal if he thought that kissing up to the media required such a superfluous gesture. But when he debated McCain, he would be able to take an opposing position and not see it easily dismissed. If the Democrats fund another year and a half of slaughter, the only people who benefit will be war profiteers and third party candidates. Republicans may benefit too, since Democrats make themselves look weak every time they refuse to stand up for what they supposedly stand for.
Millions of families are likely to lose their homes in the United States in the next nine months, thanks to Bush regulators' management of the banking industry, and thanks to the growing Bush-Cheney recession, which appears to be the result in part of the outrageous expense of occupying Iraq and Afghanistan and the broader perverse effect on the economy of having made weapons our top export and weapons making our biggest public investment.
DAVID SWANSON is a co-founder of After Downing Street, a writer and activist, and the Washington Director of Democrats.com. He is a board member of Progressive Democrats of America, and serves on the Executive Council of the Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild, TNG-CWA. He has worked as a newspaper reporter and as a communications director, with jobs including Press Secretary for Dennis Kucinich's 2004 presidential campaign, Media Coordinator for the International Labor Communications Association, and three years as Communications Coordinator for ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. Swanson obtained a Master's degree in philosophy from the University of Virginia in 1997.
I have been very active in the Impeachment movement and have worked with Impeach For Peace for years. I even have Keith Ellison, who you mention in your article as my Congressman. Ellison is on the Judiciary Committee and has done NOTHING to promote Impeachment after signing HR 676. However he and other "progressive" Democrats has and continues to sign legislation to fund this illegal and immoral war. Not to mention the Homeland Terrorism Act.
I have come to the conclusion, based on experience that the Democratic Party have FOUGHT against Impeachment because the investigation would expose their complicity in supporting this war.
I also realize that "progressive" Democrats, such as PDA refuse, flat out refuse to hold the Democrats accountable for their own refusal to hold the Bush Administration accountable.
Quite frankly, many "progressive" Democrats complain about the spinelessness of the Democrats, yet continue to support them. The Dems spinelessness is nothing more than a reflection of your own.
You are fooling yourselves with talk of changing them from within. Sadly, you are bringing others along for the ride. However, as the saying goes "You can fool all the people part of the time and part of the people all of the time, but you can't fool all the people all the time."
Some of us are not being fooled anymore by psuedo-radical, wanna be progressives and know that to quote David Cobb (of Ohio Re-Count fame) "the Democratic Party is where progressive politics goes to die."
Thank God for Ralph Nader and my candidate, Cynthia McKinney.
by
Michael Cavlan (8 articles, 0 quicklinks, 3 diaries, 225 comments)
on Thursday, April 24, 2008 at 11:03:42 AM
The movements for Impeachment, peace, and health care have been growing. People work on the issues part time as they can. These global giants lobby our representatives 24/7/365. The Military Industrial Complex is in all 50 states. Health Insurers have been allowed to become giant monopolies - United Health Care and Wellpoint, Inc. to name a few.
Our Politicians, despite what they say, line their pockets from these blood suckers.
How - do we build a movement that cannot be ignored? Where we are present 24/7/365 - and the issues are not spun or bent so far that they become ineffective?
For example, National Health Insurance is much different from Single Payer Non-profit Health Care, that is not charity, but paid for by everyone including corporations and people according to their means and received by all according to their need.
Two very different things, yet none of the candidates are speaking about the latter.
Then there are things like the "economy". The number one issue. But the Global transnationals are still raking in profits. They have outsourced US jobs, gutted the middle class, robbed pension funds and closed good paying jobs in the US to outsourced poverty wages. No candidate is speaking to the "common mans" economic plight.
So I ask, what do we do when once every four years we vote, then for the next four years we get robbed? When we write our Congress Person and receive a form letter that says, I appreciate your position, but. And the CEO of Enron is having lunch with our Congress person?
We are struggling to fill up our gas tank, pay our power bill and they are receiving record profits, RECORD PROFITS?
Congress is so corrupt they are part of the problem.
I feel the energy of an incredible movement being created, but its slow. They're data mining, using plants to create conflict and dividing us and reshaping the issues.
If net neutrality is compromised - not sure what will happen.
by
August Adams (10 articles, 0 quicklinks, 1 diaries, 442 comments)
on Thursday, April 24, 2008 at 6:31:36 PM
Yes There Are Candidates Speaking About Single Payer
You are right about Universal (corporate HMO friendly) healthcare being different than Single payer healthcare.
You are wrong about there being no candidates speaking about it. There are indeed none of the corporate sponsored and vetted candidates such as John McCain, Barrack Obama or Hillary Clinton.
Cynthia McKinney and Ralph Nader are. In fact, it is the fact that the corporate interests which own our democracy that are not sponsoring them that makes them "not viable." Or at least so we am told by those who support the corporate parties and their corporate candidates and by the corporate media.
There seems to be a pattern developing here. Corporate branding.
Don't believe the hype.
by
Michael Cavlan (8 articles, 0 quicklinks, 3 diaries, 225 comments)
on Thursday, April 24, 2008 at 8:33:21 PM
The vast majority in Washington are all bought and paid for agents of the Militery-Industrial Complex, they are worthless co-conspirators. I am sure now that the only hope of turning America around, is what is inevitable anyway; the collapse of our economy. After enough people feel the pain of this second Great Depression; which will include stagflation, massive unemployment, homelessness, rioting, starvation, the breakdown of our families and the infrastructure across the country. Bank failures and the collapse of the monetery system. Then and only then, when we can no longer afford to drive our cars, fly anywhere, the truckers will stop driving, so nothing will be moving. It'll be like the Mad - Max movie; outright civil unrest. Then we will turn off our tv's, stop believeing change will come from Washington and the two-party system. We will wake up to the reality that we are being shafted by the Federal Reserve, and their lacky's in Congress and the Corporate MSM. Then my fellow Americans change will come. Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose; and the day of reckoning is close at hand. Be brave. These greedy fascist don't have enough FEMA prisons, or Blackwater mercinaries to handle 300 million patriots. The second Revolution is at hand. God Bless.
by
ronheri (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 151 comments)
on Thursday, April 24, 2008 at 8:59:51 PM
It's time for a real revolution, can't fix it through the corrupt electorate, too many people still sleep walking. Hardworking common folk know it's coming. My immigrant parents and immigrant friends can feel it.
My Uncle went through the depression, he's stocked up and planting. So is my Mom, they keep saying, it'll be ok, just stay close, we've been through it before.
I think they know. My IBM Exec brother points to the stock market and says, "first quarter earnings" aren't half bad in most of the fortune 500. I suppose that's because they all are profiting on the backs of outsourced poverty level jobs.
Nice system we have, the corporate elite steal out tax dollars, force us into perpetual national debt and then flee the country.
There ought to be rules that they require US jobs.
Even "Bank of America" is outsourcing many of the behind the scenes jobs. Nice corporate ethics.
by
August Adams (10 articles, 0 quicklinks, 1 diaries, 442 comments)
on Thursday, April 24, 2008 at 10:21:36 PM
6 comments
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