Discontented Soul

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr, the American jurist, once said that, "taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society. If those who live a life beyond comfort must lose a little more money to make sure somebody else's child can read and write when they grow up, so be it."

Australians used to be a fair-minded and egalitarian folk, but that was before the "aspirationals" of the greed-is-good generation decided that, "I worked for my money and the Guv'mint [sic] has no right to take it away from me." Now the fabled Australian generosity is reserved for the little brown people in Asia - as long as they stay there. Such generosity, according to the Calvinist philosophy of the New Religious Right - which seems to attract many of the aspirationals - will still earn one a place in Heaven!

It is interesting to see that a recent OECD report (see http://www.oecd.org/document/8/0,2340,en_2649_37427_1962312_1_1_1_37427,00.html ) stigmatized Australia as one of the most inequitably taxed countries in the world. It is even more interesting to realize that those who are most vociferous in calling for reduced taxation (the industry organizations and their lackeys in the Coalition and the media) are those who will gain the most benefit.

A Cry for Freedom in the US Senate
Remarks by US Senator Robert C. Byrd
Published on Friday, March 11, 2005 by CommonDreams.org

...I rise today to discuss freedom. Not the grandiose world-wide “freedom talk” one hears so much of. No. Not far-flung foreign policy goals. Rather my concern today is preserving our freedoms right in our own backyard here at home. Freedom, like a good garden, needs constant tending. One must watch for the worms in the wood. As Wendell Phillips, the abolitionist, orator, and columnist once said, “Eternal Vigilance is the price of liberty.” One must pay the price if one wants the blessing.
In a culture where sports metaphors are more common public parlance than historical analogies, our unique form of government, carefully restraining powers while protecting rights, presents a special challenge to maintain. The “winning is everything” philosophy so beloved by Americans may, without careful balance, obscure the goal of justice for all that must be the aim of a representative democracy. Demeaning minority views, characterizing opposition as obstructionist, these are first steps down the dark alley of subjugating rights...

Can Democracy Survive Bush's Embrace?
by Naomi Klein
Published on Friday, March 11, 2005 by The Nation

It started off as a joke and has now become vaguely serious: the idea that Bono might be named president of the World Bank. US Treasury Secretary John Snow recently described Bono as "a rock star of the development world," adding, "He's somebody I admire."
The job will almost certainly go to a US citizen, one with even weaker credentials, like Paul Wolfowitz. But there is a reason Bono is so admired in the Administration that the White House might just choose an Irishman. As frontman of one of the world's most enduring rock brands, Bono talks to Republicans as they like to see themselves: not as administrators of a diminishing public sphere they despise but as CEOs of a powerful private corporation called America. "Brand USA is in trouble...it's a problem for business," Bono warned at the World Economic Forum in Davos. The solution is "to re-describe ourselves to a world that is unsure of our values."...
The problem is not that Iraqis have lost faith in the democracy for which they risked their lives on January 30; it's that the electoral system imposed on them by Washington is profoundly undemocratic.
Terrified at the prospect of an Iraq ruled by Iraqis, former chief US Envoy Paul Bremer designed elections that gave the US-friendly Kurds 27 percent of the seats in the National Assembly even though they make up as little as 15 percent of the population. And since the US-authored interim constitution requires an absurdly high majority for all major decisions, the Kurds now hold the country hostage. Their central demand is control over Kirkuk; if they get it, and then decide to separate, Iraqi Kurdistan will handily include the massive northern oilfields.
Kurdish Iraqis have a legitimate claim to independence, as well as understandable fears of being ethnically targeted. But the US-Kurdish alliance has handed Washington a backdoor veto over Iraq's democracy. And with Kirkuk as part of Iraqi Kurdistan, if Iraq does break apart Washington will still end up with a dependent, oil-rich regime - even if it's somewhat smaller than the one originally envisioned....
[T]he Bush definition of liberation robs democratic forces of their most potent tools. The only idea that has ever stood up to kings, tyrants and mullahs in the Middle East is the promise of economic justice, brought about through nationalist and socialist policies of agrarian reform and state control over oil. But there is no room for such ideas in the Bush narrative, in which free people are only free to choose so-called free trade. That leaves secularists with little to offer but empty talk of "human rights"--a weedy weapon against the powerful swords of ethnic glory and eternal salvation.
George W. Bush likes to say that democracy has the power to defeat tyranny. He's right, and that's precisely why it is so very dangerous for history's most powerful emancipatory idea to be bundled into an empty marketing exercise. Allowing the Bush Administration to fold the liberation struggles of Lebanon, Egypt and Palestine into its own "story" is a gift to authoritarians and fundamentalists. Freedom and democracy need to be liberated from Bush's deadly embrace and returned to the movements of the Middle East that have been struggling for these goals for decades. They have a story of their own to finish.

Are We in World War IV?
by Tom Engelhardt
Published on Thursday, March 10, 2005 by TomDispatch.com

Throughout much of the Cold War, people feared above all else a global hot war, the third great one in a century of devastating world wars; and we crept up to it more than once - most desperately, there can be no doubt, at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962. For decades, the world was poised for that next world war; the two superpowers with their nuclear arsenals running to thousands of weapons (as they still do), a few hundred of which would have been civilization-busting, many hundreds of which might have been nuclear-winter inducing and life extinguishing; all of them cocked in their silos or loaded in the bomb-bays of Soviet or American planes, or stashed on the submarines that made up the unreachable third leg of the nuclear "tripod" and were primed for almost instantaneous action. World War III, which might have ended it all, could indeed have started, as the U.S. military feared for decades, with those Soviet tanks pouring through the Fulda Gap in Germany, and escalated from there to "theater," and finally intercontinental, ballistic missiles. It would have been a show. The last picture show, you might say. And, let's face it, it didn't happen...

© 2005 Tom Engelhardt

Ten Questions the Senate Should Ask John Bolton at his Confirmation Hearing, But Probably Won't
by Phyllis Bennis
Published on Wednesday, March 9, 2005 by the Institute for Policy Studies

1. In 1994 you said "There is no United Nations." Do you still believe that the international community, and the world's premiere multilateral organization, are illusions?
2. You also said "When the United States leads, the United Nations will follow. When it suits our interest to do so, we will do so. When it does not suit our interests we will not." Do you still believe that the US should approach the United Nations only in a tactical way, treating it as a tool of US foreign policy?
3. Do you think that the United Nations represents a threat to US sovereignty, and therefore do you think we should simply stop paying dues to the UN?
4. The United Nations Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, both of which the US has signed and ratified, form the cornerstones of international law. Do you believe the US would be better off if it "unsigned" those two treaties?
5. While you were heading the Bush administration's arms control efforts, you fought for the US to withdraw from the ABM treaty. Do you believe that because the US military is so dramatically more powerful than that of any other country or group of countries in the world, that it's easier if we simply dictate to other nations what weapons they can or can't have rather than worrying about complicated multi-lateral agreements?
6. The US was one of the original drafters of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Do you think we have any obligation to fulfill the terms of that treaty regarding the rights of nuclear weapons states, or is it really something that only the non-nuclear signatories are accountable to?
7. Do you think the U.S. should ever sign on to any treaty that holds us accountable to the same limits (of arms, nukes, etc.) as other countries around the world? Do you think we should refuse to sign on to a strengthened global treaty on bio-weapons, for instance, if it required the US.\ to allow the same kind of international inspections that we require of other countries?
8. Was "unsigning" the Rome Treaty creating the International Criminal Court the "happiest moment" of your government service? What other treaties do you think the US should "unsign"?
9. Despite claims to the contrary by numerous intelligence and military officials, do you still think Cuba is producing biological weapons?
10. Former Senator Jesse Helms described you as ''the kind of man with whom I would want to stand at Armageddon …[at] the final battle between good and evil in this world." Do you see your role at the United Nations as fighting that same battle between good and evil?

© 2005 Institute for Policy Studies

In Haiti, 'hunger in dark places' is real ... and ignored U.S. media, rights groups silent on country's torment
by Mark Weisbrot
Published on Friday, March 4, 2005 by the Houston Chronicle (Texas)

President Bush's State of the Union speech was long on "the force of human freedom," which he called "the permanent hope of mankind, the hunger in dark places, the longing of the soul." Yet just 600 miles from Florida, that hunger and longing is being met every day with bullets, beatings, arrests and rape by the unelected, unconstitutional government in Haiti. That government's biggest supporter is the administration of George W. Bush.
One year ago, Washington helped depose the elected government of Haiti. The populist ex-priest Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Haiti's president, became the first elected leader to be overthrown twice by armed thugs supported by the United States.

[What a pity Pierre Tristram is only a "journalist" ... I mean, if he had been an "economist" employed by Treasury, his arguments may have carried "weight." But then, probably not!]

Greenspan's Taxing Plan
by Pierre Tristam
Published on Tuesday, March 8, 2005 by the Daytona Beach News-Journal

...The argument against a consumption tax is two-fold: Economically, it is not a given that a consumption tax in a consumption-driven society encourages savings. Consumption will take place one way or another. Not least, if consumption is discouraged in favor of savings, fewer products and services will be sold, fewer jobs created, and fewer taxes collected. Philosophically, a sales tax would be not only less progressive, but also less fair than a progressive income tax. It would almost by definition shift the tax burden toward those less able to pay. It isn't worth the imagined uptick in economic growth.
A more egalitarian economy growing at 3.5 percent a year is more desirable than a less egalitarian economy growing at 4.5 percent a year. An economically less egalitarian economy will ultimately moot that difference anyway: Inequality concentrates wealth, but ultimately reduces consumption by limiting the numbers of those who can consume the most. Add to that the inherent contradiction of a consumer economy suddenly consuming less, and long-term growth prospects dim gloomily.
So where are the gains of a consumption tax? They glitter in the short run, maybe. In the long run they're the ruin of a fair, progressive economy. Certainly.

© 2005 News-Journal Corporation

My complaint about the compliant
by Antonia Zerbisias
Published on Tuesday, March 8, 2005 by the Toronto Star

You have to wonder what Eason Jordan thinks about last Friday's attack on the car that took Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena from her kidnapping ordeal to her close call at the Baghdad airport.
Jordan is the CNN news chief who in January made controversial remarks about U.S. troops targeting journalists, comments which led to his resigning "to prevent CNN from being unfairly tarnished by the controversy over conflicting accounts of my recent remarks regarding the alarming number of journalists killed in Iraq."
Alarming indeed: at least 73 and counting...

George Bush’s “Ownership Society” Leaves Out the Things We Actually Own — Our Bodies, Our Privacy, Our Dignity, Our Bedrooms.
by David Morris
Published on Monday, March 7, 2005 by Alternet
In his second Inaugural Address, President George W. Bush declared once again his desire to "build an ownership society.”
"By making every citizen an agent of his or her own destiny," he explained, "we will give our fellow Americans greater freedom from want and fear, and make our society more prosperous and just and equal."
Millions of words have been written about how the president intends to achieve his goals. I'll refrain from adding to that output. For I'm still bewildered by Bush's bizarre definition of "ownership."
President Bush certainly does not believe one should be able to "own" one's body, certainly the most essential of all forms of ownership. He's sent federal agents into California to arrest a woman trying to reduce chronic pain by using a plant (marijuana) grown in her own backyard, an act the good citizens of California had declared legal by direct vote.
President Bush believes people can — and perhaps should — lose their jobs because of what they do in the privacy of their bedrooms. He has moved aggressively to overturn state laws allowing the aged to die with dignity under their own control.
Ownership of personal information? President Bush opposes policies that require companies to gain permission before they use my personal information for private gain.
Ownership of public information? The Bush administration has restricted access to public information — information the public has paid to gather — to an unprecedented degree. In his first two years in office, for example, he classified more than 4 times the number of documents as Bill Clinton did in his first two years.
Bush does seek to increase home ownership. Every president since Franklin Roosevelt has sought to do so. None has done so little to make that happen as George W. Bush...
In the end, President Bush's ownership society turns the word "ownership" on its head.
He firmly believes that we don't own those things that most of us would indisputably believe we do own — our bodies, our privacy, our dignity, our bedrooms. And to add insult to injury, he just as firmly believes that we can own those things that most of us would argue are not ours to own — air, words, folklore...
Under George W. Bush's ownership society, a person wracked with debilitating pain does not "own" the right to go into her backyard, pick a plant and eat it to alleviate that pain. But a non-person — a corporation — like McDonalds has the right to "own" phrases like "Play and fun for everyone" and, "Hey, it could happen."
There is a word that describes this kind of thinking and the person who engages in it. Unbalanced.

They Can March Too: Hezbollah and the Politics of Staged Protests
by Abhinav Aima
Published on Monday, March 7, 2005 by CommonDreams.org

Neocon enthusiasts who have been slapping each other’s backs for the recent anti-Syria demonstrations in Beirut are going to face an inconvenient reality on Tuesday, March 8, when Hezbollah will lead a rally in support of Syria in Beirut...
The democracy that flows down the barrel of a gun will only create a harvest of bullets.

The Business of Executing Our Children
by Leonard Pitts Jr.
Published on Monday, March 7, 2005 by the Philadelphia Inquirer / Pennsylvania

...A civilized nation ought not be in the business of executing its children. Frankly, it ought not be in the business of executing anybody, but leave that aside for now. Because even if I considered state-sanctioned killing a proper and just response to the depravity of some criminal acts, I would still draw the line at imposing that penalty on young people.
Adolescents are, in the aggregate, less mature than their elders, less responsible, less capable of making reasoned decisions and more prone to committing foolish and impulsive acts. It's a plain truth we have long recognized in law and custom. That's why we protect young people from their own juvenility. It's why we say they are too young to sign contracts, too young to drink, too young to vote, too young to see a naughty movie without parental approval.
How, then, could they have been old enough to be executed?
If we had not drawn the line on that awful practice at 18, the commonly accepted age of adulthood, where would we draw it? How young - how low - would we be willing to go?...

Some, I know, would prefer we not draw a line at all. After all, drawing a line might suggest that we are, heaven forbid, not "tough on crime," a mantra that has guided - and too often, misguided - our criminal justice decisions for more than a generation now. Between our robotic zero-tolerance policies, our foolish mandatory-sentencing guidelines and this zeal for subjecting children to the harshest punishments in our legal code, we have tied the system into pretzel knots seeking to prove how "tough" we are.
But as poet Gil Scott-Heron once famously noted, a cheap steak is tough, too.
Point being that toughness is not its own justification. Unleavened by compassion, logic, or just plain common sense, toughness is empty. It may gull voters and help politicians win office, may even make some of us feel all warm and righteous inside, but it does little to ensure justice...

Women Worldwide Face Effects of Bush's Gag Rule
by Dian Harrison
Published on Monday, March 7, 2005 by the San Francisco Chronicle

Tuesday is International Women's Day, a worldwide celebration of women's fight for equality and human rights. In light of this commemoration, it is especially disappointing that the Bush administration is working so hard to restrict women's rights...

© 2005 San Francisco Chronicle

Thwarting Iran's Nuclear Ambitions Would be Easier if the US and Israel Kept their Side of the Bargain
by Richard Butler
Published on Monday, March 7, 2005 by the Sydney Morning Herald / Australia

In recent months the US President, George Bush, and senior members of his Administration have asserted that Iran is involved in the clandestine development of nuclear weapons.
Last week Bush turned up the temperature during his visit to Europe, when he declared, on one public occasion punching the air with his fist, Iran "must not be allowed to acquire a nuclear weapon"...

CNI Info Alert

The suicide bombing a week ago, on February 25, which left 5 Israelis dead, sent shivers up and down the collective spine of peace watchers in the West. Would the Israelis resume their traditional response policy of raids, assassinations, bombings and arrests? Would the Sharm al-Sheikh "understanding" that had brought "relative calm" in the area collapse under the weight of retaliations?
As Alison Weir reminds us in If Americans Knew, the term "relative calm of late" has become a wildly misleading cliché, bearing no meaning for Palestinians since the "understanding" was proclaimed at Sharm al-Sheik on February 8. Since that time, according to the Palestine Center for Human Rights, 11 Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, including 3 children, have been killed by the Israeli Occupation Forces; according to the Palestinian Red Crescent, another 30 suffered injuries or wounds at the hands of the IOF. In the period between January 15, the date of the Palestinian elections that brought Mahmoud Abbas to power, and February 8 Sharm al-Sheikh meeting between Abbas and Ariel Sharon, 32 Palestinians had been killed, and 12 wounded. Between November 8, the last previous suicide bombing, and January 15, 115 had been killed and 187 wounded. We are looking at a total of 158 Palestinian dead and 229 wounded, between the two suicide attacks.
In the meanwhile, and almost every day, the IOF makes incursions into Gaza and the West Bank, usually resulting in raids, shooting, bombings, and arrests. In the period of the "relative period of calm" between February 8 and February 25, dozens of incursions, shelling and raids occurred. More than 70 people were arrested. They can be read in the Weekly Reportsavailable on the Palestine Center for Human Rights website.
They also make it clear that despite pronouncements to the contrary, the closures of checkpoint crossings between Israel and Gaza continue enforce, and Gazans are unable to cross into Israel for any reason.
In addition, the IOF supervises the steady construction of the Apartheid Wall, now working its way around Jerusalem. The Palestine Center for Human Rights reports show that almost every day, Israelis cease land from the Palestinians - 50 dunums here, 301 dunums there. During the week of 10-16 February, for example, the people in the villages of Hazma and Anata northeast of Jerusalem lost 50 dunums due to the construction of the Wall; in the same week, some 301 dunums was taken from villagers living in Toura al-Gharbiya. A dunum is one-quarter of an acre.
Admirably, the Israeli High Court has issued a series of rulings recently halting the construction of the wall so that grievances brought buy Palestinians can be heard. But, as the Palestine Center points out, these are almost always ignored by the IOF, and construction of the wall resumes, regardless of the law.
The suicide bombings are deplorable as innocent lives are lost, but the behavior of the Israeli army toward the civilian population of Palestine goes unchecked or undeplored by the western media. Congressional representatives ... continually rant about the need to check the violence of the Palestinians before aid to the Palestinians can be given. But when it comes to real numbers, Americans need to realize that the Palestinians, not the Israelis, are the chief victims of this conflict - regardless of what the US and Israeli national leaders say, and even during a so-called "period of relative calm."