Iraq

Does Anybody Else Think Getting America Shopping Again is Crazy Talk?

dlindorff — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 11:48:05 -0500

By Dave Lindorff

I was listening to Robert Reich, once the left end of the spectrum
in the Clinton cabinet, talking with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer a few days ago,
and Reich, who has in the past sometimes made sense, was talking about
how Americans’ incomes had fallen over the last eight years of the
Bush/Cheney administration and that it was necessary to get their
incomes back on an upward trend, so that they could “start shopping
again.”

Now I understand Reich was trying to make the case that the bailout
so far has been focused on the banks and the insurance industry, and
that none of this will help unless ordinary people start getting some
relief, but still, there’s something completely twisted and out of
whack when the best we can come up with is that we need to get
Americans back into the malls.

In fact, that is a good part of what’s wrong with the US economy: Fully 75 percent of GDP in America is consumer spending.

The problem facing America, and to a great extent the broader world economy, is that we’ve pretty much met basic human needs long ago, and now it’s about creating human wants and then convincing people that they need to buy more stuff and more services.

This is wrong in so many ways and on so many levels.

First of all, we don’t need all this stuff. Is my life any better
if I go from a 18-inch TV screen to a 60-inch TV screen? Is it, for
that matter, any better if I go from an old cathode-ray tube to a flat
screen digital display, or from no TV to a TV?

Is my life any better if I buy a high-performance $50,000 BMW than
if I drive a $20,000 Honda Civic, or even a $5000 used Toyota Corolla
with extended warranty?

Is my life any better if I live with my wife and my teenage son in
a 4000-square-foot house than if I live in a 1800-square-foot or a
1200-square-foot house?

The answer is no. The benefits, if there are any at all, are minuscule, and usually short-lived.

The costs of these trying to satisfy these wants, however, are
enormous. When I buy the large flat screen TV, I am contributing to the
production of gases, used in the flat screen, that are hundreds of
times more potent greenhouse factors than carbon dioxide, and of
course, from a balance-of-trade perspective, I’m sending dollars
overseas to wherever the product is made (none are made in America). If
I buy the $50,000 BMW, I contribute to massive waste of resources in
building the vehicle and having it shipped from Germany, as well as
driving it, not to mention to balance-of-trade issue again. If I buy
the Honda, it may at least be made in America, but again there is all
the energy waste and pollution that goes into its construction. The
used car, on the other hand, gets good mileage and already exists. As
for the house, no family, except perhaps one that eschews family
planning and has a baby every year and a half, needs a 4000-square-foot
house, and any family with 12 kids that might occupy such a palace
would never be able to afford one.

So all this buying doesn’t make us happier. In fact, by saddling us
with massive amounts of debt, it simply enslaves us to jobs that polls
tell us most people are simply desperate to get away from. Why,
otherwise, do polls show that so many people want to retire early in an
era when life expectancies are extending, and when people are staying
healthy much longer into old age? Why, otherwise, do polls consistently
show that over 60 percent of Americans say they would like to have a
labor union represent them at work if they could get one? The reality
is that most jobs, where we spend the majority of our waking hours five
or six days a week, simply suck, and in many ways they suck because
people are so desperate to hang on to them so they can pay their bills
that they don’t dare speak up or, god forbid, sign a union card.

Secondly, these artificial wants which so dominate our daily lives
and that are instilled in us via slick marketing campaigns, are a
disaster for the environment and for the chances of human survival. The
earth is a finite resource, while humanity, growing at a prodigious
rate, is gobbling up those resources—water, oil, trees, the oceans, and
the very atmosphere itself--much faster than even the renewable
resources can replace themselves. This situation cannot go on, and yet
we’re told that the goal is to get us back on that rapacious and
self-destructive path as quickly as possible. Economic growth, we are
always told, is an unambiguous good and is the primary goal of economic
policy, though clearly it cannot go on.

Finally, thinking of ourselves as consumers, instead of as citizens
and as people, is destructive of our social nature. Instead of learning
to build community, and to relate to one another as neighbors and
fellow citizens and human beings, as mere “consumers,” we compete to
have more or better stuff, compete to get the best deals on the things
we buy, and compete to get jobs that will help us buy those things. The
one thing we do not do in a consumer-based model of society is
cooperate.

This is not condition we need to go back to.

Nor can we.

The consumer society as we have known it since the 1950s is dead,
at least here in America. We have bought so much that now the country
is a gigantic economic basket case. Our debts as individuals and
especially as a nation (of which we all own a piece), are
incomprehensibly great. According to a new report by Bloomberg, just
the debts that the government has promised to back up in the banking
and insurance industry in the current bailout have reached $7.5
trillion, which is half the nation’s annual gross domestic product for
the past year! The national public debt now totals $59.1 trillion,
which represents over half a million dollars for every man, woman and
child in America. External debt—the amount of money owed by the US to
foreign nations—was, before the bailout, $13.7 billion, or about the
total of a year’s economic activity in the US. Let’s be honest here:
There’s no way all, or even a significant portion, of this can ever be
repaid.

So what should we do? Well, for starters we need to start to
rethink what constitutes a good society. It’s clearly not a bunch of
crazed consumers, all struggling to pay their monthly bills, because
we’ve seen where that has gotten us. Far better would be a society that
valued education, the arts, scientific and philosophical inquiry, and
natural beauty. Instead of encouraging kids to go to business school or
law school, we should be encouraging them to go into the sciences, into
medicine, into the arts. Bailout funds should not be going to Citicorp
or AIG. They should be going to the hellholes that are called schools
in our decayed inner cities. They should be going into environmental
clean up projects and tree planting projects across the land. They
should be going into solar and wind energy programs, and geothermal
heating installation subsidies for every home in America.

Meanwhile, Americans should be waking up and recognizing how
consumerism has reduced us all to little more than serfs of the
corporations that sell us the things they convince us we need. Then we
should all sign up for unions, and start demanding that the Bill of
Rights be extended to the workplace. Why on earth should a boss be able
to fire someone for expressing an opinion that is constitutionally
protected outside the building? Why should a boss be able to tell me to
either do a dangerous job or quit? Why, for that matter, should the
boss be insulated from personal liability if I am injured at work
because of decisions that were made by management about working
conditions? These may seem to be remote issues from the matter of a
consumer-based economy, but they are not. It is because we are all
consumer-serfs that we have surrendered so much to our corporate
masters.

The very idea that someone as supposedly liberal as Robert Reich
could speak in terms of getting the consumer debt treadmill back up and
running as a goal shows how impoverished our politics has become.

A scant few months ago, people were finally waking up to the fact
that human life on this planet, indeed all life on this planet, is in
grave danger because of the buildup of carbon in the atmosphere that is
being caused by human development and economic activity. Even then,
with clear evidence that the North Polar ice cap is vanishing, that the
oceans are acidifying and that species are dying off at an alarming
rate, there were those who grumbled at the cost when candidate Barack
Obama spoke of spending $15 billion over the next few years to combat
some of that warming by investing in clean energy program research and
development. Now, however, no one is talking about that sorely needed
investment, and meanwhile nobody bats an eye as the government, Obama
included, talks about blowing as much as a trillion dollars to get the
economy moving again!

There’s plenty of money to get people out to the mall, but no money
to save the earth, no money to save our children from ignorance, no
money for healthcare reform, no money for the arts.

And of course there’s war—two really. Since the US has ceased to be
a productive power in the world, and has become the world’s biggest
debtor nation, its sole claim to importance and power is now military,
and so there is not a word said, even as the country sinks into a
depression, of cutting the bloated and out-of-control $1-trillion
annual military and intelligence budget, perhaps 90 percent of which
serves no function but to frighten and oppress and kill mostly poor,
third world people around the globe. The propaganda machine tells us
that those poor saps in uniform dodging roadside bombs in Iraq and
Afghanistan, or dropping shells and bombs on villages made of mud
bricks and killing innocent women and children, are “defending our
freedom.”

Nonsense. They are destroying our freedom by helping to bankrupt this nation, while stirring up deep hatreds of America everywhere they set foot.

The good news is that this particular economic downturn in the US
may prove to be more than just another turn of the business cycle, but
rather, the beginning of the inexorable spiral of decline of the US as
a global economic power. The corporations (along with the schools,
churches and politicians) that have lured and tricked us all into this
mad consumer scramble for more and more useless crap and momentary
gratification have driven the country into a debt hole from which it
will clearly be impossible to climb out. That may not sound like good
news, but viewed from the perspective of the wider world it certainly
is—especially if it bankrupts the American military machine, and slows
the production of greenhouse gases. It could also be good news if it
leads us, the American people, to rethink what our lives are really all
about—if it leads us to start thinking of ourselves as part of a
society, again, instead of just that incredibly insulting and
derogatory term: “consumers.”

People recognized how inane and wrong it was when, immediately after the 9-11 attacks, President Bush told us it was important for Americans to pick themselves up and then go out and shop. But Robert Reich has it just as wrong. The challenge we face as a nation is not
to get people’s income growing and consumers back to buying stuff. It
is to get people to rethink what is important, to downsize our
appetites, to think as citizens of a community, and to focus our
politics and government on the important issues, like protecting the
environment and enhancing the quality of life not just for all
Americans, but for all the people who inhabit this globe.
_____________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist.
His latest book is "The Case for Impeachment" (St. Martin's Press, 2006
and now available in paperback edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Pelosi Confesses Knowing the Truth About Bush's War Based on Lies: "I don't know what could have been done..." Tell her!

Chip — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 14:38:56 -0400

Begins at 4:51.

Q: If you were to go back and change anything from your political career, what would it be?

A: Well, of course, the biggest disappointment for me is that we are still in this war in Iraq, and, ah, I had always thought at the time that, that, ah, people knew the truth they would not vote for this war and, I don't know what else, er, not have been supportive of this, I don't know what else we could have done, ah, but this has been the most damaging to us: loss of life, over 4,000, tens of thousands injured, many thousands of them permanently, cost in dollars, which is small compared to the loss of life and limb but the cost in dollars to the tune of trillions of dollars, the cost of reputation in the world, the cost in our military readiness, our capabi...eroding our...undermining our military capability to protect our interests wherever they are threatened, undermining our ability to fight the real war on terror which is in Afghanistan, uh, I don't know what else could have been done, ah, but I keep revisiting that every step of the way to think what could we have done to stop this President from taking us into a war on the basis of a false premise, without the proper preparation of our troops, without a plan for success, a strategy to leave, ah, that is where we have been for more than 2 years, we're there 2 years longer than we were in World War II.

This War Report Has Been Approved by Your Government

dlindorff — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 11:24:52 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

We Americans got a graphic illustration of the demise of any
independent American corporate news media these past few days as the
coverage on TV and in print was saturated with reports about John
Edwards’ infidelity and, equally important, Russia’s invasion of
Georgia.

In the first case, we had the completely pointless if prurient
airing of Edwards’ sordid extra-marital affair. Pointless because
Edwards at this time is a has-been politician. If there were any point
to the coverage it should have been, as Alex Cockburn pointed out in
his journal Counterpunch,
the abject failure of those same reporters and “news” organizations to
cover the story back last fall, when it might have mattered. Back then,
when the only paper covering the story was the National Enquirer,
Edwards was still a viable candidate for the presidency, or a possible
contender for vice president again. It’s not that his personal sex-life
has any news value in and of itself. The point is that had he won the
nomination, or been picked as a vice presidential running mate, its
inevitable exposure later during the general election would have
destroyed any Democratic presidential chances. And the corporate media
knew back then all about this story. They just weren’t pursuing it (and
the current blitz of stories proves that they weren’t holding back out
of principle!).

Then there’s the Georgia war. I was stunned by the graphic
depictions of Russian brutality in Gori and other cities that were
massively bombed and shelled, with apartment buildings collapsed into
rubble, children killed, and civilians targeted. The New York Times, in
particular, had photographic images of dead Georgian soldiers, of
charred bodies, of hysterical mothers. On NBC News, Russian planes were
shown dropping their loads of bombs on apartments.

We read that President Bush condemned the Russian invasion of another nation and called for an immediate ceasefire. Yet there was not one word of astonishment or challenge from reporters or commentators or editorial writers at this stunningly cynical statement coming from a leader who himself is responsible for the blatantly illegal and much more destructive invasion of another nation. And remember, while Georgia is on Russia’s border, and was at least possibly guilty of oppressing and attacking and perhaps even killing members of the Russian minority in two of its provinces (Georgia bombed the biggest town in the secessionist province of Ossetia, killing perhaps 1000 civilians, before Russia invaded), Iraq is half a world away from America and was minding its own business, not threatening Americans in any way. Russia, thus far, has at most killed a few thousand Georgians. America has, by most accounts killed hundreds of thousands and perhaps as many as 1.2 million Iraqis, very few of them combatants.

We watch and read voluminous reports on this relatively small Russian war against its neighbor and former domestic province (Georgia was one of the SSRs in the old USSR), and meanwhile there is almost nothing being reported about the continuing five-year-old war launched by Bush and Cheney against Iraq. And certainly, over the course of five years we have gotten no visual depiction of that war even approaching the scenes that were on display from the front in Georgia.

Apparently, in the view of our corporate news editors and managers, it is important for Americans to fully witness the bloody horrors of war when that war is being fought by Russia, but we are to be carefully protected from seeing such things when they are being perpetrated by our own centurions. We aren’t even allowed to see the grievous injuries and death being suffered by our own troops.

And, of course, don't feel to good about the quality of the coverage of the Russian/Georgia conflict either. This too is biased. Indeed one reason we are shown all the carnage is that the US government has been backing Georgia, and there is evidence that the US even encouraged the Georgian attacks on ethnic Russians which provoked the invasion. The US also has obligingly airlifted Georgian troops back from Iraq to Georgia.

This is not news. This is propaganda, pure and simple.

American corporate news media broadcasts and articles should include
a disclaimer: “This report was approved by the media managers of the
Bush/Cheney administration.”
_________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist.
His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006
and now available in paperback edition). His work is available at
www.thiscantbehappening.net

Keeping Count (When Ours Goes Down, Theirs Goes Up)

dlindorff — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 13:18:25 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

Celeste Zappala, the Gold Star mother of an early casualty in
America's invasion of Iraq who lost her son when he was doing guard
duty during a fraudulent "search" for alleged WMDs in Iraq, was
speaking from the heart when she told a group of antiwar demonstrators
at Philadelphia's Independence Mall Saturday that she was grateful no
American troops had been killed during the past week in Iraq.

Her concern for the troops' well-being is understandable.

But left unsaid is that the lower US casualty figures in Iraq are
coming at the expense of much higher civilian casualties. This is even
more true in Afghanistan, where the war is heating up.

The reason for this ugly calculus is that in order to keep
politically damaging US casualties as low as possible, the US military
and the Bush/Cheney administration that gives the generals their
marching orders, are resorting increasingly to the use of air
power--bombs and rockets and remote controlled, missile-equipped
Predator drone aircraft--to attack suspected militant targets.

Case in point--the 22 people the BBC reports
were killed in eastern Afghanistan's Nangarhar Province yesterday in a
US missile strike on what turns out to have been a wedding procession.
According to reports from local Afghan police and other officials
quoted in the BBC story, 19 of the victims of this horrific attack were
women and children.

This slaughter--which US military authorities, following their
standard MO, are denying, claiming that those killed were "militants"--
follows an earlier one Friday in Afghanistan, in which a missile fired
from a US helicopter killed 15 people, all civilians.

It has reached a point that in Afghanistan, the US and its NATO
allies (though primarily the US, since most NATO forces are not in
front-line combat roles, and are not conducting most of the air
strikes) are killing far more Afghan civilians than are the Taliban and
their allies in the country.

The same thing is true in Iraq, where the on-the-ground combat role
of US forces is being scaled back, while the use of air power is being
ramped up.

The very idea of conducting an "occupation" via airpower is
fundamentally criminal in nature, since there is simply no way that
people operating at command centers and computer terminals--sometimes
in the case of Predator drones, terminals that are actually situated in
the US!--can make accurate determinations about who the target is, and,
equally importantly, how many innocent civilians may be in the
immediate vicinity of a strike.

We cannot celebrate the reduction in US casualties if they are
coming at the expense of innocent civilians (and I know that this was
not Ms. Zappala's intent, either).

The same strategy of killing from the air was adopted in the later
years of the Vietnam War. It wasn't as successful at reducing US
casualties, because in Vietnam, US forces were confronting a large,
well organized military force, and had to confront them on the ground,
but it was successful at killing innocent Vietnamese, as well as people
in Cambodia and Laos, who were dying at a more prodigious rate towards
the end of that conflict than in its earlier years, thanks to
indiscriminate US bombardment.

The same thing is happening now in America's current imperialist wars.

At the Independence Mall demonstration, organized by the venerable
Brandywine Peace Community, there was a somber memorial made to
America’s dead in Iraq: a black cloth on which was painted the number
4000 in large white numerals. Several blood-red long-stemmed roses were
laid upon the cloth. But there should have been a second black cloth
also strewn with roses, on which should have been painted the number
1.2 million—the estimated number of innocent Iraqis killed in America’s
invasion and occupation of their country. (I don’t mean to criticize
either Celeste or Brandywine here, and certainly the Iraqi and Afghani
deaths were mentioned by speakers at the event.)

We in the anti-war movement need to make certain that we do not
allow the issue to be narrowly focussed on protecting American troops.
We need to continually make the point that it is criminal for America's
military forces to be slaughtering innocent Iraqis and Afghanis.
___________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest book is
“The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and now available
in paperback). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

$165 Billion for Iraq

Roger Mills — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 17:08:26 -0400

In an email letter dated June 16, 2008, Rep. Scott wrote, "I am an avid supporter of FUNDING our troops AS LONG AS THERE IS A DEFINED TIMELINE FOR WITHDRAWAL." In a letter dated July 20, 2007 to the President, Rep. Scott, joined 68 other members of Confress in writint, "Mr. President...We are writing to inform you that we will ONLY SUPPORT APPROPRIATING ADDITIONAL FUNDS for U.S. military operations in Iraq during fiscal year 2008 and beyond FOR THE PROTECTION AND SAFE RE-DEPLOYMENT OF ALL OUR TROOPS OUT OF IRAQ before you leave office." (Emphasis added).

The Henry County Chapter of the Georgia Peace & Justice Coalition HCC/GPJC today (June 19) faxed Rep. Scott's Chief of Staff, Michael Andel, and Legislative Director for Iraq isssues, Brian Greer, a letter imploring him to keep his word to the citizens of the 13th Congressional District of Georgia by VOTING NO on H.R. 2642, a supplemental appropriations bill that provides $165 billion to keep the war in Iraq going through June 2009. The letter states that Amendment 2 to H.R. 2642, which passed the House on May 15, was not in the Senate bill voted on on May 22. It is, therefore, not in the House bill being voted on today. That amendment required that troops begin re-deployment from Iraq within 30 days with a goal of completing withdrawal of combat troops by December of 2009. We said H.R. 2642 is not the right bill to carry the GI college benefits amendment and extension of unemployment benefits amendment. The Administration has already signaled that it will support these measures and so these measures can be voted on separate from H.R. 2642, the war funding appropriations bill.

The HCC/GPJC also early this morning (June 19) sent out on the GPJC mailing list statewide a detailed plea for activists to contact their House member through the switchboard with a message to vote NO on Iraq War funding (or if they are Republican, to vote "present" again as they did on May 15 because the reason for doing so--by-passing the committee process--remains the case and otherwise their protest vote won't mean anything.

Iraq165B Vote

Dem-WI — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 12:31:02 -0400

Call to Dr Kagen to vote against this bill. Urge him to support separate bills for vets and active duty troops. Troops, Yes! War, No!

Iraq $165B Vote

hterrya — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 11:35:58 -0400

I called Congressman Dogget's (TX-25) office this morning (Thursday, June19, 2008), gave my name and address, and urge the Congressman to vote against the open-ended $165B for the continued occupation and destruction of Iraq. I was assured that as a constituent, Rep. Doggett would be informed of my strong opinion on this topic.

vote no on more funds for Iraq

bsp11771 — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 08:57:01 -0400

Just called DC offices of Rep King, identified myself as a constituent to a staffer who said she would relay my message to vote NO for the Steny Hoyer deal to provide further funding for Iraq and to separately authorize funds for GI Bill, flood relief and unemployment benefits.

BSP

Impeachment Imperative and Deja Vu

Bgilmore — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 05:15:47 -0400

On 06/12/2008, the Florida Sun-Sentinel ridiculed impeachment efforts, advising that "if Congress needs more things than impeachment to keep lawmakers busy, it has myriad options."

Is their sarcasm justified? Let's look at the options. The last time the nation replaced the "bad cop" with the "good cop" (1992), we spent eight years watching a president peeled layer by layer until the bad cops managed to return to the scene of their crimes and plunder the treasury AGAIN. All of this was easily predictable politically or even just by our mothers' teaching, "if you don't hold people accountable for their crimes....."

Cleaning up others' messes and moving on without accountability has worked out wonderfully, hasn't it? We went from billions lost in false S&L profits (which we're still paying off) and over 100,000 killed in a manipulated war... to trillions plundered in "myriad" ways, nearly a million dead, and four million refugees.... with no end in sight.

Back then the buried story was illegal slant-drilling into Iraq ("drinking the milkshake"), even though that particular crime will get you shot in Texas. We went from a VP turned president who ignored all the warnings about S&L fraud (even from prominent Republicans) to "All right, you've covered your ass now" as the presidential response to the latest warning of a pending terrorist attack. Loyalty and due diligence are simply not recognized as duties by this Board of Directors.

So, what advice does the Sun-Sentinel have for us to address this growing criminality? Move on, folks, nothing to see here. In other words, it's got NOTHING. Further, it's got WORSE than nothing.

Mother, help us.

Time for Congress to Stand Up in Its Own Defense: Impeach Bush and Cheney N

dlindorff — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 10:24:50 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

The last couple of weeks have brought confirmation—as if it were needed—even in the corporate media, that President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and the gang of thugs and sycophants around them in the White House, engaged in a massive conspiracy to lie the country into a war in Iraq.

The release of a confessional book by former White House press spokesman Scott McClellan and the subsequent release of a long blocked report by the Senate Intelligence Committee make it clear that Bush, Cheney & Company deliberately lied to Congress and the American public back in 2002 and early 2003 about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein (there was none). McClellan also states that Bush and Cheney conspired to “out” CIA undercover operative Valerie Plame Wilson, as part of a compaign to prevent her husband from exposing a major part of that campaign of lies: the claim that Saddam Hussein was seeking to build nuclear weapons.

It would be hard to overstate the extent of or the damage caused by these crimes that are now exposed to the light of day.

Beginning in 2001, making the most cynical use of the tragic killing of nearly 3000 Americans in the 9-11 attacks, Bush and Cheney moved to aggrandize as much power as possible in the executive, and then, to consolidate that power grab, engineered a full-scale war against Iraq, enabling them to claim that any opponent of their dictatorial usurpation of power was a traitor to the nation.

It was all a lie.

Saddam Hussein had no links to Al Qaeda, and he had no nuclear program. He had no weapons of mass destruction. His country was broken, thanks to years of international sanctions and war.

As a result of these lies, we have a country that no longer even remotely resembles what the Founders had intended. The Congress has been shorn of its once exclusive authority to legislate, and even its Constitutional power to investigate the executive branch has been successfully defied. It is now an atrophied relic. The federal judiciary, right up to the Supreme Court, has been packed with administration sycophants and Federalist Society advocates of unfettered executive power.

We also have been saddled with an unwinnable war in the Middle East that has claimed the lives of 4500 Americans, destroyed the lives of another 30,000—or perhaps several hundred thousand, if we add in all those suffering psychological damage, or genetic damage from exposure to depleted uranium weapons. That war has also killed over 1 million innocent Iraqis, including countless chiildren, destroyed their country, bankrupted this nation, and made the US a pariah and a rogue state in the eyes of the rest of the world.

Most Americans long since came to the conclusion that the Bush administration was a gang of idiots. Just watching their handling of the Hurricane Katrina disaster unfold was enough to make that clear. But the new reports from McClellan and from the Senate Intelligence Committee should make it clear that this was not just stupidity. The disasters that have befallen this nation, or that it has brought on the rest of the world, over the past eight years have been the result of deliberate lying and deceit and of the conspiratorial policies of a cabal of leaders whose goal from day one was undoing the Constitution and establishing the presidency as a kind of dictatorship.

Most of the corporate media have been unable to bring themselves to state this clearly. They edge around the issue by talking about the White House having been “misleading” or “untruthful.” And little is said about the lasting damage that has been done to the Republic and the Constitution, or about what is to be done about a still bloody war that never should have been fought in the first place.

The answer is clear. Impeachment proceedings should be initiated against both Bush and Cheney. These two arch criminals must not be permitted to leave office with their titles intact. They need to be tossed out in disgrace, and then indicted for war crimes and for crimes like perjury, conspiracy and perhaps treason.

We are already seeing the long-term damage that has been wrought. John McCain, the presumed Republican nominee for president, is saying that the president’s use of the National Security Agency to spy, without any court order, on tens or hundreds of thousants, or perhaps millions of Americans, is legal, and would continue under a McCain administration. Barack Obama, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, has said that he would continue Bush’s use of “signing statements” to ignore Congressional legislation that he felt impaired his Constitutional powers as president.

The nation is at a dangerous crossroad. Either Congress reasserts its authority now, via impeachment, drawing a Constitutional line in the stand in defense of Article I of the Constitution—the article that defines the power of Congress as absolute in terms of passing legisation—or it forever surrenders that role, leaving us with what can only be called a dictatorship.

We clearly cannot count on the next president, whoever that may be, to surrender powers usurped by the current one. What leader in history has willingly and voluntarily surrendered authority, after all?

Such power must be wrested back by Congress, and the only way for that to happen is impeachment—a course laid out clearly by the authors of the Constitution for just such a crisis.
____________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and now available in paperback edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net