ITSSD Journal on Political Surrealism (Radical 'Change')

The Titanic Fall (Sinking) of the Obama Legend

noreply@blogger.com (ITSSD Charitable Mission) — Sun, 15 Aug 2010 15:29:00 +0000

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/nilegardiner/100050412/the-stunning-decline-of-barack-obama-10-key-reasons-why-the-obama-presidency-is-in-meltdown/

The stunning decline of Barack Obama: 10 key reasons why the Obama presidency is in meltdown

By Nile Gardiner

UK Telegraph.co.uk

August 12, 2010

The last few weeks have been a nightmare for President Obama, in a summer of discontent in the United States which has deeply unsettled the ruling liberal elites, so much so that even the Left has begun to turn against the White House. While the anti-establishment Tea Party movement has gained significant ground and is now a rising and powerful political force to be reckoned with, many of the president’s own supporters as well as independents are rapidly losing faith in Barack Obama, with open warfare breaking out between the White House and the left-wing of the Democratic Party. While conservatism in America grows stronger by the day, the forces of liberalism are growing increasingly weaker and divided.

Against this backdrop, the president’s approval ratings have been sliding dramatically all summer, with the latest Rasmussen Daily Presidential Tracking Poll of US voters dropping to minus 22 points, the lowest point so far for Barack Obama since taking office. While just 24 per cent of American voters strongly approve of the president’s job performance, almost twice that number, 46 per cent, strongly disapprove. According to Rasmussen, 65 per cent of voters believe the United States is going down the wrong track, including 70 per cent of independents.

The RealClearPolitics average of polls now has President Obama at over 50 per cent disapproval, a remarkably high figure for a president just 18 months into his first term. Strikingly, the latest USA Today/Gallup survey has the President on just 41 per cent approval, with 53 per cent disapproving.

Related link: The Obama presidency increasingly resembles a modern-day Ancien Régime

There are an array of reasons behind the stunning decline and political fall of President Obama, chief among them fears over the current state of the US economy, with widespread concern over high levels of unemployment, the unstable housing market, and above all the towering budget deficit. Americans are increasingly rejecting President Obama’s big government solutions to America’s economic woes, which many fear will lead to the United States sharing the same fate as Greece.

Growing disillusionment with the Obama administration’s handling of the economy as well as health care and immigration has gone hand in hand with mounting unhappiness with the President’s aloof and imperial style of leadership, and a growing perception that he is out of touch with ordinary Americans, especially at a time of significant economic pain. Barack Obama’s striking absence of natural leadership ability (and blatant lack of experience) has played a big part in undermining his credibility with the US public, with his lacklustre handling of the Gulf oil spill coming under particularly intense fire.

On the national security and foreign policy front, President Obama has not fared any better. His leadership on the war in Afghanistan has been confused and at times lacking in conviction, and seemingly dictated by domestic political priorities rather than military and strategic goals. His overall foreign policy has been an appalling mess, with his flawed strategy of engagement of hostile regimes spectacularly backfiring. And as for the War on Terror, his administration has not even acknowledged it is fighting one.

Can it get any worse for President Obama? Undoubtedly yes. Here are 10 key reasons why the Obama presidency is in serious trouble, and why its prospects are unlikely to improve between now and the November mid-terms.

1. The Obama presidency is out of touch with the American people

In a previous post I noted how the Obama presidency increasingly resembles a modern-day Ancien Régime, extravagant, decaying and out of touch with ordinary Americans. The First Lady’s ill-conceived trip to Spain at a time of widespread economic hardship was symbolic of a White House that barely gives a second thought to public opinion on many issues, and frequently projects a distinctly elitist image. The “let them eat cake” approach didn’t play well over two centuries ago, and it won’t succeed today.

[See APOLLOBAMA, PATRON GOD OF THE ARTS, THE GIFT OF PROPHECY ('CHANGE'), HEALING & CLEANSING IS DELIVERED TO BLUE PARTY ON TEMPLE MOUNT, ITSSD Journal on Political Surrealism (Aug. 29, 2008) at: http://itssdjournalpoliticalsurrealism.blogspot.com/2008/08/apollobama-patron-god-of-arts-gift-of.html ].

2. Most Americans don’t have confidence in the president’s leadership

This deficit of trust in Obama’s leadership is central to his decline. According to a recent Washington Post/ABC News poll, “nearly six in ten voters say they lack faith in the president to make the right decisions for the country”, and two thirds “say they are disillusioned with or angry about the way the federal government is working.” The poll showed that a staggering 58 per cent of Americans say they do not have confidence in the president’s decision-making, with just 42 per cent saying they do.

3. Obama fails to inspire

In contrast to the soaring rhetoric of his 2004 Convention speech in Boston which succeeded in impressing millions of television viewers at the time, America is no longer inspired by Barack Obama’s flat, monotonous and often dull presidential speeches and statements delivered via teleprompter. From his extraordinarily uninspiring Afghanistan speech at West Point to his flat State of the Union address, President Obama has failed to touch the heart of America. Even Jimmy Carter was more moving.

4. The United States is drowning in debt

The Congressional Budget Office Long-Term Budget Outlook offers a frightening picture of the scale of America’s national debt. Under its alternative fiscal scenario, the CBO projects that US debt could rise to 87 percent of GDP by 2020, 109 percent by 2025, and 185 percent in 2035. While much of Europe, led by Britain and Germany, are aggressively cutting their deficits, the Obama administration is actively growing America’s debt, and has no plan in place to avert a looming Greek-style financial crisis.

5. Obama’s Big Government message is falling flat

The relentless emphasis on bailouts and stimulus spending has done little to spur economic growth or create jobs, but has greatly advanced the power of the federal government in America. This is not an approach that is proving popular with the American public, and even most European governments have long ditched this tax and spend approach to saving their own economies.

6. Obama’s support for socialised health care is a huge political mistake

In an extraordinary act of political Harakiri, President Obama leant his full support to the hugely controversial, unpopular and divisive health care reform bill, with a monstrous price tag of $940 billion, whose repeal is now supported by 55 per cent of likely US voters. As I wrote at the time of its passing, the legislation is “a great leap forward by the United States towards a European-style vision of universal health care, which will only lead to soaring costs, higher taxes, and a surge in red tape for small businesses. This reckless legislation dramatically expands the power of the state over the lives of individuals, and could not be further from the vision of America’s founding fathers.”

7. Obama’s handling of the Gulf oil spill has been weak-kneed and indecisive

While much of the spilled oil in the Gulf has now been thankfully cleared up, the political damage for the White House will be long-lasting. Instead of showing real leadership on the matter by acing decisively and drawing upon offers of international support, the Obama administration settled on a more convenient strategy of relentlessly bashing an Anglo-American company while largely sitting on its hands. Significantly, a poll of Louisiana voters gave George W. Bush higher marks for his handling of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, with 62 percent disapproving of Obama’s performance on the Gulf oil spill.

8. US foreign policy is an embarrassing mess under the Obama administration

It is hard to think of a single foreign policy success for the Obama administration, but there have been plenty of missteps which have weakened American global power as well as the standing of the United States. The surrender to Moscow on Third Site missile defence, the failure to aggressively stand up to Iran’s nuclear programme, the decision to side with ousted Marxists in Honduras, the slap in the face for Great Britain over the Falklands, have all contributed to the image of a US administration completely out of its depth in international affairs. The Obama administration’s high risk strategy of appeasing America’s enemies while kicking traditional US allies has only succeeded in weakening the United States while strengthening her adversaries.

9. President Obama is muddled and confused on national security

From the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to the War on Terror, President Obama’s leadership has often been muddled and confused. On Afghanistan he rightly sent tens of thousands of additional troops to the battlefield. At the same time however he bizarrely announced a timetable for the withdrawal of US forces beginning in July 2011, handing the initiative to the Taliban. On Iraq he has announced an end to combat operations and the withdrawal of all but 50,000 troops despite a recent upsurge in terrorist violence and political instability, and without the Iraqi military and police ready to take over. In addition he has ditched the concept of a War on Terror, replacing it with an Overseas Contingency Operation, hardly the right message to send in the midst of a long-war against Al-Qaeda.

10. Obama doesn’t believe in American greatness

Barack Obama has made it clear that he doesn’t believe in American exceptionalism, and has made apologising for his country into an art form. In a speech to the United Nations last September he stated that “no one nation can or should try to dominate another nation. No world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will succeed. No balance of power among nations will hold.” It is difficult to see how a US president who holds these views and does not even accept America’s greatness in history can actually lead the world’s only superpower with force and conviction.

[See Obama's Mea Culpa Madness: Both Ineffective & Unsupported by the Majority of Americans, ITSSD Journal on Pathological Communalism (July 25, 2009) at: http://itssdpathologicalcommunalism.blogspot.com/2009/07/obamas-mea-culpa-madness-both-insincere.html ].

There is a distinctly Titanic-like feel to the Obama presidency and it’s not hard to see why. The most left-wing president in modern American history has tried to force a highly interventionist, government-driven agenda that runs counter to the principles of free enterprise, individual freedom, and limited government that have made the United States the greatest power in the world, and the freest nation on earth.

This, combined with weak leadership both at home and abroad against the backdrop of tremendous economic uncertainty in an increasingly dangerous world, has contributed to a spectacular political collapse for a president once thought to be invincible. America at its core remains a deeply conservative nation, which cherishes its traditions and founding principles. President Obama is increasingly out of step with the American people, by advancing policies that undermine the United States as a global power, while undercutting America’s deep-seated love for freedom.

Obama's Recess Appointment of Berwick to head Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Flouts, Circumvents & Undermines the US Constitution?

noreply@blogger.com (ITSSD Charitable Mission) — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 12:49:00 +0000

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703792704575367020548324914.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

Berwick: Bigger Than Kagan - If the American people want the health-care world Dr. Berwick wishes to give them, that's their choice. But they must be given that choice.

By Daniel Henninger

Wall Street Journal

Wonder Land

July 15, 2010

Barack Obama's incredible "recess appointment" [ON JULY 7, 2010 - DURING THE JULY 5-11 HOUSE and SENATE CONGRESSIONAL RECESS - See: http://www.thecapitol.net/FAQ/cong_schedule.html ] of Dr. Donald Berwick to head the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) is probably the most significant domestic-policy personnel decision in a generation. It is more important to the direction of the country than Elena Kagan's nomination to the Supreme Court.

The court's decisions are subject to the tempering influence of nine competing minds. Dr. Berwick would direct an agency that has a budget bigger than the Pentagon. Decisions by the CMS shape American medicine.

Dr. Berwick's ideas on the design and purpose of the U.S. system of medicine aren't merely about "change." They would be revolutionary.

One may agree with these views or not, but for the president to tell the American people they have to simply accept this through anything so flaccid as a recess appointment is beyond outrageous. It isn't acceptable.

The Democratic chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, Max Baucus, was taken aback at the end-around: "Senate confirmation of presidential appointees is an essential process prescribed by the Constitution that serves as a check on executive power."

Let's look, then, at what President Obama won't let the American electorate hear Dr. Berwick say in front of a committee of Congress. These excerpts are from past speeches and articles by Dr. Berwick:

"I cannot believe that the individual health care consumer can enforce through choice the proper configurations of a system as massive and complex as health care. That is for leaders to do."

"You cap your health care budget, and you make the political and economic choices you need to make to keep affordability within reach."

"Please don't put your faith in market forces. It's a popular idea: that Adam Smith's invisible hand would do a better job of designing care than leaders with plans can."

"Indeed, the Holy Grail of universal coverage in the United States may remain out of reach unless, through rational collective action overriding some individual self-interest, we can reduce per capita costs."

"It may therefore be necessary to set a legislative target for the growth of spending at 1.5 percentage points below currently projected increases and to grant the federal government the authority to reduce updates in Medicare fees if the target is exceeded."

"About 8% of GDP is plenty for 'best known' care."

"A progressive policy regime will control and rationalize financing—control supply."

***

There is no need to rehearse the analogies in literature and social thought that Dr. Berwick's ideas summon. That the Obama White House would try to push this past public scrutiny with a recess appointment says more about Barack Obama than it does Dr. Berwick.

Vilifying Dr. Berwick alone for his views is in a way beside the point. Within Mr. Obama's circle they all think like this. Defeat Dr. Berwick, and they will send up 50 more who would pursue the same goals.

If the American people want the world Dr. Berwick wishes to give them, that's their choice. But they must be given that choice with full, televised confirmation hearings.

Barack Obama, Donald Berwick and the rest may fancy themselves philosopher kings who know what we need without the need to inform or persuade us first. That's not how it works here. That is Sen. Baucus's point.

It should be clear why Berwick is bigger than Kagan. We need a large public debate over these views, over what Mr. Obama has said his health plan would and would not do. We need to find out if every Democrat in Congress and every Democrat writing newspaper columns and blogs agrees with Dr. Berwick about clinical and individual autonomy and about leaders with plans.

Then we need to build an election around whether we want to go down the road Dr. Berwick has planned for us, or start dismantling the one that President Obama paved through Congress on a partisan vote.

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http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/Obamacare-preys-on-the-young_-flouts-the-Constitution-8265433-59788627.html

Obamacare preys on the young, flouts the Constitution

Examiner Editorial

September 20, 2009

Ask the Obama administration why it is pushing legislation to conscript the young, and it will likely deny doing any such thing. But how else to describe individual mandates, the latest twist in the White House's nationalized health care scheme?

It's bad enough that the federal government is expanding its own power in telling citizens that they absolutely must pay for health insurance, like it or not. The most sinister element is that politically unpopular tax increases can be delayed or minimized by taking healthy young people and shoehorning them into a massive entitlement system. The youngest taxpayers would have to swallow their mandated insurance like bad medicine.

We've seen this movie before with Social Security, which has been in a perpetual state of crisis for years and for President George W. Bush became the third rail of politics. Why would Congress want to impose another similarly disastrous scheme on the American people? Probably because it's the only way to ensure the support of special interests in the pursuit of universal health care. Forcing everyone to purchase insurance from government-approved plans would be a boon for the industry: It's not so much guaranteed coverage as it is guaranteed profits.

Too bad for Democrats, there's a higher authority than America's Health Insurance Plans -- the U.S. Constitution. David B. Rivkin Jr. and Lee A. Casey wrote in the Wall Street Journal on Friday that constitutional limitations on congressional power prohibit Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont.'s, most recent plan.

If the legislative branch wants to remake or reform the health care industry, it must do so according to the Commerce Clause. Regulation can occur only when activities are shown to substantially affect interstate commerce. And charging people to opt out of a federal imposition is mere euphemism for regulating every American into performing what the government wants him to do. With that precedent set, "Congress could evade all constitutional limits by 'taxing' anyone who doesn't follow an order of any kind."

Not that Americans are counting on Democrats to follow the rules anyway. The financial crisis has seen to it that politicians will stop at no law, no limitation on power, to look like they're solving problems. It's only natural when they don't think the American people can solve their own.

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http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124562948992235831.html

Is Government Health Care Constitutional? The right to privacy conflicts with rationing and regulation.

By DAVID B. RIVKIN JR. and LEE A. CASEY

Wall Street Journal Op-Ed

June 22, 2009

Is a government-dominated health-care system unconstitutional? A strong case can be made for that proposition, based on the same "right to privacy" that underlies such landmark Supreme Court decisions as Roe v. Wade.

The details of this year's health-care reform bill are still being hammered out. But the end result is sure to be byzantine in complexity. Washington will have immense say over how, when and through whom Americans are treated. Moreover, despite the administration's public pronouncements about painless cuts in wasteful spending, only the most credulous believe that some form of government-directed health-care rationing can be avoided as a means of controlling costs.

The Supreme Court created the right to privacy in the 1960s and used it to strike down a series of state and federal regulations of personal (mostly sexual) conduct. This line of cases began with Griswold v. Connecticut in 1965 (involving marital birth control), and includes the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion.

The court's underlying rationale was not abortion-specific. Rather, the justices posited a constitutionally mandated zone of personal privacy that must remain free of government regulation, except in the most exceptional circumstances. As the court explained in Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), "these matters, involving the most intimate and personal choices a person may make in a lifetime, choices central to personal dignity and autonomy, are central to the liberty protected by the Fourteenth Amendment. At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and the mystery of human life."

It is, of course, difficult to imagine choices more "central to personal dignity and autonomy" than measures to be taken for the prevention and treatment of disease -- measures that may be essential to preserve or extend life itself. Indeed, when the overwhelming moral issues that surround the abortion question are stripped away, what is left is a medical procedure determined to be "necessary" by an expectant mother and her physician.

If the government cannot proscribe -- or even "unduly burden," to use another of the Supreme Court's analytical frameworks -- access to abortion, how can it proscribe access to other medical procedures, including transplants, corrective or restorative surgeries, chemotherapy treatments, or a myriad of other health services that individuals may need or desire?

This type of "burden" analysis will be especially problematic for a national health system because, in the health area, proper care often depends upon an individual's unique physical and even genetic history and characteristics. One size clearly does not fit all, but that is the very essence of governmental regulation -- to impose a regularity (if not uniformity) in the application of governmental power and the dispersal of its largess. Taking key decisions away from patient and physician, or otherwise limiting their available choices, will render any new system constitutionally vulnerable.

It is true, of course, that forms of rationing already exist in our current system. No one who has experienced the marked reluctance to treat aggressively lethal illnesses in the elderly can doubt that. However, what may be permissible for private actors -- including doctors and insurance companies -- is not necessarily lawful when done by the government.

Obviously, the government does not have to pay for any and all services individual citizens may desire. And simply refusing to approve a procedure or treatment under applicable reimbursement rules, as under the government-run Medicare and Medicaid, does not make the system unconstitutional. But if over time, as many critics fear, a "public option" health insurance plan turns into what amounts to a single-payer system, the constitutional issues regarding treatment and reimbursement decisions will be manifold.

The same will be true of a quasi-private system where the government claims a large role in defining acceptable health-insurance coverage and treatments. There will be all sorts of "undue burdens" on the rights of patients to receive the care they may want. Then the litigation will begin.

Anyone who imagines that Congress can simply avoid the constitutional issues -- and lawsuits -- by withdrawing federal court jurisdiction over the new health system must think again. A brief review of the Supreme Court's recent war-on-terror decisions, brought by or on behalf of detained enemy combatants, will disabuse that notion. This area of governmental authority was once nearly immune from judicial intervention. Over the past five years, however, the Supreme Court (supposedly the nonpolitical branch) has unapologetically transformed itself into a full-fledged, policy-making partner with the president and Congress.

In the process, the justices blew past specific congressional efforts to limit their jurisdiction and involvement like a hot rod in the desert. Questions of basic constitutionality (however the court may define them) cannot now be shielded from judicial review.

It is, of course, impossible to predict how and when the courts will ultimately rule on the new health system. Much depends on the details and the extent to which reasonable and practical private alternatives to the national plan remain. In crafting the law, however, its White House and congressional sponsors must keep privacy -- that near absolute right to personal autonomy they have so often praised and promoted -- squarely before them. The only thing that is certain today is that the courts, and not Congress, will have the last word.

Messrs. Rivkin and Casey worked in the Justice Department under Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush.

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https://senate.gov/reference/resources/pdf/RS21308.pdf

Recess Appointments: Frequently Asked Questions

By Henry B. Hogue

Analyst in American National Government Government and Finance Division

CRS Report for Congress #RS21308

March 12, 2008

Under the Constitution (Article II, Section 2, clause 2), the President and the Senate share the power to make appointments to high-level policy-making positions in federal departments, agencies, boards, and commissions. Generally, the President nominates individuals to these positions, and the Senate must confirm them before he can appoint them to office. The Constitution also provides an exception to this process. When the Senate is in recess, the President may make a temporary appointment, called a recess appointment, to any such position without Senate approval (Article II, Section 2, clause 3).

...What Is the Purpose of a Recess Appointment? The Constitution states that “[t]he President shall have Power to fill up all Vacancies that may happen during the Recess of the Senate, by granting Commissions which shall expire at the End of their next Session” (Article 2, Section 2, clause 3). The records of debate at the Constitutional Convention and the Federalist Papers provide little evidence of the framers’ intentions in the recess appointment clause. Opinions by later Attorneys General, however, suggested that the clause was meant to allow the President to maintain the continuity of administrative government through the temporary filling of offices during periods when the Senate was not in session, at which time his nominees could not be considered or confirmed.1 This interpretation was bolstered by the fact that both Houses of Congress had relatively short sessions and long recesses between sessions during the early years of the Republic. In fact, until the beginning of the 20th century, Congress was, on average, in session less than half the year. Throughout the history of the republic, Presidents have also sometimes used the recess appointment power for political reasons. For example, recess appointments enable the President to temporarily install an appointee who probably would not be confirmed by the Senate.(p. CRS-1)

...What Is a “Recess”? Generally, a recess is a break in House or Senate proceedings. Neither House may take a break of more than three days without the consent of the other.6 Such consent is usually provided through a concurrent resolution.7 A recess within a session is referred to as an intrasession recess. In recent decades, Congress has typically adjourned for 5-11 intrasession recesses of more than three days, usually in conjunction with national holidays. The break between the end of one session and the beginning of the next is referred to as an intersession recess. In recent decades, each Congress has consisted of two 9-12 month sessions separated by an intersession recess. The period between the second session of one Congress and the first session of the following Congress is also an intersession recess. (p. CRS-2)

...How Long Must the Senate Be in Recess Before a President May Make a Recess Appointment? The Constitution does not specify the length of time that the Senate must be in recess before the President may make a recess appointment. Over the last century, as shorter recesses have become more commonplace, the Department of Justice has offered differing views on this issue. Most recently, in 1993, a Justice Department brief implied that the President may make a recess appointment during a recess of more than three days.9 On at least three occasions, the Senate has used procedural tools to prevent the occurrence of a recess of more than three days for the stated purpose of preventing such appointments: the 2007 Thanksgiving holiday period,10 the period between the first and second sessions of the 110th Congress,11 and the 2008 Presidents Day holiday period.12 In each of these cases, the Senate met in pro forma sessions (during which no business was to be conducted) every three or four days over the course of what otherwise would have been a longer Senate recess. The President made no recess appointments during these periods.

Although President Theodore Roosevelt once made recess appointments during an intersession recess of less than one day, the shortest recess during which appointments have been made during the past 20 years was 9 days. Appointments made during short recesses (less than 30 days) have sometimes aroused controversy, and they may involve a political cost for the President. Controversy has been particularly acute in instances when Senators perceived that the President was using the recess appointment process to circumvent the confirmation process for a nominee who was opposed in the Senate. (p. CRS-3)

...What Constitutes a “Vacancy”? Historically, questions have arisen about the meaning of the constitutional phrase “Vacancies that may happen during the Recess of the Senate.” Does “happen” mean “exist” or “occur”?

The first meaning would allow the President to make recess appointments to any position that became vacant prior to the recess and continued to be vacant during the recess, as well as positions that became vacant during the recess.

The second meaning would allow recess appointments only to positions that became vacant during the recess. Although this question was a source of controversy in the early 19th century, Attorneys General and courts have now long supported the first, broader interpretation of the phrase.13

A second question regarding the meaning of “Vacancies” arises in connection with recess appointments to fixed-term positions, such as those often associated with regulatory boards and commissions. In order to promote continuity of operations, Congress has often included “holdover” provisions in the statutory language creating such positions. The question then arises whether or not a position is vacant, for the purposes of a recess appointment, if an individual is continuing to serve, under a holdover provision, past the end of his or her term. The courts have varied in their rulings on this matter, and it has not been settled definitively by an appellate court. Based on decisions to date, however, the answer appears to hinge on the specific language of the holdover provision. For example, if the language is mandatory (the officeholder “shall continue to serve after the expiration of his term”), rather than permissive (“may continue to serve”), the position has been seen by the courts as not vacant, and therefore not available for a recess appointment.14 When the provision includes a specific time limit for the holdover, such as one year, the position has also been seen as not vacant.15

How Long Does a Recess Appointment Last? A recess appointment expires at the end of the Senate’s next session or when an individual (either the recess appointee or someone else) is nominated, confirmed, and permanently appointed to the position, whichever occurs first. In practice, this means that a recess appointment could last for almost two years. If the President makes a recess appointment between sessions (of the same or successive Congresses), that appointment will expire at the end of the following session. If he makes the appointment during a recess in the middle of a session, that appointment also will expire at the end of the following session. (p. CRS-4)

...Are There Any Legal Constraints on the President’s Recess Appointment Power? There is no qualification on the President’s “Power to fill up all Vacancies...” in the constitutional provision. Neither is there a statutory constraint on this power.

There are, however, two provisions of law that may prevent a recess appointee from being paid.

Under 5 U.S.C. § 5503(a), if the position to which the President makes a recess appointment became vacant while the Senate was in session, the recess appointee may not be paid from the Treasury until he or she is confirmed by the Senate.

The salary prohibition does not apply if (1) the vacancy arose within 30 days of the end of the session; (2) a nomination for the office (other than the nomination of someone given a recess appointment during the preceding recess) was pending when the Senate recessed; or (3) a nomination was rejected within 30 days of the end of the session and another individual was given the recess appointment. A recess appointment falling under any one of these three exceptions must be followed by a nomination to the position not later than 40 days after the beginning of the next session of the Senate.17

For this reason, when a recess appointment is made, the President generally submits a new nomination to the position even when an old nomination is pending. In addition, although a recess appointee whose nomination to a full term is subsequently rejected by the Senate may continue to serve until the end of the recess appointment, a provision routinely included in an appropriations act may prevent him or her from being paid after the rejection. (p. CRS-4)

Loss of Kennedy MA Senate Seat is a Referendum on the Democratic Majority's Runaway Control Over Two of the Three Branches of US Government For a Year

noreply@blogger.com (ITSSD Charitable Mission) — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 03:50:00 +0000

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/19/AR2010011904196.html

Dems cast blame at each other over Senate campaign

By LAURIE KELLMAN

The Associated Press

January 19, 2010

WASHINGTON -- The buck stops ... Well, it was hard to tell just where the buck stopped Tuesday when it came to the Democratic party's loss of the Massachusetts Senate seat that had been held by Edward M. Kennedy for nearly half a century. Days before Republican state Sen. Scott Brown officially captured the seat over Democrat Martha Coakley, Washington to Boston began dodging blame and pointing fingers at each other.

Cool-headed analysis of what was driving independents from Coakley to Brown? No. The issue was who botched Democrat Martha Coakley's Senate campaign more: her state people or national Democrats.

Most spoke the classic Washington way, under the cloak of anonymity. But President Barack Obama's senior adviser took precise, public aim at Coakley's camp as Brown closed in on the late Sen. Edward Kennedy's seat.

"I think the White House did everything we were asked to do," David Axelrod told reporters. "Had we been asked earlier, we would have responded earlier."

But the signs had been there. In the bluest of blue states, the election was seen, at least in part, as a referendum on Obama, on health care reform, on the Democratic majority that had controlled two of three branches of government for a year.

And the Republican candidate was surging.

What of Obama himself?

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http://www.latimes.com/la-oe-goldberg19-2010jan19,0,412450.column

The filibuster rule is the least of Democrats' problems

By Jonah Goldberg

Opinion

LA Times

January 19, 2010

As of this writing, Bay State voters appear poised to do the unthinkable: elect a Republican to fill the Senate seat held by Ted Kennedy for nearly half a century. Even more amazing is that the Republican in question, Scott Brown, turned his campaign into a referendum on healthcare reform, the keystone of the Obama agenda and the North Star of Kennedy's career.

Even if Brown loses today, that it was even close should shake Democrats to their core. They outnumber Republicans 3 to 1 in a state Barack Obama won by 26 points. Massachusetts hasn't sent a Republican to the Senate since 1972, when Edward Brooke (the first popularly elected black senator) was reelected, and haven't sent even a nominal conservative since velociraptors roamed Beacon Hill. All this on the heels of stunning GOP gubernatorial wins in New Jersey and Virginia last fall.

It's impossible to imagine a more direct, and democratic, repudiation of Democratic governance.

Will Democrats get the message? Doubtful. It seems the only way the Democratic leadership can catch a clue is if it is hammered into their pates with a ball-peen hammer.

Over the weekend, Democratic Rep. Anthony Weiner of New York told the Wall Street Journal that if Brown wins, Democrats will race to cram the healthcare bill through while fending off Brown. "We're going to have to finish this bill and then stall the swearing-in as long as possible," Weiner said. "That's our strategy, a hurry-up-and-stall strategy."

Perhaps even more telling, Democrats are obsessively blaming their problems on the Senate's filibuster rule. Under the filibuster, it takes 60 senators to get controversial things done. As a result, many of the preferred policies of the left -- the "public option," soak-the-rich taxes, etc. -- had to be pulled out of the bill in order to win support from moderates like Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.). That's how the Senate is supposed to work. It was designed to cool the passions of the more democratic House.

Nonetheless, it seems every prominent liberal pundit has come out in favor of interring this "undemocratic" impediment to unobstructed Democratic rule. They hated the filibuster before many of them even knew who Scott Brown was, but now that this alleged bumpkin from the sticks looks like he will crash his truck into healthcare reform as the "41st senator," they are becoming positively unglued.

New York Times columnist Gail Collins offered her own, aptly titled, "special rant" against the filibuster last week, bemoaning how a handful of red states can hold up the Democrats' entitlement to enact their agenda unimpeded. She points out that it would only take the senators from the 20 least populated states, representing "10.2% of the country," plus one to hold up legislation. But so what? The GOP doesn't solely represent the smallest states -- hello, Texas? -- or represent a mere 10.2% of the nation.

Regardless, the real problem with Collins' argument, and others like it, is a deep contempt for America's political system joined with an abiding sense of entitlement. "People, think about what we went through to elect a new president -- a year and a half of campaigning, three dozen debates, $1.6 billion in donations. Then the voters sent a clear, unmistakable message. Which can be totally ignored because of a parliamentary rule that allows the representatives of slightly more than 10% of the population to call the shots.

"Why isn't 90% of the country marching on the Capitol with teapots and funny hats, waving signs about the filibuster?"

What an odd way to bemoan the lack of majority rule: mocking the majority of Americans for not agreeing with you! Indeed, it seems lost on the anti-filibuster chorus that it wouldn't be so hard to have their way if what they wanted to do was actually popular (a new Democracy Corps poll finds that only one-third of respondents support Obamacare).

Now, I don't support raw majority rule or government by polling. We all agree that unelected judges should be able to buck popular sentiment when the law or the Constitution requires it. Likewise, both the House and Senate have some anti-majoritarian rules precisely because our system was designed to defend against the tyranny of majorities just as much as the tyranny of minorities. The Senate was designed so it could dilute popular passions, a point Harry Reid, Chuck Schumer and other Democrats made ad nauseam just a few years ago when the GOP ran things.

As Massachusetts Senate candidate Martha Coakley is learning, the Democrats are unpopular now because they're rightly perceived as arrogant, ideological and fixated on an agenda not supported by the people. Blaming their problems on the filibuster will make them worse.

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[ACTUALLY, THE BROWN VICTORY AND COAKLEY LOSS HAS AN EVEN GREATER SIGNIFICANCE THAN THE ALREADY IMPORTANT CONGRESSIONAL DEBATE OVER HEALTHCARE REFORM 'CHANGE' LEGISLATION THAT THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION AND PELOSI-REID DEMOCRATIC PARTY SUPERMAJORITY SEEK TO SHOVE DOWN THE THROATS OF AN UNACCEPTING AMERICAN PUBLIC. IT SYMBOLIZES THE POLITICAL REAWAKENING OF THE AMERICAN PUBLIC, AND PERHAPS, EVEN ITS UNDERSTANDING OF THE POLITICAL NECESSITY FOR MAINTAINING CONSTITUTIONAL 'CHECKS AND BALANCES' WHICH CAN ONLY BE ENSURED WITH THE LOSS OF A FILIBUSTER-PROOF SENATE.]

[HISTORY SHOWS THAT OUR NATION'S FOUNDERS, THE FIRST AMERICANS LIVING DURING THE 18TH CENTURY, DID NOT ENVISION A FILIBUSTER-PROOF SENATE AS BEING GOOD FOR THE NASCENT REPUBLIC. SO, WHY SHOULD WE, NOW LIVING DURING EARLY 21ST CENTURY AMERICA, THINK THAT IT IS A GOOD THING FOR OUR MORE EVOLVED COUNTRY TODAY??]

[IT SHOULD BE NOTED, HOWEVER, THAT WHILE THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY IS TODAY GUILTY OF ATTEMPTING, DURING THE PAST YEAR, TO USE A FILIBUSTER-PROOF SENATE TO RAM THEIR POLITICAL AGENDA THROUGH CONGRESS NOTWITHSTANDING THE WILL OF THE PEOPLE WHOSE INTERESTS THEY WERE SWORN TO REPRESENT, AND ARE ALSO GUILTY OF NOW CONSIDERING HOW TO CHANGE THE RULES FOR FILIBUSTER TO SUIT THEIR NARROW POLITICAL INTERESTS, IT WAS PREVIOUSLY THE REPUBLICAN PARTY, DURING THE ELECTIONS OF 2004, THAT HAD ENDEAVORED TO DO THE SAME.]

[See Janet Hook, Some Democrats want to rein in the filibuster With Republicans using endless speeches to block all manner of legislation, LA Times (Jan. 10, 2010) at: http://articles.latimes.com/2010/jan/10/nation/la-na-filibuster10-2010jan10 ]

[ONE VERY IMPORTANT LESSON TO BE LEARNED IS THAT IT IS NOT GOOD FOR OUR COUNTRY TO HAVE A SINGLE POLITICAL PARTY CONTROL TWO OF THE THREE BRANCHES OF THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT. A SECOND IMPORTANT LESSON TO BE LEARNED IS THAT A SINGLE PARTY SHOULD NOT HOLD A SUPERMAJORITY IN THE LEGISLATIVE BRANCH OF THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT. A THIRD IMPORTANT LESSON TO BE LEARNED IS THAT IT IS NOT GOOD FOR A STATE TO HAVE A SINGLE POLITICAL PARTY CONTROL TWO OF THE THREE BRANCHES OF A STATE GOVERNMENT, OR IF ONE POLITICAL PARTY HOLDS A SUPERMAJORITY IN A STATE LEGISLATURE, WHICH IS CLEARLY, CURRENTLY THE CASE IN THE STATES OF MASSACHUSETTS AND NEW JERSEY!!]

[LASTLY, IT IS ARGUABLY BEST IF THERE IS DIVIDED GOVERNMENT, WHERE NO POLITICAL PARTY HOLDS A CLEAR RUNAWAY SUPERMAJORITY WITH WHICH TO IMPOSE THEIR WILL ON THE MINORITY FOR TOO LONG. PERHAPS OUR GOVERNMENTS WILL FINALLY RECOGNIZE THAT, AS FORMER PRESIDENT ABRAHAM LINCOLN ONCE ELOQUENTLY SAID, “Government of the People, by the People, and for the People.”]

[THE FOLLOWING ARTICLE CONSISTS OF A DEBATE UNDERTAKEN AT GEORGE MASON UNIVERSITY, LOCATED IN ARLINGTON, VIRGINIA DURING 2005, BY FORMER AND CURRENT MEMBERS OF THE U.S. CONGRESS]

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http://hnn.us/articles/12012.html

Excerpts: The Senate Filibuster Debate

George Mason University’s History News Network

5-19-05

...From none other than Senate Majority Leader (then Senator) Harry Reid (bemoaning the potential loss of the filibuster):

… The first filibuster in the Congress happened in 1790. It was used by lawmakers from Virginia and South Carolina who were trying to prevent Philadelphia from hosting the first Congress. Since then, the filibuster has been employed hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of times. It has been employed on legislative matters. It has been employed on procedural matters relating to the President's nominations for Cabinet and sub-Cabinet posts. And it has been used on judges for all those years. One scholar estimates that 20 percent of the judges nominated by Presidents have fallen by the wayside, most of them as a result of filibusters....

A conversation between Thomas Jefferson and George Washington I believe describes the Senate and our Founding Fathers' vision of this body in which we are so fortunate to serve. Jefferson asked Washington: "What is the purpose of the Senate?" Washington responded with a question of his own: "Why did you pour that coffee into your saucer?" Jefferson replied: "To cool it." To which Washington said: "Even so, we pour legislation into the senatorial saucer to cool it."That is exactly what the filibuster does. It encourages moderation and consensus, gives voice to the minority so cooler heads may prevail. ...

… For 200 years, we have had the right to extended debate. It is not some ``procedural gimmick.'' It is within the vision of the Founding Fathers of this country. They did it; we didn't do it. They established a government so that no one person and no single party could have total control.

...From none other than Senator Arnold Specter (bemoaning the loss of the filibuster):

A well-known story is told about Benjamin Franklin. Upon exiting the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, he was approached by a group of citizens asking what sort of a government the constitutional delegates had created. Franklin responded, ``A Republic, if you can keep it.''

In this brief response, Franklin captured the essential fragility of our great democracy. Although enshrined in a written Constitution and housed in granite buildings, our government is utterly dependent upon something far less permanent, the wisdom of its leaders. Our Founding Fathers gave us a great treasure, but like any inheritance, we pass it on to successive generations only if our generation does not squander it. If we seek to emulate the vision and restraint of Franklin and the Founding Fathers, we can hand down to our children and grandchildren the Republic they deserve, but if we turn our backs on their example, we will debase and cheapen what they have given us.

…From none other than Senator Patrick Leahy (bemoaning the loss of the filibuster):

James Madison, one of the Framers of our Constitution, warned in Federalist Number 47 of the very danger that is threatening our great Nation, a threat to our freedoms from within: "[The] accumulation of all powers legislative, executive and judiciary in the same hands . . . may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny."

…George Washington, our great first President, reiterated the danger in his famous Farewell Address to the American People: "The spirit of encroachment tends to consolidate the powers of all the departments in one, and thus to create, whatever the form of government, a real despotism."

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http://www.judgingtheenvironment.org/assets/files/Conservative_Anti-Nuclear_Quotes.doc

Conservative and Republican Concern and Opposition to the “Nuclear Option” [ELIMINATING FILIBUSTERS]

George Will in Newsweek (December 6, 2004):

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6596229/site/newsweek/

The filibuster is an important defense of minority rights, enabling democratic government to measure and respect not merely numbers but also intensity in public controversies. Filibusters enable intense minorities to slow the governmental juggernaut.

Conservatives, who do not think government is sufficiently inhibited, should cherish this blocking mechanism. And someone should puncture Republicans' current triumphalism by reminding them that someday they will again be in the minority.

The promiscuous use of filibusters, against policies as well as nominees, has trivialized the tactic. But filibusters do not forever deflect the path of democratic government. Try to name anything significant that an American majority has desired, strongly and protractedly, but has not received because of a filibuster.

Former Senators Jim McClure (R-ID) and Malcolm Wallop (R-WY) in the Wall Street Journal (March 15, 2005):

http://www.wallstreetjournal.com/

“Conservatives, in and out of the Senate, are now being assured that this extraordinary approach will not be applied to the legislative filibuster, which, in the not-so-distant past, was our only defense against the excesses of a bipartisan liberalism. There are several problems with that argument. First and foremost, as a matter of principle, we should not accept the contrary-to-fact assertion that the Senate and its rules do not continue from election to election.

Second, setting aside principle -- ouch! -- it is naive to think that what is done to the judicial filibuster will not later be done to its legislative counterpart, whether by a majority leader named Reid, or Clinton, or Kennedy.

Third, even if a senator were that naive, he or she should take a broader look at Senate procedure. The very reasons being given for allowing a 51-vote majority to shut off debate on judges apply equally well -- in fact, they apply more aptly -- to the rest of the executive calendar, of which judicial nominations are only one part. That includes all executive branch nominations, even military promotions.

“Former Senator Alan Simpson (R-WY) in an appearance on NPR’s The Connection (April 26, 2005):

http://www.theconnection.org/shows/2005/04/20050426_b_main.asp (audio)http://judgingthefuture.net/2005/05/a_little_good_a.php (transcript)

“They [Republicans] will be out of power one day, and there’ll be tears as big as golf balls streaming down their cheeks as they look and say “we put this in motion and we’re sitting here immobilized, neutered in this game.” I can promise you.”

“But there isn’t a question in my mind that when the Republicans go out of power and they, they’re looking for a protection of minority rights, they’re going to be alarmed and saddened. So when they pull the trigger, the boomerang may not come back for a few years but when it does it will get them right in the back of the neck.”

Former Senator Bill Armstrong (R-CO) quoted in Roll Call (April 25, 2005):

http://www.rollcall.com/

“Having served in the majority and in the minority, I know that it’s worthwhile to have the minority empowered. As a conservative, I think there is a value to having a constraint on the majority.”

Former Senator David Durenberger (R-MN) writing in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune (with former Vice-President Walter Mondale) (May 5, 2005):

http://www.startribune.com/stories/1519/5385977.html

“The American people should know that the proposed repeal of the filibuster rule for judicial nominees by majority vote will profoundly and permanently undermine the purpose of the U.S. Senate as it has stood since Thomas Jefferson first wrote the Senate's rules.”

Former Senator Charles “Mac” Matthias (R-MD) writing in the Washington Post (May 12, 2005):

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/11/AR2005051101764.html

“Make no mistake about it: If the Senate ever creates the precedent that, at any time, its rules are what 51 senators say they are -- without debate -- then the value of a senator's voice, vote and views, and the clout of his state, will be diminished.”

Former Congressman Mickey Edwards (R-OK) quoted in the Washington Post (May 10, 2005):

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/09/AR2005050901126.html

“It's a total disavowal of the basic framework of the system of government. It's much more efficient [for Bush], but our government was not designed to be efficient.”

“Every president grabs for more power. What's different to me is the acquiescence of Congress.”

Ed Rollins (former aide to Presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan and H.W. Bush) quoted in the Denver Post (April 10, 2005):

http://www.denverpost.com/Stories/0,1413,36%257E28203%257E2808623,00.html?search=filter

“The latest gambits - DeLay's proposed inquisition of the federal judiciary and Majority Leader Bill Frist's planned attempt to change the legislative rule on filibusters to ram conservative judicial nominees through the Senate - could further polarize and alienate Americans, says Rollins.”

“’If Republicans change the filibuster rule, there will be nothing that gets done in this town for two years,’ Rollins predicts.”

"’The country is not as concerned about judges as it is about Congress showing some fiscal responsibility and doing what it is supposed to do,’ he says.”

David Hoppe (former Chief of Staff to Sen. Lott (R-MS)) in an appearance on The Journal Editorial Report on PBS (April 1, 2005):

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/journaleditorialreport/040105/briefing.html

[T]he system is broken. The question is, how do you try and fix the system. I keep going back, as I consider this, to a line from the play A MAN FOR ALL SEASONS, "Richard, after you've cut down all the trees, where will you hide when the devil comes after you?"

That's the problem with the nuclear option, because it will not stop there. The next step when somebody needs it will be to get rid of the filibuster on legislative issues. Say a president seven, eight years in the future decides that his national health care program just has to be done, and they've got the might to make right of 51 senators. Should they get rid of the filibuster on legislative items? That's the way we're headed here if we do it this way.

Christine Todd Whitman, Former Republican Governor of New Jersey and EPA Administrator speaking to Virginia Conservation Network as quoted in the Richmond Times-Dispatch (April 29, 2005):

http://www.timesdispatch.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=RTD%2FMGArticle%2FRTD_BasicArticle&c=MGArticle&cid=1031782426426&path=!news&s=1045855934842

“Huge political mistake”“[I]f the Senate's Democratic minority is stripped of the power to filibuster against Bush picks for the federal courts, it will be ‘portrayed as Republicans trying to railroad through certain ideological justices.’”

Stephen Moore, President, Free Enterprise Fund, Founder and Past-President, Club for Growth writing in the Washington Post (with Wade Henderson, Leadership Conference on Civil Rights) (April 17, 2005):

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A57777-2005Apr15.html

“What troubles us most is that the "nuclear option" could become a routine tactic for the majority party in the Senate to push legislation through with only a 51-vote requirement for passage. The Senate was always envisioned by the Founders to be the deliberative body in Congress, in which the heated emotions of the moment's debate could cool before new laws or judges were approved. The filibuster and the 60-vote cloture rule are nearly indispensable in facilitating full debate and strong consensus for legislative action.”

“Eviscerating the filibuster would violate the spirit of the Constitution and endanger our rights as individuals against excessive governmental power.”

Michael Hammond, Gun Owners of America (and former General Counsel to Senate Steering Committee [1978-89]) in Kill the Filibuster?

http://www.gunowners.org/a031505a.htm

“The reason the Second Amendment is still viable today is, in large part, because of the Senate filibuster.”“If any Senate rule, at any time, can be eliminated, without debate, by fifty senators, the Senate rules –- all of them –- effectively become meaningless in any context in which they would matter.

The legislative filibuster will die the first time it becomes important –- perhaps in connection with Social Security reform, perhaps after the Democrats regain control of the Senate.”

Mark Mix, President of National Right-to-Work Committee (March 14, 2005): http://www.right-to-work.org/content.php3?id=350

“For Right to Work supporters, the filibuster rule has been and remains a vital safety net. We would be extremely foolhardy to stand by while anyone, regardless of how good their intentions, proceeds to tear holes in it.

Jim Boulet, Executive Director of English First, in his memo titled: How Liberals Could Thrive in a Post-Nuclear-Option Senate [Oppose the Nuclear Option (web page title)] (March 29, 2005):

http://www.englishfirst.org/nuclear_option/nuclear%20_option_memo32905.htm

“[O]nce such at precedent is established, any legislation which commands the support of 51 but not 60 Senators could provoke a similar request for a ruling that requirements for a supermajority are not ‘in order.’”

“Keep in mind that much of the Democratic "wish list" involves sweeping new legislation which will be heavily supported by the mainstream media. The Republican agenda, by contrast, tends to involve incremental changes to existing programs.”

Linda Chavez, Syndicated Columnist, former Bush nominee for Labor Secretary writing in the Washington Times (April 29, 2005):

http://www.washingtontimes.com/functions/print.php?StoryID=20050428-095317-7482r

“The more I think about it, the more I am convinced Republicans would make a mistake getting rid of the filibuster. Republicans won't be in the majority forever, and they may rue the day they deprive themselves of the ability to block a candidate to some future Supreme Court. Worse, they may end up making themselves look like the heavies instead of forcing the Democrats to take center stage as the real fanatics. Let the filibuster stay -- and force the Democrats to actually use it.”

Judge Kenneth Starr, Former DC Circuit Judge, Former Independent Counsel, Dean, Pepperdine Law School on the CBS Evening News (May 9, 2005):

http://www6.lexisnexis.com/publisher/EndUser?Action=UserDisplayFullDocument&orgId=574&topicId=100007217&docId=l:279226796&isSearch=true

“It may prove to have the kind of long-term boomerang effect, damage on the institution of the Senate that thoughtful senators may come to regret.”

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[See Did the Founders Envision a Filibuster-Proof Congress (Senate) as Being Good for the Republic?, ITSSD Journal on Political Surrealism (Radical Change) (Nov. 22, 2008) at: http://itssdjournalpoliticalsurrealism.blogspot.com/2008/11/was-filibuster-proof-senate-envisioned.html ].

Sarkozy est Le Masque!

noreply@blogger.com (ITSSD Charitable Mission) — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 17:33:00 +0000

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/7910555.stm

Sarkozy's Talent for Reinvention

By Emma Jane Kirby

BBC News

February 28, 2009

Emma Jane Kirby reflects on why the unpredictability of Nicolas Sarkozy makes it difficult to define him.

It seems to me that almost every day, someone here coins a new nickname for the French president.

Many are just variations on the same theme.

His smallish stature has prompted scores of fairly predictable titles along the "dwarf", "mini-me", "built-up heels" variety and his unpopular policies have generated myriad epithets ranging from "Sarko the American" - referring to his fondness for closer transatlantic ties - to the more generalised "iznogoud" (pronounced "is no good" with a French accent), to the pretty all-encompassing "heap of dog's muck".

But what strikes me is that no-one really seems to agree on who or what Nicolas Sarkozy is.

If this was a French musical, perhaps now would be the moment when an exuberant nun or Mother Superior might burst into the song: "How do you solve a problem like Sarkozy?"

But since there are no willing Sisters in the vicinity, I shall try myself to catch the French leader and pin him down.

But how do you define a man who is at once described as "Super Sarko" and "Sarko the smurf", as "Nico Napoleon" and "Nico the nervous"?

The short answer, I believe, is that you cannot and this is exactly what makes the leader of the Fifth Republic such an infectiously alluring character.

Numerous faces

[See: The Many Faces of France's Sarkozy - Which One Can We Trust??, ITSSD Journal on Disguised Trade Barriers, at: http://itssddisguisedtradebarriers.blogspot.com/2009/02/many-faces-of-frances-sarkozy-which-one.html ].

Last summer I went to visit the cartoonist Jul at the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo.

I remember asking him how he set about drawing the president and whether he had any characteristics that really stood out.

Jul told me that when his subject matter was Nicolas Sarkozy, he could never plan his comic strip in advance.

The president, he said, was like a chameleon that changed every five minutes and if he drew too far ahead of time, his cartoon would simply be out of date.

And apart from one satirist who routinely draws Mr Sarkozy as the devil - albeit in a thousand disguises - it seems that none of Jul's fellow artists can classify or categorise him either.

While one is portraying him as the confident King of Bling, another is sketching him as a sad puppy rejected by women.

And that is exactly how President Sarkozy likes it. Predictability is not a word he recognises.

Endless reinvention

French journalists constantly complain they are unable to cover his story sufficiently because he is always on the go.

On Monday afternoon he is in Lille talking about the car industry, on Tuesday morning he pops up in Iraq.

The ink has barely dried on the headline "Protectionism" when the typeface has to be reset to "Reconstruction".

“ Get up close and you are not even sure you are following the same man as yesterday .”

And then quite suddenly he is on three television channels simultaneously, addressing the nation about the economic crisis.

It is an exhausting, punishing schedule... at least for those of us who are charged with reporting him. But the French leader himself appears to take it all in his stride. A keen jogger, he enjoys keeping the nation on its toes.

Catch me, he seems to be saying, if you can.

But you will never catch him. Get up close and you are not even sure you are following the same man as yesterday.

Apart from the children's TV character Mr Benn, who regularly visited a dressing up shop and became a different person each day, I can think of no-one who reinvents himself so frequently.

In just over 18 months of office President Sarkozy has already been the "happily-married-family-man", the "macho-man" (jogging round Paris in a sweat-stained New York Police Department T-shirt), the "business-man" reclining on yachts and dripping in Rolex watches and "super-man", heroically rescuing French hostages in Libya.

When his ex-wife was speedily replaced by the classy former supermodel and pop star Carla Bruni, there was a new metamorphosis. Nicolas Sarkozy began to read the classic literature he had previously scoffed at, he began to talk about the importance of faith in society and his explosive temper softened.

"I've changed," he told stunned reporters brusquely. And that was that.

Playing games

The first time I met the French leader, at an Elysee news conference with Gordon Brown, we did not see eye-to-eye.

I had asked the new prime minister whether he envisaged any problems working with Nicolas Sarkozy, who did not exactly share his own views about economic liberalism.

Although my question was not addressed to him, President Sarkozy took the microphone anyway and jabbing his finger at me angrily he swiftly qualified his views on competition, clearly irritated that I had dared to imagine I knew what his opinions were.

Just before Christmas I found myself again in a press conference at the Elysee with the same two leaders and as I was sitting in the front row. Nicolas Sarkozy caught my gaze.

He gave me a small but not unfriendly smile and then slowly, deliberately, he winked.

You think you are on to me, he seemed to be saying. And while I may know who you are, you will never know me.

From Our Own Correspondent was broadcast on Saturday, 28 February, 2009 at 1130 GMT on BBC Radio 4.

Please check the programme schedules for World Service transmission times.

Story from BBC NEWS:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/7910555.stm

Published: 2009/02/28 12:03:33 GMT

Does Obama's Religious Faith & Political DNA Contain Elements of Early Radical European Socialism or Later 20th Century 'Soft' - 'New Left' Socialism?

noreply@blogger.com (ITSSD Charitable Mission) — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 14:58:00 +0000

[The following entries set forth a pattern of ideology and policy prescriptions that, in many ways, resembles the platform of the American Democratic Party and the campaign positions of new U.S. President, Barack Obama. If we are mistaken, we kindly ask the Democratic National Committee and the White House to appropriately correct us.]

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http://www.amazon.com/After-Progress-American-Socialism-Twentieth/dp/0195158598

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0195158598/ref=kinw_rke_tl_1#reader

After Progress: American Social Reform and European Socialism in the Twentieth Century (Paperback)

by Norman Birnbaum

432 pp. New York:

Oxford University Press

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Birnbaum, a Georgetown law school professor who writes for the New Left Review and the Nation (The Crisis of Industrial Society; etc.), traces the decline and fall of social reform in Europe and America. At the beginning of the 20th century, he says, folks both here and abroad were committed to reforming society, to reining in the excesses of capitalism and improving life for all. Of course, with the great reformers came strident reactionaries. Birnbaum shows, for example, that William Howard Taft railed against socialism, by which he meant anything restricting the market. Birnbaum traces the limitations of the reforming impulse in America, saying that the New Deal was basically a wash: it created Social Security, and FDR acknowledged that America is not a classless society. But the language of class never really raised its head again, Birnbaum says, and social reform ended in 1938. Birnbaum's discussion of the post-WWII welfare state is provocative: the welfare model, he says, is preferable to unchecked capitalism. But at the same time that Europe and America embraced the welfare state, they also experienced a rising standard of living, and Birnbaum wonders if decades of social reform were destined to culminate simply in a consumerist orgy. Finally, he takes the United States to task, observing that America has the grossest economic inequalities, and the weakest left, of any industrialized country. Birnbaum offers a readable, if occasionally overgeneralized and superficial, history, and an inspiring call to arms for readers who still hope to see social and economic reform.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal
In this scholarly, detailed, and methodically written study, Birnbaum author of leftist critiques of democratic, capitalist societies (The Crisis of Industrial Society) documents and analyzes the successes and failures of social reform in America and Europe in the last 50 years. He concludes that both European welfare-state parliamentary democracies and American presidential administrations led by Democrats Kennedy, Johnson, and Clinton have been undermined by an economic overemphasis on the value of consumption and the pervasiveness of an individualistic social ethic. Although Birnbaum has no magic solutions, he believes that government must act to control market forces to meet the social needs of its citizens and that government needs to focus on citizen education to create a citizenry that is "autonomous and critical," resulting in a rebirth of citizenship characterized "not by a promised land, but a terrain of dialogue and experiment." He believes that the majority of people living in democratic societies today fail to understand the delicate balance between their rights and their responsibilities as citizens of their country. For academic and large public libraries. Jack Forman, San Diego Mesa Coll. Lib., CA Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

"A sophisticated and wide-ranging study. It is erudite, melancholy, and bound to arouse interest and controversy."--Peter Gay

"A wonderful journey through the ins and outs of Western socialism and social reform by a participant-observer with educated eyes."--Immanuel Wallerstein, Yale University

"The book is to be celebrated for its astonishing synoptic powers, its erudition, and, not least, its political quotes and anecdotes."--Norman Mailer

"In this great synopsis of a century of reform movements in the U.S. and Europe, Norman Birnbaum gives an account of what has kept accumulating in the course of the cosmopolitan life of a scholar with that unique combination of talents in comparative social, political, and religious studies."--Jurgen Habermas

"Superb...presents the key events and players in left movements of the twentieth century in a way that helps us understand their importance.... An elegantly written and thoroughly researched work that goes well beyond the standard left-wing narrative of rapacious capitalists and heroic organizing drives."--Ruy Teixeira, The American ProspectProduct Description

Publisher Review (Oxford University Press)

The twentieth century witnessed a profound shift in both socialism and social reform. In the early 1900s, social reform seemed to offer a veritable religion of redemption, but by the century's end, while socialism remained a vibrant force in European society, a culture of extreme individualism and consumption all but squeezed the welfare state out of existence. Documenting this historic change, After Progress: European Socialism and American Social Reform in the 20th Century is the first truly comprehensive look at the course of social reform and Western politics after Communism, brilliantly explained by a major social thinker of our time. Norman Birnbaum traces in fascinating detail the forces that have shifted social concern over the course of a century, from the devastation of two world wars, to the post-war golden age of economic growth and democracy, to the ever-increasing dominance of the market. He makes sense of the historical trends that have created a climate in which politicians proclaim the arrival of a new historical epoch but rarely offer solutions to social problems that get beyond cost-benefit analyses. Birnbaum goes one step further and proposes a strategy for bringing the market back into balance with the social needs of the people. He advocates a reconsideration of the notion of work, urges that market forces be brought under political control, and stresses the need for education that teaches the rights and responsibilities of citizenship. Both a sweeping historical survey and a sharp-edged commentary on current political posturing, After Progress examines the state of social reform past, present and future.

About the Author

Norman Birnbaum is University Professor at Georgetown University Law School and the author of The Crisis of Industrial Society and Toward a Critical Sociology (both from OUP). A founding editor of New Left Review, he has served on the board of Partisan Review and The Nation . He lives in Washington, D.C.

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http://www.times.com/books/01/04/08/reviews/010408.08diggint.html

A Secular Faith: A scholar urges a return to the radical socialism of Europe.

New York Times Book Review of After Progress: American Social Reform and European Socialism in the Twentieth Century

By John Patrick Diggins

April 8, 2001

Equating socialism with religion was once considered a double insult. Karl Marx, after all, drew on science for his analysis of history. To see socialism as a faith would be a case of ''the opium of the intellectuals.''

But Norman Birnbaum, a professor at Georgetown University Law School, proudly affirms the relationship of socialism to religion. Defining socialism as the historic effort to ''domesticate the market and terminate unnecessary human inequalities,'' Birnbaum sees it as our savior. ''The idea of redemption suggests that socialism has something religious about it. As a secular derivative of Judeo-Christian millennialism, socialism has had a theology, an account of first and last things, and its earthly bodies resembled churches and sects.''

Does the proposition of socialism become more palpable if we are taught to think of it as some kind of church? Religion, after all, is not about this world; Christianity dwells on pain, asking us to suffer and sacrifice. Perhaps Birnbaum has in mind social responsibility for the poor and oppressed. Contemporary America does indeed need a Michael Harrington, the revered conscience of American Socialism, and one of the people to whom the book is dedicated. But religion can live comfortably with poverty and inequality, whereas socialism cannot; and while the philosopher may question why God allows evil and suffering to endure, Birnbaum has no doubt that such offenses exist because we foolish mortals have ceased questioning capitalism.

''After Progress'' is a call to return to earlier times, when radical socialism was alive and well and living in Western Europe. Stuck, as many academics are, on theory, Birnbaum would have us ponder the writings of the Frankfurt School, that group of thinkers who escaped the Nazis to arrive in America with their gloomy notions about the future of industrial societies, as though all such societies were destined to the same totalitarian fate as Germany. Birnbaum also discusses Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Marxist who has been red-hot on the American campus with his message that it is up to students and academics to deliver us to socialism, not necessarily by changing the economy but by transforming a culture of competitive individualism. But Birnbaum wryly notes that it was Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher who actually changed popular attitudes. ''They created a structure of fact, a Darwinian system, and then pointed to it as evidence that ideas of a cooperative and just social order were fantasies.''

The value of Birnbaum's book lies in its comprehensive survey of socialism together with its intelligent commentary. But his message that America should turn to Europe would be more persuasive if he could convince readers that he is writing about success instead of flat failure. The mere existence of European Socialist parties tells us little about the validity of socialism as an ideal capable of realization.

Thus, Birnbaum acknowledges that even a modest plan in Sweden to transfer some stock ownership to workers not only was resisted by capitalists but met with ''indifference'' from labor itself. Similarly, Willy Brandt's Social Democrats in Germany could at most expand the welfare state while failing to alter the economy. When François Mitterrand was elected in 1981, Parisians danced in the streets. But the best his Socialist government accomplished was raising the minimum wage and increasing social benefits, not transforming society.

The record is no better in Spain and Italy. The Socialist Party of Felipe Gonzales turned the economy over to technocrats in search of international capital. The first Socialist prime minister of Italy, Bettino Craxi, fled prosecution for corruption and died in exile. Meanwhile, the Italian Communists became ''silent partners'' with the Christian Democrats, only to see workers aligning with right-wing parties in the prosperous 1990's. Birnbaum regards the Italian left as a ''tragedy,'' with Socialists unable to radicalize democratic liberalism and Communists unable to democratize geriatric Leninism.

In Britain, the Labor Party watched helplessly as once-militant workers moved into a new society of consumption. How, Birnbaum asks, could Labor talk about the demands of idealism in the face of the comforts of materialism? Under Tony Blair, Socialism has settled for managerial efficiency while distancing itself from the labor unions.

With Europe's Socialist parties moving away from socialism, why in the world does Birnbaum think that America should run after it?

[GOOD QUESTION!]

He is understandably outraged by our scandalous maldistribution of wealth and culture of avarice. But when it comes to American history, he offers us nostalgia in place of nerve. He thinks the Depression years of the 1930's were the best of times because they gave America a ''New Deal ideology of solidarity'' based on a generation's ''collective experience.'' Birnbaum's favorite expression, used throughout the book, is ''solidarity,'' but how inspiring is it to find in the Depression a solidarity of fathers in search of work and mothers standing in bread lines?

Why has socialism been so alien to America's political culture? Birnbaum describes Louis Hartz's book ''The Liberal Tradition in America'' as enjoying a ''canonical status,'' and he feels he can refute it with the following question and answer: ''Did American liberalism, as a structure of assumptions about the nature of humans and their societies, so shape American politics that a socialist alternative had no chance to develop? That certainly could be concluded from the insistence of the authors of the Constitution on curbing direct democracy.''

Birnbaum completely misunderstands Hartz's thesis. Drawing on Tocqueville, Hartz demonstrated that the checks and controls devised by the Constitution's framers, which did indeed aim to protect property owners from the popular masses, failed to curb democracy, and in the Jacksonian era people of all classes came to identify themselves with their possessions. The socialist simply cannot face the fact that there is no conflict between democracy and capitalism, and that there is no example in all of modern history of a country with an established liberal tradition leaving its political culture behind in order to move toward socialism. Therein lies Birnbaum's heartache.

John Patrick Diggins, a professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, is the author of ''On Hallowed Ground: Abraham Lincoln and the Foundations of American History.''

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http://www.aaup.org/AAUP/pubsres/academe/2007/JF/Feat/birn.htm

An Interview with Norman Birnbaum

By Roger W. Bowen

Academe Online

January-February 2007

In this interview, Norman Birnbaum, one of the country’s foremost public intellectuals, brings to life the history of the United States and the European New Left. He takes us through U.S. and British higher education and politics from the McCarthy era through today, with personal and historical detail that reminds us that the tumult of today has precedent and, perhaps, roots in the 1950s and 1960s. Birnbaum is a founding editor of the New Left Review, was on the editorial board of the Partisan Review, and is on the editorial board of the Nation. Birnbaum was born in 1926 in New York City and educated at its public schools, Williams College, and Harvard University. He has taught at the London School of Economics, Oxford University, the University of Strasbourg, and Amherst College and is University Professor Emeritus at Georgetown University Law Center. His most recent book is After Progress: American Social Reform and European Socialism in the Twentieth Century, and he is working on a memoir titled From the Bronx to Oxford—and Not Quite Back. AAUP general secretary Roger Bowen interviewed Birnbaum in May 2006 in Washington, D.C.

Bowen: You just turned eighty this year, and you have had a very distinguished career. You advised Ted Kennedy’s presidential campaign. You consulted with the National Security Council during the Carter years.

Birnbaum: Yes, but I cannot claim that the foreign policy apparatus was very enthusiastic about it, and any advice I had to give was systematically not followed. And I was shuffled out in a remarkably rapid and smooth process.

Bowen: You’ve also advised the United Auto Workers, and you’ve served on the editorial board of the Partisan Review and the Nation for a great many years.

Birnbaum: Yes, the Nation for a very long period. I also think I may be one of the oldest living contributors to the Nation who is also compos mentis. But I’ve certainly been on the board since the 1970s—and remain today due to the generosity of editor and publisher Katrina vanden Heuvel’s excellent regime. And, of course, I began to read the Nation when my father was a New York City school teacher. When it came into the house, I began to read it and the New Republic at the age of probably twelve. And now the Nation is in some danger, namely, of being in the black. We have got this awful experience and don’t know what to do with it.

Bowen: You can thank George Bush. You were also on the editorial board of the New Left Review.

Birnbaum: Well, I was on the founding editorial board of the New Left Review when it was launched in 1959 as a fusion of the New Reasoner and Universities and Left Review, which was done by a younger and somewhat more independent group from Oxford, including the late Raphael Samuel, Stuart Hall, and Charles Taylor. I joined Universities and Left Review with a lot of other people, like Ralph Miliband and Iris Murdoch in 1957, one year after both journals were founded.

Bowen: Okay. Let me ask the most obvious question. You have been on the left your whole life, your entire career. Why?

Birnbaum: When I think of the characters and ideas of many of those on the right, the left seems to be the only place anybody with self-respect could be. But, that apart, I think probably there is some religious ethnic inheritance, although I don’t go to synagogue. My grandfather was a member of the old Yiddish grouping. He was a house painter who came from Poland after having served his imperial majesty the tsar in the military service. My father was a New York City high school teacher who had studied at City College and liked the ideas of John Dewey. And, of course, Franklin Roosevelt was an iconic figure in the family. But I think we sensed that our fate depended upon the general installation of a regime of justice. And, of course, there was the atmosphere of American progressivism and then the New Deal. I think the first big books I read were things like the Beards on American civilization and Dos Passos’s U.S.A., which made a great impression on me. And I remember when I heard Thomas Mann speak—I think at age twelve—at the last rally for the Spanish Republic in New York. Andre Malraux was also among the speakers. But I remember my father’s astonishment when I said that Thomas Mann wasn’t Jewish. Gradually, there was the discovery that progressivism is at the center of a broad stream of American history. Being on the left was a way to join America, not to distance oneself from it.

Bowen: You identified somewhere three values of the left: emancipation, social solidarity, and democracy. I haven’t seen it put quite that way before. Of those three values, do you favor one over another?

Birnbaum: No, I think that a good society would provide for each of these. But, obviously, there are times when pursuing them involves situations where the context is unfavorable. After all, we have a long tradition of social Catholicism, not only in Europe, but even in this country, which is not necessarily conducive to emancipation but is conducive to a considerable amount of distributive justice that would be inconceivable without the social Catholics. And that’s also true of the European or postwar welfare states. Emancipation may be the most difficult to achieve of all these since we’re not quite agreed on what it means. That depends on one’s theory of human nature and human potential, or how much emancipation a society can stand.

Bowen: Are there moments in American history where the value of freedom and the value of equality are in direct conflict?

Birnbaum: Suppose there were a national referendum on civil unions or something like that. The value of democracy would conceivably dictate obedience to the majority rule, which I doubt would come out strongly in favor of civil unions. In that case, democracy needs to be strengthened by certain guarantees or certain institutional immunizations from majority rule. Anybody who lived through the McCarthy period, with its long institutionalized Cold War sequel, and who now has to endure tirades about how one is not loyal to the West because one doesn’t support the great struggle against Islamo-fascism, understands this. The impoverished defense of the West by persons who know little about fascism and nothing about Islam is grotesque. They may constitute a majority even though democracy is violated. There must be something else, namely, the dimensions of emancipation and solidarity. The other day, I was in Germany to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of a man long gone, Wolfgang Abendroth, who was the great leader of the academic left in the early years of the Federal Republic. One of the ceremonies was held at the rather nice, new headquarters of the metal workers’ union. It still has 2.5 million members. Abendroth was also a lawyer, a jurist, as well as a professor of politics, an adversary of the disciples of Carl Schmitt, who dominated the courts and law faculties after the war. In effect, I think the Europeans, with their notions of social democracy, which are widely shared although under attack, have an understanding of a democracy that is not reduced to formal voting. Their notion of civic society clearly entails the social provision of decent minima of the things necessary for the good life: education and health.

Bowen: You mentioned you were somewhat insulated from McCarthyism, because during the years when it was at its worst, you were at your best, teaching in Britain.

Birnbaum: I was insulated also because I never belonged to the American Communist Party. I was briefly a member of a Communist front group, the American Student Union, from 1939, when I entered high school, until 1940, when I felt that the party line on the Soviet Union’s alliance with Germany was intolerable and left. But I simply felt uncomfortable in the early McCarthy years and didn’t like what I saw. I had no difficulty when I got to Europe. When I began to teach in England in 1953, it was widely assumed I must be a political refugee, as there were some, like my late friend Moses Finley, the great classicist. I remember that a student who later became a distinguished anthropologist asked me how I stayed out of jail in America. In fact, one of my great early memories in England was having lunch with Mo in his rooms at his college at Cambridge University. At about 12:30, there was a knock on the door, and three servants marched in with silver platters, put them down, poured the wine, and discreetly withdrew. And he said, “I sure owe the House Un-American Activities Committee a lot.”

Bowen: You were first at the London School of Economics. From that vantage point, what did you think about McCarthyism?

Birnbaum: I think that the whole European experience was “deprovincializing.” It made me see there were other approaches to the Cold War, which in Europe were closer to what was then the mainstream of politics. I got to know people in the British Labor Party. I got to meet people in France, ex-communists like Edgar Morin and others, who had a different view of the Cold War. And I got to know the people in Germany from the Confessional Church who had resisted Hitler. They felt that the country could not continue divided, and that, therefore, efforts to talk with the other side were not treason but necessary. This gave me a view of the crabbed, narrow, anxious anticommunism, which persisted when McCarthy himself had fallen into disgrace. Also, when I was in England, the Congress for Cultural Freedom and the Central Intelligence Agency dispatched Irving Kristol to London to start Encounter. And I knew him and some of his group.
Bowen: But did you know that the CIA was sponsoring Encounter magazine?

Birnbaum: It got to be an open secret. As an eminent American social scientist whom I don’t feel like naming pointed out to me, “Given the money they’re throwing around, it must be from the CIA.” And later, there was a famous episode in which Dwight MacDonald came over to edit Encounter for a bit with some proposal that he should eventually replace Kristol. But the New York gang led by Sidney Hook fought tooth and nail against it, since Dwight was unreliable—that is, an independent thinker who rowed nobody’s party line. Dwight submitted a piece to Encounter that was later published in Dissent. Encounter didn’t print it, because it was thought to be too critical, and Dwight protested about this. I took up the protest by writing an open letter to the Congress, which was printed in Universities and Left Review, saying, “Come on, tell us where you get the money.”

Bowen: So you were attacked?

Birnbaum: I was. I think the year was 1958. I moved to Oxford in 1959.

Bowen: Did the term “New Left” originate around that time?

Birnbaum: Yes. The New Left had many sources in Europe and in the states. I taught in the summer of 1962 at Harvard and toured the states. I spoke at different universities. I went to Ann Arbor and met Tom Hayden, when he was writing the Port Huron Statement, the manifesto of Students for a Democratic Society. And I was treated as if I were an emissary from a brotherly cosmos in Europe. Among the many Europeans studying in the United States at the time was an anti-Franco physicist, Javier Solana, who brought the ideas back to Spain, to the antifascist turbulence of its sixties. I later met him when he was foreign minister, and he is now the senior foreign policy official of the European Union.

["Review' - Marcuse brought a forceful clarity to the leftist table, a classical Marxism willing to confront new realities. Several of his recurring points are worth remembering today.' - The Nation -- Marcuse brought a forceful clarity to the leftist table, a classical Marxism willing to confront new realities. Several of his recurring points are worth remembering today. - The Nation

Product Description - Marcuse embodied many of the defining political impulses of the New Left in his thought and politics - hence a younger generation of political activists looked up to him for theoretical and political guidance. The new material collected in this volume provides a rich and deep grasp of the era and the role of Marcuse in the theoretical and political dramas of the day.This volume contains articles, letters, talks an interviews including: "On the New Left," a transcription of the 1968 talk at The Guardian newpaper's 20th anniversary; "Reflections on the French Revolution" which contains comments on the 1968 French student and worker uprising; "Liberation from the Affluent Society" which presents Marcuse's contribution to the 1967 "Dialectics of Liberations" conference; and "USA: Questions of Organization and the Revolutionary Subject", a conversation between Marcuse and the German writer Hans Magnus Enzenburger, published here in English for the first time. Edited by Douglas Kellner this volume will be of interest to all those previously unfamiliar with Herbert Marcuse, generally acknowledged as a major figure in the intellectual and social mileux of the 1960s and 1970s, as well as to specialists who will here have access to previously disparate papers." http://www.amazon.com/New-Left-1960s/dp/B000OT7W0S ].

Bowen: You wrote that, for a time, the New Left provided you with a spiritual home. How so?

Rethinking the New Left: An Interpretative History

Van Gosse

MacMillan

August 2005

A Choice Outstanding Academic Title of 2006!

From the 1950s to the 1970s, a host of movements struggled to make democracy and equality realities in America. A radical conception of democracy animated the movements for civil rights and black power, for peace and solidarity with the Third World, and for gender and sexual equality. From Vietnam to the war at home against African and Native Americans, Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, and Asian Americans, from Women's to Gay Liberation, the New Left was the broadest-based movement for fundamental change in American history. This book synthesizes and chronicles those protests, confrontations, victories, and defeats over two decades and more. It has a much wider chronological focus than just the decade of the 1960s, and is the most inclusive and broadest ranging analytical synthesis of the New Left yet published.

"Gosse's rethinking of the New Left provides an interesting and provocative framework within which to view the Sixties."
--Register of the Kentucky Historical Society

"Van Gosse has long been the leading voice of the post-1960s generation of historians of the 1960s. In Rethinking the New Left he has written a clear, lively, provocative, and wide-ranging history of the New Left. Rethinking the New Left will become the first stop for those looking for a concise, yet comprehensive, introduction to social movements of the 1960s and how they changed America for the better."
--Roy Rosenzweig, Director, Center for History & New Media, George Mason University

"Rethinking the New Left is a compelling and rigorous study of what truly was a 'movement of movements.' Correctly rejecting the notion that the New Left was synonymous with white college students, Van Gosse offers an in depth historical analysis of the various forces and social movements that brought about the political earthquake that was the '60s. Rethinking the New Left is as exciting to read as it is thought-provoking in recounting the courage and audacity of overlapping generations of activists who refused to sit still in the face of domestic and global injustice. Rethinking the New Left leaves the reader with issues to ponder as progressives consider new directions for transformative politics in the 21st century."
--Bill Fletcher, Jr., President, TransAfrica Forum.

"Rethinking the New Left is a refreshing account of social movements that goes beyond standard mythologies about the tumultuous 1960's. Broad in scope and accessible as well as analytic, Van Gosse's book is both a fast-paced history of New Left radicalism and a provocation to think anew about its countours and long-term impact."

--Max Elbaum, author of Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao, and Che

"I'd like to echo van Gosse's very sensible plea that we focus primarily on the social movements that made 'the 60s' rather than on the possible limitations of the largely mythic idea of 'the 60s.' What's more, I highly recommend Rethinking the New Left: it is must read material for folks like ourselves."
--Jeremy Varon, author of Bringing the War Home - http://us.macmillan.com/rethinkingthenewleft].

Birnbaum: Well, it was “home” partly in the sense that I had membership in a group; our house in London was one of the meeting points. But it was my spiritual home in the sense that those in the New Left shared the conviction that although the Soviet Union had failed, liberal capitalism was not the only alternative. This was a period in which the great French social political scientist Maurice Duverger coined the phrase “fascisme á l’exterior,” meaning external fascism was a continuation of imperialism. The New Left included German Protestants and French left Catholics, as well as important segments of the British labor movement. I think I was particularly aware of the religious traditions, not just dissident Marxism.

Bowen: So this is a secular religion?

Birnbaum: Well, the older I get, the more bewildered and cautious I get about that term, which is still worth investigating. But let’s say that we subscribed to a secular set of beliefs that rest on metahistorical assumptions about human capacity.

Bowen: And who was part of that group at the time? And who among them are still close friends?

Birnbaum: Well, there are some people who are close friends whom I rarely see. Some I see more than others. In England, the late Raphael Samuel. Eric Hobsbawm sympathized with it. He stayed in the British Communist Party, but he probably belonged more to us than he did to mainline communism. Even though he stayed, Eric didn’t like the Soviet Union. But, I would say in England, there were Raphael Samuel and certainly Stuart Hall.

Bowen: Was Hobsbawm involved with Past and Present? You were on the editorial board there.

Birnbaum: Yes, he was very much involved with Past and Present.

Bowen: And Victor Kiernan was also on that board, was he not?

Birnbaum: Yes, Victor Kiernan was on the board. Past and Present opened up to people who weren’t quite Marxists but were certainly excellent social historians, like Lawrence Stone, who later went to Princeton.

Bowen: Kiernan, I know, left the party, I think in 1957.

Birnbaum: A lot of them did. Christopher Hill, who was also on the board, did. I knew him well at Oxford. Christopher is another person in England from that era who remained a friend. And of course, I knew and greatly respected and liked Charles Taylor. Charles moved in and out of England. He later came back from Canada and was a professor at Oxford. Charles had a very decided Catholic component in his beliefs and had good contacts with continental Catholicism.

Bowen: What about Americans?

Birnbaum: Certainly, I would say Christopher Lasch, although he later criticized it. Christopher and I were very close. We once collaborated, and we joined Partisan Review at the same time. Susan Sontag, too.

Bowen: Was Norman Podhoretz part of that movement?

Birnbaum: Podhoretz helped start the American New Left. He took over Commentary in 1961. I remember visiting the states in 1961 or 1962 and being received by the Kristols on the west side of Manhattan in their apartment, where I bumped into Bernard Malamud, who was going out. I remember being told by the Kristols in one voice, “You’ve come back at the right time. The whole country is pointing left. The Podhoretzes have just had the most ferocious argument with the Trillings.” The comment suggests that they had a rather village-like view of the country. Norman Podhoretz was very much at that time a part of the New Left. He published David Reisman and Michael Maccoby’s article on the American crisis, he published the first version of Paul Goodman’s Growing Up Absurd, and he published Staughton Lynd’s arguments against the war. He published critiques of the Kennedy administration, which displeased it very much. Norman’s turn to the right was precipitated, I think, by the New York City school strike and by the conflict with the blacks—between the Jewish community and the blacks. When large segments of the American non-Jewish left sympathized with the Palestinians after the 1967 war, his New Left period ended.

Bowen: I want to go back to Oxford for a second. You taught class with Iris Murdoch.

Birnbaum: Yes.

Bowen: You were friendly with Isaiah Berlin.

Birnbaum: Well, it was Isaiah who encouraged me to come to Oxford.

Bowen: Yet you two were not very close ideologically?

Birnbaum: That was increasingly and painfully apparent.

Bowen: But you got along quite well, generally?

Birnbaum: Well, for a while. Let’s just say that the left is frequently accused of combining high-flying, broad, generous, inclusive notions of humanity with fallible human behavior. Let us say that in my relations with Isaiah, I discovered that this could also apply to liberals. Briefly, Isaiah encouraged me to come to Oxford to start sociology as an undergraduate discipline, which I did. But when the time came to back me in certain academic quarrels, he wasn’t there. Part of this was my fault. It’s a very complicated story.

Bowen: If we set aside personality differences, what in your judgment differentiates a liberal from a leftist, or a liberal from a progressive?

Birnbaum: I think it is clear that many liberals emphasize the formal properties of democracy. Some of the ideological groups around the White House have an exclusive focus on things like voting. One hopes they are not just thinking of the electronic machines used and abused in Ohio in 2004. But I think liberalism is certainly contained in the kind of social democracy I would identify myself with. But I think we must go a step further and ask what institutions could, in fact, sustain individual freedom, particularly in the face of the pressures of the market. Liberals concentrate on free space against the state, splendid when we think of practices like wiretapping, but true individualism requires free space against any number of coercive institutions. There were plenty of liberals I met in England who were in the old Tory Party. McMillan was a liberal. Some of them, by the way, the so-called one-nation Tories, are quite attentive to social issues. The Tory Party had that tradition rather like some of the Gaullists and certainly the European Christian democratic parties, German and Italian, which I knew quite well.

Bowen: Let me move you from Britain to the United States. You left Oxford, and you took a teaching position at Amherst College?

Birnbaum: No. When I first left Oxford, I consoled myself for eleven years of British Sundays by teaching for two years at Strasbourg with Henri Lefebvre. I then came back and taught for two years in New York on the graduate faculty in the New School. And so I didn’t move to Amherst until 1968.

Bowen: Which is very similar to your undergraduate college,Williams?

Birnbaum: Yes, it was for me. I was very glad to do it, because it was a good return to my roots; I had a marvelous experience at Williams. At bottom, I like very much the notion of broadly liberal undergraduate education, and I was the first sociologist at Amherst. Well, once Oxford and Cambridge decided to teach it, Swarthmore, Williams, Wesleyan, and Amherst decided it was safe to do so—even though it had been taught at Harvard and Yale for a very, very long time.

Bowen: So you were at Amherst maybe one year before getting involved in a fascinating legal case that, in some ways, resembles recent events? And that was Mandel v. Mitchell in 1969. You, Robert Heilbroner, Noam Chomsky, Richard Falk, Robert Paul Wolfe, and other major intellectual heavyweights sued the U.S. government over the issue of ideological exclusion?

Birnbaum: Yes. The U.S. government excluded Mandel, the leader of world Trotskyism, especially because the attorney general, John Mitchell, said he was responsible for the student riots in France. We sued on the very liberal grounds that we were teaching about these social movements and about Marxist ideas to our students. And whether or not we agreed with them, or the government agreed with them, the students should hear these ideas first hand. We wanted Mandel to come talk to our students.

Bowen: You make my point here. Your argument was a classic AAUP academic freedom issue.

Birnbaum: It was an academic freedom issue.

Bowen: And you lost.

Birnbaum: Yes, we lost first. But Mandel later came. I remember him coming to Amherst and giving a very good talk in which he quaintly referred to the students as “comrades,” which I hadn’t heard for a long time. But that was much later. We lost, yes.

Bowen: Well, fast forward to a year ago, with Muslim scholar Tariq Ramadan likewise being excluded, this time by the Department of Homeland Security and the State Department, which invoked article 411 of the Patriot Act, the ideological exclusion clause. And of course, the AAUP is suing, with the American Civil Liberties Union and other groups, on behalf of Ramadan. What explains this? Have we come full circle, or are we continuing on a crooked line? (On September 21, 2006, Ramadan received a letter from the U.S. government informing him that his visa had been denied. See the story in this issue of Academe.)

Birnbaum: Let’s go back to something really interesting. Years ago, the New York Times did a series on “Middletown,” which was actually Muncie, Indiana. Ball State College, which later became Ball State University, was there. The Times went and looked at it, and some parent from the vicinity told the newspaper, “There’s nothing I fear so much as the college professor,” in all seriousness. Think about the kids at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who didn’t want, in the first-year introductory program, to read about Islam. There is a certain tendency among Americans to resist ideas, different ideas, whether in the form of opposition to Marxists, opposition to alleged Islamists, or opposition to other things. Ban Mandel, ban readings about Islam. David Horowitz, for instance, believes college professors are “remote from American values,” and higher education, presumably, is safe only in his hands. So this tendency is there, and shrewd ideological marketers like Horowitz and Daniel Pipes exploit it to boost their careers and affirm their own political preferences. I am reminded that the giant John Kenneth Galbraith, who has just died, was fired from Harvard in the thirties for being a Keynesian and a New Dealer.

Bowen: Back to the issue of what makes ideas so threatening to the American public. What are they frightened of?

Birnbaum: Well, I think this is a good question. And I think it’s a question we ought to ask ourselves, because of the campaigns against the universities. The paradox is, and this was pointed out by Todd Gitlin in a review in the Chronicle of Higher Education, the only people who take the academic left’s political potential seriously are state legislatures, which are fighting this phantom. I think really one probably has to go back to two things: first, that sketched by Richard Hofstadter in the famous book Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, that is, the premium on character, the suspicion of abstraction. Second is the notion of the United States as the achieved revolution, a religiously founded one. But is the American Revolution achieved, or is it still an open-ended project? But Hofstadter went back to the sources of the notion of America as a redemptive nation in the ideas of the people who fled Cromwell’s England because they thought that even Cromwell was betraying God’s cause. And I think the notion of the nation as a church means that dissent has very little or no place in it.

Bowen: You wrote, “Democratic socialism has suffered from the failure of modern liberalism to achieve its promise.” Let me ask, specifically, if modern liberalism had achieved its promise, what would the United States look like today?

Birnbaum: Well, if modern liberalism had achieved its promise, the United States certainly would be a society in which the differential in investment of resources between the elite sector of higher education and the kinds of colleges most people go to would certainly be far less. And there would also, I think, be a much greater diversity of opinion and cultural resources available on television and in the mass media rather than the anxious servility of those awful Washington journalists when they speak about political issues. I think more value would also be placed on cosmopolitan, international, innovative experimentation and culture.

Bowen: Conservatives today do not like the term “social justice.” The term gets them quite upset. Why is that term so upsetting to conservatives?

Birnbaum: I wish I knew, since, after all, people identify a certain type of old conservative who thought that the order conservatives proposed was the only one that would work and that it had its quantity of justice. These people were the patrician New Dealers led by Franklin Roosevelt. But it seems to me the kinds of conservatism now institutionalized in the Republican Party and its fellow-traveling institutes, research centers, and the like is based on anxiety and fear. Fear of change. These conservatives have profited pretty well from the present order. If you think of the recent tensions between, let’s say, the Jewish community and the black community, certainly, there’s a note of inappropriate triumphalism in the Jewish response, “We made it, why don’t they?” Of course, if we’re talking of Jews, we came from two thousand years of written culture, and when we came to this country, we weren’t brought here as slaves from primitive societies without a written tradition. And we weren’t confined to the South as agricultural laborers. It makes a difference, even though Norman Podhoretz and others won’t admit it. It does seem that an anxious conservatism may reflect on some people’s sense of the fragility of their acquisitions. What is going to happen in America? I’m reminded of a professor of economics at Wesleyan who two or three years ago wrote a letter to the Times severely criticizing those who didn’t understand that outsourcing was an economic good, that it brought cheaper goods, and asking why people shouldn’t have cheaper goods. And I replied, “Well, you know, you can outsource lots of things. With video, why couldn’t the very expensive price of education at Wesleyan be reduced by using people from India who have very good educations, and who, because of the time difference, would also be available to their students at all hours of the day and night?” Of course, the economists favor free trade: there are no $65-a-week Mexican economists to take their jobs. A lot of the anxiety is directly related to the sense of fragility. I think this probably has been true through much of American history. There were always challenges, there were always dangers, there were always political polarizations.

Bowen: Please give me your assessment of the state of higher education today and of the primary threats that we face.

Birnbaum: I think that what we have now is a very, very serious threat because of the organized nature of what were previously scattered vigilante responses. The David Horowitz phenomenon and the campaigns and activities of the people around Lynne Cheney and the American Council of Trustees and Alumni—these represent an organized danger. At the same time, however, they are very explicit in their ends and therefore, in some sense, easy to identify and fight. That’s one thing. Second, there’s another kind of danger to academic freedom. Everybody talks about the predominance of liberals in certain fields. Well, what about the predominance of market analysts in economics? A British thinker said that as long as the world profession of economics looks to Harvard and MIT for leadership, we’ll never get a social democratic revival in economics. The same might apply to fields like international relations. When Kissinger left the State Department with such obvious reluctance in 1976, he was asked in a notable interview whether he thought there would be new thought on foreign affairs in the universities. And Kissinger laughed and said derisively, “Don’t be silly. When every assistant professor in international relations thinks he can be a deputy assistant secretary of state or defense, why should he think any differently than the bureaucrats?” And he was right. Absolutely right on that. So that you have to ask yourself why this allegedly left-wing American university has produced Kissinger, George Shultz, Condoleezza Rice, Samuel Huntington, and James Schlesinger. How come this university produces the technocrats who run American capitalism and our empire? Wasn’t it William Buckley who coined the phrase, “We’d rather be governed by the first two thousand pages of the names in the phone book than by people who came from Harvard”? Well, his objection to being governed by fellow Yale alumni (Ford and two Bushes) is less. But there is a much more subtle danger to the university, and it comes from the inner stratification of American higher education. That is to say, the stratification and the allocation of resources, the fact that 46 percent of the people teaching are part time and without benefits.

Bowen: You referenced the American Counsel of Trustees and Alumni a moment ago. It would like to have a top-down management structure that prevents faculty from participating in the governance of institutions. And ACTA does not lament the fact that two out of three appointments today in the academy go to contingent labor.

Birnbaum: No, because contingent faculty have to struggle for existence; they haven’t got much time to develop broad, socially critical views. They tend to be people with great integrity, despite being under the most obvious kinds of pressures.

Bowen: Do you think faculty need collective bargaining today, at both public and private institutions?

Birnbaum: I would think so, yes. Given the tendency of trustees, state legislatures, and so on to try to decide how and when resources should be allocated. Second, given the ideological pressures, I think collective bargaining can secure tenure and thus academic freedom. It is interesting that those who would not dream of telling their physician what medicines to prescribe do not hesitate to tell professors of history, politics, economics, and literature what they should teach. It does seem to me that there is a direct connection between the preservation of academic freedom and faculty autonomy.

Bowen: Do you think, then, that collective bargaining by faculty is the best way to achieve academic freedom and protect faculty autonomy?

Birnbaum: That is a fair conclusion. It strikes me that probably in the long run, it is.

Bowen: Why do you, as a sociologist, think so many faculty are averse to collective bargaining?

Birnbaum: Well, let me speak about my own experiences at Amherst. When I arrived, we were quite well paid and had terrific resources, but there was tension with the board of trustees, some of whom were philistines who believed that the communists had a foothold at Amherst. The “communists” were me and my eminent colleague in American studies, Leo Marx. John J. McCloy of Wall Street fame was for a while the chair of the board of trustees. McCloy publicly declared that tenure was very bad, because it made for deadwood. And I said, “Well, the American ruling class is characterized by three things: one, its murderous hypocrisy; two, its total incompetence—this was the time of the last agonies of Vietnam; and three, its total absence of style.” McCloy had insulted the very people he wished to behave as servants. He shortly thereafter protested to the late Bill Ward, who was then college president, and told him to make me apologize. Bill said that’s the one thing he was sure he couldn’t do. Shortly thereafter, McCloy left the board of trustees.

Bowen: Is that when you first joined the AAUP?

Birnbaum: Yes, because I think it was the first time I had a full-time tenured job at an American university. There was a little group of us at Amherst. One of my dear friends at Amherst was Tom Yost, who later became AAUP president. He was a great guy, and we had marvelous times together at Amherst. But I think that some of my colleagues felt socially elevated by being allowed to teach the sons of the American upper-middle class, and they felt that we were at the apex of the American academic system. It was no problem flying somebody in to talk to our students, and I remember the large parade of great European left thinkers who visited.

Bowen: Amherst had incredible resources. The faculty were paid well, the students were very bright and highly motivated, and the faculty had a voice in governance. Why, then, would faculty at Amherst even consider collective bargaining?

Birnbaum: Well, that, I think, was what certain people thought. On the other hand, there were episodes. The trustees insisted they would name the president, and there was a conflict with faculty when Bill Ward resigned. The trustees advertised that they wanted, other things being equal, a graduate of Amherst College to be the next president, which excluded women, since no woman graduate of Amherst was old enough at that point. It excluded also any number of colleagues who had served the college for twenty or twenty-five years who would have been plausible candidates. I remember writing to the Chronicle of Higher Education, saying, “A liberal arts institution is an institution of learning, not a country club. This distinction, however, appears to have escaped our trustees.” Julian Gibb, chair of chemistry at Brown, got the job. Julian’s distinction was that he had been chair of chemistry and he was an Amherst graduate of 1946. Neil Rudenstine, who was then provost of Princeton, was turned down. Neil was later made president of Harvard, but he wasn’t thought to be quite qualified at Amherst. He wasn’t an Amherst man. It was preposterous. The faculty would have certainly taken Neil, and we’d have had a very, very good president. He might have even done better at Amherst than at the gigantic factory in Cambridge.

Bowen: Let me conclude by asking one last question. You left Amherst to go to Georgetown Law. You were a tenured full professor at Amherst and a prolific author. You were highly regarded throughout the academy. Why leave and go to Georgetown?

Birnbaum: There were several reasons. I had already made contact with mainline America, but as I had mentioned, I was working with the United Auto Workers, which was great for me. With the presidential bid by Ted Kennedy, I felt that if I went to Washington, I could do things of consequence for the Democratic Party. Too, I had tired of a certain localism at Amherst, which grew after the exciting days of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Let’s put it that way. And second, I greatly treasured my contacts among the Jesuits and American Catholicism. I went to Georgetown as a visitor for a couple of years. My colleagues at the law school felt that I should do what I had always done, general social commentary. I, at this point, was beginning to detach myself from American sociology, with its disciplinary emphasis. Somebody asked me why I didn’t write in sociological journals anymore, to which the answer was, “How many times can you write papers proving that (a) America has a class system, and (b) people are alienated? I have done that.” And I was quite interested in things like the Cold War, the critique of the Cold War. I was interested in doing a different kind of intellectual work that I learned from my Amherst colleague, Leo Marx. This discovery of America and American culture is somewhat reflected in my 1988 book, The Radical Renewal. So there were all kinds of reasons at that point, including personal ones, to make a change.

Bowen: How did a critical social scientist fit in at a law school?

Birnbaum: In the most famous line of German literature, Faust bemoans the two souls dwelling in his breast. Law professors are rigorous and dispassionate parsers of statutes and decisions, meticulous in dark suits, shirts, and restrained ties. They are also, however, in jeans and sports shirts, social thinkers and metahistorians, Platonic philosopher kings. I greatly enjoyed the company of my hospitable Georgetown Law colleagues and learned a lot from their inner union of opposites.

Bowen: Has writing your memoirs been a kind of self-discovery or rediscovery?

Birnbaum: Yes, it’s been very much a voyage of self-discovery, of reconsideration. For instance, the other night, I talked at the Oxford-Cambridge dinner and actually found benign words about my period at Oxford, which used to rankle to a certain degree. So it’s a work of not only self-discovery, but also of reconsideration and acceptance of one’s self.

Bowen: But you’re not softening politically, I sense.

Birnbaum: In brief, no, I am not softening politically. How could I? After all, I am only eighty years young.

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http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/category/trotskyism

http://www.isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=512&issue=121

Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist

Building the New Anti-capitalist Party

By François Sabado

Socialist International Magazine

Issue: 121

2 January 09

Alex Callinicos’s article 1 in the most recent issue of International Socialism shows well the changes that have taken place in the radical left in recent months. The characteristics of the situation, and in particular the deepening of the crisis of the capitalist system and the social-liberal evolution of social democracy, confirm that there is a space “to the left of the reformist left”. This space opens up possibilities for the building of new political formations or for initiatives such as the conferences of the anti-capitalist left,2 processes that require clarification. Certain experiences involve a diversity of currents. Although the political frontiers between these currents do not always appear clearly, the question of support for, or participation in, centre-left or social-liberal governments is a fundamental dividing line in the politics of alliances or regroupment.

There are not only “paths that diverge”, but different politics and distinct projects. When Callinicos evokes “more positive experiences” in connection with Die Linke in Germany and the New Anti-capitalist Party (Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste, NPA) in France, he is, in fact, speaking of two different projects.

In the case of Die Linke we are dealing with a left reformist party. This is a party integrated into the institutions of the German state. The great majority of its members come from the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS)—the party of the bureaucracy of the former East Germany. Die Linke is a party that has come out in favour of a common government with the Social Democrats (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, SPD) and, finally, a party whose project comes down to a “return to the welfare state”. Admittedly this party also reflects, in the west of Germany, a movement of radicalisation of certain sectors of the social movement, a step forward for the workers’ movement. But revolutionaries should not confuse these processes with the leadership of Die Linke, its reformist policies, its subordination to capitalist institutions and its objective of participation in government with the SPD.

The NPA on the other hand presents itself as an anti-capitalist party. It is a party whose centre of gravity revolves around struggles, around social movements and not parliamentary institutions. The founding characteristic of this party is the rejection of any alliance or participation in government with the centre-left or social liberalism. The NPA does not stop at anti_liberalism. Its politics are directed towards a break with capitalism and the overthrow of the power of the ruling classes.

In each case we are confronted with political formations—there are delimitations, programmes, policies—but they are not the same ones.

Anti-capitalist party or united front of a particular kind?

Also we cannot share Callinicos’s characterisation of the new formations of the radical left as “united fronts of a particular kind”. The Socialist Workers Party’s (SWP) conceptions were formulated by John Rees as follows: “The Socialist Alliance [the precursor of Respect] is…best seen as a united front of a particular kind applied to the electoral field. It seeks to unite left reformist activists and revolutionaries in a common campaign around a minimum programme”.3 This conception, originally linked to the British experience, was generalised as “the SWP’s conception of the nature of the new formations of the radical left”. We disagree with this conception.

To use the term “united front” for the building of a party or a political formation really is a novelty.

The united front is a response to the problems that are posed by the united action or the unification of the workers or of the social movement and of their organisations. The united front and the building of a party are two distinct things. An anti-capitalist and/or revolutionary workers’ party, over and above its precise definition, is a delimited political formation, on the basis of a programme and a comprehensive strategy of conquest of power by and for the workers. An anti-capitalist party cannot be the organic expression of “the whole class”. Although it must seek to constitute “a new representation of the workers”, or the convergence of a series of political currents, it will nevertheless not make the other currents of the social movement, or even the organisations that are “reformist or of reformist origin” led by bureaucratic apparatuses, disappear. The question of the united front remains posed.

Why should we not consider anti-capitalist parties within the framework of the united front? Because, if that were the case, it would amount to regarding these parties as a simple alliance or unitary framework—even of a “particular kind”. This would mean underestimating their construction as a framework or mediation necessary for the emergence of the revolutionary leaderships of tomorrow. To consider the NPA as a united front would amount to “toning down” its political positions to make them compatible with the realisation of this united front. For example, we do not make the unity of action of the workers’ and social movements conditional on an agreement on the question of government. Is that a reason for the NPA to give up or even relativise a battle on the question of government? No, we do not think so. The NPA made the question of government—the refusal to participate in governments of class collaboration—a decisive delimitation of its political combat. This example obviously demonstrates, but we could also evoke other examples, that the NPA does not fit in a united front framework. We want to build it as a coming together of experiences, activists and currents, but especially as a party. To regard it as a “united front of a particular kind” amounts to underestimating the battles that are necessary in order to build a political alternative. This conception of “a united front of a particular kind around a minimum programme” led the leadership of the SWP to reproach the leadership of the LCR with having “a negative and sometimes ultimatist attitude towards the collectives”,4 when the LCR was putting at the centre of its political battle the refusal to take part in a government with the leadership of the Socialist Party (Parti Socialiste, PS). With hindsight, does the leadership of the SWP still think that these reproaches were well founded?

And today, when Jean Luc Mélenchon, one of the organisers of the socialist left, leaves the PS while maintaining the continuity of his reformist conceptions, his positions on participation in or support for the Mitterrand and Jospin governments, and declaring that he wants to build a “French Die Linke”, what should the attitude of revolutionaries be? Should we support him and join with his proposals and projects for alliances with the French Communist Party, which maintains the perspective of governing tomorrow—with the PS? Or should we take into account his break with the PS, have a positive approach to unity of action with his current but not confuse the building of an anti-capitalist left with the building of a left reformist party?

Once again, yes to unity of action—as we demonstrated at the time of the No campaign in the European Constitution referendum—and yes to debate, but we should also realise that differences on the relationship to representative institutions and the attitudes concerning the question of government separate the electoral alternatives and the projects of building parties. The building of a French Die Linke, in relation to the history of the revolutionary movement and to what has been accumulated by the NPA, would constitute a retreat from building an anti-capitalist alternative. When a whole sector influenced by the anti_capitalist left has distanced itself from the leaderships of the traditional left, to constitute a new left reformist force would represent a step backward for the workers’ movement. We would once again involve this sector in “reformist manoeuvres”. Concepts such as that of the “united front of a particular kind” could then disarm us in defining a clear policy towards this type of current.

This concept, which underestimates the strategic range of the differences on the questions of government and representative institutions, throws light on some of positions taken by the International Socialist Tendency5 on international questions. It can explain, in the policy of your comrades in Germany, a relativisation of the critique of the policies of the leadership of Die Linke on the question of participation in governments with the SPD.

In the same way, we can also note the indulgence of the IST towards the new leadership of Rifondazione Comunista in Italy. At the last congress of Rifondazione a “left” reaction by its members put the partisans of Bertinotti 6 in a minority. However, the policy followed by the new leadership is in continuity with the historical positions of Rifondazione, and continues to endorse the policy of alliances with the Democratic Party 7 in all the regional executives governed by the centre-left.

Lastly, didn’t this conception of “a united front of a particular kind around a minimum programme” contribute to disarming the leadership of the SWP in its relationship with George Galloway, for whom Respect had to sustain “alliances with local Muslim notables who could deliver votes”?

To consider an anti-capitalist party as a united front framework can also lead to sectarian deviations. If the united front is realised, even in a particular form, might we not be tempted to make everything go through the channel of the party, precisely underestimating the real battles for unity of action? The anti-capitalist party must combine the party activities of a party and an orientation of unitary action, because we have not forgotten, contrary to what Callinicos suggests, that reformism continues to exist, that the movement of the workers has divisions and differentiations, and that it is necessary to intervene to draw it together, to unify the workers and their organisations.

Once again, the united front, in all its varieties, is one thing. Building a political alternative is another. The latter is the choice of the NPA.

What kind of revolutionary party?

Callinicos tries to catch us out by explaining that, although the NPA is an anti-capitalist party, it is “not a revolutionary party in the specific sense in which it has been understood in the classical Marxist tradition”. Let us discuss the classical Marxist tradition, which is extremely rich in its diversity.

Within this history the degree of strategic clarification, on principles and organisational tactics, and not forgetting the various interpretations of this or that revolutionary current, there are several models. It is true that the NPA is not the replica of the revolutionary organisations of the period after May 1968. Anti-capitalist parties such as the NPA do not start from general historical or ideological definitions. Their starting point is “a common understanding of events and tasks” on questions that are key for intervening in the class struggle. Not a sum of tactical questions, but the key political questions, like the question of a programme for political intervention around an orientation of class unity and independence.

In this movement there is a place and even a necessity for other histories, other references coming from the most varied origins.

Does that make it a party without a history, a programme and delimitations? No. It has a history, a continuity—that of class struggles, the best of the socialist, communist, libertarian and revolutionary Marxist traditions. It situates itself in the revolutionary traditions of the contemporary world, basing itself, more precisely, on the long chain of French revolutions from 1793 to May 1968, via the days of 1848, the Paris Commune and the general strike of 1936.

The NPA is also a type of party that tries to answer the needs of a new historical period—which opened at the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century—and the need to refound a socialist programme faced with the combined historical crises of capitalism and of the environment of the planet.

Faced with such challenges, the NPA affirms itself as a revolutionary party rather in the sense given by Ernest Mandel:

What is a revolution? A revolution is the radical overthrow, in a short time, of economic structures and (or) political power, by the tumultuous action of broad masses. It is also the abrupt transformation of the mass of the people from a more or less passive object into a decisive actor of political life. A revolution breaks out when these masses decide to put an end to conditions of existence that seem to them unbearable. It thus always expresses a grave crisis of a given society. This crisis has its roots in a crisis of the structures of domination. But it also expresses a loss of legitimacy of governments, a loss of patience, on the part of broad popular sectors.

Revolutions are, in the end, inevitable—the real locomotives of historical progress—precisely because domination by a class cannot be eliminated by the road of reforms. Reforms can at the most soften it, not suppress it. Slavery was not abolished by reforms. The absolutist monarchy of the ancien regime was not abolished by reforms. Revolutions were necessary in order to eliminate them.8

It is true that this definition is more general than the strategic, even politico-military, hypotheses that provided the framework for the debates of the 1970s, which were at that time illuminated by the revolutionary crises of the 20th century.

Anti-capitalist parties such as the NPA are “revolutionary” in the sense that they want to put an end to capitalism—” the radical overthrow of economic and political structures (thus state structures) of power”—and the building of a socialist society implies revolutions where those below drive out those above and “take the power to change the world”.

They have a strategic programme and delimitations but these are not completed. Let us recall that Lenin, against even part of the leadership of the Bolshevik Party, changed or substantially modified his strategic framework in April 1917, in the middle of a revolutionary crisis. He went from calling for the “democratic dictatorship of the workers and peasants” to the need for a socialist revolution and the power of the workers’ councils. Certainly Lenin had consolidated over the years a party based on the objective of a radical overthrow of Tsarism, on the refusal of any alliance with the democratic bourgeoisie and on the independence of the forces of the working class allied with the peasantry. And this preparatory phase was decisive. But many questions were decided in the very course of the revolutionary process.

Many things have changed compared to the period after May 1968 and more generally compared to the whole historical period marked by the driving power of the Russian Revolution. It is more than 30 years since the advanced capitalist countries have experienced revolutionary or pre_revolutionary situations. The examples that we can use are based on the revolutions of the past. But, once again, we do not know what the revolutions of the 21st century will be like. The new generations will learn much from experience and many questions remain open.

What we can and must do is to solidly base the parties that we build on a series of strong references, drawn from the experience and the intervention of recent years, which constitute a programmatic and strategic foundation. Let us recall them: an anti-capitalist transitional programme which combines immediate demands and transitional demands— [1] a redistribution of wealth, [2] the challenging of capitalist property, [3] social appropriation of the economy, [4] class unity and independence, [5] a break with the economy and the central institutions of the capitalist state, the rejection of any policy of class collaboration, the taking into account of the ecosocialist perspective, the revolutionary transformation of society…

Recent debates have led us to make our conceptions of violence more precise. We have reaffirmed that “it was not the revolutions that were violent but the counter-revolutions”, as in Spain in 1936 or in Chile in 1973, when the use of violence aimed to protect a revolutionary process against violence from the ruling classes.

So in what respect does the new party constitute a change compared to the LCR? It must be a party that is broader than the LCR; a party that does not incorporate the entire history of Trotskyism and that has the ambition of making possible new revolutionary syntheses; a party that is not reduced to the unity of revolutionaries; a party in dialogue with millions of workers and young people; a party that translates its fundamental programmatic references into popular explanations, agitation and formulas. From this point of view, the campaigns of Olivier Besancenot 9 constitute a formidable starting point. It must also be a party that is capable of conducting wide-ranging debates on the fundamental questions which affect society: the crisis of capitalism, global warming, bioethics, etc; a party of activists and adherents, which makes it possible to integrate thousands of young people and workers with their social and political experience, preserving their links with the backgrounds they come from; a pluralist party that brings together a whole series of anti_capitalist currents.

We do not want a second LCR or an enlarged and broader version of the LCR. To make a success of the gamble we are taking, the new party must represent a new political reality, following in the tradition of the revolutionary movement and contributing to inventing the revolutions and the socialism of the 21st century.

Avoid reformist temptations: build an anti-capitalist party!

In spite of these delimitations, Callinicos remains sceptical: “The LCR’s solution to the problem seems to be to install a kind of programmatic security_lock—commitment to anti-capitalism and opposition to centre-left governments. But this is unlikely to work: the more successful the NPA, the more it is likely to come under reformist pressures and temptations.”

Why such fatalism? Why would the development of the NPA automatically lead to reformist temptations? It is necessary from this point of view to consider the difference between a “spontaneous trade unionism”,10 to take up a formula of Lenin, and reformism as a political project and organisation, and even an apparatus. This “spontaneous trade unionism”, although it can form an environment favourable to reformist ideas, can also, faced with the increasing alignment of the reformist apparatuses to capitalist politics, move towards radical anti-capitalist, even revolutionary, positions, especially when the capitalist system is entering a phase in which it is reaching its historical limits. It is logical, if we build a popular, pluralist, broad, open party, that this party will come under all sorts of pressures. If it did not, that would be abnormal. But why should these pressures be expressed in crystallised reformist positions? There is and there can be a tension between the anti-capitalist character of the new party and the fact that workers, young people, even a series of personalities, join the new party quite simply because they seek a real left party, starting in particular from the interventions of Olivier Besancenot.

These new members can indeed be combative but full of illusions. This is the case with every mass party, even one that is in a minority. That is when it will be necessary to discuss and educate. That implies even more the need for a strong content to the political responses of the NPA and the careful maintenance of the radical character and the independence of the party.

In the same way, if these parties want to play a part in the reorganisation of the social movements, they must be pluralist. Many sensibilities must find their place in their ranks, including “consistent reformist” activists and currents, but that does not automatically mean that the problem is posed in terms of struggles between the revolutionary current and crystallised reformist currents that would have to be fought. The key question is that all the currents and activists of the NPA, over and above their positions on “reform and revolution”, put the class struggle at the centre and subordinate their positions in representative institutions to struggles and social movements.

Of course, we cannot exclude the hypothesis of a confrontation between reformists and revolutionaries. But it is not very probable, with the present political delimitations of the NPA, that bureaucratic reformist currents will join or crystallise. In a first historical phase of building the party the role of revolutionaries is to do everything they can so that the process of constituting the party really does give birth to a new political reality. That implies that revolutionaries avoid projecting the debates of the former revolutionary organisation into the new party. As soon as the NPA has taken off there will, of course, be discussions, differentiations, currents. Perhaps certain debates will correspond to cleavages between revolutionary perspectives and more or less consistent reformism. But even in these cases, the debate will not take the form of a political battle opposing a bureaucratic reformist bloc to the revolutionaries. Things will be more mixed, depending on the experience of the new party itself.

A revolutionary current in the NPA?

Here too there is no model. In many anti-capitalist parties there are one or more revolutionary currents, when these parties are in fact fronts or federations of currents. This is the case of the militants of the Fourth International in Brazil in the “Enlace” current.11 Without organising themselves as political currents related to the national political life of these parties, certain sections of the Fourth International can be organised through ideological associations or sensibilities. This is, for example, the case of the Revolutionary Socialist Political Association (Associação Política Socialista Revolucionária) within the Left Bloc in Portugal and of the Socialist Workers’ Party (Socialistisk Arbejderparti) within the Red-Green Alliance in Denmark. We can also find this type of current in other broader organisations or parties. This schema does not work for the NPA.

There are fundamental reasons for this. First, and fundamentally, there is the anti_capitalist and revolutionary character of the NPA, in the broad sense, and the general identity of views between the positions of the LCR and those of the NPA. There are and there will be political differences between the LCR and the NPA, with a greater heterogeneity and diversity of positions within the NPA, but the political bases under discussion for the founding congress of the new party already show political convergences between the ex-LCR and the future NPA.

Also, even though the NPA already constitutes another reality than the LCR, even though it is the possible crucible of an anti-capitalist pluralism, it is not justified today to build a separate revolutionary current in the NPA.

There is also a specific relation between the ex-LCR and the NPA. The ex-LCR represents the only national organisation taking part in the constitution of the NPA. There are other currents, such as a fraction of Lutte Ouvrière, Gauche Révolutionnaire, communist activists and libertarians, but unfortunately there are not, at this stage, organisations of a weight equivalent to that of the LCR. If that had been the case, the problem would be posed in different terms. In the present relation of forces, the separate organisation of the ex-LCR in the NPA would block the process of building the new party. It would install a system of Russian dolls which would only create mistrust and dysfunction.

Finally, the NPA does not come from nowhere. It is the result of a whole experience of members of the ex-LCR and also of thousands of others who have forged an opinion in a battle to defend their independence with respect to social liberalism and reformism.

There is thus a militant synergy within the NPA, where revolutionary positions intersect with other political positions coming from other origins, other histories and other experiences. Only new political tests will lead to new alignments within the NPA, not former political attachments.

It is an unprecedented gamble in the history of the revolutionary workers’ movement, but the game is worth the candle.

We will advance as we walk…

Notes
1: Callinicos, 2008. This comment by François Sabado of the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire (LCR) is an edited version of the translation by Murray Smith.
2: For instance, the conference “May 1968-May 2008” held in Paris earlier this year.
3: Rees, 2001, p32.
4: The “collectives” were the bodies that drove the successful No campaign in the French referendum on the European Constitution in 2005.
5: The international grouping of the which the SWP is a member.
6: Fausto Bertinotti led Rifondazione into a disastrous coalition with the centre-left in Italy.
7: The Democratic Party is a grouping of centre-left currents formed in 2007.
8: Ernest Mandel, “Why are we Revolutionaries Today?”, La Gauche, 10 January 1989.
9: The LCR’s candidate in recent presidential elections and its most well known figure.
10: Lenin used the phrase to evoke the spontaneous trade union reaction or the feeling of workers who wished to defend conditions in the workplace.
11: A current within the Brazilian Socialism and Freedom Party (Partido Socialismo e Liberdade).
References
Callinicos, Alex, 2008, “Where is the Radical Left Going?”, International Socialism 120 (autumn 2008), www.isj.org.uk/?id=484
Rees, John, 2001, “Anti-capitalism, Reformism and Socialism”, International Socialism 90 (spring 2001), http://pubs.socialistreviewindex.org.uk/isj90/rees.htm

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http://www.blacklistednews.com/view.asp?ID=5714

Universal Health Care: A 100 Year Plan

By Ethan Allen

Blacklisted News

Feb. 26, 2008

“…There's been a driven agenda by the Fabian socialists to create national health care systems throughout the world, including the United States…The march towards complete integration of the United States into global socialism has been an age old battle going back to the early 1900s, and doesn't look to stop any time soon. The modern socialist agenda masks itself in the humanist platform, of helping those that cannot help themselves. When the curtain is pulled back to show who's been behind social health care reforms, the secret reveals a power elite of bankers, socialists, and industrialists who only crave power and total control. History shows this to be true, and if we don't learn from history, we're doomed to repeat it…”

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Types_of_socialism

Types of Socialism
The word "socialism" has been used by many political movements throughout history to describe themselves or their goals, generating numerous types of socialism. Different self-described socialists have used the term socialism to refer to different things, such as an economic system, a type of society, a philosophical outlook, a collection of moral values and ideals, or even a certain kind of human character. Some definitions of socialism are so vague that they may include anything and everyone on Earth,[1] while others are so specific that they only include a small minority of the things that have been described as "socialism" in the past.

There have been numerous political movements who called themselves socialist under some definition of the term; this article attempts to list them all. Some of these interpretations are mutually exclusive, and all of them have generated debates over the "true" meaning of socialism.

Democratic socialism and social democracy

Main articles: Democratic socialism and social democracy

Modern democratic socialism is a broad political movement that seeks to propagate the ideals of socialism within the context of a democratic system. Many democratic socialists support social democracy as a road to reform of the current system. Other groups within democratic socialism support more revolutionary change in society to establish socialist goals. Conversely, modern social democracy emphasises a program of gradual legislative reform of the capitalist system in order to make it more equitable and humane, while the theoretical end goal of building a socialist society is either completely forgotten or redefined in a pro-capitalist way. The two movements are widely similar both in terminology and in ideology, though there are a few key differences.

Many who describe themselves as "socialists" disagree with the terminology of "democratic socialism" because they believe that socialism necessarily implies democracy. For many years, though, the terms "democratic socialism" and "social democracy" were used interchangeably to describe the same overall political movement, but in modern times, social democracy is considered to be more centrist and broadly supportive of current capitalist systems (for example, the mixed economy) and the welfare state, while many democratic socialists support a more fully socialist system, either through evolutionary or revolutionary means.

The term social democracy can refer to the particular kind of society that social democrats advocate. The Socialist International (SI) - the worldwide organization of social democratic and democratic socialist parties - defines social democracy as an ideal form of representative democracy, that may solve the problems found in a liberal democracy. The SI emphasizes the following principles[1]: Firstly, freedom – not only individual liberties, but also freedom from discrimination and freedom from dependence on either the owners of the means of production or the holders of abusive political power. Secondly, equality and social justice – not only before the law but also economic and socio-cultural equality as well, and equal opportunities for all including those with physical, mental, or social disabilities. Finally, solidarity – unity and a sense of compassion for the victims of injustice and inequality.

Democratic socialists and social democrats both advocate the concept of the welfare state, but whereas most social democrats view the welfare state as the end itself, many democratic socialists view it as a means to an end. Democratic socialists are also committed to the ideas of the redistribution of wealth and power, as well as social ownership of major industries, concepts widely abandoned by social democrats. As of current, there are no countries in the world that could qualify as a "democratic socialist" state, though many European nations are considered to be socially democratic or nearly so.

The prime example of social democracy is Sweden, which prospered considerably in the 1990s and 2000s. Sweden has produced a robust economy from sole proprietorships up through to multinationals, while maintaining one of the highest life expectancies in the world, low unemployment, inflation, all while registering sizable economic growth. Many see this as validation of the superiority of social democracy. However, many others point out that in comparison with other developed countries Sweden did fall behind in that period [2]. Also, Sweden experiences welfare dependency of around 20% of the working age population according to the Swedish Trade Union Confederation. Likewise, crime has been steadily rising since the 1960s, and during the past decade has grown ever more violent.

[edit] Religious socialism
[edit] Christian socialism

Main article: Christian socialism

There are individuals and groups, past and present, that are clearly both Christian and Socialist, such as Frederick Denison Maurice, author of The Kingdom of Christ (1838), or the contemporary Christian Socialist Movement (UK) (CSM), [3] affiliated with the British Labour Party.

Distributism, is a third-way economic philosophy formulated by such Catholic thinkers as G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc to apply the principles of social justice articulated by the Roman Catholic Church, especially in Pope Leo XIII's encyclical Rerum Novarum.

Various Catholic clerical parties have at times referred to themselves as "Christian Social." Two examples are the Christian Social Party of Karl Lueger in Austria before and after World War I, and the contemporary Christian Social Union in Bavaria. Yet these parties have never espoused socialist policies and have always stood at the conservative side of Christian Democracy [10].

Hugo Chavez of Venezuela is an advocate of a form of Christian socialism as he claims that Jesus Christ was a socialist.

Further information: Christian left and social gospel

Irish Republican socialism
Socialism has traditionally been part of the Irish Republican movement since the early 20th century, when James Connolly, an Irish Marxist theorist, took part in the Easter Rising of 1916. Today, most Irish nationalist and Republican organizations located in Northern Ireland advocate some form of socialism, both Marxist and non-Marxist. The Social Democratic and Labour Party, which until recently was the largest nationalist party in Northern Ireland, promotes social democracy, while militant Republican parties such as Sinn Féin, Republican Sinn Féin, and the 32 County Sovereignty Movement all promote their own varieties of democratic socialism intended to re-distribute wealth on an all-island basis once a united Ireland has been achieved (by force). The Irish Republican Socialist Movement, encompassing the Irish Republican Socialist Party and Irish National Liberation Army, has an ideology which combines Marxist-Leninism with traditional militant Republicanism and is said to be the most direct fulfillment of Connolly's legacy.

[edit] Eco-socialism
Main article: Eco-socialism

Merging aspects of Marxism, socialism, environmentalism and ecology, Eco-socialists generally believe that the capitalist system is the cause of social exclusion, inequality and environmental degradation. Eco-socialists criticise many within the Green movement for not going far enough in their critique of the current world system and for not being overtly anti-capitalist. At the same time, Eco-socialists would blame the traditional Left for overlooking or not properly addressing ecological problems[12].

Eco-socialists are anti-globalisation. Joel Kovel sees globalisation as a force driven by capitalism - in turn, the rapid economic growth encouraged by globalisation causes acute ecological crises[13].

Eco-socialism goes beyond a criticism of the actions of large corporations and targets the inherent properties of capitalism. Such an analysis follows Marx's theories about the contradiction between use values and exchange values. As Joel Kovel explains, within a market economy, goods are not produced to meet needs but are produced to be exchanged for money that we then use to acquire other goods. As we have to keep selling in order to keep buying, we must persuade others to buy our goods just to ensure our survival, which leads to the production of goods with no previous use that can be sold to sustain our ability to buy other goods. Eco-socialists like Kovel stress that this contradiction has reached a destructive extent, where certain essential activities - such as caring for relatives full-time and basic subsistence - are unrewarded, while unnecessary economic activities earn certain individuals huge fortunes[13].

Agrarian socialism is another variant of eco-socialism.

[edit] Differences between various schools

Although they share a common root (as elaborated upon in the above sections), schools of socialism are divided on many issues, and sometimes there is a split within a school. The following is a brief overview of the major issues which have generated or are generating significant controversy amongst socialists in general.

[edit] Theory

Some branches of socialism arose largely as a philosophical construct (e.g. utopian socialism); others in the heat of a revolution (e.g. early Marxism, Leninism). A few arose merely as the product of a ruling party (e.g. Stalinism), or a party or other group contending for political power in a democratic society (e.g. social democracy).

Some are in favour of a socialist revolution (e.g. Leninism, Trotskyism, Maoism, revolutionary Marxism), whilst others tend to support reform instead (e.g. Fabianism, reformist Marxism). Others believe both are possible (e.g. Syndicalism, various Marxisms). The first utopian socialists even failed to address the question of how a socialist society would be achieved.

Socialists are also divided on which rights and liberties are desirable, such as the "bourgeois liberties" (such as those guaranteed by the U.S. First Amendment or the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union). Some hold that they are to be preserved (or even enhanced) in a socialist society (e.g. social democracy), whilst others believe them to be undesirable (e.g. Maoism). Marx and Engels even held different opinions at different times, and some schools are divided on this issue (e.g. different strains of Trotskyism).

All socialists criticize the current system in some way. Some criticisms center on the ownership of the means of production (e.g. Marxism), whereas others tend to focus on the nature of mass and equitable distribution (e.g. most forms of utopian socialism). A few are opposed to industrialism as well as capitalism (common where socialism intersects green politics)? Utopian Socialists, like Robert Owen and Saint-Simon argued, though not from exactly the same perspective, that the injustice and widespread poverty of the societies they lived in were a problem of distribution of the goods created. Marxian Socialists, on the other hand, determined that the root of the injustice is based not in the function of distribution of goods already created, but rather in the fact that the ownership of the means of production is in the hands of the upper class. Also, Marxian Socialists maintain, in contrast to the Utopian Socialists, that the root of injustice is not in how goods (commodities) are distributed, but for whose economic benefit are they produced and sold.

[edit] Implementation

Most forms and derivatives of Marxism, as well as variations of syndicalism, advocated total or near-total socialization of the economy. Less radical schools (e.g. Bernsteinism, reformism, reformist Marxism) proposed a mixed market economy instead. Mixed economies, in turn, can range anywhere from those developed by the social democratic governments that have periodically governed Northern and Western European countries, to the inclusion of small cooperatives in the planned economy of Yugoslavia under Josip Broz Tito. A related issue is whether it is better to reform capitalism to create a fairer society (e.g. most social democrats) or to totally overthrow the capitalist system (all Marxists).

Some schools advocate centralized state control of the socialized sectors of the economy (e.g. Leninism), whilst others argue for control of those sectors by workers' councils (e.g. syndicalism, Left and Council communism, Marxism, Anarcho-communism). This question is usually referred to by socialists in terms of "ownership of the means of production." None of the social democratic parties of Europe advocate total state ownership of the means of production in their contemporary demands and popular press.

Another issue socialists are divided on is what legal and political apparatus the workers would maintain and further develop the socialization of the means of production. Some advocate that the power of the workers' councils should itself constitute the basis of a socialist state (coupled with direct democracy and the widespread use of referendums), but others hold that socialism entails the existence of a legislative body administered by people who would be elected in a representative democracy.

Different ideologies support different governments. For example, in the era of the Soviet Union, western socialists were bitterly divided as to whether the Soviet Union was basically socialist, moving toward socialism, or inherently un-socialist and, in fact, inimical to true socialism. Similarly, today the government of the People's Republic of China claims to be socialist and refers to its own approach as "Socialism with Chinese characteristics," but most other socialists consider China to be essentially capitalist. The Chinese leadership concurs with most of the usual critiques against a command economy, and many of their actions to manage what they call a socialist economy have been determined by this opinion.

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabian_Society

Fabian Society - Socialism

The Fabian Society is a British intellectual socialist movement, whose purpose is to advance the principles of Social democracy via gradualist and reformist, rather than revolutionary means. It is best known for its initial ground-breaking work beginning late in the 19th century and continuing up to World War I. The society laid many of the foundations of the Labour Party and subsequently affected the policies of states emerging from the decolonisation of the British Empire, especially India. Today, the society is a vanguard "think tank" of the Centre-left New Labour movement. It is one of 15 socialist societies affiliated to the Labour Party. Similar societies exist in Australia (the Australian Fabian Society), Canada (the Douglas-Coldwell Foundation and in past the League for Social Reconstruction) and New Zealand.

The group, which favoured gradual incremental change rather than revolutionary change, was named – at the suggestion of Frank Podmore – in honour of the Roman general Quintus Fabius Maximus (nicknamed "Cunctator", meaning "the Delayer"). His Fabian strategy advocated tactics of harassment and attrition rather than head-on battles against the Carthaginian army under the renowned general Hannibal Barca.

The society was founded on 4 January 1884 in London as an offshoot of a society founded in 1883 called The Fellowship of the New Life.[1] Fellowship members included poets Edward Carpenter and John Davidson, sexologist Havelock Ellis, and future Fabian secretary, Edward R. Pease. They wanted to transform society by setting an example of clean simplified living for others to follow. But when some members also wanted to become politically involved to aid society's transformation, it was decided that a separate society, The Fabian Society, also be set up. All members were free to attend both societies. The Fabian Society additionally advocated renewal of Western European Renaissance ideas, and their imposition on the rest of the world.

The Fellowship of the New Life was dissolved in 1898[2], but the Fabian Society grew to become the preeminent academic society in the United Kingdom in the Edwardian era, typified by the members of its vanguard Coefficients club.

Immediately upon its inception, the Fabian Society began attracting many prominent contemporary figures drawn to its socialist cause, including George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, Annie Besant, Graham Wallas, Hubert Bland, Edith Nesbit, Sydney Olivier, Oliver Lodge, Leonard Woolf and Virginia Woolf, Ramsay MacDonald and Emmeline Pankhurst. Even Bertrand Russell briefly became a member, but resigned after he expressed his belief that the Society's principle of entente (in this case, countries allying themselves against Germany) could lead to war.

At the core of the Fabian Society were Sidney and Beatrice Webb. Together, they wrote numerous studies of industrial Britain, including alternative co-operative economics that applied to ownership of capital as well as land

…Through the course of the 20th century the group has always been influential in Labour Party circles, with members including Ramsay MacDonald, Clement Attlee, Anthony Crosland, Richard Crossman, Tony Benn, Harold Wilson, and more recently Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. The late Ben Pimlott served as its Chairman in the 1990s. (A Pimlott Prize for Political Writing was organized in his memory by the Fabian Society and The Guardian in 2005, and continues annually). The Society is affiliated to the Party as a socialist society. In recent years the Young Fabian group, founded in 1960, has become an important networking and discussion organisation for younger (under 31) Labour Party activists and played a role in the 1994 election of Tony Blair as Labour Leader. Following a period of inactivity, the Scottish Young Fabians were reformed in 2005.

The ideology of the Fabians can be encompassed in the famous quote, " Fabianism feeds on Capitalism, but excretes Communism ".

^ Pease, Edward (1916). A History of the Fabian Society. New York: E.P. DUTTON & COMPANY. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/13715/13715.txt.
^ Pease, 1916

Political Surrealism Meets Political Reality: Opportunism

noreply@blogger.com (ITSSD Charitable Mission) — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 21:17:00 +0000

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2009/01/the_case_for_cooperation.html

An Opportunity for Cooperation?

By Jack Kelly

RealClearPolitics.com

January 17, 2008

"He is so well informed, and he loves to deal with both sides of an issue," said Larry Kudlow, conservative economist and CNBC talk show host. "I was honored to meet him. He is a very impressive man."

He is President-elect Barack Obama, with whom Mr. Kudlow and other conservative opinion leaders, including columnist Charles Krauthammer, Wall Street Journal editorial page editor Paul Gigot, Weekly Standard Editor Bill Kristol and National Review Editor Rich Lowry, dined Tuesday night at the home of columnist George Will.

The dinner caused consternation among partisans left and right. Some liberals wondered if it didn't presage a further trimming of the promises Mr. Obama made during the campaign. Some conservatives groused the pundits were trading in their principles for greater standing in the D.C. social circuit.

But as a matter of both policy and politics, the dinner was exactly the right thing for both Mr. Obama and his frequent critics to do.

Mr. Obama spoke often in the campaign of his intent to listen to all sides in the American conversation. This is apparently one campaign promise he intends to keep.

The likelihood the dinner conversation changed anyone's mind about big issues is exceedingly small. But what almost certainly will happen is that the pundits will be quicker to praise Mr. Obama when they think he is right, more gentle in their criticism when they think he is wrong. That's certainly worth the investment of an evening's time.

And it's worth the investment of an evening to try to change the tone in Washington. I blame the poisonous atmosphere in the capital more on his critics than on President Bush, but Mr. Obama's efforts to change that atmosphere are welcome. America has real enemies. But Democrats and Republicans are not among them. Extreme partisans on both sides could profit from the example of civility and outreach set by the president-elect and the conservative pundits.

Yes, it's all symbolism. But symbolism is important. I think the greatest failure of the Bush administration was his failure to communicate effectively what he was doing, and why. He spent little time talking to his friends, much less to his critics. It would be an exaggeration to say Barack Obama already has spent more effort in outreach to conservative opinion leaders than Dubya did in his eight years in office, but it wouldn't be much of an exaggeration.

And Mr. Obama displays an exquisite subtlety in his symbolism. The day after the dinner at the Will home, he met with liberal pundits, which is wholly appropriate. But the meeting with the liberals didn't last as long, and no refreshments were served. Both evangelical Pastor Rick Warren and gay Episcopal Bishop Gene Robinson will pray at the Inaugural, but Pastor Warren has the more prominent role.

Beneath the symbolism there is the slim possibility of substantive cooperation from time to time. The Obama administration appears likely to occupy ground between the Democratic leadership in Congress and Republicans. So on some issues -- like, for instance, on the size and nature of tax cuts in the stimulus package -- it might be the president and the GOP against House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

The dinner at the Will home may have been part of Mr. Obama's effort to obtain GOP support for his stimulus plan, from which he has much more to gain than Republicans do. If it works, Mr. Obama will get all the credit. If it doesn't, GOP participation will make it harder for Republicans to criticize him at election time.

The most juvenile assumption partisans make is that the people who disagree with them are stupid. Republicans will be in big trouble if they fail to recognize that Mr. Obama is a formidable political talent. Republicans should accept the hand he extends to them, because it is far, far more important that the economy recover than that Democrats be blamed for its failure to do so. But Republicans should count carefully their fingers afterward.

Move Aside Aquaman! Here Comes America's Caped Climate Crusader & the Environmental Justice League!

noreply@blogger.com (ITSSD Charitable Mission) — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 16:13:00 +0000

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28141383/

Barack Obama, Climate Crusader: Major Policy Shift Coming, But Quick Enough for Treaty by December 2009?

msnbc.com staff and news service reports

Dec. 12, 2008

Al Gore has a competitor for title of America's climate crusader. His name is Barack Obama, and of all his immediate foreign policy changes none will mark as big a shift from the Bush administration as his approach to cutting carbon emissions, the leading cause of global warming.

"President Obama will be like night and day compared to President Bush," Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., told reporters this week at U.N.-sponsored climate talks in Poznan, Poland.

Obama's administration will mark a new era in U.S. climate policy, one eagerly awaited by countries and environmental groups that believe global warming is the most urgent problem facing the world today.

[NO. BASED ON OBAMA'S VICE PRESIDENT-ELECT JOE BIDEN, UNOFFICIAL CLIMATE CZAR, AL GORE & HIS OFFICIAL CABINET CHOICES - A VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENTAL 'JUSTICE LEAGUE' - HILLARY CLINTON AS SECRETARY OF STATE, BILL RICHARDSON AS SECRETARY OF COMMERCE, STEVEN CHU, AS SECRETARY OF ENERGY, HARVARD UNIVERSITY PHYSICIST JOHN HOLDREN AS PRESIDENTIAL SCIENCE ADVISER and OREGON STATE UNIVERSITY MARINE BIOLOGIST JANE LUBCHENCO AS HEAD OF THE COMMERCE DEPARTMENT'S NATIONAL OCEANIC AND ATMOSPHERIC ADMINISTRATION - IT WILL MARK A CONTINUATION OF THE PRIOR CLINTON-GORE ADMINISTRATIONS' CLIMATE CHANGE POLICIES! SEE: BELOW]

The Bush administration has steadfastly refused to sign on to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which requires the 37 industrial nations that have agreed to the pact to reduce emissions to just below 1990 levels by 2012.

Obama wants to cut U.S. emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases back to 1990 levels by 2020. [THIS WOULD SIGNIFICANTLY RAISE THE COST OF LIVING FOR ALL AMERICANS DURING A PROFOUND ECONOMIC CRISIS]. Bush rejected the Kyoto Protocol. U.S. emissions now run 17 percent above 1990 levels, and his policies would allow them to keep rising until 2025.

Obama's approach would set a cap on emissions but also allow companies to share emission allowances if one company runs over its limit and another is below its ceiling. Bush opposed such mandates and instead promoted finding technological solutions.

Obama also is betting that pumping public money into "green jobs" tied to climate and energy policies can help pull the country out of recession.

The Senate and House are controlled by Democrats, so a green stimulus and a cap-and-trade program are on a fast track.

Obama has nominated an alternative fuels guru, Nobel-award winning physicist Steven Chu, to be the nation's energy secretary, and is creating a White House office on energy and environment to be run by Clinton-era EPA chief Carol Browner.

Buzz in the air... (cont'd below following commentary)

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[WE SURMISE THAT THE 'BUZZ IN THE AIR' IS LIKELY CAUSED BY THE WHIRLING SOUND OF BLACK HELICOPTER BLADES FROM THE ADVANCE-TEAM 'COMING TO TAKE THEM AWAY HA-HAAA!]

["'They're Coming To Take Me Away, Ha-Haaa!' is a hit 1966 novelty song by Napoleon XIV (aka Jerry Samuels)...The song was a worldwide hit. Kim Fowley recorded a cover version produced by Mark Wirtz in 1966 which charted in Denmark and New Zealand. Shortly after, German act Malepartus II released "Ich glaab, die hole mich ab" (I think they're coming to get me) in Hessian dialect on Telefunken's record label. Mexico's Los Ovnis recorded the song "Napoleon XIV" in Spanish the same year. Tiny Tim has allegedly recorded a cover of this song, but the only copy is said to be in the possession of author Samuels himself...Released on Warner Bros. Records, the bizarre depiction of mental illness became an instant hit in the United States that summer, reaching number 3 on the Billboard Hot 100 pop singles chart...The song, mostly set to a rhythm tapped out on a snare drum and tambourine, deals with mental illness, seemingly brought about by the singer's lover. The singer speaks rhythmically rather than singing the lyric, over a sparse, multitracked percussion track dominated by drum kit and tambourines with a siren sounding in and out of the "chorus". According to Samuels, the vocal glissando, signifying the vocalist's plunge into insanity, was achieved by Samuels manipulating tape recording speeds, a variation on the technique used by Ross Bagdasarian in creating the original Chipmunks novelty hits. Supposedly, the song's thumping beat derives from or was inspired by the Scottish marching song "The Campbells Are Coming".]

'THEY'RE COMING TO TAKE ME AWAY' LYRICS:

By: Napoleon The 14th

----------------------

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTKq4uMB-QQ&feature=related

Remember when you ran away

And I got on my knees and begged you

Not to go because I'd go berserk?

-----------------------------

WELL,

------------------------------

You left me anyhow and

Then the days got worse and worse

And now you see I've gone completely

out of my mind,

-----------------------------
AND
-----------------------------

[chorus 1]

They're coming to take me away,

Haha, they're coming to take me away,

Ho ho, hee hee, ha ha,

To the funny farm

Where Life is Beautiful all the time

And I'll be happy to see

Those Nice Young Men

In their Clean White Coats

And they're coming to take me AWAY,HA HAAAAA

-------------------------------

You thought it was a joke,

and so you LAUGHED, YOU LAUGHED

When I had said that losing you

Would make me flip my lid,

--------------------------

RIGHT?

-------------------------

You know you laughed.

I HEARD you laugh, you laughed

And laughed and laughed

And then you left,

And now you know I'm Utterly Mad

-------------------------

AND

--------------------------

[chorus 2]

They're coming to take me away,

Haha, they're coming to take me away,

Ho ho, hee hee, ha ha,

To the Happy Home with Trees and Flowers

And Chirping Birds and basket weavers

Who sit and smile and

Twiddle their thumbs and toes

And they're coming to Take me Away,

HAHAAAAAAAAA

---------------------------

I cooked your food,I cleaned your house,

And this is how you pay me back

For all my kind unselfish loving deeds

---------------------------

HUH?

-------------------------

Well, you just wait,

They'll find you yet,

And when they do, they'll put you in

the ASPCA, you mangy MUTT,

-------------------------

AND

-------------------------

(chorus 1)

(chorus 2)

(chorus 1 trailing into mumbles in the distance)

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

(continued from above article)

...Abroad [ABOARD], Obama will have plenty of support for his dramatic departure from Bush's policies.

"As I walk around the hallways, I hear lots of different dialects and languages — and then 'Obama, Obama, Obama,'" Gustavo Silva-Chavez, a climate analyst with Environmental Defense, said during the Poznan talks. "So definitely a lot of the negotiators here understand that it's the end of the Bush era and the beginning of the Obama era, and they're very excited about that."

Brice Lalonde, the chief French delegate to the talks, said Europe was "thrilled" with Obama's promises to pursue renewable energies. If the U.S. commits itself to ambitious environmental goals, other countries will be forced to take bold steps themselves, he said.

Obama has promised to invest $15 billion each year to support private-sector efforts toward clean energy, arguing that tackling climate change can create millions of new jobs as the U.S. invests in technologies to promote solar and wind power, biofuels and cleaner coal-fired plants.

[BUT THE CAPED CLIMATE CRUSADER WILL BE HARDPRESSED TO DELIVER THE MILLIONS OF NEW 'GREEN-COLLAR AMERICAN JOBS' HE HAS PROMISED. UNFORTUNATELY, THE FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES: WINDMILLS, COMPACT FLUORESCENT LIGHTBULBS, & ELECTRIC CAR BATTERIES ARE ALL PRIMARILY MANUFACTURED IN ASIA & EUROPE AND MUST BE 'OUTSOURCED'. BY DEFINITION, 'GREEN-COLLAR JOBS' ARE JOBS THAT CANNOT BE OUTSOURCED!]

[See: Holy Guacamole Batman! Those Electric Auto Battery Manufacturing Jobs You Promised Are NOT American GREEN, But Rather Foreign RED, BLUE & ORANGE!! ITSSD Journal on Energy Security, at: http://itssdenergysecurity.blogspot.com/2008/12/holy-guacamole-batman-these-electric.html ; How Many New Obama Administration-Created American Jobs Will it Take to Change an Imported Chinese Compact Fluorescent Lightbulb?, ITSSD Journal on Energy Security, at: http://itssdenergysecurity.blogspot.com/2008/12/how-many-new-obama-administration.html ].

Hurdles ahead

But there are obstacles. With a recession and financial bailouts at home, Obama might not get as much funding as he'd like.

[WELL, IF THE CAPED CLIMATE CRUSADER USES HIS 'GREEN POWERS' TO PRINT MORE 'GREENBACKS', PERHAPS, THEN, HE WILL BE BETTER ABLE TO 'SPREAD THE WEALTH AROUND'!]

Activists also fear Obama will not be able to quickly reduce the U.S. appetite for coal and oil, increase the fuel efficiency of American cars or fight powerful economic interests like the oil industry.

[THE CAPED CLIMATE CRUSADER WILL HAVE TO BALANCE THE NEED TO SECURE THE COUNTRY'S ENERGY SECURITY WITH HIS CONSTITUENTS' ZEAL TO SAVE THE PLANET AND BANKRUPT THE COUNTRY IN ORDER TO DEFEAT THE FORCES OF EVIL - AMERICA'S ENERGY PROVIDERS & CONSUMING PUBLIC].

The talks on where to go after the Kyoto pact expires in 2012 are behind schedule due to bickering. Participants had hoped to have a new roadmap by December 2009.

Kerry, in Poznan as soon-to-be chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said it was "absolutely essential" that China, which has overtaken the United States as the world’s top carbon dioxide emitter, gets more involved in combating global warming to win U.S. endorsement of any new treaty.

China, however, insists that rich nations should first make deep cuts at home. India happens to back China on this.

The transitional state of U.S. politics hasn't helped speed things up, either.

"The immediate effect is a stalling of discussions," said Kim Carstensen, the World Wildlife Fund's chief official on climate change. "It's a sort of black hole. But in the larger picture, we are definitely hopeful."

Jake Schmidt, international climate policy director for the Natural Resources Defense Council, shares that longer-term view. Obama "gets global warming," he said, "and understands that its solutions are also at the heart of solving our financial situation through the creation of millions of green jobs."

msnbc.com's Miguel Llanos, The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.

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http://www.themoneytimes.com/articles/20081219/advocates_of_grave_global_warming_issues_to_be_obama_s_top_science_advisers-id-1045187.html

Advocates of Grave Global Warming Issues to be Obama’s Top Science Advisers

by Shikha P

Money Times

December 19, 2008

Washington, December 19: Determined to reverse Bush’s anti science policies, President-elect Barack Obama has included prominent anti-global warming scientists in his administration to be his top science advisers.

[MAY WE ASK, WHAT ARE 'ANTI-GLOBAL WARMING SCIENTISTS'??? HOW CAN TRUE SCIENTISTS BE ANTI-ANYTHING IF SCIENCE IS SUPPOSED TO BE OBJECTIVE AND FACT-BASED??? ISN'T THE MONIKER 'ANTI-GLOBAL WARMING SCIENTIST' AN OXI-MORON?? ISN'T IT MORE CREDIBLE THAT 'ANTI-GLOBAL WARMING SCIENTISTS' ARE THOSE THAT HAVE A PRECONCEIVED IDEA OR IDEOLOGY THAT PRESUPPOSES A CERTAIN SCIENTIFIC OUTCOME???]

While Harvard University physicist, John Holdren, is named as the presidential science adviser, Jane Lubchenco, marine biologist at Oregon State University, would be the head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Their appointments are due to be announced tomorrow.

John Holdren has deep understanding of global environmental changes and energy technologies and his work has always focused on nuclear proliferation and science and technology policies. After serving as the chairman of the board of directors of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and as the director of the Woods Hole Research Center, now he is all set to address global warming issues more vigorously under Obama’s patronage.

Jane Lubchenco would further strengthen the flagship operation with her immense knowledge in environmental science and marine ecology, as she becomes one of the key science advisers of the president. She would also happen to be the first woman to hold that position.

Holdren and Lubchenco have argued consistently for a mandatory limit on greenhouse gas emissions to prevent cataclysmic climate change, Bush administration always turned a deaf ear.

In October, Lubchenco was quoted as saying, “The Bush administration has not been respectful of the science. But I think that's not true of Republicans in general. I know it's not.”

Bush’s administration has always been criticized for being anti-science. Nobel laureate David Baltimore, former president of the California Institute of Technology commented, “the Bush administration has been the most remarkably anti-science administration that I've seen in my adult lifetime".

On the other side, Barack Obama has always made it his agenda to reverse Bush’s global climatic notions. “This is our generation’s moment to save future generations from global catastrophe by creating a market for clean-burning fuels that can stop the dangerous transformation of our climate,” said Obama in 2007, while unveiling his global warming plan during his campaign in California.

Keeping up to his agenda, Obama has acted wisely by including prominent scientific personalities to his administration. Holdren and Lubchenco may work with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Commerce Secretary Bill Richardson to reform global warming policies of the government for better solutions.

Holdren and Lubchenco have started churning best possible solutions for controlling the catastrophic climatic changes by involving best scientists worldwide. Holdren has been attending international climate talks and has helped coordinate a statement on the subject from scientific academies around the world. Lubchenco has also formed the Aldo Leopold Leadership Program to teach mid-career scientists how to participate in public policy debates.

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http://uk.reuters.com/article/burningIssues/idUKTRE4BI5UZ20081220

Obama picks climate specialist as science adviser

By Ross Colvin

Reuters

Sat Dec 20, 2008

CHICAGO (Reuters) - President-elect Barack Obama underscored on Saturday his intent to push initiatives on climate change by naming John Holdren, an energy and climate specialist, as the new White House science adviser.

Holdren is a Harvard University physicist who has focused on the causes and consequences of climate change and advocated policies aimed at sustainable development. He has also done extensive research on the dangers of nuclear weapons.

[WELL, IF DR. HOLDREN HAS FOCUSED ON THE IMPORTANT SCIENTIFIC CONCEPT OF 'CAUSATION', WHICH IS DIFFERENT THAN THE SCIENTIFIC CONCEPT OF 'CORRELATION', THEN HE MUST ADMIT TO THE AMERICAN PUBLIC THAT HE CANNOT ESTABLISH THAT HUMAN ACTIVITIES HAVE PRIMARILY OR EVEN SUBSTANTIALLY' CAUSED' GLOBAL WARMING, SINCE HE AND OTHER CLIMATE SCIENTISTS HAVE FAILED TO ESTABLISH THAT OTHER INDIVIDUAL INTERVENING CAUSES ARE TO BLAME. ALSO, DR. HOLDREN & OTHER CLIMATE SCIENTISTS HAVE FAILED TO ESTABLISH THAT NON-CYCLICAL GLOBAL WARMING ATTRIBUTABLE TO HUMAN ACTIVITIES ARE, IN FACT, THE PRIMARY 'CAUSE' OF OBSERVABLE NON-CYCLICAL CLIMATE CHANGE. WHILE DR. HOLDREN AND OTHER CLIMATE SCIENTISTS HAVE ARGUABLY FOUND A 'CORRELATION' BETWEEN HUMAN ACTIVITIES, OBSERVABLE GLOBAL WARMING & OBSERVABLE CHANGES IN CLIMATE, THIS IS NOT THE SAME AS PROVING 'CAUSATION', WHICH ENTAILS A HIGHER SCIENTIFIC STANDARD OF PROOF.]

[THIS INDICATES THAT PRESIDENT-ELECT OBAMA HAS SELECTED THESE INDIVIDUALS FOR THE PURPOSE OF CHANGING U.S. NATIONAL SCIENTIFIC STANDARDS FROM THE MORE RIGOROUS 'CAUSATION' TO THE LESS RIGOROUS 'CORRELATION', AS A BASIS FOR U.S. SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY POLICY!! THIS, IN TURN, ESPECIALLY IN THE CASE OF GLOBAL WARMING & CLIMATE CHANGE DEBATES (it must be kept in mind that these two terms are different), SIGNIFIES AN INTENTION TO FOCUS NO LONGER ON PROVING ENVIRONMENTAL & HEALTH 'RISKS', BUT RATHER, ENVIRONMENTAL & HEALTH 'HAZARDS', IN ORDER TO ULTIMATELY ESTABLISH EUROPE'S EXTRA-WTO PRECAUTIONARY PRINCIPLE AS U.S. LAW!!]

Obama pledged to put a priority on encouraging scientific breakthroughs in areas such as alternative energy solutions and finding cures to diseases, as he announced the pick of Holdren and other top science advisers in the Democratic weekly radio and video address.

"Today, more than ever before, science holds the key to our survival as a planet and our security and prosperity as a nation," Obama said. "It's time we once again put science at the top of our agenda and worked to restore America's place as the world leader in science and technology."

"From landing on the moon, to sequencing the human genome, to inventing the Internet, America has been the first to cross that new frontier," Obama said.

Obama said that government has played an important role in encouraging those breakthroughs and could do so in the future.

The Bush administration has had a rocky relationship with the scientific community and was at times accused by critics of ignoring scientific evidence in its efforts to make political points on issues such as global warming.

Holdren, who teaches at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, will head the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. He is a former president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Obama, who takes office on January 20, this week finished naming Cabinet secretaries for his incoming administration.

On Friday, he introduced his choices of Illinois Republican congressman Ray LaHood to head the Transportation Department and California Democratic Rep. Hilda Solis to be secretary of labor.

HAWAII VACATION

After working for weeks in his hometown of Chicago to assemble his team, Obama leaves on Saturday morning for Hawaii for a Christmas vacation with his family.

Obama has named Steven Chu, winner of the 1997 Nobel Prize in physics who was an early advocate for finding scientific solutions to climate change, to head the Energy Department.

He has also tapped former Environmental Protection Agency head Carol Browner for a new post that will coordinate White House policy on energy and climate change.

In addition to the pick of Holdren, Obama also announced that marine ecologist Jane Lubchenco of Oregon State University would be his nominee for head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Obama also named two people to work with Holdren to lead the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, also known as PCAST.

One of them, Eric Lander, is founding director of the Broad Institute, a collaboration of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University that focuses mapping the human genome.

The other is Harold Varmus, a former director of the National Institutes of Health who won a Nobel Prize for his studies on cancer and genetics. For the past nine years, Varmus has served as president and chief executive officer of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York.

(Writing by Caren Bohan; Editing by Eric Beech)

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http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid=azT0MzwSNKwM&refer=us

Holdren as Obama Science Pick Adds Climate Activism (Update2)

By John Lauerman and Brian K. Sullivan

Dec. 19 (Bloomberg) -- Harvard University Professor John P. Holdren, President-elect Barack Obama’s pick as his top science adviser, will push for action on climate change and embryonic stem cell research in the White House.

Holdren, 64, a professor of environmental policy, will be named to the post in a radio address by Obama tomorrow, Harvard, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, said today in a statement. His appointment to the position of assistant to the president for science and technology depends on confirmation by the U.S. Senate. Obama assumes office Jan. 20.

Holdren, former president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, is a specialist in energy and climate change who advised Al Gore on the documentary “An Inconvenient Truth.” His appointment signals a sharp about- face from President George W. Bush’s approach to greenhouse gases and global warming.

“The disruptions and its impacts are growing more rapidly than anyone expected, even just a few short years ago,” Holdren said in an interview last year. “There is already widespread harm.”

Holdren uses a U.S. map in global warming presentations to show areas of Cape Cod and Florida that would vanish if temperatures continue rising. “Global warming” is too mild a term to describe climate changes happening now, he said.

‘Rapid’ Warming

“It implies something gradual, something uniform, something quite possibly benign, and what we are experiencing is none of those,” Holdren said. “It is rapid in relation to the capacity of societies and eco-systems to respond, it is highly non- uniform, and it is certainly not benign.

Calls and e-mails to Holdren’s office today weren’t returned.

Scientists and former colleagues praised Holdren’s experience and familiarity with top scientific issues. Obama’s pick of Holdren and the appointments of Steven Chu as Energy Secretary and Jane Lubchenco as National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration chief complete a “science dream team for the new administration,” Peter Frumhoff, director of science and policy for the advocacy group Union of Concerned Scientists, said in a statement.

Holdren is “absolutely the right person at the right time,” said Alan Leshner, chief executive officer of the AAAS, the science advocacy group where Holdren formerly served as president. “He’s an expert not only in energy climate and environment but also in national security, nuclear arms and nuclear energy.”

‘World-Class’

William K. Reilly, the Environmental Protection Agency administrator under President George H. W. Bush and now a San Francisco-based senior advisor to the private equity firm TPG, praised Holdren as a “world-class scientist” who is “extremely knowledgeable about energy research needs and quite critical of the decline in support for energy research since the late- 1970s.”

Reilly and Holdren co-chair the National Commission on Energy Policy, a bipartisan group of energy experts that released energy policy recommendations in 2004.

Holdren is the Teresa and John Heinz Professor of Environmental Policy at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and director of the Science, Technology, and Public Policy program in the School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. He admonished politicians last year to show stronger leadership on climate change, which the AAAS called a “growing threat to society.”

Great Challenges

“None of the great interlinked challenges of our time -- the economy, energy, environment, health, security, and the particular vulnerabilities of the poor to shortfalls in all of these -- can be solved without insights and advances from the physical sciences, the life sciences, and engineering,” Holdren said in today’s statement.

Holdren’s views on another controversy, embryonic stem cell research, also are likely to run contrary to those of Bush, who has restricted U.S. funding to minimize the number of embryos destroyed to create new colonies of cells.

Holdren has already said he thinks the research should advance without the funding restrictions, said David Baltimore, the 1975 Nobel Prize winner who is now a biology professor at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

“I’m a great fan of John,” Baltimore said yesterday in a telephone interview. “He’s an extraordinary thinker and he also has just the right kind of background to play a role in the energy area that’s so important right now.”

Truth-Tellers [OR TRUE-BELIEVERS???]

Jonathan Lash, president of the Washington-based environmental advocacy group World Resources Institute, cited the choices of Holdren and Chu as signs the new administration will aggressively act on climate change and other scientific issues.

“They will tell the president and the American people the truth about the scientific findings on our most important challenges,” Lash said. “Each of them has shown a deep understanding of the risks created by human pressure on our environment, and each has experience and skill in helping policy makers understand and base their decisions on science.”

Holden’s appointment also was cheered by George Daley, an embryonic stem cell researcher at the Harvard-affiliated Children’s Hospital in Boston.

“It’s very exciting to have a really formidable scientific intellect in that position,” Daley said in a telephone interview today. “It says the administration clearly wants to hear from the most credible scientists, whether its on energy, climate change or, we hope, on stem cells.”

[THIS COMPARISON IMPLIES THAT ONLY 'CREDIBLE' SCIENTISTS AGREE THAT ACTION NEED BE TAKEN ON BOTH CLIMATE CHANGE & EMBRYONIC STEM CELL RESEARCH. IF A SCIENTIST GOES AGAINST 'CONSENSUS' AND ADVOCATES FOR OTHER THAN IMMEDIATE ACTION ON EITHER, HE OR SHE IS 'DEEMED' NONCREDIBLE. THIS WOULD APPEAR TO HARKEN BACK TO THE 1950'S MCCARTHYISM DURING WHICH THOSE WHO DID NOT AGREE WITH THE 'COMMUNIST (RED) THREAT' CONSENSUS WERE DISPARAGED AND MARGINALIZED PROFESSIONALLY.]

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http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2008/08/04/convincing_the_climate_change_skeptics/

Convincing the climate-change skeptics

By John P. Holdren

Boston Globe

August 4, 2008

THE FEW climate-change "skeptics" with any sort of scientific credentials continue to receive attention in the media out of all proportion to their numbers, their qualifications, or the merit of their arguments. And this muddying of the waters of public discourse is being magnified by the parroting of these arguments by a larger population of amateur skeptics with no scientific credentials at all.

Long-time observers of public debates about environmental threats know that skeptics about such matters tend to move, over time, through three stages. First, they tell you you're wrong and they can prove it. (In this case, "Climate isn't changing in unusual ways or, if it is, human activities are not the cause.")

Then they tell you you're right but it doesn't matter. ("OK, it's changing and humans are playing a role, but it won't do much harm.") Finally, they tell you it matters but it's too late to do anything about it. ("Yes, climate disruption is going to do some real damage, but it's too late, too difficult, or too costly to avoid that, so we'll just have to hunker down and suffer.")

All three positions are represented among the climate-change skeptics who infest talk shows, Internet blogs, letters to the editor, op-ed pieces, and cocktail-party conversations.

The few with credentials in climate-change science have nearly all shifted in the past few years from the first category to the second, however, and jumps from the second to the third are becoming more frequent.

All three factions are wrong, but the first is the worst. Their arguments, such as they are, suffer from two huge deficiencies.

First, they have not come up with any plausible alternative culprit for the disruption of global climate that is being observed, for example, a culprit other than the greenhouse-gas buildups in the atmosphere that have been measured and tied beyond doubt to human activities. (The argument that variations in the sun's output might be responsible fails a number of elementary scientific tests.)

[DEAR PROFESSOR, THE PHRASE YOU HAVE USED, 'TIED BEYOND DOUBT', IS LOOSELY BORROWED FROM THE LEGAL PROFESSION WHERE IT HAS A MUCH MORE PRECISE MEANING IN CRIMINAL and CONSTITUTIONAL LAW & PROCEDURE. (See, e.g.: IN RE WINSHIP , 397 U.S. 358 (1970), at: http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US&vol=397&invol=358 .) SINCE WORDS AND THEIR USAGE ARE IMPORTANT TO ANY MEANINGFUL DEBATE, LET US EXAMINE WHAT THE LEGAL DEFINITION OF 'BEYOND A REASONABLE DOUBT' REALLY MEANS: IT IS DEFINED AS AN ADJECTIVE EMPLOYED AS "part of jury instructions in all criminal trials, in which the jurors are told that they can only find the defendant guilty if they are convinced 'beyond a reasonable doubt' of his or her guilt. Sometimes referred to as 'to a moral certainty,' the phrase is fraught with uncertainty as to meaning, but try: 'you better be damned sure.' By comparison it is meant to be a tougher standard than 'preponderance of the evidence,' used as a test to give judgment to a plaintiff in a civil (non-criminal) case." See: Law.Com Dictionary at: http://dictionary.law.com/default2.asp?selected=59 .]

[IN OTHER WORDS, FIRST, WE SEE THAT YOU ARE IMPLYING THAT CLIMATE CHANGE SCIENTISTS HAVE ESTABLISHED GUILT IN A 'CRIMINAL' SENSE, THAT GREENHOUSE GAS BUILDUPS IN THE ATMOSPHERE HAVE BEEN MEASURED AND TIED 'BEYOND DOUBT TO HUMAN ACTIVITIES' [SUGGESTING THAT THE SCIENTIFIC COMMUNITY HAS SATISFIED AN EVEN GREATER STANDARD THAN THE LEGAL 'BEYOND A REASONABLE DOUBT' STANDARD]. AND SECOND, WE SEE THAT YOU ARE IMPLYING THAT CLIMATE CHANGE SCIENTIST OBSERVATIONS HAVE ESTABLISHED, THAT GREENHOUSE GAS BUILDUPS IN THE ATMOSPHERE THUS TIED TO HUMAN ACTIVITIES, HAVE, 'BEYOND A DOUBT', DISRUPTED GLOBAL CLIMATE. HOWEVER, CLIMATE SCIENTIST 'OBSERVATIONS' OF CLIMATE DISRUPTION, DO NOT, IN FACT, SCIENCE OR LAW, COUNT AS PROOF 'BEYOND A (REASONABLE) DOUBT' THAT HUMAN-INDUCED GLOBAL WARMING HAS CAUSED CLIMATE DISRUPTION.]

Second, having not succeeded in finding an alternative, they haven't even tried to do what would be logically necessary if they had one, which is to explain how it can be that everything modern science tells us about the interactions of greenhouse gases with energy flow in the atmosphere is wrong.

Members of the public who are tempted to be swayed by the denier fringe should ask themselves how it is possible, if human-caused climate change is just a hoax, that:

 The leaderships of the national academies of sciences of the United States, United Kingdom, France, Italy, Germany, Japan, Russia, China, and India, among others, are on record saying that global climate change is real, caused mainly by humans, and reason for early, concerted action.

 This is also the overwhelming majority view among the faculty members of the earth sciences departments at every first-rank university in the world.

 All three of holders of the one Nobel prize in science that has been awarded for studies of the atmosphere (the 1995 chemistry prize to Paul Crutzen, Sherwood Rowland, and Mario Molina, for figuring out what was happening to stratospheric ozone) are leaders in the climate-change scientific mainstream.

[JUST BRING OUT THE 'BIG NAMES' IN ACADEMIA, SCIENCE & POLITICS TO SUBDUE & 'RE-EDUCATE' THE PUBLIC WHEN THE TRUE SCIENCE ARGUMENT CANNOT BE ESTABLISHED! THIS IS ONE OF THE OLDEST TRICKS IN POLITICS!!]

US polls indicate that most of the amateur skeptics are Republicans. [IS THIS THE TYPE OF 'SCIENCE' ('POLITICAL' & 'SOCIAL' SCIENCE) THAT DR. HOLDREN REPRESENTS???] These Republican skeptics should wonder how presidential candidate John McCain could have been taken in. He has castigated the Bush administration for wasting eight years in inaction on climate change, and the policies he says he would implement as president include early and deep cuts in US greenhouse-gas emissions. (Senator Barack Obama's position is similar.)

The extent of unfounded skepticism about the disruption of global climate by human-produced greenhouse gases is not just regrettable, it is dangerous. It has delayed - and continues to delay - the development of the political consensus that will be needed if society is to embrace remedies commensurate with the challenge. The science of climate change is telling us that we need to get going. Those who still think this is all a mistake or a hoax need to think again.

John P. Holdren is a professor in the Kennedy School of Government and the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard and the director of the Woods Hole Research Center.

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/12/18/AR2008121803640.html?wprss=rss_politics

Advocates for Action on Global Warming Chosen as Obama's Top Science Advisers

By Juliet Eilperin and Joel Achenbach

Washington Post Staff Writers

Friday, December 19, 2008; A06

President-elect Barack Obama has selected two of the nation's most prominent scientific advocates for a vigorous response to climate change to serve in his administration's top ranks, according to sources, sending the strongest signal yet that he will reverse Bush administration policies on energy and global warming.

The appointments of Harvard University physicist John Holdren as presidential science adviser and Oregon State University marine biologist Jane Lubchenco as head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which will be announced tomorrow, dismayed conservatives but heartened environmentalists and researchers.

Like Energy Secretary-designate Steven Chu, who directs the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Holdren and Lubchenco have argued repeatedly for a mandatory limit on greenhouse gas emissions to avert catastrophic climate change. In 2007, as chairman of the board of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Holdren oversaw approval of the board's first statement on global warming, which said: "It is time to muster the political will for concerted action."

In October, Lubchenco told the Associated Press that she believed public attitudes on climate change were shifting, adding: "The Bush administration has not been respectful of the science. But I think that's not true of Republicans in general. I know it's not."

The Bush administration's political appointees have edited government documents to delete scientific findings and to block scientists' recommendations on issues involving climate change, endangered species, contaminants in drinking water and air pollution.

"The Bush administration has been the most remarkably anti-science administration that I've seen in my adult lifetime," Nobel laureate David Baltimore, former president of the California Institute of Technology, said in an interview. "And I do think that there will be a sea change in the Obama administration with the respect shown for the findings of science as well as the process of science."

But Bush's science adviser, John H. Marburger III, challenged that assessment. "There are stupid and foolish things that have been perpetrated by employees of the federal government in the executive branch, but it doesn't mean that the president is anti-science," he said. "The president is getting blamed for every little thing that happens that people don't like in the administration."

Marburger added that because of the president's opposition to federal funding of embryonic stem cell research and mandatory curbs on greenhouse gas emissions: "It was easy [for opponents] to infer that he was negative toward science. . . . The president respects science; he likes science."

Alden Meyer, director of strategy and policy for the Union of Concerned Scientists, predicted that Obama's latest nominees would work with a Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and a Commerce Secretary Bill Richardson to change how government addresses global warming.

"You can see the elements coming together," Meyer said. "It means you've got people in key places across the administration that get the urgency of the climate issue and get the need for aggressive policy to move climate solutions forward, both in the U.S. and internationally."
But Holdren's reported selection inspired no joy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a free-market advocacy group that denounces global warming "alarmists" and opposes many environmental laws. Myron Ebell, director of energy and global warming policy at CEI, said, "I think he's a very bad choice. His views are extreme, they're not based in fact, and he's a ranter."

Of the overall Obama team, Ebell said, "They will pursue an anti-energy agenda that is designed to constrict energy supplies and raise energy prices."

Lubchenco did not draw the same level of criticism from conservative groups as Holdren yesterday, but she represents just as radical a departure for NOAA, which oversees marine issues as well as much of the government's climate work. While NOAA has traditionally favored commercial fishing interests in policy disputes, Lubchenco has consistently called for conservation measures to safeguard ocean ecosystems in the face of industry opposition.

Joshua S. Reichert, managing director of the Pew Environment group, said NOAA officials have too often set aside scientific considerations when deciding how much fish to extract from the sea. "For too many years, politics has played a greater role in fisheries management than science," he said. "This appointment carries with it the hope that this may soon change."

Holdren and Lubchenco have pushed other scientists to play a more active policy role. Holdren has attended international climate talks and helped coordinate a statement on the subject from scientific academies around the world. Lubchenco founded the Aldo Leopold Leadership Program to teach mid-career scientists how to participate in public policy debates.

Andrew Rosenberg, who was deputy director of NOAA's Marine Fisheries Service under President Bill Clinton and is professor of natural resources and the environment at the University of New Hampshire, said that by selecting Lubchenco -- someone who is a respected researcher and an active player in national policy discussions -- "it's saying that science agencies have a role in policy."

Staff researcher Madonna Lebling contributed to this report.

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http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/greenspace/2008/12/obamas-new-ocea.html

Obama’s New Hotshot at NOAA

By Kenneth R. Weiss

LA Times

December 18, 2008

Jane Lubchenco, one of the nation's top marine ecologists, has been picked to lead the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, sources say, an indication that President-elect Barack Obama wants to restore integrity to the science-based agency buffeted by politics in recent years.

Her appointment, and the likely appointment of John Holdren of Harvard and Woods Hole Research Center, signals a U-turn in the federal government's approach to greenhouse gases and global warming. Holdren, rumored to be named Friday as Obama's science advisor, has likened our current situation to "being in a car with bad brakes driving toward a cliff in the fog."

The two anticipated appointments have been met with relief -- and even glee -- among scientific and environmental organizations. Their members have spent a half-dozen years hand-wringing over the politicization of science and worrying about lost opportunities to preserve remnants of nature and the resiliency of the planet.

[SPEAKING OF THE 'POLITICIZATION OF SCIENCE'...]

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which makes up the largest portion of the Department of Commerce, does much of the federal government's research on global warming, as well as regulate fisheries. Lubchenco, among her various efforts to protect the abundance and diversity of marine life, has led a team of researchers at Oregon State University studying the link of climate change devastating sea life in coastal waters off the Pacific Northwest.

“Our oceans are experiencing the effects of global climate change –- melting sea ice, acidification, and coral loss," said Vikki Spruill, president of the Ocean Conservancy. "It is especially reassuring to have a world-renowned ecologists as NOAA administrator who knows where the biggest environmental challenge of our lifetime is taking place: beneath the sea and along our coastlines."

Both Lubchenco and Holdren have fat resumes, with a long list of degrees and awards, and both previously held the post of president of the American Assn. for the Advancement of Science.

Did the Founders Envision a Filibuster-Proof Congress (Senate) as Being Good for the Republic?

noreply@blogger.com (ITSSD Charitable Mission) — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 17:15:00 +0000

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/thefix/2008/11/should_barack_obama_go_to_geor.html?nav=rss_blog

Should Barack Obama Go To Georgia?

By Chris Cillizza

The Fix - Washington Post Political Blog

November 20, 2008, 6:30 pm

UPDATE, 6:30 pm: Barack Obama has cut a new 60-second radio ad in support of former state Rep. Jim Martin's Senate campaign in Georgia. In the ad, which was obtained by The Fix moments ago, Obama thanks everyone who voted for him on November 4 and then adds: "The elections aren't over....I want to urge you to turn out one more time and help elect Jim Martin to the United States Senate."

A radio ad is not a personal visit by the president-elect but Martin's campaign will gladly take it.

ORIGINAL POST

Even as President-elect Barack Obama continues to rapidly fill out his White House staff and Cabinet picks, the buzz around whether he will spend some of his prized political capital on behalf of former state Rep. Jim Martin (D) in Georgia continues to grow.

Martin is taking on Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R) in a Dec. 2 runoff occasioned by the fact that the GOP incumbent was unable to win 50 plus one percent of the vote on Nov. 4.

Martin clearly benefited from Obama's presence at the top of the ticket -- particularly in the black community -- and Democrats eyeing a 60-seat filibuster proof majority believe an Obama appearance may be the only way Martin can come close to re-creating the sort of base turnout he needs to beat Chambliss next month.

To date, Obama and his transition team have been non-committal about such a visit so soon after he was elected the 44th president of the United States.

For Obama, it may not make sense to head to Georgia as it would be painted by Republicans -- rightly, so -- as a partisan act inconsistent with the president-elect's post-partisan message. And, if Martin winds up losing, which conventional wisdom suggests he will, then some of Obama's luster will have worn off before he even takes the oath of office.

But, with Democrats currently holding 58 seats, Sen. Norm Coleman's (Minn.) margin over entertainer Al Franken narrowing and polls showing Martin within shouting distance, the pressure on Obama to make a visit to get Democrats to 60 seats in the 111th Congress is sure to increase.

"When you're President of the United States it pays to remember who your friends are," said one senior Democratic operative granted anonymity to speak candidly about the president-elect. "Thinking Barack Obama has anything to risk by campaigning for Jim Martin is like most conventional wisdom -- just plain wrong."

Another Democratic Senate insider was more measured about Obama's impact. "Obama could make a big difference with a visit, but it's not the only way he can help," said the source. "Fundraising or appearing in ads would be enormously beneficial to Martin as well."

Obama is already an issue in the runoff campaign as Martin is attacking Chambliss in a television ad for his opposition to the "Obama economic recovery plan." The ad's narrator adds: "Jim Martin will help Barack Obama cut taxes for the middle class and get our economy moving again."

The Martin campaign is also recycling a radio ad that Obama did for them in the general election. (It began airing Tuesday in the state.)

During the campaign, Obama turned down a series of requests for appearances or television ads in support of Democratic candidates -- picking and choosing only a few races in which to engage.
The most prominent was the television ad Obama cut in support of Oregon Sen.-elect Jeff Merkley; he also lent his voice to a radio ad for Rep.-elect Jim Himes in Connecticut.

Whether Obama travels to Georgia may well depend heavily on whether he views the Senate contest as the last race of 2008 or the first race of 2010.

Because Obama did take the time to lend his voice to radio ads for Martin during the campaign, his political operation could well point those ads -- and the burdens of filling out a new government between now and January 20 -- as reasons why he simply can't make the time to come down to the Peach State.

If Georgia is seen as the first race of the 2010 cycle, however, Obama could use it as an opportunity to flex his political muscles for Republicans (and Democrats) in Congress; if Martin won due to an Obama visit, there would be significant trepidation -- among vulnerable Democrats and Republicans -- to cross his legislative priorities

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http://features.csmonitor.com/politics/2008/11/19/georgia%E2%80%99s-us-senate-runoff-has-broader-political-importance

Georgia’s US Senate runoff has broader political importance

By Patrik Jonsson Staff writer

Christian Science Monitor

November 19, 2008 edition

The post-election vote could tighten Democrats’ grip on Capitol Hill while giving GOP stars a chance to shine.

Atlanta

The last voters in the historic 2008 election headed back to the polls in Georgia on Tuesday, ready to decide the extent of the Democrats’ grip on Washington and give Republican standard-bearers clues as to how to operate as outsiders.

“I don’t mind voting again,” says Democrat James Cato, an Atlanta travel agent, braving a brisk morning to file an early vote for the Dec. 2 runoff between Republican incumbent Saxby Chambliss and Democratic challenger Jim Martin. “I tend to come out when I feel my vote is really going to count.”

The Senate runoff between two former University of Georgia fraternity brothers is the first election after Barack Obama won the presidency. It’s become increasingly important as Democrats won the Alaska recount this week, putting them within two seats of gaining a 60-seat filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. That makes the Georgia runoff the last seat to be decided by voters as the disputed Minnesota race now heads to a recount.

As the GOP’s current panoply of stars – Gov. Sarah Palin, Mitt Romney, and Mike Huckabee – prepare to stump for Mr. Chambliss, the Georgia runoff has become a stage for potential Republican national candidates to find their footing, hone their messages, and begin formulating the answer to a vexing question: How to marshal the vaunted independent vote and rebuild the party from what Duke University political scientist Michael Munger calls “the smoking ruins.”

GOP stars play to larger audience

“This is the first quick election after the Obama victory,” says Mr. Munger. “So when we see these people coming in and trying out messages … they’re trying out messages for a larger stage.”

To be sure, that stage is looking dusty, even in this Republican shoo-in state. “The really bad thing for Republicans is that there’s any runoff at all – this was thought to be a completely safe seat,” says David Rohde, also a Duke election expert. “For the Republican party and for the way each party can see itself in the national context, it has a lot of implications.”

It’s personal between Chambliss and Mr. Martin, who have run a series of highly negative ads attacking each other’s characters and associations.

Chambliss, who was first swept into office as part of the Republican revolution in 1994, is having an image crisis of his own making – testing even Republicans’ patience. At a recent Senate hearing, he defended corporations by berating a safety whistle-blower. Many conservative Georgians are upset about Chambliss’s support for the $700 billion Wall Street bailout.

“A major part of the advertising from [Chambliss] is that this [runoff] is now the front line for the battle of ideological control of the nation,” says Charles Bullock, a political science professor at the University of Georgia in Athens. “So if you’re a conservative and worried about what the Democrats may do with the White House and [Congress], here’s where you could make a difference.”

Martin faces his own challenges.

Chambliss seems to be winning points by drawing Martin into a debate over a “fair tax” proposal that shows some promise as a future Republican drawing card.

Still, says Munger, “The Republicans are demoralized, it’s hard to get partisans out, and Democrats could win by a ton of votes.” Thus, the parade of stars on behalf of Chambliss.

Last week, Zell Miller, the former Democratic senator who blasted John Kerry at the 2004 Republican convention, stumped for Chambliss. “I don’t like this ‘spread the wealth,’” Mr. Miller told a raucous partisan crowd. “To steal from Peter to pay Paul, even if it gets Paul to vote for you, is wrong, wrong, wrong.”

John McCain, Mr. Huckabee and Mr. Romney split the Republican ticket by thirds in the Georgia primary, with Huckabee eking out the win. Former Arkansas governor and pastor Huckabee now has a show on Fox News; Romney is the economic strategist and corporate turnaround artist; and Ms. Palin, who had a rough entry into national politics, can also find a stage in Georgia unshackled from McCain.

Party unity is being tested

They all appeal to various strands of the fractured GOP coalition. But the question, especially in light of the primary results, is whether one of them can unite the GOP.

They’re likely to test their chances in Georgia, says Napp Nazworth, a political science lecturer at the University of Georgia. Huckabee’s message is, “I’m conservative, but I’m not angry about it,” says Mr. Nazworth. For Palin, he says, “it depends on her being able to reinvent herself as someone who can appeal beyond the base.”

For their part, Democrats have been begging Mr. Obama to come, but he has so far demurred. But Bill Clinton was scheduled to speak at Clark Atlanta University on Wednesday, providing a foil to the Republican heavyweights.

Victor Davis Hanson, a political commentator and classics professor at the University of California, Fresno, says the runoff here will give clues as to how deep the Republican dilemma really runs, and who might be best to carry the GOP standard forward.

“For now,” Mr. Hanson writes in an e-mail, “Republicans can’t agree whether (1) much needs changing ideology-wise … since many conservative ballot measures passed, or (2) Democratic success … proves that the [Republican] base and its ideas are hopelessly unappealing to growing numbers of youth, minorities, and women, or (3) the conservative message is fine but needs to be repackaged for the times with better spokespeople.”

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http://www.ajc.com/news/content/metro/stories/2008/11/19/nra_chambliss_senate.html

NRA backs Chambliss in U.S. Senate runoff

By JIM THARPE

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

November 19, 2008

The National Rifle Association on Wednesday threw its support behind incumbent Republican U.S. Sen. Saxby Chambliss in Georgia’s Dec. 2 runoff, saying he fears Democratic challenger Jim Martin would help erode Second Amendment protections for gun owners.

“We’re going to have some real battles in Washington,” Wayne LaPierre, executive vice-president of the NRA, said Wednesday morning in Atlanta before traveling to Perry for a Chambliss rally.

LaPierre, speaking to reporters at Chambliss’s Cobb County headquarters, said he thinks President-elect Barack Obama will “break his promise” to protect gun rights. And he said that if Martin is elected, the Atlanta attorney and former state lawmaker will help hasten the erosion of gun rights in the United States.

Martin’s campaign immediately rejected that idea, saying Martin is a strong supporter of the Second Amendment.

“Jim supports the Second Amendment and will protect the rights of all law-abiding citizens to bear arms,” said Martin spokesman Matt Canter. “Saxby Chambliss is the one who wants to raise taxes on guns and ammunition with his support of a national sales tax.”

The NRA has about 150,000 members in Georgia and about 4 million nationwide.

LaPierre was in town a few hours before former President Bill Clinton arrives in Atlanta to campaign for Martin.

“That’s the same Bill Clinton who for eight years tried to destroy our rights,” NRA executive director Chris Cox said.

The Georgia Senate runoff is attracting a lengthening line of political A-listers as Democrats push for a 60-vote, filibuster-proof “super majority” in the upper chamber and Republicans pull out all stops to hold Chambliss’s seat.

The possibility of a 60-vote majority shot up overnight as Republican U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens lost his seat in Alaska to a Democrat. The Democrats now have 58 seats - only races in Minnesota and Georgia have to be decided.

“If the Minnesota race is lost and this race is lost, they (Democrats) will have a blank check,” Chambliss told reporters and about three dozen gun-rights supporters who attended LaPierre’s endorsement.

Charles Bogle Jr., 75 of Sandy Springs came up to shake LaPierre’s hand at the end of the press conference.

“Don’t give up,” Bogle, a gun owner and hunter, told the NRA official.

“I won’t,” LaPierre replied. “This thing is going to be a battle. They (Democrats) are going to break their promises.”

Bogle said he fears a Democratic congress and president will work together to raise taxes on guns and ammunition. He said he thinks they will also place additional restrictions on gun ownership and tighten registration requirements.

“They will take them away from us,” Bogle said. “These people scare me to death.”

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http://chronicle.augusta.com/stories/111408/edi_483365.shtml

Georgia Senate runoff crucial to nation: Chambliss re-election may prevent a filibuster-proof Democratic majority

Augusta Chronicle Editorial Staff

November 14, 2008

So you thought the election was over? No way. One of the most important elections of the year is taking place right here in Georgia in the runoff between Republican U.S. Sen. Saxby Chambliss and challenger Jim Martin.

The race is important enough for President-elect Barak Obama to flood the state with "community organizers," including 15 sent to Augusta, to get out the vote for Martin.

And Republicans are sending in heavy hitters to stump for Chambliss, including John McCain, Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee.

The stakes couldn't be higher. There are still undecided Senate races in Alaska, Minnesota and Georgia. If all three go Democratic -- and the first two are trending that way -- Democrats will have a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, giving Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, both far-out liberals, unbridled congressional power, even if Obama disagrees with them.

This is why the re-election of Chambliss is a must. He may be all that stands between the American people and congressional tyranny.

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http://www.mercurynews.com/politics/ci_10978721

Democrats hopeful about filibuster-proof Senate

By Paul Kane

Washington Post

Posted: 11/13/2008 06:50:04 PM PST

WASHINGTON — In a strange turn of events, the Democrats' pursuit of a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate — left for dead after last week's election results — now is back on course.

The road to 60 seats will now go through an Anchorage election office, the Minnesota state courts, a runoff in Georgia next month and, ultimately, a tense caucus meeting next week in which Democrats must deal with a renegade lawmaker who is making noise about crossing the aisle to join Republicans.

"Let me beat you to the punch: Will we get 60 seats?" said Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, cutting off reporters Thursday before they could ask the question everyone wants answered. "It's possible, but unlikely."

This seemed impossible last week, when Democrats appeared to gain six seats, to reach 57 for the 111th Congress starting in January, failing to secure a filibuster-proof majority for President-elect Barack Obama.

Now, the terrain has changed in the three remaining undecided Senate races, where Republican incumbents finished ahead on election night but local rules have given Democrats the chance to add one to three seats to their majority.

In Alaska, Anchorage Mayor Mark Begich pulled 814 votes ahead of Republican Sen. Ted Stevens late Wednesday night after officials tallied 59,000 votes that included absentee, early and questionable ballots whose validity was verified.

An additional 40,000 votes are set to be counted in the days ahead.

Final results are expected Wednesday, with a certified winner Dec. 1. That is one day before the runoff election in Georgia, where Republican Sen. Saxby Chambliss led initial voting but did not clear the required 50-percent mark. As a result, he must once again face Democratic former state representative Jim Martin.

The most legally complex battle is in Minnesota, where a recount process is about to start amid echoes of the controversial Florida 2000 presidential recount. Democrat Al Franken remains 206 votes behind Republican Sen. Norm Coleman. More than 24,000 ballots that electronically recorded votes in the presidential race but did not record any vote in the Coleman-Franken contest will now be examined, and legal challenges have been lodged. Hundreds of attorneys on both sides are volunteering to help resolve the dispute.

So, more than a week after Election Day, the Democratic and Republican senatorial camps are furiously raising money for ads and get-out-the-vote efforts in Georgia and for attorneys in Minnesota.

The first sign of clarity may come in Alaska. There, almost 100,000 ballots were left to count after the Nov. 4 election, mostly because the state's absentee-voter laws allowed ballots to be postmarked up until that day.

If the race is decided by less than 0.5 percent, the loser can ask for a state-funded recount, which would not be complete until January.

But Democrats have their own internal dispute that could derail their pursuit of 60 seats as early as next week.

Some Democrats want to punish Sen. Joe Lieberman, a Connecticut independent, who caucuses with them, for his support of the GOP presidential ticket by stripping his chairmanship of a key committee. But Lieberman has balked at such a move, amid whispers that he would instead caucus with Republicans.

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http://www.findingdulcinea.com/news/politics/2008/November/Democrats-Near-Filibuster-Proof-Senate.html

Democrats Near Filibuster-Proof Senate

By Lindsey Chapman

Finding Dulcinea – Internet Librarian

November 5, 2008

Democrats recorded considerable gains in Election 2008. With the 111th Congress in place, what will its members work on first?

Votes Still Left to Be Counted (and Recounted)

Democrats are still waiting to learn whether they will gain enough seats in the 2008 election to have a filibuster-proof Senate. But even if they don’t hold 60 seats, they “were within reach of a working coalition on major policy issues,” according to The New York Times.

Republican losses like those by Elizabeth Dole in North Carolina and John E. Sununu in New Hampshire helped the Democratic cause.

But a few more cliffhangers remain undecided. In Minnesota, Republican Sen. Norm Coleman and Democratic challenger Al Franken will have to wait awhile longer for the final results of their race. Early Wednesday, Coleman was ahead by less than 1,000 votes out of the 2.9 million-odd ballots cast, a margin small enough to require a recount under Minnesota law, according to the Associated Press.

Minnesota Secretary of State Mark Ritchie said the recount could last into December. “No matter how fast people would like it, the emphasis is on accuracy,” he said.

Meanwhile, Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens holds a slim lead over Anchorage mayor Mark Begich, with 99 percent of Alaska’s precincts reporting. Another 40,000 absentee ballots remain to be counted, though. If he wins, Stevens will be the first senator found guilty of criminal charges to be re-elected to office, the Boston Herald wrote.

Analysis: Hoping for a filibuster-proof Senate

Sources in this Story

o The New York Times: Senate Races Hang in Balance; Democrats Gain
o findingDulcinea: Elizabeth Dole Loses Senate Seat to Democrat Kay Hagan
o FOXNews.com: AP Pulls Result of Minnesota Senate Race
o Boston Herald: Sen. Ted Stevens holding thin margin in Alaska
o The Austin American-Statesman: Democrats strive for filibuster-proof Senate
o The Oregonian: Smith warns of a "Pres. Obama with no brakes"
o MarketWatch: Broken Congress will have chance to fix itself
o findingDulcinea: Ted Stevens to Seek Re-election Despite Conviction
o International Herald Tribune: In U.S. Congress, Democrats reap substantial gains

In the days before the election, Republicans, Democrats and political analysts were eyeing the possibility of a “filibuster-proof Senate,” according to The Austin American-Statesman.

With 23 of 49 seats up for re-election, Senate Republicans had more work to do this year than the Democrats, who only had 12 of their 51 seats to protect. Both parties were interested in maintaining their influence “because the Senate can make or break a presidency,” the paper reported.

Opinion: Things to fix

The possibility that one party could dominate both houses of Congress and the White House was worrisome to some election candidates. Sen. Gordon Smith, the Republican incumbent in Oregon, warned, “One-party dominance, a blank check, no checks and balances, could be a very unfortunate thing for our country,” according to Jeff Mapes of The Oregonian.

The new Congress has a “poor image” to repair, writes Robert Schroeder of MarketWatch. Some of the first issues lawmakers will be expected to address are the economy and the Iraq War, along with corruption scandals such as the case involving Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens.

“What they need is the appearance of dealing with and finding solutions to the nation’s toughest problems,” Stuart Rothenberg of the Rothenberg Political Report told MarketWatch.

The House of Representatives will also have “more maneuvering room” with Democrats picking up additional seats there, the International Herald Tribune reported. Analysts had predicted that a gain of 30 seats was possible, but it appeared the party would fall short of that number the day after the election.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said the Democrats’ gains could “increase bipartisanship, civility and fiscal responsibility,” she was quoted as saying by the International Herald Tribune.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/06/us/politics/06senate.html?_r=1&ref=politics

Senate Races Hang in the Balance

By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN

New York Times

November 5, 2008

It will probably be weeks before Democrats learn the scope of their collective triumph in the Senate races on Tuesday, with doubts remaining about the outcome in four states. But it was clear on Wednesday that the party had picked up at least five seats in the chamber, building a commanding advantage where they held only a razor-thin 51-49 margin before the election.

Republican incumbents clung to the barest of leads in Minnesota, Oregon and Alaska, and will probably face a runoff election in Georgia on Dec. 2. A recount loomed in the Minnesota race, where Senator Norm Coleman led his Democratic challenger, the comedian-turned-politician Al Franken, by fewer than 600 votes out of nearly 3 million cast.

But there was no doubt that Democrats had ousted Republican incumbents in New Hampshire and North Carolina and had captured seats in Virginia, Colorado and New Mexico that were being vacated by Republicans.

From the White Mountains of New Hampshire to the Rocky Mountains in the West and the glaciers of Alaska, Democratic candidates rode a wave of dissatisfaction with Republicans and the Bush administration, and mounted competitive challenges to many a formerly safe Republican seat, surprising even their own party leaders in some cases.

For all their success, however, the Democrats appeared to fall several seats short of the 60-vote majority that would enable them to push bills to a vote by overcoming filibusters. And it appeared that they had failed to topple one of their biggest targets, Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska, the longest-serving Republican in Senate history, despite Mr. Stevens’s recent conviction for violating federal ethics laws.

With 99 percent of Alaska’s precincts reporting, Mr. Stevens was ahead of Mark Begich, the mayor of Anchorage, by 48.2 percent to 46.7 percent, with the remaining votes going to fringe candidates. Since thousands of absentee ballots remained to be counted, the final outcome may not be known for days. Should Mr. Stevens indeed prevail, and should he reject the many calls for his resignation, the Senate would probably vote on whether to expel one of its members for the first time in many decades.

In the Minnesota race, the margin separating Mr. Franken and Mr. Coleman was slight enough to set the stage for a recount under state law.

“Let me be clear,” Mr. Franken said. “This race is too close to call, and we do not yet know who won.” He said his goal in demanding a recount was “to ensure that every vote is properly counted.” The results of the recount are not expected to be known for weeks.

Another contest still undecided by Wednesday morning was in Oregon, where Senator Gordon Smith, a Republican, led his Democratic challenger, Jeff Merkley, by less than one percent.

Even if none of the four remaining unsettled races goes the Democrats’ way, the party’s gains on Wednesday put it within reach of a working Senate coalition on major policy issues, given the defeat of the Republican incumbents John E. Sununu of New Hampshire and Elizabeth Dole of North Carolina, and the election of former Gov. Mark Warner in Virginia as well as the congressmen-cousins Mark Udall in Colorado and Tom Udall in New Mexico.

The Democrats’ triumph began with frustration over the war in Iraq and broadened into fury and dismay over economic turmoil at home, with home prices falling, unemployment on the rise and consumer confidence shattered. But even as the Democrats celebrated their early victories on Tuesday night, one of their most highly prized targets proved out of reach: the Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, beat back a serious challenge by Bruce Lunsford, a wealthy businessman.

“Winston Churchill once said that the most exhilarating feeling in life is to be shot at — and missed,” Mr. McConnell said in a victory speech in Louisville. “After the last few months, I think what he really meant to say is that there’s nothing more exhausting.”

At the headquarters of the National Republican Senatorial Committee in Washington, the mood on Tuesday night was less exhaustion than glumness. A handful of young aides milled around watching election returns on Fox News until Senator John Ensign of Nevada, the committee’s chairman, emerged to make a brief statement.

“Obviously we expected this sort of night,” Mr. Ensign said. “The political winds, I’ve said for some time, were blowing in our face.”

“We caught a very, very tough cycle,” he added, “tougher than even Watergate was.”

Mr. Ensign and other Republican senators have made no secret of their desire that Mr. Stevens resign because of his conviction for accepting but not reporting gifts related to extensive remodeling of his Alaska home. The senator has wielded great power because of his senior seat on the Appropriations Committee, commanding respect and sometimes fear.

The Senate has expelled only 15 members since 1789, most for supporting the Confederacy. In recent years, senators who have run afoul of the law have generally resigned rather than face expulsion, a step that requires 67 votes. Mr. Stevens said after his conviction that he would not step down voluntarily.

But even without a filibuster-proof majority, and without a defeat of Mr. McConnell or Mr. Stevens to crow about, Democrats were jubilant nonetheless.

“The days of obstruction are over,” said Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. “And in a bipartisan way, we in the Senate and our colleagues in the House will work together to turn America in the right direction after eight long years.”

Since winning control of the Senate in 2006, the Democrats have had little breathing room, holding their 51-to-49 edge only because two independents, Senators Bernard Sanders of Vermont and Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, chose to caucus with them. Mr. Lieberman has consistently voted against the Democrats on bills related to the Iraq war and national security, giving Republicans and President Bush an edge on those issues.

Now Mr. Lieberman, a close ally of Senator John McCain, faces considerable uncertainty about where he stands with the Democratic caucus; some colleagues have talked about stripping him of his post as chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee because his vote is no longer essential to their majority.

In New Hampshire, the Democrat, former Gov. Jeanne Shaheen, defeated Mr. Sununu in a bitter rematch of their 2002 contest by repeatedly tying him to President Bush on the war, national security, economic policies and energy. She becomes the first female senator in the state’s history and the first Democrat elected to the Senate from New Hampshire in more than 28 years.

Mrs. Shaheen, 61, capitalized on a huge transformation of the electorate in recent years that has shifted the state solidly into the Democratic column. Mr. Sununu, who at 44 is the youngest senator, had hoped to ride Mr. McCain’s coattails, but found himself battling alone as support for Mr. McCain dissipated and Senator Barack Obama opened up a wide lead in most polls.

In North Carolina, Kay Hagan, a little-known state senator, dealt a stunning defeat to Mrs. Dole, a former Transportation secretary and Republican candidate for president who has one of the most famous names in modern Republican politics.

Ms. Hagan portrayed Mrs. Dole — the wife of the former Senate majority leader and presidential candidate, Bob Dole — as a Washington insider and suggested that she had fallen out of step with the people of her state. Mrs. Dole, in turn, was unable to counter the rising enthusiasm for Mr. Obama among the state’s Democrats. Nor was she helped by running a campaign advertisement on television that labeled Ms. Hagan “godless.”

In Virginia, Mr. Warner, a popular former governor, had been heavily favored all year. He easily defeated another former governor, James S. Gilmore III, to succeed Senator John W. Warner (no relation), who is retiring after five terms as one of the Republican Party’s most respected voices on military affairs.

The Democrats came into the 2008 contests benefiting from a clear numerical advantage, with just 12 seats to defend, compared with 23 for the Republicans. And while five of those Republican seats were left vacant by retirees, every one of the dozen Democratic incumbents up for re-election chose to run for another term.

In one bright spot for Republicans, Senator Susan Collins of Maine easily beat back a challenge by Representative Tom Allen, a Democrat whose campaign fizzled even as Mr. Obama won the state by a sizable margin.

In another, Senator Saxby Chambliss of Georgia appeared to pull ahead in his race against Jim Martin, a former Democratic state legislator, and a minor-party candidate, the Libertarian Allen Buckley. But it appeared that Mr. Chambliss would fall just short of winning the 50 percent of the vote required for election under Georgia law, necessitating a runoff against Mr. Martin on Dec. 2.

Mr. Chambliss could have an advantage in such a runoff, since Mr. Martin probably benefited from a coattail effect with Mr. Obama on the top of the ticket on Tuesday. On the other hand, President-elect Obama and his political advisers could use their influence against Mr. Chambliss, who unseated the Democrat Max Cleland in a bitter contest six years ago.

In South Dakota, Senator Tim Johnson, a Democratic incumbent who nearly died of a brain hemorrhage two years ago, easily won re-election. His victory was dramatically different from his 2002 triumph, when he defeated then Representative John Thune by a mere 524 votes in the closest Senate race in the country. (Mr. Thune, a Republican, was elected to the Senate in 2004, ousting Senator Tom Daschle, the Democratic leader.)

Bernie Becker and David Stout contributed reporting from Washington, and Jack Healy from New York.

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http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122420205889842989.html

A Liberal Supermajority: Get ready for 'change' we haven't seen since 1965, or 1933

Editorial

Wall Street Journal

October 17, 2008

If the current polls hold, Barack Obama will win the White House on November 4 and Democrats will consolidate their Congressional majorities, probably with a filibuster-proof Senate or very close to it. Without the ability to filibuster, the Senate would become like the House, able to pass whatever the majority wants.

Though we doubt most Americans realize it, this would be one of the most profound political and ideological shifts in U.S. history. Liberals would dominate the entire government in a way they haven't since 1965, or 1933. In other words, the election would mark the restoration of the activist government that fell out of public favor in the 1970s. If the U.S. really is entering a period of unchecked left-wing ascendancy, Americans at least ought to understand what they will be getting, especially with the media cheering it all on.

The nearby table shows the major bills that passed the House this year or last before being stopped by the Senate minority. Keep in mind that the most important power of the filibuster is to shape legislation, not merely to block it. The threat of 41 committed Senators can cause the House to modify its desires even before legislation comes to a vote. Without that restraining power, all of the following have very good chances of becoming law in 2009 or 2010.

- Medicare for all. When HillaryCare cratered in 1994, the Democrats concluded they had overreached, so they carved up the old agenda into smaller incremental steps, such as Schip for children. A strongly Democratic Congress is now likely to lay the final flagstones on the path to government-run health insurance from cradle to grave.

Mr. Obama wants to build a public insurance program, modeled after Medicare and open to everyone of any income. According to the Lewin Group, the gold standard of health policy analysis, the Obama plan would shift between 32 million and 52 million from private coverage to the huge new entitlement. Like Medicare or the Canadian system, this would never be repealed.

The commitments would start slow, so as not to cause immediate alarm. But as U.S. health-care spending flowed into the default government options, taxes would have to rise or services would be rationed, or both. Single payer is the inevitable next step, as Mr. Obama has already said is his ultimate ideal.

- The business climate. "We have some harsh decisions to make," Speaker Nancy Pelosi warned recently, speaking about retribution for the financial panic. Look for a replay of the Pecora hearings of the 1930s, with Henry Waxman, John Conyers and Ed Markey sponsoring ritual hangings to further their agenda to control more of the private economy. The financial industry will get an overhaul in any case, but telecom, biotech and drug makers, among many others, can expect to be investigated and face new, more onerous rules. See the "Issues and Legislation" tab on Mr. Waxman's Web site for a not-so-brief target list.

The danger is that Democrats could cause the economic downturn to last longer than it otherwise will by enacting regulatory overkill like Sarbanes-Oxley. Something more punitive is likely as well, for instance a windfall profits tax on oil, and maybe other industries.

- Union supremacy. One program certain to be given right of way is "card check." Unions have been in decline for decades, now claiming only 7.4% of the private-sector work force, so Big Labor wants to trash the secret-ballot elections that have been in place since the 1930s. The "Employee Free Choice Act" would convert workplaces into union shops merely by gathering signatures from a majority of employees, which means organizers could strongarm those who opposed such a petition.

The bill also imposes a compulsory arbitration regime that results in an automatic two-year union "contract" after 130 days of failed negotiation. The point is to force businesses to recognize a union whether the workers support it or not. This would be the biggest pro-union shift in the balance of labor-management power since the Wagner Act of 1935.

- Taxes. Taxes will rise substantially, the only question being how high. Mr. Obama would raise the top income, dividend and capital-gains rates for "the rich," substantially increasing the cost of new investment in the U.S. More radically, he wants to lift or eliminate the cap on income subject to payroll taxes that fund Medicare and Social Security. This would convert what was meant to be a pension insurance program into an overt income redistribution program. It would also impose a probably unrepealable increase in marginal tax rates, and a permanent shift upward in the federal tax share of GDP.

- The green revolution. A tax-and-regulation scheme in the name of climate change is a top left-wing priority. Cap and trade would hand Congress trillions of dollars in new spending from the auction of carbon credits, which it would use to pick winners and losers in the energy business and across the economy. Huge chunks of GDP and millions of jobs would be at the mercy of Congress and a vast new global-warming bureaucracy. Without the GOP votes to help stage a filibuster, Senators from carbon-intensive states would have less ability to temper coastal liberals who answer to the green elites.

- Free speech and voting rights. A liberal supermajority would move quickly to impose procedural advantages that could cement Democratic rule for years to come. One early effort would be national, election-day voter registration. This is a long-time goal of Acorn and others on the "community organizer" left and would make it far easier to stack the voter rolls. The District of Columbia would also get votes in Congress -- Democratic, naturally.

Felons may also get the right to vote nationwide, while the Fairness Doctrine is likely to be reimposed either by Congress or the Obama FCC. A major goal of the supermajority left would be to shut down talk radio and other voices of political opposition.

- Special-interest potpourri. Look for the watering down of No Child Left Behind testing standards, as a favor to the National Education Association. The tort bar's ship would also come in, including limits on arbitration to settle disputes and watering down the 1995 law limiting strike suits. New causes of legal action would be sprinkled throughout most legislation. The anti-antiterror lobby would be rewarded with the end of Guantanamo and military commissions, which probably means trying terrorists in civilian courts. Google and MoveOn.org would get "net neutrality" rules, subjecting the Internet to intrusive regulation for the first time.

It's always possible that events -- such as a recession -- would temper some of these ambitions. Republicans also feared the worst in 1993 when Democrats ran the entire government, but it didn't turn out that way. On the other hand, Bob Dole then had 43 GOP Senators to support a filibuster, and the entire Democratic Party has since moved sharply to the left. Mr. Obama's agenda is far more liberal than Bill Clinton's was in 1992, and the Southern Democrats who killed Al Gore's BTU tax and modified liberal ambitions are long gone.

In both 1933 and 1965, liberal majorities imposed vast expansions of government that have never been repealed, and the current financial panic may give today's left another pretext to return to those heydays of welfare-state liberalism. Americans voting for "change" should know they may get far more than they ever imagined.

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http://blog.lehighvalleylive.com/committeeofcorrespondence/2008/08/a_filibuster_proof_congress.html
A Filibuster Proof Congress

Posted by Chris Miller

August 28, 2008 08:40AM

While most of us are looking at the presidential race between Barack Obama and John Mccain, few are paying attention to the various races going on in Congress and particularly in Harry Reid's Senate. At this moment 23 Republican senators up for re-election that the parrty will have to assist and support. The Democrats have but 12 seats up for re-election.

There are 435 House seats up for re-election. Currently the Democrats control 235 seats while the Republican have 199 seats. There is one vacancy. This year there were three special elections held and the Democrats won all three including the seat held by former speaker Dennis Hastert in a strong Republican district. The Republicans hope to regain their majority position or at least gain additional seats.

What many voters are unaware of is that the Democrats are spending as much money on the Congressional races as they are on the Presidential race. The reason for this is that the Democrats are determined to obtain a filibuster proof Congress. This would mean that the real power would be in the hands of Reid and Pelosi no matter who becomes the president. If that happens I believe that this nation would become a complete socailist nation, a path we have been on since the Great Depression and the era of FDR.

When the Democrats took power in 1932 they had a filibuster proof Congress for the first time in the nation's history. The citizens had elected a very liberal Democrat, some say fascist, as president. Roosevelt proposed and Congress approved that massive and expensive program known as the New Deal that called for massive subsidies of farmers something that we still do today. It increased the bureaucracy of the Federal Government that simply continues to grow. Roosevelt was also bold enough to attack the Supreme Court calling for a major alteration of that body. In the process of all of this he created the administrative state that enhanced the power of the Federal Government over the citizens.

Flash forward to November of 1963. In that month John Kennedy was assassinated and Lyndon Johnson was sworn as President of the United States. Johnson was the Democrat presidential nominee in 1964 and this nation, still weeping over the death of Kennedy, not only elected Johnson, they gave him, for the second time in our history, a filibuster proof Congress. With that in place Johnson declared that we would be able to afford guns and butter. He placed this nation on a path to disaster with a welfare program he called "THE WAR ON POVERTY". We spent trillions of dollars on this welfare state and in the process of all this generosity damn near broke the bank while reducing the population of the inner cities to a dependant class that was not changed until 1994 when the Republicans took over the House and forced Bill Clinton to sign Welfare Reform legislation.

Now we have a Democrat Party that is looking to put into place, for the third time in our history, a filibuster proof Congress. Harry Reid will not need to have 60 Democrat Senators because with the RINOs there he will be able to pick off the likes of Olympia Snow, Susan Collins, or Arlene Specter to get legislatlion passed contrary to the good of the nation and its people. Reid and Pelosi will become the KingPins of Congress and will have THE ONE in the White House. The question, therefore, is where do you think we will be in two to four years of an Obama administration with a filibuster proof Congress.

I would remind you that until he joined forces with Hitler, Benito Mussolini was beloved by the likes of Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. The national and world press wrote glowingly of Mussolini. He even came to the US and made a movie. Roosevelt was compared to him to the point that his advisors had to remind FDR that that was not a good thing. Now we have in Barack Obama and others who call themselves Progressives. Their goal, to turn us into a socialist state. With a filibuster proof Congress that is possible. So along with the presidential race bear in mind that the Congressional races are just as important as the presidential maybe even more so.

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http://www.rockymountainnews.com/news/2008/aug/27/schumer-urges-filibuster-proof-senate-dems

Schumer urges filibuster-proof Senate for Dems: Calls for party to add to slim Senate cushion

By Kevin Flynn

Rocky Mountain News

August 27, 2008

PEPSI CENTER -- Hillary Clinton’s New York Senate colleague urged the party to work for a filibuster-proof upper house to help usher Democratic programs through Congress next year.

“Barack Obama cannot do it alone,” said Sen. Charles Schumer, chair of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. “Without a strong Democratic majority in the Senate, is ambitious agenda will be thwarted by the defenders of the status quo whose goals can be boiled down to a single word: No.

“Without a large Democratic majority, President Obama might even have to pare back the breadth and strength of what he proposes.

“We know what John McCain and his friends in the Senate will do, because we’ve seen it far too many times in the last two years. Ninety-two times, they filibustered important legislation to change the direction of this country.”

Currently there are 49 Democrats and 49 Republicans in the 10-member Senate, but two independents, Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, caucus with the Democrats to give them a nominal 51-member majority.

But under Senate rules, legislation can be stopped from moving forward unless 60 members vote to end debate.

There are 35 Senate contests in November. Twenty-one are held by Republicans, and Schumer said Democrats are hopeful of picking up several of them.

“There are 17 states where we have a good chance to beat Republicans,” he said, including retiring Colorado Sen. Wayne Allard’s seat, long held by Republicans. “This is, ladies and gentlemen, a once in a generation opportunity.”

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http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=OThhODViNWRiYzEzNDgwZmFiZGMxZWFkMDg4ZjliNWM=

A Filibuster-Proof Congress? A sinkhole has opened under Congressional Republicans

By Mona Charen

March 28, 2008

There are dozens of reasons for John McCain to be gloomy this spring. So many of the structural factors at work in this election redound to his disadvantage. To name just a few: 1) he seeks to succeed a very unpopular two-term president of the same party; 2) he is a member of a body (Congress) whose approval ratings are even lower than those of the president; 3) poll after poll suggests that Republican identification among voters is plunging; 4) the economy is skidding; 5) money is cascading into Democratic sacks and only trickling into Republican hands; and 6) large majorities (66 percent in a recent poll) say they think the country is on the wrong track — a number that does not bode well for the party holding the White House.

And yet, McCain is riding high because the two Democratic front-runners are chewing each other’s ankles and actually drawing blood. And there is every reason to believe that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama will hold their mutual death grip for several more weeks or even months — pointing out for voters the other’s unfitness to serve as president. It’s a long way to November, but it is certainly possible now to envision how McCain could come out on top.

What seems less foreseeable is a concomitant revival in the fortunes of Congressional Republicans. While national attention has focused on the presidential race, a sinkhole has been opening under the Republicans in Congress. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and its Senate counterpart have reportedly raised $66 million for this election cycle so far. The Republican committees have raised $20 million. While the seesaw is somewhat righted by fundraising by the Republican National Committee ($22 million versus only $3 million for the Democrats), the rest of the picture is pretty alarming for Republicans.

As Jonathan Salant of Bloomberg news reports, Democrats had more cash on hand at the start of 2008 in 31 of the 41 most competitive House and Senate races. And Republican House members keep doing something that increases the Democrats’ chances — resigning. A total of 26 incumbent Republican members of Congress have announced their intention not to seek reelection this year whereas only five Democrats have done the same. This almost reaches the record set in 1952, when 27 incumbents left the Capital. Former Speaker of the House Denny Hastert left office midway through his term. In a special election to fill his seat in a Republican district that voted 55 percent for Bush in 2004, Democrat Bill Foster won with 52 percent of the vote.

The public holds Congress in low esteem, but this is not apparently harming the party in control as much as it is Republicans. An ABC News/Washington Post poll found that 54 percent of respondents preferred to see Democrats maintain control of Congress in 2008. The current balance is 51-49 in the Senate and 233-198 (4 vacant) in the House.

Among the Senate seats Republicans may have trouble holding are the open seats in Virginia, New Mexico, and Colorado. Also considered vulnerable because their states are trending more liberal are incumbents John E. Sununu of New Hampshire, Norm Coleman of Minnesota, Gordon H. Smith of Oregon, and Susan Collins of Maine. In order to obtain the magic number of 60 — a veto-proof majority — the Democrats will have to win nine contests. That’s a tall order, but far from out of the question.

Some of the talk about excitement on the Democratic side — particularly the focus on huge disparities in voter turnout — is simply an artifact of this year’s close contest between Clinton and Obama. Voters in many primaries who hadn’t shown up in past years did so in 2008 because their votes really mattered. On the other hand, the party identification and fundraising numbers are sobering.

It would be nearly impossible for the minority party in Congress to run on its own platform (like the Contract with America) in a presidential year. Republicans therefore find themselves in the peculiar position of having to hope for salvation from a “maverick” who has never been much of a party man. But in this strange year, anything is possible.

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http://hnn.us/articles/12012.html

Excerpts: The Senate Filibuster Debate

George Mason University’s History News Network

5-19-05

In the course of the opening Senate debate concerning the nomination of Priscilla Richman Owen to be U.S. Circuit Judge for the Fifth District senators frequently invoked history. Excerpts follow.

Bill Frist, Senate Majority Leader (R-TN)

In the last Congress, for the first time in history a minority of Senators obstructed the principle of a fair up-or-down vote on judicial nominees. That was unprecedented. Never in 214 years of Senate history had a judicial nominee with majority support been denied an up-or-down vote. Yet it happened--again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again. A minority of Senators denied an up-or-down vote not just once to one nominee but 18 times on 10 individual nominees. ...

I have to believe the Senate will make the right choice. We will choose the Constitution over obstruction. We will choose principle over politics. We will choose votes over vacillation. And when we do, the Senate will be the better for it. The Senate will be, as Daniel Webster once described it: ". . . a body to which the country looks, with confidence, for wise, moderate, patriotic, and healing counsels."

To realize this vision, we don't need to look as far back as the age of Webster or Clay or Calhoun. All we must do is look at the recent past and take inspiration from the era of Baker, Byrd, and Dole. For 70 percent of the 20th century, the same party controlled the White House and the Senate. Yet during that period, no minority ever denied a judicial nominee with majority support an up-or-down vote on this floor. Howard Baker's Republican minority didn't deny Democrat Jimmy Carter's nominees. Robert Byrd's Democratic minority did not deny Republican Ronald Reagan's nominees. Bob Dole's Republican minority did not deny Democrat Bill Clinton's nominees. These minorities showed restraint. They respected the appointments process. They practiced the fine but fragile art of political civility. Sure they disagreed with the majority at times, but they nonetheless allowed up-or-down votes to occur.

Harry Reid, Minority Leader (D-NV)

Mr. President, the majority leader said that during the Dole years, Clinton nominees were treated fairly. Sixty-nine Clinton nominees were not even given the decency of a hearing. They never saw the light of day. We have participated in hearings. The matters have come to the floor. For my friend to say that Clinton was treated fairly under the Dole years is simply untrue....

The first filibuster in the Congress happened in 1790. It was used by lawmakers from Virginia and South Carolina who were trying to prevent Philadelphia from hosting the first Congress. Since then, the filibuster has been employed hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of times. It has been employed on legislative matters. It has been employed on procedural matters relating to the President's nominations for Cabinet and sub-Cabinet posts. And it has been used on judges for all those years. One scholar estimates that 20 percent of the judges nominated by Presidents have fallen by the wayside, most of them as a result of filibusters....

A conversation between Thomas Jefferson and George Washington I believe describes the Senate and our Founding Fathers' vision of this body in which we are so fortunate to serve. Jefferson asked Washington: "What is the purpose of the Senate?" Washington responded with a question of his own: "Why did you pour that coffee into your saucer?" Jefferson replied: "To cool it." To which Washington said: "Even so, we pour legislation into the senatorial saucer to cool it."

That is exactly what the filibuster does. It encourages moderation and consensus, gives voice to the minority so cooler heads may prevail. ...

I spoke yesterday about Senator Holt and his 1939 filibuster to protect workers' wages and hours. There are also recent examples of the filibuster achieving good. In 1985, Senators from rural States--even though there were few of them--used the filibuster to force Congress to address a major crisis in which thousands of farmers were on the brink of bankruptcy. In 1995, 10 years later, the filibuster was used by Senators to protect the rights of workers to a fair wage and a safe workplace.

I cannot stand here and say the filibuster has always been used for positive purposes. It has not. Just as it has been used to bring about social change, it was also used to stall progress that this country needed to make. It is often shown that the filibuster was used against civil rights legislation. But civil rights legislation passed. Civil rights advocates met the burden. It is noteworthy that today, as I speak, the Congressional Black Caucus is opposed to the nuclear option--unanimously opposed to it. ...

For 200 years, we have had the right to extended debate. It is not some ``procedural gimmick.'' It is within the vision of the Founding Fathers of this country. They did it; we didn't do it. They established a government so that no one person and no single party could have total control.

Some in this Chamber want to throw out 214 years of Senate history in the quest for absolute power. They want to do away with Mr. Smith, as depicted in that great movie, being able to come to Washington. They want to do away with the filibuster. They think they are wiser than our Founding Fathers. I doubt that is true....

For further analysis, let's look at Robert Caro. He is a noted historian and Pulitzer Prize winner, and he said this at a meeting I attended. He spoke about the history of the filibuster. He made a point about its legacy that was important. He noted that when legislation is supported by the majority of Americans, it eventually overcomes a filibuster's delay, as a public protest far outweighs any Senator's appetite to filibuster.

But when legislation only has the support of the minority, the filibuster slows the legislation--prevents a Senator from ramming it through, and gives the American people enough time to join the opposition....

The Senate is now being threatened with a fundamental change through a self-inflicted wound. ``Master of the Senate'' author Robert Caro recalled an important chapter in the Senate and the Nation's history. Consider this and contrast it with what is happening here today.

When Senator Lyndon Johnson of Texas left the Senate, he was the most powerful majority leader in the history of this country. When he was elected Vice President with President Kennedy and he was preparing to leave the Senate, he told his protege and successor, Senate Mansfield of Montana, that he, Johnson, would keep attending the Democratic luncheons and help his successor as majority leader in running the Senate. Senator Mansfield said no, Vice President Johnson was no longer a Member of the Senate, but an officer of the executive branch and by means of that office was accorded the privilege of presiding over the Senate.

What a contrast Senator Mike Mansfield's respect for the separation of powers and checks and balances is from those in power today. I say that as one who was privileged to serve here with Senator Mansfield. Instead, this White House took an active role in naming the present Senate leadership and this White House regularly sends Vice President Cheney and Karl Rove to Republican caucus luncheons to give the Republican majority its marching orders. What a difference from the days of Mike Mansfield and Lyndon Johnson.

Arlen Specter (R-PA)

As a starting point, it is important to acknowledge that both sides--Democrats and Republicans--have been at fault. Both claim they are the victims and that their party's nominees have been treated worse than the other's. Both sides cite endless statistics. I have heard so many numbers spun so many different ways that my head is spinning. I think even Benjamin Disraeli, the man who coined the phrase, there are ``lies, damn lies, and statistics,'' would be amazed at the creativity employed by both sides in contriving numbers in this debate.

In 1987, upon gaining control of the Senate and the Judiciary Committee, the Democrats denied hearings to seven of President Reagan's circuit court nominees and denied floor votes for two additional circuit court nominees. As a result, the confirmation for Reagan circuit nominees fell from 89 percent prior to the Democratic takeover to 65 percent afterwards. ...

A well-known story is told about Benjamin Franklin. Upon exiting the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, he was approached by a group of citizens asking what sort of a government the constitutional delegates had created. Franklin responded, ``A Republic, if you can keep it.''

In this brief response, Franklin captured the essential fragility of our great democracy. Although enshrined in a written Constitution and housed in granite buildings, our government is utterly dependent upon something far less permanent, the wisdom of its leaders. Our Founding Fathers gave us a great treasure, but like any inheritance, we pass it on to successive generations only if our generation does not squander it. If we seek to emulate the vision and restraint of Franklin and the Founding Fathers, we can hand down to our children and grandchildren the Republic they deserve, but if we turn our backs on their example, we will debase and cheapen what they have given us.

At this critical juncture in the history of the Senate, let us tread carefully, choose wisely, and prove ourselves worthy of our great inheritance. Since the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics avoided a nuclear confrontation in the Cold War by concessions and confidence-building measures, why should not Senators do the same by crossing the aisle in the spirit of compromise?...

Patrick Leahy (D-VT)

What the White House ignores is that President Bush completed his first term with the third highest total of confirmed judges in our history--in our history--and more Federal judges on the courts than at any time in our history. The truth is, Senate Democrats have cooperated extensively in confirming more than 95 percent of this President's judicial nominees--208 of them.

George Washington, the most popular and powerful President in our history, was not successful in all of his judicial nominations. The Senate rejected President Washington's nomination of John Rutledge to be Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. For example. And certainly I would hope that the current President would not assume he stands higher in our history books than George Washington.

The truth is, in President Bush's first term, the 204 judges confirmed were more than were confirmed in either of President Clinton's two terms, more than during the term of this President's father, and more than Ronald Reagan's first term when he had a Republican majority in the Senate. By last December, we had reduced judicial vacancies from the 110 vacancies I inherited in the summer of 2001 to its lowest level, lowest rate, and lowest number in decades, since President Ronald Reagan was in office. ...

How can any Senator look himself or herself in the mirror if they weaken the Senate, if they allow the Senate to no longer be the check and balance it should be? Why would anyone want to serve here if they come to this body with that in mind?

James Madison, one of the Framers of our Constitution, warned in Federalist Number 47 of the very danger that is threatening our great Nation, a threat to our freedoms from within: "[The] accumulation of all powers legislative, executive and judiciary in the same hands . . . may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny."

That is what they are trying to do, put all the power into one hand. All of us should know enough of history to know we should not do that. George Washington, our great first President, reiterated the danger in his famous Farewell Address to the American People: "The spirit of encroachment tends to consolidate the powers of all the departments in one, and thus to create, whatever the form of government, a real despotism."

Now, our freedoms as Americans are the fruit of too much sacrifice to have the rules broken in the Senate, especially to break them in collusion with the executive branch. What ever happened to the concept of separation of powers?...

Charles Schumer (D-NY)

The Senator from Tennessee, our majority leader, who got on the floor earlier today and said for 214 years there have not been filibusters of judges, has a very short memory. I asked him this morning, Did you not, on March 8, 2000, vote in favor of a filibuster of Richard Paez to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals? Here is a copy of the vote. Voting no: Frist, Republican of Tennessee. Did he think it was unconstitutional then? He said on the floor, in answer, Well, some are successful, some are not. I have never known the Constitution to say that something is unconstitutional if it fails and constitutional if it succeeds.

One out of every five Supreme Court nominees did not make it to the Supreme Court. That is part of the tradition of this country. Should the Senate have majority say? No. Should we have the say the majority of the time? No. Should we have the say some of the time? Yes. And there is the balance. The more a President consults, the more the President nominates moderate nominees, the more likely his nominees will succeed.

Dianne Feinstein (D-CA)

I think John Adams, in 1776, made it very clear on the point of checks and balances and an independent judiciary, when he said:

"The dignity and stability of government in all its branches, the morals of the people and every blessing of society, depends so much upon on upright and skillful administration of justice, that the judicial power ought to be distinct from both the legislative and executive, and independent upon both, that so it may be a check upon both, as both should be checked upon that . . . [The judges'] minds should not be distracted with jarring interests; they should not be dependent upon any man or body of men."

Now, that is the clearest statement of intent from our Founding Fathers, that the judiciary should be and must be independent. That is what is being eroded with the partisanship and with the nuclear option. The Senate was meant to play an active role in the selection process. The judiciary was not solely to be determined by the executive branch. Last week, I described how, in the Constitutional Convention, the first effort put forward was actually to have the Senate nominate and appoint judges. Then it was later on, with the consideration of others, changed to allow the President to nominate. But the explanation in the Federalist Papers is all centered around the Senate having the real power to confirm, and that power is not a rubberstamp....

I pointed out earlier where, in 1881, President Hayes nominated a gentleman to the Supreme Court. That was successfully filibustered throughout President Hayes' term. When President Garfield then came into office, he renominated the individual, and the Senate then confirmed that individual. But that does not negate the filibuster. It was the first recorded act of a filibuster of a judicial nominee, and it, in fact, took place and was successful for the length of President Hayes' term.

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http://www.judgingtheenvironment.org/assets/files/Conservative_Anti-Nuclear_Quotes.doc

Conservative and Republican Concern and Opposition to the “Nuclear Option” [ELIMINATING FILIBUSTERS]

George Will in Newsweek (December 6, 2004):
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6596229/site/newsweek/

The filibuster is an important defense of minority rights, enabling democratic government to measure and respect not merely numbers but also intensity in public controversies. Filibusters enable intense minorities to slow the governmental juggernaut. Conservatives, who do not think government is sufficiently inhibited, should cherish this blocking mechanism. And someone should puncture Republicans' current triumphalism by reminding them that someday they will again be in the minority.

The promiscuous use of filibusters, against policies as well as nominees, has trivialized the tactic. But filibusters do not forever deflect the path of democratic government. Try to name anything significant that an American majority has desired, strongly and protractedly, but has not received because of a filibuster.

Former Senators Jim McClure (R-ID) and Malcolm Wallop (R-WY) in the Wall Street Journal (March 15, 2005):
http://www.wallstreetjournal.com/

“Conservatives, in and out of the Senate, are now being assured that this extraordinary approach will not be applied to the legislative filibuster, which, in the not-so-distant past, was our only defense against the excesses of a bipartisan liberalism. There are several problems with that argument. First and foremost, as a matter of principle, we should not accept the contrary-to-fact assertion that the Senate and its rules do not continue from election to election.

Second, setting aside principle -- ouch! -- it is naive to think that what is done to the judicial filibuster will not later be done to its legislative counterpart, whether by a majority leader named Reid, or Clinton, or Kennedy.

Third, even if a senator were that naive, he or she should take a broader look at Senate procedure. The very reasons being given for allowing a 51-vote majority to shut off debate on judges apply equally well -- in fact, they apply more aptly -- to the rest of the executive calendar, of which judicial nominations are only one part. That includes all executive branch nominations, even military promotions. “

Former Senator Alan Simpson (R-WY) in an appearance on NPR’s The Connection (April 26, 2005):
http://www.theconnection.org/shows/2005/04/20050426_b_main.asp (audio)
http://judgingthefuture.net/2005/05/a_little_good_a.php (transcript)

“They [Republicans] will be out of power one day, and there’ll be tears as big as golf balls streaming down their cheeks as they look and say “we put this in motion and we’re sitting here immobilized, neutered in this game.” I can promise you.”

“But there isn’t a question in my mind that when the Republicans go out of power and they, they’re looking for a protection of minority rights, they’re going to be alarmed and saddened. So when they pull the trigger, the boomerang may not come back for a few years but when it does it will get them right in the back of the neck.”

Former Senator Bill Armstrong (R-CO) quoted in Roll Call (April 25, 2005):
http://www.rollcall.com/

“Having served in the majority and in the minority, I know that it’s worthwhile to have the minority empowered. As a conservative, I think there is a value to having a constraint on the majority.”

Former Senator David Durenberger (R-MN) writing in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune (with former Vice-President Walter Mondale) (May 5, 2005):
http://www.startribune.com/stories/1519/5385977.html

“The American people should know that the proposed repeal of the filibuster rule for judicial nominees by majority vote will profoundly and permanently undermine the purpose of the U.S. Senate as it has stood since Thomas Jefferson first wrote the Senate's rules.”

Former Senator Charles “Mac” Matthias (R-MD) writing in the Washington Post (May 12, 2005):
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/11/AR2005051101764.html

“Make no mistake about it: If the Senate ever creates the precedent that, at any time, its rules are what 51 senators say they are -- without debate -- then the value of a senator's voice, vote and views, and the clout of his state, will be diminished.”

Former Congressman Mickey Edwards (R-OK) quoted in the Washington Post (May 10, 2005):
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/09/AR2005050901126.html

“It's a total disavowal of the basic framework of the system of government. It's much more efficient [for Bush], but our government was not designed to be efficient.”

“Every president grabs for more power. What's different to me is the acquiescence of Congress.”

Ed Rollins (former aide to Presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan and H.W. Bush) quoted in the Denver Post (April 10, 2005):
http://www.denverpost.com/Stories/0,1413,36%257E28203%257E2808623,00.html?search=filter

“The latest gambits - DeLay's proposed inquisition of the federal judiciary and Majority Leader Bill Frist's planned attempt to change the legislative rule on filibusters to ram conservative judicial nominees through the Senate - could further polarize and alienate Americans, says Rollins.”

“’If Republicans change the filibuster rule, there will be nothing that gets done in this town for two years,’ Rollins predicts.”

"’The country is not as concerned about judges as it is about Congress showing some fiscal responsibility and doing what it is supposed to do,’ he says.”

David Hoppe (former Chief of Staff to Sen. Lott (R-MS)) in an appearance on The Journal Editorial Report on PBS (April 1, 2005):
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/journaleditorialreport/040105/briefing.html

[T]he system is broken. The question is, how do you try and fix the system. I keep going back, as I consider this, to a line from the play A MAN FOR ALL SEASONS, "Richard, after you've cut down all the trees, where will you hide when the devil comes after you?"

That's the problem with the nuclear option, because it will not stop there. The next step when somebody needs it will be to get rid of the filibuster on legislative issues. Say a president seven, eight years in the future decides that his national health care program just has to be done, and they've got the might to make right of 51 senators. Should they get rid of the filibuster on legislative items? That's the way we're headed here if we do it this way.

Christine Todd Whitman, Former Republican Governor of New Jersey and EPA Administrator speaking to Virginia Conservation Network as quoted in the Richmond Times-Dispatch (April 29, 2005):
http://www.timesdispatch.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=RTD%2FMGArticle%2FRTD_BasicArticle&c=MGArticle&cid=1031782426426&path=!news&s=1045855934842

“Huge political mistake”

“[I]f the Senate's Democratic minority is stripped of the power to filibuster against Bush picks for the federal courts, it will be ‘portrayed as Republicans trying to railroad through certain ideological justices.’”

Stephen Moore, President, Free Enterprise Fund, Founder and Past-President, Club for Growth writing in the Washington Post (with Wade Henderson, Leadership Conference on Civil Rights) (April 17, 2005):
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A57777-2005Apr15.html

“What troubles us most is that the "nuclear option" could become a routine tactic for the majority party in the Senate to push legislation through with only a 51-vote requirement for passage. The Senate was always envisioned by the Founders to be the deliberative body in Congress, in which the heated emotions of the moment's debate could cool before new laws or judges were approved. The filibuster and the 60-vote cloture rule are nearly indispensable in facilitating full debate and strong consensus for legislative action.”

“Eviscerating the filibuster would violate the spirit of the Constitution and endanger our rights as individuals against excessive governmental power.”

Michael Hammond, Gun Owners of America (and former General Counsel to Senate Steering Committee [1978-89]) in Kill the Filibuster?
http://www.gunowners.org/a031505a.htm

“The reason the Second Amendment is still viable today is, in large part, because of the Senate filibuster.”

“If any Senate rule, at any time, can be eliminated, without debate, by fifty senators, the Senate rules –- all of them –- effectively become meaningless in any context in which they would matter.

The legislative filibuster will die the first time it becomes important –- perhaps in connection with Social Security reform, perhaps after the Democrats regain control of the Senate.”

Mark Mix, President of National Right-to-Work Committee (March 14, 2005):
http://www.right-to-work.org/content.php3?id=350

“For Right to Work supporters, the filibuster rule has been and remains a vital safety net. We would be extremely foolhardy to stand by while anyone, regardless of how good their intentions, proceeds to tear holes in it.

And make no mistake. If a bare majority of senators vote now to eliminate judicial filibusters, legislative filibusters will not stand for long. If the Senate’s presiding officer can rule, with the consent of 51 senators, that only a bare majority vote is needed to end debate on judicial nominees, then he can also rule that only a bare majority is needed to end debate on legislation.
Jim Boulet, Executive Director of English First, in his memo titled: How Liberals Could Thrive in a Post-Nuclear-Option Senate [Oppose the Nuclear Option (web page title)] (March 29, 2005):

http://www.englishfirst.org/nuclear_option/nuclear%20_option_memo32905.htm
“[O]nce such at precedent is established, any legislation which commands the support of 51 but not 60 Senators could provoke a similar request for a ruling that requirements for a supermajority are not ‘in order.’”

“Keep in mind that much of the Democratic "wish list" involves sweeping new legislation which will be heavily supported by the mainstream media. The Republican agenda, by contrast, tends to involve incremental changes to existing programs.”

Linda Chavez, Syndicated Columnist, former Bush nominee for Labor Secretary writing in the Washington Times (April 29, 2005):
http://www.washingtontimes.com/functions/print.php?StoryID=20050428-095317-7482r

“The more I think about it, the more I am convinced Republicans would make a mistake getting rid of the filibuster. Republicans won't be in the majority forever, and they may rue the day they deprive themselves of the ability to block a candidate to some future Supreme Court. Worse, they may end up making themselves look like the heavies instead of forcing the Democrats to take center stage as the real fanatics. Let the filibuster stay -- and force the Democrats to actually use it.”

Judge Kenneth Starr, Former DC Circuit Judge, Former Independent Counsel, Dean, Pepperdine Law School on the CBS Evening News (May 9, 2005):
http://www6.lexisnexis.com/publisher/EndUser?Action=UserDisplayFullDocument&orgId=574&topicId=100007217&docId=l:279226796&isSearch=true

“It may prove to have the kind of long-term boomerang effect, damage on the institution of the Senate that thoughtful senators may come to regret.”

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http://www.c-spanarchives.org/congress/?q=node/77531&id=7326906

JUDICIAL NOMINATIONS

Text From the Congressional Record

C-Span Congressional Chronicle

4-21-05

Mr. REID. I understand we are in a period for morning business. I will use leader time. Mr. President, I have the greatest respect for my friend from South Dakota, but his assertion of facts is simply without foundation. When the Democrats took the majority in the Senate, I, along with others, said that this was not payback time; we were not going to treat the Republicans the way they treated us during the Clinton years. During those years, they did not have the decency even to have hearings for judicial nominations; they simply left them, 60 in number, in the committee. We thought that was inappropriate, and that is the reason during the time that President Bush has been President--we were in the majority, and we are now in the minority--we have approved 205 judges for President Bush and turned down 10, which is a pretty good record.

For people to say there have not been judicial filibusters in the past is simply without historical foundation. In the early days of this Republic, there was no way to stop a filibuster. The only way one could stop a filibuster on judges or anything else was by virtue of agreeing to stop talking. Many judges were simply left by the wayside. They were talked out and they simply never came forward for a vote before the Senate.

The most noteworthy filibuster of a judge that would require a vote that failed was in 1881. There was a filibuster of a judge that went to a vote. Prior to that time, they never even went to a vote.

It was determined in the Senate in 1970 that it would be appropriate to figure out some way to break a filibuster--on judges, on Cabinet nominations, and on legislation. At that time the Senate changed its rules by a two-thirds vote and had filibusters broken, then, by 67 votes. In the 1960s it was determined that was a burden that was no longer necessary, and it was changed to 60 votes. From that time to today, there has been the ability to break a filibuster by 60 Senators voting.

There have been filibusters since that rule was changed in 1960, filibusters of judges. The most noteworthy, of course, was Abe Fortas. There was a filibuster, and there are wonderful statements in the Congressional [Page: S4043]Record by Howard Baker at that time, who extolled the virtues of the filibuster.

During the time I have been in the Senate there have been filibusters of judges. I can name two that come to my mind: Berzon and Paez. We had a vote to break those here, on the filibuster. The majority leader voted against breaking those filibusters. So we have had votes on many occasions dealing with filibusters of judges. This is no new thing.

What we have to keep in mind is that we, the legislative branch of Government, are separate but equal. That is what checks and balances are all about. The President should not have, from the Senate, a rubberstamp for everything he wants. We have the advise and consent clause in the Constitution and we have the obligation to look at these judges. We have approved 205 and turned down 10. For people to suggest that you can break the rules to change the rules is un-American.

The only way you can change the rule in this body is through a rule that now says, to change a rule in the Senate rules to break a filibuster still requires 67 votes. You can't do it with 60. You certainly cannot do it with 51. But now we are told the majority is going to do the so-called nuclear option. We will come in here, having the Vice President seated where my friend and colleague from Nevada is seated. The Parliamentarian would acknowledge it is illegal, it is wrong, you can't do it, and they would overrule it. It would simply be: We are going to do it because we have more votes than you.

You would be breaking the rules to change the rules. That is very un-American. I ask my friends to look at what is going on in the press. In the Post today, David Broder, a nationwide columnist, talks about how bad it would be. Dick Morris, who certainly is no lapdog for the Democrats, has stated very clearly it would be the wrong thing to do. The political damage would be done to Republicans for many years to come.

This is something we should work out. This is something that should not cause the disruption and dysfunction of our family, the Senate family. If this is done, the Senator from South Dakota is absolutely right; we will be working off the Democrats' agenda. We will let things go forward. Of course, we will let things go forward to take care of the troops and let us make sure the Government is funded. We are not going to do the Gingrich plan.

But things around here work by unanimous consent. Maybe the majority wants an excuse not to complete business because most of their business is a little faulty anyway. But we have worked very hard and showed our good faith in the first quarter of this Congress. We have passed, for example, the class action bill; we passed the bankruptcy bill--both of which were 15 years in the making. These are bills the majority of the Senators on this side of the aisle opposed. But I thought it was appropriate that we do business the way we should be doing business: have people speak, debate the issue, and take your wins and losses as they come. We had a couple of losses. But the fact is, we believe the business of the Senate should be conducted in this manner.
I do not know what is going to happen in the Foreign Relations Committee as it relates to Bolton, but the fact is, that is how things should be decided. They should debate publicly and openly and then make a decision as to whether he is good or bad for the United Nations. They are going to have some more hearings in that regard. I think that is appropriate. But to think that just because you do not get your way that you are going to change the rules is wrong.

I have said once or twice on the Senate floor, when I was a little boy I took a big trip. My brother was 10 or 12 years older than I. He was working for Standard Stations in a place in Arizona. It was a little town. It seemed like a big town coming from Searchlight. It took quite a few hours
to drive over there. I spent a week with my brother. I thought it was going to be a week, but he had a girlfriend and I didn't spend much time with him at all. I spent time with his girlfriend's brother. I could beat her brother in anything--all card games, board games, running, jumping, throwing. But I could never win because he kept changing the rules in the middle of the game. That is what is happening in the Senate. The majority can't get what they want so they break the rules to change the rules.

We believe the traditions of the Senate should be maintained. We believe if you are going to change the rules in the Senate, change them legally, not illegally.

I hope my friends, people of goodwill on the other side of the aisle, will take a very close look at this and see if it is the right thing to do. I think we do have people of goodwill on the other side of the aisle who understand the importance of maintaining the integrity of this body.

As Senator Dole said when asked on Public Radio last week what he thought about the so-called nuclear option, He said: Watch it because we are not going to be in the majority all the time. It will come back--these are my words, not his but the same meaning--it will come back to haunt us because the majority changes all the time.

I think it would be wrong for the Democrats to be able to do what the Republicans are talking about doing. I think it would be wrong for the Republicans to do what they are talking about doing. That is why we, Senator Frist and I, working with our caucus, have to try to tamp down the emotions on this issue and do what we can to bring the Senate family together and do things the right way so we can continue to do legislation.

I spoke to the distinguished majority leader a few minutes ago. We want to do the highway bill. We have the Energy bill. Senator Domenici and Senator Bingaman are working hand in hand, more than they have in many years. They are going to come up with the Energy bill. The Senators are going to bring it to the floor and we will debate it.

As the President was told several days ago by Senator Baucus when they were called to the White House, Senator Baucus said: You do the nuclear option, there will be no Energy bill. That is the way things are and that is wrong.

(Ms. MURKOWSKI assumed the Chair.)

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http://www.c-spanarchives.org/congress/?q=node/77531&id=7326903

JUDICIAL NOMINATIONS

Text From the Congressional Record

C-Span Congressional Chronicle

4-21-05

Mr. THUNE. Mr. President, I rise today in morning business to speak about a matter of great importance, and that is our broken judicial nomination and confirmation process. As Senators, we have sworn to support and defend the Constitution, and on the issue of judicial nominations the Constitution is straightforward. It states that the President nominates judges and the Senate has the duty to give its advice and consent on those nominations. For over 200 years, that is exactly how it worked, regardless of which party was in power.

Over the past 2 years, the Democrat minority has attempted to change the rules and stand 200 years of Senate tradition on its head. The Democrat minority now thinks that 41 Senators should be able to dictate to the President which judges he can nominate. The minority also thinks that it should be able to prevent the rest of the Senate from fulfilling its constitutional duty of voting up or down on judicial nominees.

The Democrats' position is contrary to our Constitution, our Senate traditions, and the will of the American people as expressed at the ballot box this past November. It must stop. [Page: S4042]The advice and consent provision in the Constitution has served us for over 214 years up until the last Congress. That meant that the Senate should vote, and for over 200 years no nominee with majority support has been denied an up-or-down vote in this body, zero.

The Democrats have said that they have confirmed 98 percent of the President's nominees. The actual number is 89 percent. But even at that, are we to say that we are only going to follow the Constitution 89 percent of the time? Furthermore, this Senate's record on dealing with the President's appellate court nominees is the worst for any President in modern history. This President's record of having his appellate court nominees voted on is 69 percent, which ranks him lowest of any President in modern history.

It would be one thing if these nominees did not have the votes for confirmation, but they do. These nominees will have 54 or 55, 56, 57 votes for confirmation. It is wrong to deny them what the Constitution says they deserve and for us to ignore our constitutional responsibility to see that they have an up-or-down vote in this body.

The Democrats have said that it is their prerogative to debate. Well, that is great. Let us debate them on the floor of the Senate. But before they can be debated, a nomination has to be brought to the Senate floor for debate. We have a right to debate under the Constitution in the Senate.
They have also suggested that judges ought to have broad support; that they ought to have more than the necessary 51 votes for the simple majority that has traditionally been the case in the Senate. There is nothing in the Constitution about filibustering judges. There is nothing in the Constitution about requiring a super-majority to confirm judges. If the Founders had wanted judges to get a super-majority vote, they would have put that in there. They did it for treaties, for constitutional amendments, and for overriding a Presidential veto. Clearly, that was not the case with judges. It was the Founders' intention that the Senate dispose of them with a simple majority vote.

The Democrats in the Chamber have said that what we are trying to accomplish is ``the nuclear option,'' suggesting that somehow this is a radical process that we are trying to implement. Well, simply, that is not true. There is nothing nuclear about re-establishing the precedent that has been the case, the practice, and the pattern in this Senate for over 200 years.

What is nuclear is what is being discussed by the Democrats in this body, and that is shutting the Senate down over the issue of judicial nominees, which means important legislation to this country, such as passing a highway bill that will create jobs and growth in this economy, could get shut down, or an energy policy which is important in my State of South Dakota. We have gas prices at record levels, we have farmers going into the field, the tourism industry is starting its season, so we need to do something to help become energy independent. I am very interested in the issue of renewable fuels. I want to see as big a renewable fuels standard as we can get on the Energy bill, but we have to get it on the floor to debate it first. We cannot have these attempts, these threats--and I hope they are just that: threats--because it would be tragic, it would be nuclear, if the other side decided to shut this Senate down over the issue of judicial nominees.

The Democrats in this Chamber have tried to confuse the issue of legislative and judicial filibusters, clearly trying to confuse the public about what this means. Well, what we are talking about is simply the narrow issue of judicial nominees. It is part of this Senate's constitutional responsibility and duty, and we must take it very seriously. However, in the last Congress that became extremely politicized.

What we are talking about again is simply the issue of judicial filibusters. Incidentally, it was the Democrats who last voted on the filibuster in the Senate to do away with it back in 1995. It was a 76-to-19 vote. It had to do with the whole issue, not just judicial but legislative filibusters as well. Many of those Democrats who voted to end the filibuster still serve in this institution today.

The American people see this as an issue of fundamental fairness. They understand that this body's constitutional obligation, responsibility, and duty is to provide advice and consent, and that means an up-or-down vote in the Senate.

The Democrats in the Senate have said that this President's nominees are extreme. There are going to be a couple of them reported out of the Judiciary Committee today. Janice Rogers Brown received 76 percent of the vote the last time she faced the voters in California, which is not exactly a bastion of conservatism. Her nomination in this Senate has been stalled out for 21 months. Priscilla Owen will also be reported out today. She received 84 percent of the vote the last time she faced the voters in Texas. She has been waiting around for 4 years in the Senate to get an up-or-down vote on her nomination. She was endorsed by every major newspaper in the State of Texas. These nominees are not extreme. What is extreme is denying these good nominees a vote, and it betrays the role and responsibility the Founders gave the Senate.

So as we embark upon and engage in this debate that is forthcoming on judicial nominees, let us keep in sight and in focus the facts, and the role and responsibility this institution has to perform its duty. And that is to make sure that when good people put their names forward for public service, they at least are afforded the opportunity that every nominee with majority support throughout this Nation's history has had, and that is the chance to be voted on in the Senate.

I fully support what the other side is saying about wanting to debate these nominees. Let us do it. I am certainly willing and hopeful that we will be able to engage in a spirited and vigorous debate. Let us debate, but then let us vote.

I yield the floor.

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http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/hatch200501120729.asp

Crisis Mode: A fair and constitutional option to beat the filibuster game

By Senator Orrin G. Hatch

National Review Online

January 12, 2005, 7:29 a.m.

Judicial nominations will be one of the most important issues facing the Senate in the 109th Congress and the question is whether we will return to the tradition of giving nominations reaching the Senate floor an up or down vote. The filibusters used to block such votes have mired the judicial-confirmation process in a political and constitutional crisis that undermines democracy, the judiciary, the Senate, and the Constitution. The Senate has in the past changed its procedures to rebalance the minority's right to debate and the majority's right to decide and it must do so again.

Newspaper editorials condemning the filibusters outnumber supporting ones by more than six-to-one. Last November, South Dakotans retired former Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, in no small part, because he led the filibuster forces. Yet within hours of his election to succeed Senator Daschle as Minority Leader, Senator Harry Reid took to the Senate floor to defend them. Hope is fading that the shrinking Democratic minority will abandon its destructive course of using filibusters to defeat majority supported judicial nominations. Their failure to do so will require a deliberate solution.

DIAGNOSING THE CRISIS

If these filibusters were part of the Senate's historical practice or, as a recent NRO editorial put it, merely made confirming nominees more difficult, a deliberate solution might not be warranted. But this is a crisis, not a problem of inconvenience.

Senate rules reflect an emphasis on deliberation and debate. Either by unanimous agreement or at least 60 votes on a motion to invoke cloture under Rule 22, the Senate must end debate before it can vote on anything. From the Spanish filibustero, a filibuster was a mercenary who tries to destabilize a government. A filibuster occurs most plainly on the Senate floor when efforts to end debate fail, either by objection to unanimous consent or defeat of a cloture motion.

During the 108th Congress, Senate Democrats defeated ten majority-supported nominations to the U.S. Court of Appeals by objecting to every unanimous consent request and defeating every cloture motion. This tactic made good on then-Democratic Leader Tom Daschle's February 2001 vow to use "whatever means necessary" to defeat judicial nominations. These filibusters are unprecedented, unfair, dangerous, partisan, and unconstitutional.

A Political Crisis

These are the first filibusters in American history to defeat majority supported judicial nominations. Before the 108th Congress, 13 of the 14 judicial nominations on which the Senate took a cloture vote were confirmed. President Johnson withdrew the 1968 nomination of Abe Fortas to be Supreme Court chief justice the day after a failed cloture vote showed the nomination did not have clear majority support. In contrast, Democrats have now crossed the confirmation Rubicon by using the filibuster to defeat judicial nominations which enjoy clear majority support.

Focusing on President Clinton's judicial nominations in 1999, I described what has been the Senate's historical standard for judicial nominations: "Let's make our case if we have disagreement, and then vote." Democrats' new filibusters abandons this tradition and is unfair to senators who must provide the "advice and consent" the Constitution requires of them through a final up or down vote. It is also unfair to nominees who have agreed, often at personal and financial sacrifice, to judicial service only to face scurrilous attacks, trumped up charges, character assassination, and smear campaigns. They should not also be held in permanent filibuster limbo. Senators can vote for or against any judicial nominee for any reason, but senators should vote.

These unprecedented and unfair filibusters are distorting the way the Senate does business. Before the 108th Congress, cloture votes were used overwhelmingly for legislation rather than nominations. The percentage of cloture votes used for judicial nominations jumped a whopping 900 percent during President Bush's first term from the previous 25 years since adoption of the current cloture rule. And before the 108th Congress, the few cloture votes on judicial nominations were sometimes used to ensure up or down votes. Even on controversial nominees such as Richard Paez and Marsha Berzon, we invoked cloture to ensure that we would vote on confirmation. We did, and both are today sitting federal judges. In contrast, these new Democratic filibusters are designed to prevent, rather than secure, an up or down vote and to ensure that targeted judicial nominations are defeated rather than debated.

These filibusters are also completely partisan. The average tally on cloture votes during the 108th Congress was 53-43, enough to confirm but not enough to invoke cloture and end debate. Democrats provided every single vote against permitting an up or down vote. In fact, Democrats have cast more than 92 percent of all votes against cloture on judicial nominations in American history.

A Constitutional Crisis

Unprecedented, unfair, and partisan filibusters that distort Senate procedures constitute a political crisis. By trying to use Rule 22's cloture requirement to change the Constitution's confirmation requirement, these Democratic filibusters also constitute a constitutional crisis.

The Constitution gives the Senate authority to determine its procedural rules. More than a century ago, however, the Supreme Court unanimously recognized the obvious maxim that those rules may not "ignore constitutional restraints." The Constitution explicitly requires a supermajority vote for such things as trying impeachments or overriding a presidential veto; it does not do so for confirming nominations. Article II, Section 2, even mentions ratifying treaties and confirming nominees in the very same sentence, requiring a supermajority for the first but not for the second. Twisting Senate rules to create a confirmation supermajority undermines the Constitution. As Senator Joseph Lieberman once argued, it amounts to "an amendment of the Constitution by rule of the U.S. Senate."

But don't take my word for it. The same senators leading the current filibuster campaign once argued that all filibusters are unconstitutional. Senator Lieberman argued in 1995 that a supermajority requirement for cloture has "no constitutional basis." Senator Tom Harkin insisted that "the filibuster rules are unconstitutional" because "the Constitution sets out...when you need majority or supermajority votes in the Senate." And former Senator Daschle said that because the Constitution "is straightforward about the few instances in which more than a majority of the Congress must vote....Democracy means majority rule, not minority gridlock." He later applied this to judicial nomination filibusters: "I find it simply baffling that a Senator would vote against even voting on a judicial nomination." That each of these senators voted for every judicial-nomination filibuster during the 108th Congress is baffling indeed.

These senators argued that legislative as well as nomination filibusters are unconstitutional. Filibusters of legislation, however, are different and solving the current crisis does not require throwing the entire filibuster baby out with the judicial nomination bathwater. The Senate's authority to determine its own rules is greatest regarding what is most completely within its jurisdiction, namely, legislation. And legislative filibusters have a long history. Rule 22 itself did not even potentially apply to nominations until decades after its adoption. Neither America's founders, nor the Senate that adopted Rule 22 to address legislative gridlock, ever imagined that filibusters would be used to highjack the judicial appointment process.

TRYING TO CHANGE THE SUBJECT

Liberal interest groups, and many in the mainstream media, eagerly repeat Democratic talking points trying to change, rather than address, the subject. For example, they claim that, without the filibuster, the Senate would be nothing more than a "rubberstamp" for the president's judicial nominations. Losing a fair fight, however, does not rubberstamp the winner; giving up without a fight does. Active opposition to a judicial nomination, especially expressed through a negative vote, is the best remedy against being a rubberstamp.

They also try to change the definition of a filibuster. On March 11, 2003, for example, Senator Patrick Leahy, ranking Judiciary Committee Democrat, used a chart titled "Republican Filibusters of Nominees." Many individuals on the list, however, are today sitting federal judges, some confirmed after invoking cloture and others without taking a cloture vote at all. Invoking cloture and confirming nominations is no precedent for not invoking cloture and refusing to confirm nominations.

Many senators once opposed the very judicial nomination filibusters they now embrace. Senator Leahy, for example, said in 1998: "I have stated over and over again...that I would object and fight against any filibuster on a judge, whether it is somebody I opposed or supported." Since then, he has voted against cloture on judicial nominations 21 out of 26 times. Senator Ted Kennedy, a former chairman of the Judiciary Committee, said in 1995 that "Senators who believe in fairness will not let a minority of the Senate deny [the nominee] his vote by the entire Senate." Since then, he has voted to let a minority of the Senate deny judicial nominees a vote 18 out of 23 times.

Let me put my own record on the table. I have never voted against cloture on a judicial nomination. I opposed filibusters of Carter and Clinton judicial nominees, Reagan and Bush judicial nominees, all judicial nominees. Along with then-Majority Leader Trent Lott, I repeatedly warned that filibustering Clinton judicial nominees would be a "travesty" and helped make sure that every Clinton judicial nomination reaching the full Senate received a final confirmation decision. That should be the permanent standard, no matter which party controls the Senate or occupies the White House.

SOLVING THE CRISIS

The Senate has periodically faced the situation where the minority's right to debate has improperly overwhelmed the majority's right to decide. And we have changed our procedures in a way that preserves the minority's right to debate, and even to filibuster legislation, while solving the crisis at hand.

The Senate's first legislative rules, adopted in 1789, directly reflected majority rule. Rule 8 allowed a simple majority to "move the previous question" and proceed to vote on a pending matter. Invoked only three times in 17 years, however, Rule 8 was dropped in the Senate rules revision of 1806, meaning unanimous consent was then necessary to end debate.

Dozens of reform efforts during the 19th century tried to rein in the minority's abuse of the right to debate. In 1917, President Woodrow Wilson described what had become of majority rule: "The Senate of the United States is the only legislative body in the world which cannot act when its majority is ready for action.... The only remedy is that the rules of the Senate shall be altered." Leadership turned gridlock into reform, and that year the Senate adopted Rule 22, by which 2/3 of Senators present and voting could invoke cloture, or end debate, on a pending measure.

Just as the minority abused the unanimous consent threshold in the 19th century, the minority abused the 2/3 threshold in the 20th century. A resolution to reinstate the previous question rule was introduced, and only narrowly defeated, within a year of Rule 22's adoption. A steady stream of reform attempts followed, and a series of modifications made until the current 60-vote threshold was adopted in 1975. The point is that the Senate has periodically rebalanced the minority's right to debate and the majority's right to decide. Today's crisis, with constitutional as well as political dimensions and affecting all three branches of government, presents an even more compelling case to do so.

These filibusters are an unprecedented shift in the kind, not just the degree, of the minority's tactics. After a full, fair, and vigorous debate on judicial nominations, a simple majority must at some point be able to proceed to a vote. A simple majority can achieve this goal either by actually amending Rule 22 or by sustaining an appropriate parliamentary ruling.

A Simple Majority Can Change the Rules

The Senate exercises its constitutional authority to determine its procedural rules either implicitly or explicitly. Once a new Congress begins, operating under existing rules implicitly adopts them "by acquiescence." The Senate explicitly determines its rules by formally amending them, and the procedure depends on its timing. After Rule 22 has been adopted by acquiescence, it requires 67 votes for cloture on a rules change. Before the Senate adopts Rule 22 by acquiescence, however, ordinary parliamentary rules apply and a simple majority can invoke cloture and change Senate rules.

Some object to this conclusion by observing that, because only a portion of its membership changes with each election, the Senate has been called a "continuing body." Yet language reflecting this observation was included in Senate rules only in 1959. The more important, and much older, sense in which the Senate is a continuing body is its ongoing constitutional authority to determine its rules. Rulings by vice presidents of both parties, sitting as the President of the Senate, confirm that each Senate may make that decision for itself, either implicitly by acquiescence or explicitly by amendment. Both conservative and liberal legal scholars, including those who see no constitutional problems with the current filibuster campaign, agree that a simple majority can change Senate rules at the beginning of a new Congress.

A Simple Majority Can Uphold a Parliamentary Ruling

An alternative strategy involves a parliamentary ruling in the context of considering an individual nomination. This approach can be pursued at any time, and would not actually amend Rule 22. The precedent it would set depends on the specific ruling it produces and the facts of the situation in which it arises.

Speculation, often inaccurate, abounds about how this strategy would work. One newspaper, for example, offered a common description that this approach would seek "a ruling from the Senate parliamentarian that the filibuster of executive nominations is unconstitutional." Under long-standing Senate parliamentary precedent, however, the presiding officer does not decide such constitutional questions but submits them to the full Senate, where they are debatable and subject to Rule 22's 60-vote requirement. A filibuster would then prevent solving this filibuster crisis. Should the chair rule in favor of a properly framed non-debatable point of order, Democrats would certainly appeal, but the majority could still sustain the ruling by voting for a non-debatable motion to table the appeal.

Democrats have threatened that, if the majority pursues a deliberate solution to this political and constitutional crisis, they will bring the entire Senate to a screeching halt. Perhaps they see this as way to further escalate the confirmation crisis, as the Senate cannot confirm judicial nominations if it can do nothing at all. No one, however, seriously believes that, if the partisan roles were reversed, Democrats - the ones who once proposed abolishing even legislative filibusters - would hesitate for a moment before changing Senate procedures to facilitate consideration of judicial nominations they favored.

A FAMILIAR FORK IN THE ROAD

The United States Senate is a unique institution. Our rules allowing for extended debate protect the minority's role in the legislative process. We must preserve that role. The current filibuster campaign against judicial nominations, however, is the real attack on Senate tradition and an unprecedented example of placing short-term advantage above longstanding fundamental principles. It is not simply annoying or frustrating, but a new and dangerous kind of obstruction which threatens democracy, the Senate, the judiciary, and even the Constitution itself. As such, it requires a more serious and deliberate solution.

While judicial appointments can be politically contentious and ideologically divisive, the confirmation process must still be handled through a fair process that honors the Constitution and Senate tradition. If the fight is fair and constitutional, let the chips fall where they may. As it has before, the Senate must change its procedures to properly balance majority rule and extended debate. That way, we can vigorously debate judicial nominations and still conduct the people's business.

— The Honorable Orrin G. Hatch is a Republican senator to the United States Senate from Utah. Senator Hatch is former chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

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http://www.nationalreview.com/editorial/editors200412150737.asp

Let Them Filibuster: A Senate rules change may not be wise

Editorial

National Review Online

December 15, 2004, 7:37 a.m.

Democrats have waged an "unprecedented" campaign against Bush's judicial nominees — to quote an accurate observation that Democratic senator Jon Corzine made in a fundraising letter. They have denied up-or-down votes to several Bush nominees who had the support of a majority of senators. They have made scurrilous charges against nominees. Priscilla Owen was said to be an enemy of women because, as a judge in Texas, she had interpreted a state law to grant parents a stronger right to be notified of their children's abortions than Democrats would like. Democrats sought to breach the confidentiality of Miguel Estrada's work for the Justice Department in a desperate search for embarrassing material on him. The effect of the Democratic campaign, and probably the intent, has been to intimidate some qualified conservative jurists from putting themselves in the line of fire.

So we sympathize with those Republicans who have been proposing to change the Senate rules to make it easier to confirm nominees who have majority support. Nevertheless, we think the idea is a mistake.

Under current Senate procedures, it takes 60 votes to end a debate and move to a vote. It takes 67 votes to change the procedures. Some conservatives argue that the 60-vote rule to cut off debate, when applied to judicial nominations, violates the Constitution. The "advice and consent" of the Senate, they say, implies that it should only take a majority of the Senate to confirm a judge. The use of the filibuster effectively creates a supermajority requirement, which, on this argument, is unconstitutional.

It is, in our view, an implausible argument. The Constitution does not forbid the Senate from setting its own procedures.

Republicans should insist on political accountability for filibusters instead of a rules change.

Conservatives are on stronger ground in arguing that a simple majority of senators should be able to rewrite the rules. But whether it would be prudent for Republicans to act on this insight is another question.

It may be wiser to insist on political accountability for filibusters of judicial nominees than to change the rules to prevent them. In the 2002 and 2004 elections, Republicans took Senate seats from the Democrats. The Democrats' filibusters against Bush's judge picks were an issue in all of them.

The consequences might be worse for the Democrats in the case of a Supreme Court vacancy. Only small portions of the electorate have paid attention to the political battles over appellate-court nominations. The public will be paying attention during a Supreme Court fight. Many voters will root for Bush's nominee and many will root against. But it is unlikely that middle-of-the-road voters will have much tolerance for attempts to block a vote.

Consider the Ashcroft precedent. Liberals were incensed over Bush's nomination of John Ashcroft to be attorney general. They were energized by their strong showing in the 2000 Senate elections and angered by the Florida recount. They demanded a filibuster of Ashcroft. The Democratic Senate leadership refused to take this step, rightly calculating that the public reaction would be negative.

The Democrats will probably not be able to resist the liberal pressure to wage a filibuster when a Supreme Court vacancy arises. But at some point, we strongly suspect that the filibuster would collapse. That collapse would do more for Republicans — and for the cause of confirming conservative judges — than a rules change. (A rules change might demoralize Democrats, but it would also enrage them. An unsuccessful filibuster would just be demoralizing.)

Republicans could change the rules, but they have no constitutional obligation to do so. And the best moment for changing the rules, during a Supreme Court fight, would also be the moment when a change would be least necessary. So let the Democrats filibuster — and pay the price.

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http://www.usconstitution.net/constfaq_a7.html

U.S. Constitution Online: Answers From the FAQ, Page 7

This page is one of the answer pages for the USConstitution.net's Constitutional FAQ. There have been so many questions and answers over the years, that it was best to split them among several files.

Q139. "Why can't I find anything about filibusters in the Constitution?"

A. The short answer is because there is nothing there to find: the Constitution does not contemplate the filibuster in any way, directly or indirectly. So, then, what is all this talk about the Framers, the Senate, the filibuster, and its relationship to the Constitution?

By way of definition, the filibuster is a delaying tactic that is a part of the rules of the Senate. It is a word that comes from the Spanish word for "freebooter," which means "pirate." The origin seems to be that a person who filibusters is plundering the time and focus of a deliberative body, like a legislature. Specifically, in the U.S. Senate, a filibuster is used by a single Senator or group of Senators to stop or delay action on a piece of legislation. It has long been the tradition of the Senate that debate may not be stopped unless those taking up the debate allow it to be stopped. In other words, once a Senator has the floor, he or she may continue to talk forever. This rule goes back to the very beginnings of the Senate.

The Constitution allows each house of Congress to set its own rules. Early on, both houses had unlimited debate provisions. The House of Representatives, however, as a much larger body, found this rule unworkable and rules to limit debate came into effect. The Senate, until recently, never created such a rule. The term for the use of unlimited debate as a legislative tactic became known as a filibuster in the 1850's. The first attack on the filibuster came in 1841, by no lesser a figure than Henry Clay. It survived, though, until 1917, when the Senate adopted a rule allowing a filibuster to be stopped by a two-thirds vote. Such a vote is known as "cloture." Cloture ended the ability of a single Senator to hold up Senate business, but since a two-thirds vote can be difficult to get, it certainly did not stop the filibuster.

In 1975, the two-thirds rule was changed to three-fifths. Today, the three-fifths rule allows cloture on the basis of the vote of sixty Senators. In 2005, the filibuster again came under attack when threats to filibuster judicial appointments prompted calls for a rule change specifically against filibusters on judicial appointments.

So the filibuster has it constitutional origins in the ability of each house of Congress to set its own rules. It has its origins in the framers in that they saw the Senate as a place where extended debate and discussion would have a cooling effect on the actions of the more "heated" House. And it has its origins in the concept ingrained in our political system that the rights of the minority must be protected from the force of the majority.
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http://rules.senate.gov/senaterules/rule22.php

Standing Rules of the Senate

RULE XXII - PRECEDENCE OF MOTIONS

1. When a question is pending, no motion shall be received but

To adjourn.
To adjourn to a day certain, or that when the Senate adjourn it shall be to a day certain.
To take a recess.
To proceed to the consideration of executive business.
To lay on the table.
To postpone indefinitely.
To postpone to a day certain.
To commit.
To amend.

Which several motions shall have precedence as they stand arranged; and the motions relating to adjournment, to take a recess, to proceed to the consideration of executive business, to lay on the table, shall be decided without debate.

2. Notwithstanding the provisions of rule II or rule IV or any other rule of the Senate, at any time a motion signed by sixteen Senators, to bring to a close the debate upon any measure, motion, other matter pending before the Senate, or the unfinished business, is presented to the Senate, the Presiding Officer, or clerk at the direction of the Presiding Officer, shall at once state the motion to the Senate, and one hour after the Senate meets on the following calendar day but one, he shall lay the motion before the Senate and direct that the clerk call the roll, and upon the ascertainment that a quorum is present, the Presiding Officer shall, without debate, submit to the Senate by a yea-and-nay vote the question:

"Is it the sense of the Senate that the debate shall be brought to a close?" And if that question shall be decided in the affirmative by three-fifths of the Senators duly chosen and sworn -- except on a measure or motion to amend the Senate rules, in which case the necessary affirmative vote shall be two-thirds of the Senators present and voting -- then said measure, motion, or other matter pending before the Senate, or the unfinished business, shall be the unfinished business to the exclusion of all other business until disposed of.

Thereafter no Senator shall be entitled to speak in all more than one hour on the measure, motion, or other matter pending before the Senate, or the unfinished business, the amendments thereto, and motions affecting the same, and it shall be the duty of the Presiding Officer to keep the time of each Senator who speaks. Except by unanimous consent, no amendment shall be proposed after the vote to bring the debate to a close, unless it had been submitted in writing to the Journal Clerk by 1 o'clock p.m. on the day following the filing of the cloture motion if an amendment in the first degree, and unless it had been so submitted at least one hour prior to the beginning of the cloture vote if an amendment in the second degree. No dilatory motion, or dilatory amendment, or amendment not germane shall be in order. Points of order, including questions of relevancy, and appeals from the decision of the Presiding Officer, shall be decided without debate.

After no more than thirty hours of consideration of the measure, motion, or other matter on which cloture has been invoked, the Senate shall proceed, without any further debate on any question, to vote on the final disposition thereof to the exclusion of all amendments not then actually pending before the Senate at that time and to the exclusion of all motions, except a motion to table, or to reconsider and one quorum call on demand to establish the presence of a quorum (and motions required to establish a quorum) immediately before the final vote begins. The thirty hours may be increased by the adoption of a motion, decided without debate, by a threefifths affirmative vote of the Senators duly chosen and sworn, and any such time thus agreed upon shall be equally divided between and controlled by the Majority and Minority Leaders or their designees. However, only one motion to extend time, specified above, may be made in any one calendar day.

If, for any reason, a measure or matter is reprinted after cloture has been invoked, amendments which were in order prior to the reprinting of the measure or matter will continue to be in order and may be conformed and reprinted at the request of the amendment's sponsor. The conforming changes must be limited to lineation and pagination.

No Senator shall call up more than two amendments until every other Senator shall have had the opportunity to do likewise.

Notwithstanding other provisions of this rule, a Senator may yield all or part of his one hour to the majority or minority floor managers of the measure, motion, or matter or to the Majority or Minority Leader, but each Senator specified shall not have more than two hours so yielded to him and may in turn yield such time to other Senators.

Notwithstanding any other provision of this rule, any Senator who has not used or yielded at least ten minutes, is, if he seeks recognition, guaranteed up to ten minutes, inclusive, to speak only.

After cloture is invoked, the reading of any amendment, including House amendments, shall be dispensed with when the proposed amendment has been identified and has been available in printed form at the desk of the Members for not less than twenty four hours.

Transatlantic Convergence, Fücks

noreply@blogger.com (ITSSD Charitable Mission) — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 23:55:00 +0000

http://www.aicgs.org/analysis/c/fuecks112108eng.aspx

Transatlantic Convergence

By Ralf Fücks

American Institute For Contemporary German Studies

November 21, 2008, AICGS Advisor

With Barack Obama the U.S. will become both more American and more European

Until only very recently the consensus was that Europe and America were growing ever further apart. The key words of unilateralism, Guantanamo, International Criminal Court, war on terror, and climate policy were plenty of evidence of the transatlantic divide, and all those wanting to further underline the deep foreign policy differences pointed out the shift in the growth momentum from the American east coast westwards. It seemed that Europe was becoming less important for the U.S. by the same measures that Asia was becoming more important.

[THIS IS STILL THE CASE]

Yet this picture was distorted even before the next president of the United States was elected. And all the more so now that Barack Obama and his team are preparing to assume power. The troika of France, Great Britain, and Germany negotiated with Iran in the name of the U.S. as well. During the Georgian crisis it was European multi-talent Nicolas Sarkozy who brokered an agreement with Russia to end the war, while the White House remained in the background. And when the credit crisis came, the cooperation between the U.S. and Europe was decisive in containing the panic in the markets. China, India and other threshold countries have not become less important, but Europe will remain the U.S.'s central partner in many major international questions.

With Obama's election the U.S. will become both more American and more European. It will become more American because he has rehabilitated the values of the American constitution and given the country its self esteem back, [??? HE HAS???] as he represents the ethnic diversity of America and has brought sections of society into national politics that were previously on the sidelines. The basis of American democracy has become broader. At the same time, the U.S. will move closer to the European model in terms of both social policy and foreign policy.

The new U.S. administration will place greater emphasis on international cooperation and stop seeing international law as an unwelcome nuisance. This is not in any way saying that America will not act in what it considers to be its national interest in cases of conflict; in the future the U.S. will continue to refuse to bow to international bodies. But the Obama administration will listen to others and seek a joint approach. By entering into dialogue with its partners, America will also expect them to shoulder more of the responsibility. This will not necessarily be comfortable for Europe - but it does open up the opportunity for frank dialogue and constructive cooperation. This applies equally to international policy on climate and the restructuring of the financial markets, to a new approach in Afghanistan, as well as the resurrection of active disarmament policy. There will also be fresh impetus for policy in the Middle East once the taboo of negotiating with Damascus is dropped. The sooner Europe develops initiatives of its own on these questions and adopts a proactive approach to the new administration instead of one of wait-and-see what they will be confronted with, the better.

Redistributor in Chief

The preoccupation with America's global foreign policy tends to overshadow the paradigm shift in social policy that is soon to occur. The room for a change of direction in the area of foreign policy is substantially smaller than what exists in the area of issues that the Obama team now intends to address in order to remedy the mistakes of the past years and decades. With Barack Obama the neo-liberal revolution that began in the eighties will finally come to an end. Not since Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal will an American president take up office with an agenda that has such a decided focus on social policy issues: equal opportunities, general health insurance, good and affordable education for everyone, modernization of public infrastructure, and greater compatibility of family and work. Barack Obama is prepared to tackle the taboo of "redistribution of wealth," and branding him as a "socialist" or "Redistributor in Chief" did nothing for the Republican cause. Once this would probably have cost a Democratic candidate for president the election, but not this time.

The way the Bush administration reacted to the threatened collapse of the banking system showed in itself that "times are changing" in the U.S. as well: an end to the wave of privatizations and the orgy of deregulation, recognition that the market needs regulation backed by politicians [??? SINCE WHEN DO AMERICANS HAVE RESPECT FOR POLITICIANS THAT WISH TO DICTATE TO THEM???] and the law [WHEN THE LAW IS FOUNDED ON POLITICAL WHIM, RATHER THAN OBJECTIVE SCIENCE OR ECONOMICS???].

The relationship between the market and the state will also be redefined in the home of capitalism. This does not mean that America will copy the old-school style of the European welfare state. The U.S. will remain a country in which initiative, self-responsibility, and the entrepreneurial spirit have a major role to play. [THANK YOU, SIR, FOR THE REASSURANCE!!] And this is where Europe could learn something from America.

But the draining of public infrastructure, the deep divide between sections of society, and the economic uncertainty that is spreading have all now reached a point where they threaten both the social cohesion and the economic future of America. This was the core message of the Obama campaign and it was well-received, even among the privileged.

[THERE IS NO ACCOUNTING FOR THE LACK OF COMMON SENSE & EDUCATION POSSESSED BY TODAY'S AMERICANS WHO ARE SEDUCED BY GRANDE & SULTRY ORATORY DEVOID OF SUBSTANCE & EXPERIENCE. THIS HAS RESULTED, SADLY, IN THE FAILURE OF MANY, EVEN THOSE PRIVILEGED, TO SEE THE SUBTLE RISE OF LIBERAL FASCISM, A COUSIN OF THE MORE MUSCULAR RIGHT-WING FACISM THAT ELIMINATED PUBLIC DISSENT AND DEBATE THROUGH REPUTATION DISPARAGEMENT, LEGAL PROSECUTION AND EVEN PERSECUTION, AS IT SWEPT THROUGH GERMANY, MUCH LIKE A TSUNAMI WAVE, DURING THE 1930'S.]

Green Wave in the White House

Transatlantic convergence seems to be likely in the fields of climate and energy policies as well. The way ahead had already been prepared over the last few years by initiatives taken by cities, states, and businesses that saw climate protection not as an unavoidable necessity but as an economic chance. This green wave has now reached the White House. A few days before Barack Obama was elected, the head of his transition team, John Podesta, spoke at an event of the Heinrich Böll Foundation in Washington. He announced that Barack Obama, if elected, would make climate protection a top priority, made the connection between dependence on oil, climate change and increasing competition to gain resources in short supply, announced the introduction of a national CO2 emission trading (cap & trade), and pleaded for greater energy efficiency.

What was striking was the connection he made between averting a looming recession and making "green investments." According to Podesta, it is not about kick-starting consumption but about investment in education, science, and the ecological modernization of the economy in order to stimulate growth that can be sustained. Hopefully this message will also be heard in Europe.

Washington's expectations of a renewed transatlantic partnership are huge. Podesta expressed this in the formula that Europe should not use the past as an excuse to evade future cooperation. This does not only apply to Afghanistan and Iraq. The door for transatlantic initiatives is open and the courage to make changes should not just come from the American side.

Ralf Fücks is on the executive board of the Heinrich Böll Foundation, which is affiliated with the German Green Party, and is a regular participant in AICGS events.

This essay appeared in the November 21, 2008, AICGS Advisor. For the original German version, please click here.

Mission Accomplished: Bush Administration Delivers American Sovereignty on a Silver Platter to Socialist Europe

noreply@blogger.com (ITSSD Charitable Mission) — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 13:53:00 +0000

http://thehill.com/dick-morris/bushs-legacy-european-socialism-2008-11-18.html

Bush’s legacy: European socialism

By Dick Morris

Posted: 11/18/08 07:10 PM [ET]

The results of the G-20 economic summit amount to nothing less than the seamless integration of the United States into the European economy.

In one month of legislation and one diplomatic meeting, the United States has unilaterally abdicated all the gains for the concept of free markets won by the Reagan administration and surrendered, in toto, to the Western European model of socialism, stagnation and excessive government regulation. Sovereignty is out the window. Without a vote, we are suddenly members of the European Union.

Given the dismal record of those nations at creating jobs and sustaining growth, merger with the Europeans is like a partnership with death.

At the G-20 meeting, Bush agreed to subject the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and our other regulatory agencies to the supervision of a global entity that would critique its regulatory standards and demand changes if it felt they were necessary. Bush agreed to create a College of Supervisors.

According to The Washington Post, it would “examine the books of major financial institutions that operate across national borders so regulators could begin to have a more complete picture of banks’ operations.”

Their scrutiny would extend to hedge funds and to various “exotic” financial instruments. The International Monetary Fund (IMF), a European-dominated operation, would conduct “regular vigorous reviews” of American financial institutions and practices. The European-dominated College of Supervisors would also weigh in on issues like executive compensation and investment practices.

There is nothing wrong with the substance of this regulation. Experience is showing it is needed. But it is very wrong to delegate these powers to unelected, international institutions with no political accountability.

We have a Securities and Exchange Commission appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate, both of whom are elected by the American people. It is with the SEC, the Treasury and the Federal Reserve that financial accountability must take place.

The European Union achieved this massive subrogation of American sovereignty the way it usually does, by negotiation, gradual bureaucratic encroachment, and without asking the voters if they approve. What’s more, Bush appears to have gone down without a fight, saving his debating time for arguing against the protectionism that France’s Nicolas Sarkozy was pushing.

By giving Bush a seeming victory on a moratorium against protectionism for one year, Sarkozy was able to slip over his massive scheme for taking over the supervision of the U.S. economy. All kinds of political agendas are advancing under the cover of response to the global financial crisis.

Where Franklin Roosevelt saved capitalism by regulating it, Bush, to say nothing of Obama, has given the government control over our major financial and insurance institutions. And it isn’t even our government! The power has now been transferred to the international community, led by the socialists in the European Union.

Will Obama govern from the left? He doesn’t have to. George W. Bush has done all the heavy lifting for him. It was under Bush that the government basically took over as the chief stockholder of our financial institutions and under Bush that we ceded our financial controls to the European Union. In doing so, he has done nothing to preserve what differentiates the vibrant American economy from those dying economies in Europe.

Why have 80 percent of the jobs that have been created since 1980 in the industrialized world been created in the United States? How has America managed to retain its leading 24 percent share of global manufacturing even in the face of the Chinese surge? How has the U.S. GDP risen so high that it essentially equals that of the European Union, which has 50 percent more population?

It has done so by an absence of stifling regulation, a liberation of capital to flow to innovative businesses, low taxes, and by a low level of unionization that has given business the flexibility to grow and prosper. Europe, stagnated by taxation and regulation, has grown by a pittance while we have roared ahead. But now Bush — not Obama — Bush has given that all up and caved in to European socialists.

The Bush legacy? European socialism. Who needs enemies with friends like Bush?

Morris, a former adviser to Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.) and President Bill Clinton, is the author of Outrage.

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http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6607757.stm

US and EU agree 'single market'

BBC News

April 30, 2007

The United States and the European Union have signed up to a new transatlantic economic partnership at a summit in Washington.

The pact is designed to boost trade and investment by harmonising regulatory standards, laying the basis for a US-EU single market.

The two sides also signed an Open Skies deal, designed to reduce fares and boost traffic on transatlantic flights.

But little of substance was agreed on climate change.

However, EU leaders were pleased that the US acknowledged human activity was a major cause.

Richest regions

Economics rather than the environment or politics was the focus of the summit, says the BBC's Europe correspondent, Jonny Dymond, from Washington.

The two sides agreed to set up an "economic council" to push ahead with regulatory convergence in nearly 40 areas, including intellectual property, financial services, business takeovers and the motor industry.

Without the US there can't be any success in coping with a globalised world European diplomat

The aim is to increase trade and lower costs.

Some reports suggest that incompatible regulations in the world's two richest regions add 10% to the cost of developing and producing new cars.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, whose country holds the EU's rotating presidency, said last month that if the US and EU could set business norms today, they would "secure the markets of tomorrow".

Since she came to office 18 months ago, she has made repairing damaged relations with the US a top priority.

Emission cuts

The Europeans said they were pleased that the US now officially acknowledged that climate change was happening and that human activity was a major cause of it. "We agree there's a threat, there's a very serious global threat," said European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso. "We agree that there is a need to reduce emissions. We agree that we should work together."

But behind the scenes, says our Europe correspondent, officials were saying that not much had changed. Ms Merkel will try to nudge the US towards a global approach to climate change before a G8 summit Germany is chairing in six weeks' time, says our correspondent. But the US has consistently rejected the European approach of imposing national limits on greenhouse gas emissions, saying they would harm the international economy.

Visa hope

The Open Skies agreement will take effect on 30 March 2008 and will allow EU carriers to fly to anywhere in the US and vice versa.

The deal promises to lower airfares and widen choice for passengers on both sides of the Atlantic.

The EU hopes to go further and create an "Open Aviation Area" between the two sides "in which investment can flow freely and in which European and US airlines can provide air services without any restriction," said a EU statement.

The EU is also hoping that the US will agree to withdraw its visa requirement for travellers from a number of EU states.

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[READERS SHOULD CAREFULLY REFLECT UPON, IF NOT STUDY, THE LIKELY IMPACTS OF PRIOR TRANSATLANTIC REGULATORY SUMMITS. A REVIEW OF STRICT EU REGULATIONS ON DIETARY SUPPLEMENTS WILL SHOW HOW AMERICANS' 'HEALTH FREEDOM' CAN BE ADVERSELY AFFECTED.]

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http://www4.dr-rath-foundation.org/us/summit07/index.html

EU-U.S. Summit Signals New ThreatsTo Natural Health Therapies

By Paul Anthony Taylor

Dr. Rath Health Foundation

April 2007

New transatlantic economic integration agreement and secret FDA-EU ‘confidentiality arrangement’ threaten the harmonizing of U.S. dietary supplement legislation to restrictive European regulations

June 2006 – The European Union and the United States recently announced the signing of a Framework for Advancing Transatlantic Economic Integration at a summit in Washington. Describing the agreement as “a statement of the importance of trade”, President Bush, speaking at the post-summit press conference, claimed that it was “a commitment to eliminating barriers to trade” and “a recognition that the closer that the United States and the EU become, the better off our people become.”

Because the signing of this agreement received only minimal media coverage, U.S. consumers could perhaps be forgiven for assuming that its potential to affect the regulation of dietary supplements was negligible. In reality, however, not only does the existence of a secret “confidentiality agreement” signed by the FDA with its European counterparts in 2005 now threaten the harmonizing of U.S. dietary supplement legislation to restrictive European regulations, but the European Commission President, José Manuel Barroso, has specifically stated that the pharmaceutical sector will be one of the areas that would benefit the most from transatlantic regulatory cooperation.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, US President George W. Bush and European Commission President José Manuel Barroso at[ttended the] EU/US Summit, April 30, 2007, at the White House, Washington, DC. The agreement they signed threatens the harmonizing of U.S. dietary supplement legislation to restrictive European regulations.

Economic integration – the new threat to natural health therapies

Historically speaking, regulatory threats to natural health therapies have almost exclusively been of a national, as opposed to an international, nature. In the United States (U.S.), for example, the pharmaceutical industry-inspired Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (ANPR) that was published by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in June 1993 - which suggested, among other provisions, that vitamins and minerals contained in dietary supplements be limited to low multiples of the Recommended Daily Intakes (RDIs) – would not, had it been implemented, have directly affected consumers living outside of the U.S.. Similarly, in the United Kingdom (UK), the unsuccessful attempt by the Blair government to limit the maximum permitted level of vitamin B6 in supplements to 10 mg in the late 1990s would not, had the proposal become law, have affected the freedom of choice of consumers living in other countries.

Meeting of the Codex Alimentarius Commission in Rome, July 2005. Following the Commission’s adoption of its restrictive ‘Guidelines for Vitamin and Mineral Food Supplements’ as the new global regulatory standard for dietary supplements, the threats to natural health therapies are becoming increasingly international in nature.

Following the creation of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1995, however, and the subsequent adoption by the Codex Alimentarius Commission, in 2005, of the controversial Guidelines for Vitamin and Mineral Food Supplements, regulatory threats to natural health therapies are becoming increasingly international in nature. The WTO uses Codex standards as the benchmark in its adjudication of international trade disputes involving foods and, as such, Codex standards that had once been entirely voluntary now have the bite of law in the global trade system - thus giving Codex coercive authority and WTO Members very real incentives to harmonize their regulations by adopting its standards.

Moreover, the key methodology via which countries are increasingly harmonizing their domestic regulations with those of their neighbors is by organizing themselves into regional trading blocs. Membership of such blocks - which can take the form of free trade areas, customs unions, common markets and other forms of economic integration – increases the pressure upon countries to harmonize their regulations and, in the case of food and dietary supplements legislation, to base them upon Codex standards.

The influence of the European Union

The European Union (EU) is the world’s largest - and arguably the most powerful - trading block. Established by the Treaty of Rome in 1957, its number of member countries has grown over the past fifty years from the original six participants to a current total of twenty-seven.

Six nations established the European Economic Community by signing the Treaty of Rome, above, in 1957. Now consisting of 27 member countries, the European Union is the world’s largest trading block. Its restrictive Food Supplements Directive was used as the blueprint for the controversial Codex ‘Guidelines for Vitamin and Mineral Food Supplements’.

This dramatic growth has naturally resulted in a parallel increase in the EU’s economic and political power, the most obvious example of which - from a natural health perspective - being at Codex meetings, where it is now effectively able to shape the drafting of global food and dietary supplement standards to reflect European law.

In this respect, it is particularly notable that the Codex Guidelines for Vitamin and Mineral Food Supplements (which, unlike the United States’ relatively liberal Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994 (DSHEA), contain a requirement for maximum nutrient levels to be set) utilizes the EU’s highly restrictive Food Supplements Directive as its blueprint. As such, it is with these facts in mind that the signing of the new transatlantic agreement - and the commercial and political influences that led to it - must be examined.

Laying the basis for a U.S.-EU single market

The agreement signed by U.S. President George Bush, European Commission President José Manuel Barroso and German Chancellor Angela Merkel as head of the German term of the rotating EU Presidency has three main components.

The new Transatlantic Economic Council will be chaired by U.S. National Economic Council director Allan Hubbard (left) and European Commission Vice President Günter Verheugen (right). Together, they will oversee the efforts to achieve transatlantic regulatory convergence in nearly 40 areas.

Firstly, it has a regulatory focus on finding ways to converge the different regulatory structures and regulatory approaches of the United States and the European Union. In this respect, it is significant that the Senior Administration Officials who conducted the post-summit press briefing specifically stated that they had “interacted with the business communities on both sides of the Atlantic” and that the feedback that they’d received was that the different regulatory frameworks of the United States and European Union “pose real barriers to economic advancement and growth.” Perhaps not surprisingly, therefore, and as we shall discover, the pressure to deliver this agreement came from some of the world’s most powerful multinational corporations, including the pharmaceutical industry.

The second key component of the agreement is a set of priority projects focused on intellectual property rights, trade, financial markets, consolidation, investment promotion and technology.

Finally, the agreement also includes the setting up of a Transatlantic Economic Council, to be chaired by U.S. National Economic Council director Allan Hubbard and European Commission Vice President Günter Verheugen. The Council will be a permanent body and will oversee the efforts to meet the agreement’s objectives, with the goal of accelerating progress and achieving regulatory convergence in nearly 40 areas.

Notably, therefore, within only hours of the pact being signed, the BBC was already describing it as “laying the basis for a US-EU single market.”

The influence of the TransAtlantic Business Dialogue

[PROTECTIONIST-MINDED U.S. & EU INDUSTRIES INFLUENCED THE TERMS OF EU-US REGULATORY INTEGRATION WITHOUT PUBLIC INPUT]

Originally the idea of the late U.S. Secretary of Commerce Ron Brown, it has long been the stated goal of the TransAtlantic Business Dialogue (TABD) to establish a Barrier-Free Transatlantic Market. Given this objective, it is hardly surprising that TABD’s Executive Board Companies comprise some of the world’s richest and most powerful corporations and include the pharmaceutical manufacturers Merck, Pfizer, AstraZeneca and BASF.

In the run-up to the April 30 summit, TABD issued no less than three separate press releases in which it recommended that a barrier-free transatlantic market should be established, urged that time was running out for the U.S. and EU to tackle trade barriers and stated that it was time for the transatlantic political process to catch up with the deep integration already achieved by the business community. Clearly, given the size and economic power of its Executive Board Companies, these press releases translated into a great deal of pressure upon President Bush, President Barroso and Chancellor Merkel to deliver what TABD required.

That said, however, there can be little doubt that all three of the signatories were fully supportive of the agreement’s aims - particularly so Chancellor Merkel, who had already promoted the idea in a previous meeting with President Bush at the White House in January, only four days after Germany assumed the rotating presidency of the 27-nation European Union. Moreover, a mere eight days after the signing of the agreement, in a further demonstration of TABD’s political influence, Merkel, accompanied by European Commission Vice President Günter Verheugen - who along with U.S. National Economic Council director Allan Hubbard will chair the new Transatlantic Economic Council set up by the agreement – was a guest at TABD’s Innovation Conference Healthcare in Berlin.

The closing speech at the TABD Conference was given by Verheugen, who especially stressed “the crucial role of Chancellor Merkel and the German Presidency in catalysing the new EU-US Framework” and praised “Its organiser, the Transatlantic Business Dialogue which has been central in making the case for transatlantic economic integration.” Even more significantly, perhaps, a large proportion of Verheugen’s speech was given over to a discussion of the benefits of regulatory cooperation in which he specifically cited pharmaceuticals as an example.

President Bush, meanwhile, is already known to have his own close links to the TABD Executive Board, having previously met with it to discuss TABD’s recommendations for a barrier free transatlantic market at an EU-U.S. summit in Ireland in June 2004.

Crucially, therefore, and as we shall discover, although dietary supplements are not specifically mentioned in the agreement itself, the paper trail that led to its signing strongly suggests that they may already be scheduled for transatlantic regulatory harmonization in the not-so-distant future.

The “roadmap” to harmonization

Achieving harmonization of the regulatory framework for vitamin and mineral food supplements on both sides of the Atlantic - including the setting of maximum levels - has been a specific aim of TABD since at least November 2000.

However, whilst the passing of DSHEA in the U.S. in 1994 created what is still arguably the most liberal regulatory environment for dietary supplements in the world, the current situation in Europe could hardly be more different. In the majority of European countries, for example, the availability of dietary supplements is far more limited and, in those that are available, the doses are frequently limited to amounts that are below therapeutic levels. Worse still, even those few European countries where supplements have traditionally been regulated in a relatively liberal fashion – such as the UK, Ireland, Netherlands and Sweden – are now at risk of losing their access to effective supplements as a result of the passing by the European Parliament of the highly restrictive Food Supplements Directive in 2002.

However, as well as requiring the setting of maximum permitted levels for vitamins and minerals in supplements – the specific amounts for which are expected to be announced later this year by the European Union’s executive body, the European Commission - the Food Supplements Directive also restricts the sources of these nutrients to those (largely synthetic varieties) that are contained on its so-called “positive list”. Under the Directive’s requirements, any manufacturer wishing to use types of vitamins or minerals other than those specified on this list is required to submit a safety dossier for evaluation by the European Food Safety Authority.

Moreover, because the Directive was used as the blueprint for what is now effectively the global standard for dietary supplement regulations – the Codex Guidelines for Vitamin and Mineral Food Supplements – European regulations are, by definition, already compliant with that standard. As such, it is clear that in order to achieve the goal of transatlantic harmonization, American dietary supplement legislation will have to be harmonized to the restrictive European model, as opposed to the other way around.

Given this reality, one should perhaps not be surprised to discover that regulatory cooperation between the FDA and DG SANCO (the European Commission’s Health and Consumer Protection Directorate) is already well advanced.

Close examination of the 2005 Roadmap for EU-U.S. Regulatory Cooperation and Transparency, for example, reveals the following information:

Objective: Cooperation between FDA and DG SANCO on issues of mutual interest in the field of nutritional labelling.

Progress/Results: Experts from FDA and DG SANCO are engaged in discussions on regulatory issues relating to health claims, nutrition labeling, fortification, supplements, and infant formula. Specific areas under discussion include: 1) possible collaboration on the EU’s Estimated Average Requirement (EAR) and the U.S. Recommended Daily Allowances (RDA) for nutrients; and 2) cooperation on food labels.

Next Steps: Identify specific activities for cooperation on technical issues such as reference values for nutrient labeling, nutrient definitions, and energy conversion factors. Pursue a confidentiality arrangement to facilitate the sharing of non-public information in this subject area.

Ironic, isn’t it, that regulatory bodies supposedly promoting transparency find it necessary to pursue a “confidentiality arrangement” and the sharing of non-public information when dealing with issues related to nutrition and supplements?

In addition, however, the 2005 Roadmap also reveals extensive cooperation between the FDA, the European Commission’s DG Enterprise and Industry/Pharmaceuticals Unit and the European Medicines Agency (EMEA) in relation to pharmaceutical products. It also contains proof that personnel exchanges, joint meetings and the sharing of documents are all now taking place between these agencies.

Further evidence in respect of these activities was subsequently revealed in the June 2006 Joint Report on the Roadmap for EU-US Regulatory Cooperation, which discloses that the “confidentially arrangement” for the sharing of non-public information in relation to nutritional labeling was concluded in 2005.

The April 2007 Joint Report on the Roadmap for US-EU Regulatory Cooperation, meanwhile, released to coincide with this year’s summit meeting, shows that over the past two years, U.S. and European authorities have expanded their joint activities significantly. In the area of pharmaceuticals, for example, FDA, EMEA and DG Enterprise staff have engaged in over 800 interactions on almost 200 topics and conducted nearly 20 scientific staff exchanges and visits in the past year alone. In the area of nutritional labeling, meanwhile, the 2007 Report ominously reveals that an “Implementation Plan” has now been completed under the confidentiality arrangement.

Is ‘Free Trade’ really ‘free’?

In the opinion of this writer, the principle of transatlantic harmonization of dietary supplement regulations is not in itself inherently a bad thing. From the point of view of health freedom campaigners in Germany, for example, who are currently subject to some of the most restrictive dietary supplement legislation on the entire planet, the harmonization of their country’s regulations to those of the United States - DSHEA – would clearly be a cause for major celebration.

The problem, therefore, lays not so much in the actual concept of harmonization, but rather in the way in which it is applied. In other words, if the transatlantic harmonization of dietary supplement regulations truly resulted in – to borrow the words of President Bush - “eliminating barriers to trade”, then this writer, at least, would be amongst the very first to celebrate.

The more likely outcome, however, according to many of those in the health freedom community on both sides of the Atlantic who have been following these issues closely for many years now, appears to be that rather than “eliminating barriers to trade”, the harmonization of transatlantic dietary supplement regulations will instead – via the banning of the most effective higher-dosed products - result in the actual creation of them.

Should this happen - and regardless of whatever ‘consumer protection’ spin the political and regulatory elite may try to put on it – then only the most extreme advocates of globalization would surely argue that restricting consumers’ freedom of choice by the illiberalization of a market constitutes the elimination of trade barriers. More to the point, if the transatlantic harmonization of dietary supplement regulations results in the hard-won health freedoms of Americans being lost, then by no rational means could the trade that results from such an outcome even remotely be described as “free”.

All of which simply begs the question: “Who benefits?” Clearly, to answer this, one only needs to look as far as those companies who are the most vocal in support of transatlantic economic integration – especially so given that they include amongst their number some of the most powerful players in the global pharmaceutical industry.

Seeing things in context

In some senses, the signing of this transatlantic agreement allows us a glimpse of the bigger picture, thus enabling us to see other current natural health and health freedom-related issues in the United States in better context.

For example, whilst there can be little doubt that the FDA is now hell-bent upon eliminating the ability of American consumers to purchase non-patentable natural alternatives to the pharmaceutical industry’s multi-billion dollar market in patented drugs – in that virtually its every action appears to be consistent with this assumption – it can be seen that issues such as the Draft Guidance for Industry on Complementary and Alternative Medicine Products and Their Regulation by the Food and Drug Administration and Bill S. 1082 (the Food and Drug Administration Revitalization Act) are each but single steps in a highly coordinated ongoing plan, as opposed to separate ends in themselves.

This being the case - and bearing in mind the signing of the new transatlantic agreement and the existence of the aforesaid FDA-DG SANCO “confidentiality arrangement” - the ultimate aim behind the recent increase in domestically-based attacks on supplements in the U.S. can be seen as being to prepare the ground for the eventual dismantling of DSHEA and the harmonization of the U.S. dietary supplement market to the more restrictive legislative regimes that exist in Europe and - via the planned North American Union – Canada and Mexico.

As such, although neither the Codex Guidelines for Vitamin and Mineral Food Supplements – the global standard – or the Food Supplements Directive – the European standard – have as yet set any maximum permitted doses for nutrients contained in supplements, it would seem reasonable to conclude that whatever levels are announced later this year by the European Commission could - as a result of both European political power at Codex meetings and the trans-Atlantic regulatory cooperation outlined above - eventually be exported to, and implemented in, the United States.

Dr. Rolf Grossklaus [is the] Chairman of the German-based Codex committee that drafted the controversial Guidelines for Vitamin and Mineral Food Supplements by using the European Union’s restrictive Food Supplements Directive as its blueprint. Harmonization to these regulatory standards could eliminate health freedom in America.

Focus your attention on your elected officials, not unelected bureaucrats

There is a growing realization in the U.S. health freedom community that future access to effective dietary supplements and other natural health therapies is increasingly under threat. However, the question as to how best to deal with this threat is currently the subject of significant disagreement.

Some health freedom organizations, for example, urge people to voice their objections directly to the FDA and/or USDA. On occasion, such as where these agencies have specifically asked for public comment on a document, it is true that such responses are sometimes warranted. In reality, however, the FDA and USDA are simply not accountable to ordinary citizens in the way that elected congressional officials are. As such, even when these agencies ask for public comments, the fact is that industry – specifically the large multinational food, drug and agricultural corporations – and the government are far more influential with them than is the voting public.

Direct the majority of your energies into writing and lobbying your Senators, Congressmen and elected State officials. Unlike unelected bureaucrats from the FDA and USDA, elected officials know that if their actions and voting records are not in accordance with the wishes of the majority of their constituents, they risk losing their jobs at the next election.

By way of contrast, elected State and Congressional officials are directly and democratically accountable. Unlike unelected bureaucrats from the FDA and USDA, elected officials know that if their actions and voting records are not in accordance with the wishes of the majority of their constituents, they risk losing their jobs - and hence, their livelihoods – at the next election.

As such, in this writer’s opinion, American citizens would be best advised to direct the majority of their energies into writing and lobbying their Senators, Congressmen and elected State officials. Remember that the FDA consensually agreed – in 2004 and again in 2005 - to the adoption by Codex of its EU-inspired global Guidelines for Vitamin and Mineral Food Supplements. As such, elected government officials – not unelected FDA bureaucrats – are now the last line of defense against the harmonization of U.S. dietary supplement legislation to restrictive European standards.

By Paul Anthony Taylor

Sliding Down the 'Slippery Slope' of 'Soft Socialism'

noreply@blogger.com (ITSSD Charitable Mission) — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 14:41:00 +0000

[The following articles discuss how closely aligned US Democratic Party Presidential candidate Barack Obama's radical policies appear to the Social Democracies of Europe, Canada, Australia, etc. These countries lack a constitutional republican system of inherent checks and balances, accompanied by a bill of rights and declaration of independence that are based on preserving the sanctity of exclusive individual rights (not communal rights) and the right to equal opportunity (not the right to equal outcome/result). They lack the formative documents and institutions that can measure up to those bequeathed to and possessed by the American people. These assets have enabled America to remain a nation in the world without peers.

But, it would appear that Mr. Obama and the radical policies he espouses would 'change' that status, relegate the U.S. to co-equal status internationally and commit the U.S. to a path that promotes social parity over social progress.

Based on the extensive research performed by the ITSSD since 2002, and corroborating evidence that has come to light since then, Americans should beware that if they elect Barack Obama as President of the United States, and provide the Democratic Party with a filibuster-proof majority in Congress, it is more than likely that the combination of the two will cause the U.S. to slowly lose its national sovereignty and Americans to slowly lose their individual rights, primarily exclusive private property rights, as the U.S. slides down the slippery slope of 'soft socialism'.

Additional documented information about these similarities and this likelihood are set forth within the 'Library' and 'Programs' sections of the main ITSSD website and within the following ITSSD journal blogs:

www.itssd.org

http://itssdeconomicfreedom.blogspot.com/

http://itssdpathologicalcommunalism.blogspot.com/

http://itssdjournalpoliticalsurrealism.blogspot.com/

http://itssdenergysecurity.blogspot.com/

http://itssddisguisedtradebarriers.blogspot.com/

http://itssdjournalunclos-lost.blogspot.com/

http://itssdjournalcsr.blogspot.com/

http://itssdjournaleconomicsabotage.blogspot.com/ ]

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http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122531740452581801.html

Obama's European Vision
Shifting America's animating idea from creation to protection.

By Daniel Henninger

Wall Street Journal Asia

October 31, 2008

The most basic explanation for why Barack Obama may win next Tuesday is that voters indeed want an economic deliverance. The standard fix in politics everywhere is to crowbar the old party out and patch in the other one. It is true as well that the historic nature of the first African-American candidacy would play a big role.

Push past the historic candidacy, however, and one sees something even larger is at stake in this vote. One sees is what Joe (The Plumber) Wurzelbacher saw. The real "change" being put to a vote for the American people in 2008 is not simply a break from the economic policies of "the past eight years" but with the American economic philosophy of the past 200 years. This election is about a long-term change in America's idea of itself.

I don't agree with the argument that an Obama-Pelosi-Reid-government is a one-off, that good old nonideological American pragmatism will temper their ambitions. Not true.

With this election, U.S. is at a philosophical tipping point.

The goal of Sen. Obama and the modern, "progressive" Democratic party is to move the U.S. in the direction of Western Europe, the so-called German model and its "social market economy." Under this notion, business is highly regulated, as it would be in the next Congress under Democratic House committee chairmen Markey, Frank and Waxman. Business is allowed to create "wealth" so long as its utility is not primarily to create new jobs or economic growth but to support a deep welfare system.

The political planets are aligned to make this achievable. In the aftermath of the financial crisis, prominent Democrats, European leaders in France and Germany, and more U.S. newspaper articles than one can count have said that the crisis proves the need to permanently tame the American "free-market" model. P.O.W. Alan Greenspan is broadcasting confessions.

This would be a historic shift, one that post-Vietnam Democrats have been trying to achieve since their failed fight with Ronald Reagan's "Cowboy Capitalism."

Of course Cowboy Capitalism built the country. More than any previous nation in history, the U.S. made its way forward on a 200-year wave of upwardly mobile, profit-seeking merchants, tradesmen, craftsmen and workers. They blew out of New England and New York, rolled across the wildernesses of the Middle States, pushed thousands of miles across a tough frontier and banged into San Francisco and Los Angeles, leaving in their path city after city of vast wealth.

The U.S. emerged a superpower, and the tool of that ascent was simple -- the pursuit of economic growth. Now China, India and Brazil, embracing high-growth cowboy capitalism, are doing what America did, only their cities are bigger.

Now comes Barack Obama, standing at the head of a progressive Democratic Party, his right hand rising to say, "Stop. We've grown enough. It's time to spread the wealth around."

What this implies, undeniably, is that the United States would move away from running with the high GDP, high-growth nations rising today as economic and political powers and move over to join the low-growth economies it once displaced -- old Europe.

As noted in a 2006 World Bank report, spending in Europe on social-protection programs averages 19% of GDP (85% of it on social insurance programs), compared to 9% of GDP in the U.S. The Obama proposals send the U.S. inexorably and permanently toward European levels of social protection. This isn't an "agenda." It's a new way of life.

In detail:

Obama's federalized medical insurance system starts the transition away from private medical care and toward Obama's endlessly promised "universal health care." This has always been the sine qua non of achieving a U.S. social-market economy.

Obama's refundable tax credits are direct cash transfers from the federal government. This would place some 48% of Americans, nearly half, out of the income tax system.

This isn't just a tax proposal; it's a deep philosophical shift. In Europe it's called being "on the dole."

His stated intent to renegotiate free-trade agreements such as Nafta is also a philosophical shift. It means a transition away from a tradition of a hypercompetitive America dating back to the Industrial Revolution, toward a protected, domestic work force, as in Western Europe. The Democratic proposal to eliminate private union votes -- "card check" -- ensures the spread of a static, Euro-style work force.

Eliminating the payment limit on payroll taxes changes Social Security from an insurance to a welfare program. Obama's tax credits requires performing government-identified activities, the essence of a "directed economy."

All this would shift the animating American idea -- away from creation and toward protection.

Many voters -- progressive Democrats, wealthy older people, academics and college students -- regard this as where America should go. They explicitly want America's energies transferred away from unwieldy economic competition and toward social construction. They want the U.S. to reduce its "footprint" in the world. Monies saved by stepping down from superpower status can be reprogrammed into "investments" (a constant Obama word) in a Euro-style 19% of GDP in social protection programs.

I wish John McCain had been better able to make clearer what the truly "historic" meaning of Tuesday's vote is. Once it's done, it's done.

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http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/francis/archive/2008/10/30/obama-victory-the-canadianization-of-america.aspx

Obama victory: the Canadianization of America

By Diane Francis

The Canadian National Post

Posted: October 30, 2008

Here's the latest map drawn based on polling support for the two candidates. It shows clearly once more that the America closest to the northern border, with the highest taxation and highest incomes, is as Liberal as Canada. All but three western states which are contiguous to Canada are populated by American voters who realize that Liberal societies providing universal healthcare, fair education for all and well-regulated economies are not dirty words. See the Canada "infomercial".

America will become more like Canada. At the same time, Canada has become more "Americanized" in the past two decades: better economic opportunities and less social engineering by governments.

The electoral map below from intrade.com is a forecast for the 2008 U.S. Presidential Election in which the nominees are Republican John McCain and Democrat Barack Obama. The electoral college value for each state is shown, and the states are shaded according to the probability of a win. 364 electoral college seats for Obama to 174 for McCain't.

The electoral map below is a forecast for the 2008 U.S. Presidential Election in which the nominees are Republican John McCain and Democrat Barack Obama. The electoral college value for each state is shown, and the states are shaded according to the probability of a win.

From Zogby

With just five days to go before Election Day, Obama gained 1.1 points, as Republican McCain dropped an identical amount. The race now stands with Obama at 50.2%, compared to 43.3% for McCain. Another 6.5% said they are either undecided or favor another candidate. This poll came out of the field BEFORE the airing of Obama’s 30&-minute commercial last night.

Pollster John Zogby: "With less than a week to go, todays numbers are not a good development for McCain. There is no momentum for him, and the clock is starting to run short. Worse news for McCain today is that Obama hit 50% in the single day of polling, while he dropped back to the low 40s. Obama increased his lead among independents compared to yesterday, has moved into a lead among men, and still holds about one in five conservatives. But six days, including Election Day, is an eternity and McCain cannot be counted out yet, though he may need a wing and a prayer."

Some observations which put the lie to the McCain/Republican rant about "socialism" or "liberalism":

Democratic support is hugely ahead in the highest taxed, highest income, highest educated and most socially liberal states in the union -- California; Illinois; New York; Massachusetts. These are America's engines of economic growth where immigrants and migrants who know the world live.

Obama will crush McCain, as I have been saying since winter before they each got the nod because America is changing and will become a social democracy like every other developed country in the world. John McCain and the Pentagon/Wall Street lobby are finished finally.

[BUT, See: Obama & Gore Make Carbon Regulations/Taxes a Key Partisan Issue In Uncertain Economic Times-Shouldn't Dems Suffer Same Fate as Canada's Liberal Party?, ITSSD Journal on Energy Security, at: http://itssdenergysecurity.blogspot.com/2008/10/obama-gore-make-carbon-regulationstaxes.html ].

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http://thehill.com/dick-morris/undecideds-should-break-for-mccain-2008-10-28.html

Undecideds should break for McCain

By Dick Morris

The Hill.com

Posted: 10/28/08 07:05 PM [ET]

If current survey trends continue, Obama will finish with less than 50 percent in the polls. Even discounting the Nader vote (some people never learn), the undecided voters could tip the race either way. How will they break?

Since there is no incumbent, they cannot automatically be assigned to the challenger; and since turnout is likely to be huge, the current undecided voters will probably make their way to the polls and cast their ballots.

But for whom?

At the beginning of this contest, Obama effectively made the case that the election was a referendum on Bush’s performance in office. Painting a vote for McCain as a desire for “four more years of the same failed policies,” he made the most of Bush’s dismal approval rating. Had he been able to keep the focus on Bush, he would likely have inherited most of the undecided vote.

But as Obama surged into a more or less permanent lead in October, animated by the financial crisis, he has assumed many of the characteristics of an incumbent. Every voter asks himself one question before he or she casts a ballot: Do I want to vote for Obama? His uniqueness, charisma and assertive program have so dominated the dialogue that the election is now a referendum on Obama.

As Obama has oscillated, moving somewhat above or somewhat below 50 percent in all the October polls, his election likely hangs in the balance. If he falls short of 50 percent in these circumstances, a majority of the voters can be said to have rejected him. Likely a disproportionate number of the undecideds will vote for McCain.

But don’t write Obama off. His candidacy strikes such enthusiasm among young and minority voters that there is still a chance that a massive turnout will deliver the race to the Democrats.

None of the polling organizations has any experience with — or model for — so massive a turnout, especially among voters notorious for staying at home. But the primaries proved that these young and minority voters will not stay home this time, but will vote for Obama. The effect of this increased vote is hard to calculate, but it may be enough to offset the undecideds who will vote for McCain.

But the basic point, one week before Election Day, is that even if Obama clings to a four- or five-point lead over McCain in the polling, the election is not over. The question is not so much how large his lead is over the Republican, but whether or not he is topping 50 percent. As long as the polling leaves him below that mark, he is vulnerable and could well lose.

Clearly, in recent weeks, McCain has been able to cast Obama as a leftist. He has made the issue of income redistribution central to the campaign. With the aid of Joe the Plumber and the discovery of Obama’s Chicago PBS interview, in which he lamented the absence of redistribution of wealth, McCain has made the proposition seem central to Obama’s ideology.

The unprecedented power the bailout has given government over the banking industry raises the real specter of socialism in America. The banks have, effectively, been nationalized. How will government use its power over them? This new reality, coupled with Obama’s professed pursuit of “social and political justice” through “redistribution of the wealth,” is enough to send a shiver down the spine of those who embrace the free market as the key to economic growth.

The audacity of Obama’s injection of a social democratic concept borrowed from Western Europe into American politics is stunning. And almost half the voters seem to be buying it.

Morris, a former adviser to Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.) and President Bill Clinton, is the author of Outrage. To get all of Dick Morris’s and Eileen McGann’s columns for free by email, go to www.dickmorris.com . To order a signed copy of their new best-selling book, Fleeced, go to dickmorris.com

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http://www.poligazette.com/2008/10/28/former-edwards-clinton-obama-speech-writer-turns-republican

Former Edwards, Clinton, Obama Speech Writer Turns Republican

By: Michael van der Galien

October 28, 2008

"...It is interesting how the Democratic Party is positioning itself as a Social Democratic Party which, to a large degree, is a novelty for America. Even the policies of most liberal presidents of American history were aimed at 'spreading opportunity', as Senator John McCain called it yesterday while campaigning in Ohio. The new Democratic party, however, is not interested in 'spreading opportunity', but in 'spreading wealth'.

Some moderate Democrats are clearly unhappy with that shift, and are ready and willing to turn to the Republican Party for fiscal policies that make more sense, and that continue the age-old tradition of equality of opportunity rather than of outcome in the U.S.

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http://www.dickmorris.com/blog/2008/10/24/socialism-obama-style/

SOCIALISM, OBAMA-STYLE

By Dick Morris And Eileen McGann

10.24.2008

The perfect storm combining the vast expansion of government’s role in the American economy, a looming Obama triumph and likely huge Democratic gains in Congress augur the most serious threat of the onset of socialism the United States has faced since the New Deal. But while it became obvious that FDR’s goal was to save capitalism, not to replace it, it is by no means clear that Barack Obama is similarly inclined.

As alarm bells ring incessantly, demanding government action to prevent the conflagration of our most important companies and markets, the Federal Reserve and Treasury rush to extinguish the flames with hoses filled with money. But this massive and needed public-sector intrusion into private enterprise begs the key question: After the fires are put out, will the government firefighters leave, or will they move into the companies they saved and evict their former corporate owners?

The current crisis makes it clear that the government will be invited inside the management and ownership of our top financial and corporate institutions. But it is unclear whether it will ever withdraw after the crisis has passed.

Obama’s stated goal of “spreading the wealth around” may indicate an inclination to embrace European-style socialist democracy. His emphasis on promoting “fairness” in income distribution and his willingness to sacrifice economic growth by raising taxes on “the rich” all seem to point in that direction. Will Obama realize that while government is needed to prevent a crash, it is hopelessly inadequate as an engine of prosperity? Bureaucrats are neither sufficiently competent nor honest nor independent enough to make key decisions about where capital should be invested, except when it is needed to extinguish the flames of crisis.

If Obama wins and takes a solidly and overwhelmingly Democratic Congress with him — including a filibuster-proof Senate — we will have to entrust our system of private ownership, limited government and free enterprise to the tender mercy of the left. But the newly empowered liberals will not have to breach the walls of the private sector, justifying each new intrusion by argument and logic. Rather, they will already be inside the gates, invited there to save these institutions from their own history of greed and mismanagement. Will the left simply leave government there, effectively converting our private enterprise system, where government absorbs about a third of our GDP into a social democracy, a la Europe, where the public sector accounts for almost half of the economy?

For those who would rather not find out, it is particularly important to redouble our efforts for John McCain and to battle for each Senate seat. McCain is only seven points behind — not an insurmountable margin. A good final week could save the free enterprise system. We owe it to our future to try.

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http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24511686-7583,00.html

America's new social democracy

By Geoff Garrett

October 18, 2008

HUMBLING as it was for America's cheerleader-in-chief, President George W. Bush socialised Wall Street's losses to the tune of $US700 billion because, he said, "our entire economy is in danger". When the stock market reacted with a huge sell-off, the administration changed the plan to a profoundly un-American partial nationalisation of big banks.

As the economic crisis turns from a credit freeze on Wall Street into a painful recession on Main Street, Barack Obama and John McCain are throwing money at America's new everyman, "Joe, the plumber", standing for everyone in Middle America worried sick about what the future holds for them. Barring a stunning revelation, massive gaffe or international crisis, Australia and the world seem likely to get what most want: a president Obama. But an Obama victory would have little to do with the perceived failings of Iraq and the war on terrorism, the casus belli of Obama's candidacy and global anti-Bush antipathy. Instead, Obama seems likely to win the presidency because Americans are as mad as hell about the economic mess they blame on Bush.

Try as he might, McCain just cannot put enough distance between himself and the President on the economy. Bush and McCain are seen as lax-on-regulation, tax-cuts-for-the-rich, trickle-down-economics Republicans who have aided and abetted Wall Street's excesses and ignored Main Street's misery. Obama's answer is the standard Democrat economic fare of tax credits and affordable health care for poorer Americans, paid for by higher taxes on the wealthy elite.

What is different is that for the first time since Ronald Reagan won the White House in 1980, the Democrats seem poised to win the presidency on their own big-government terms. Reagan said government was the problem, not the solution, transforming US politics for a generation. Bill Clinton could win back the White House only by "ending welfare as we know it" and turning his Democrats into the party of fiscal prudence and budget surpluses. Now the US seems poised to go back to the future of old-style Democratic rule. Obama, by nature and history a Democrat outsider who promises post-partisanship not more partisanship, is an unlikely leader of this new US social democracy.

But if Obama wins the presidency, he will win as a conventional Democrat, with the probable support of strong Democrat majorities in both houses of Congress. The problem for Obama and the Democrats is that they will inherit a diabolical situation in which the prospect of failure is very real.

The statistics of Wall Street losses and the government bill for mopping them up are staggering. But the rising tide of bad news about the broader economy is at least as important. Up to 20 per cent of American homeowners are "under water", owing more in their mortgages than their homes are worth. Car sales, a bellwether of consumer sentiment, are down about one-quarter on a year ago. America lost more than 750,000 jobs in the first nine months of this year. The president of the San Francisco branch of the US Federal Reserve said this week what everyone else was already thinking: America is already in recession. The majority of people think the country is headed in the wrong direction.

Enter a resurgent American Keynesianism. The US budget deficit for the past year approached half a trillion dollars. America's accumulated public debt is close to $US10 trillion. With these debt and deficit numbers, the US couldn't join the euro zone because it is too fiscally profligate. And this is before the costs of the Wall Street bailout hit the Government's balance sheet, not to mention the enormous costs of Iraq and Afghanistan, which are not part of the regular budget.

Yet both presidential candidates want to cut taxes and spend more. Before the economic tsunami of the past month, Obama said he would give tax breaks to 95 per cent of Americans, invest $US15 billion a year in alternative energy and get cheap health insurance to most of the 50 million Americans who don't have it - with a bill of more than $US100 billion a year. McCain countered with a menu of his own capital gains and business tax cuts costing at least as much. Now McCain and Obama want to add an additional $US50 billion a year to the deficit, creating jobs, helping mortgage holders and cutting taxes on retirement accounts.

Cries that the US is on the precipice of the disastrous events of the 1930s all over again seem histrionic. But Washington's response to today's economic woes looks increasingly like FDR's New Deal from that period.

Can the US really run annual deficits approaching $US1trillion, with accumulated public debt as big as the US economy? It looks as if the country is headed in that direction with a president Obama at the helm.

Geoff Garrett is chief executive of the US Studies Centre at the University of Sydney.www.sydney.edu.au/us-studies

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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/10/18/mccain-surrogate-calls-ob_n_135850.html

McCain Surrogate Calls Obama (Not His Policies) "A Socialist"

Huffington Post Blog

October 18, 2008

Over the past few days there has been a concerted McCain campaign effort to paint Barack Obama's tax policies as socialistic in nature. On Friday a surrogate for the Arizona Republican took the argument to the next overheated level, declaring as fact that Obama a socialist himself.

During a speaking arrangement in southeast Ohio, Sen. George Voinovich was quoted as saying of Obama: "He is left of Teddy Kennedy...With all due respect, the man is a socialist."

The charge - unfounded and essentially hypocritical - represents the logical extension of the McCain campaign's newest gambit. Following Wednesday night's presidential debate both the Republican nominee and his running mate have taken to deriding Obama's proposal for refundable tax credits as something akin to "welfare" or a "government giveaway." But they have never gone so far as to label the candidate himself "socialist."

[THE TRUTH SIMPLY IS, THAT THE DEMOCRATS ARE TERRIFIED ABOUT THE AMERICAN PUBLIC FINDING OUT ABOUT HOW THEIR CANDIDATE, BARACK OBAMA, EMBRACES EUROPEAN & AMERICAN SOCIALIST POLICIES.]

McCain, in a radio address on Saturday, declared: "Barack Obama's tax plan would convert the (Internal Revenue Service) into a giant welfare agency, redistributing massive amounts of wealth at the direction of politicians in Washington... "At least in Europe, the socialist leaders who so admire my opponent are upfront about their objectives. They use real numbers and honest language. And we should demand equal candor from Senator Obama."

Sarah Palin, a day earlier, accused the Democratic nominee of having an economic agenda that resembled socialism. "Sen. Obama said that he wants to spread the wealth and he wants government to take your money and decide how to best to redistribute it according to his priorities," she said. "Joe [the Plumber, the new McCain working man surrogate] suggested that sounded a little bit like socialism."

There is, however, a kicker. The refundable tax credits that the McCain-Palin ticket is deriding are a major part of McCain's own health care plan. In fact, in his speech on Saturday, the Arizona Republican touted the fact that he would outfit "every single American family with a $5000 refundable tax credit" to help with insurance costs.

"Presidential campaigns are full of hypocrisy, of course," wrote the New Republic's Jonathan Cohn. "But I can't remember the last time a candidate was this brazen about it. It makes you wonder what McCain thinks about the public's power of perception."

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http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/10/planetary_president_obama.html

Planetary President Obama

By Philip C. Bom

The American Thinker

October 17, 2008

Senator Obama could well become our first planetary president.

Traditional bipartisan US foreign policy has been one of collective international security of independent nation states. In other words, nations cooperate together as independent countries to maintain international peace. This is in direct contrast to the world-order concept of "common security."

Candidate Obama heralds change and hope, but his ideological message reads like a "copy and paste" from documents written by socialists of the past century. He presents himself as a new politician but has adopted an old "world order" agenda. Obama's policies will certainly produce change -- but a fundamental change that will shock most Americans.

The Democratic Party's platform (authored by Senator Obama's policy director) reads like a planetary manifesto for a new global order.

Senator Obama himself has said he seeks to provide "a world that stands as one" with "global leadership grounded in the understanding that the world shares a common security and a common humanity" (Berlin speech and Foreign Affairs article, July/August 2007, FA). As president, Obama promises to "strengthen our common security by investing in our common humanity."

Obama adopts the old framework of international socialists. He jettisons the traditional meaning of security and adopts the view of democracy as social economic democracy. In his writings and speeches, Obama consistently calls for "building just, secure, democratic societies (FA)."

Senator Obama ties the concept of national security to global poverty. In the FA article, Obama claims that "the United States has a direct national security interest in dramatically reducing global poverty and joining with our allies in sharing more of our riches to help those most in need." He has the audacity to proclaim: "Like it or not, if we want to make America more secure, we are going to have to help make the world more secure" (AH, 304). For him, global security means eliminating world poverty.

According to the 1995 Commission on Global Governance (CGG), "...the security of people must be regarded as a goal as important as the security of states." In addition, "The primary goals of global security should be ... the security of people and the planet." The Democratic Party platform adopts this definition of national security (encompassing environmental security). The platform proudly promotes "Protecting our Security and Saving our Planet" as if they are one and the same. "We understand that climate change is not just an economic issue or an environmental concern -- this is a national security crisis."

Yet, while Obama promises to protect the American people, how often does he promise to protect the USA as an independent nation state? Following the ideology of CGG, he blurs the distinction between our national homeland and "our human homeland."

As noted, however, Obama's political ideas are hardly novel. Concepts and phrases (e.g. common humanity, common security, one world, economic security) in his speeches and in the platform can be found in the agendas of international socialists like the late Willy Brandt and Olof Palme. Even Obama's words of "change" and "hope" date back to 1981.

Both Willy Brandt and Olof Palme were important international socialist leaders during the 1970s: Brandt as Chancellor of Germany, and Olof Palme as Prime Minister of Sweden. In addition, they served together as leaders of the Socialist International with Brandt as President and Palme as Vice-President. Of particular interest is their later selection to chair commissions on development (Brandt) and disarmament (Palme). The commissions advanced the socialist perspective of the 1974 UN Charter of Economic Rights and Duties of States which laid the foundation for the new international economic order. The commissions also sought to promote a linkage between disarmament and development. The same perspective appears in Obama's positions.

In the 1980 Commission on International Development Issues report, Chairman Brandt made "a plea for change." He yearned for a new generation that would "liberate people from outworn ideas, from the grip of narrowly conceived national interests and from the passions and prejudices inherited from the past. A new international economic order will need men and women with a new mentality and wider outlook to make it work...." In his nomination speech, Obama agrees with Brandt on the "need to cast off the worn-out ideas and politics of the past."

Going back even further, the 1974 Charter for a New International Economic Order sought to establish a "just and equitable economic and social order" and promoted "economic security for development, in particular of the developing countries." A few years later, Brandt advocated "steps along the path to what could genuinely be called a society of nations, a new world order" based on international economic justice (redistribution of wealth and power among all nations). Note the similarity with Obama's words: "sharing more of our riches to help those most in need."

Brandt believed that world politics should move beyond an UN organization of nation states "towards a genuine society of nations." In addition, the 1975 Human Manifesto rejected the principle of independent nation states and pledged to place "the human interest above the national interest, and human sovereignty above national sovereignty." This is exactly what Obama has done in his emphasis on defending the American people (versus defending the USA as an independent nation state).

National security was redefined decades ago. The late international socialist, Olof Palme, (Chairman of the Commission on Disarmament and Security Issues) advanced a new definition. "The security -- even the existence -- of the nations of the world is interdependent." The report elaborated by stating "... that nations must come to understand that the maintenance of world peace must be given a higher priority than the assertion of their own ideological or political positions." "Common security requires that people live in dignity and peace, that they have enough to eat and are able to find work and live in a world without poverty and destitution."

Brandt hoped that a future leader would arise from "among the young generations who will soon carry major political responsibility." It seems that Obama may well be that New Leader for whom Brandt hoped.

Senator Clinton may be liberal Democrat, but the left-of-liberal Obama captured the Party nomination as a hero of hope and change. However, upon closer examination, his message of change and hope is anchored in old socialist doctrines. Obama launched his political career as a local community organizer. If elected, he will affirm his career as the great global community organizer -- and will fulfill the dreams of world socialists like Brandt and Palme.

The great New Leader's "heart is filled with love for this country" (AH, 362). On the other hand, his political head is filled with love for a new global order. He appears to be enthralled with dreams of global transformation through common security, economic security, and economic democracy -- concepts foreign to traditional American international policy. He could very well be a good UN Secretary General, but to entrust him with American presidential leadership will be a bridge too far. If elected, it will mean the end of America's political, military, and legal independence.

Philip C. Bom is a professor of International Politics at Regent University in Virginia Beach, VA.

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http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,2144,3596805,00.html

In Denver, German Social Democrats Listen to Obama and Learn

Deutsche World-World.DE

8/27/08

Currently in Denver to get some strategy lessons from the Democratic National Convention, a top official for Germany's Social Democrats told DW that he's also there to see what an Obama victory would mean for Germany.

Hubertus Heil, 35, is general secretary of Germany's Social Democratic Party (SPD) and a member of the German parliament.

Deutsche Welle: Why did you come to Denver?

Hubertus Heil: We are here to observe the Democratic National Convention, not so much to watch the show -- interesting as it is -- as to talk to people in order to find out what an administration led by Barack Obama would mean in terms of foreign, security, economic and environmental policy. Obviously it would have an effect on German politics, and that is why we are here.

What conclusions have you reached so far?

Obviously, a lot remains unclear. The candidate here to be nominated is very promising, to Europe and Germany, but his agenda is still unclear. Take the question of Afghanistan or the environment. These are issues we are discussing, and it is apparent that the Democratic Party, and especially the unions supporting the party, have a keen political interest in helping steer globalization -- for example by addressing labor standards around the world.

As you just mentioned, the convention is also a lot about show. What has made most impression on you so far?

Bildunterschrift:

Großansicht des Bildes mit der Bildunterschrift: The SPD party conventions are much duller affairs. It's very impressive to see how much the city of Denver identifies with the Democratic Convention. It's an extraordinary and very media-savvy show, as is standard practice in the US. It couldn't be done in Germany, that's obvious, but it's very interesting to see how it works and to witness this political culture first-hand, and the US is in fact a very old democracy.

Have you met Barack Obama yet?

No. I saw him speak at the Victory Column in Berlin -- but I wouldn't call that 'meeting' him.

Do you think he would make a good Social Democratic chancellor?

No, because we have a very different political system. The US has a presidential system. We have a parliamentary democracy, which means every country needs candidates that fit the system. But don't worry, we'll find a candidate (for the chancellorship).

Which lessons will you have learned from the Democratic Convention that could be applied to the next SPD convention in Germany?

Nothing that's specifically relevant for the convention. As I said, we have a different political culture, including party structure. The SPD is a people's party, a member's party, while the Democrats in the US are organized differently, particularly during election campaigns. We're very interested in the online election campaign the party has been running, and the way it has managed to reach so many young people; how it's organized grassroots campaigns and recruited a lot of volunteers. We can learn more from the technique than the agenda.

How much information can be gleaned from Barack Obama's campaign team?

You can learn a lot from talking to advisers, as well as to senators and congress members. But obviously they are going to play their cards close to their chest. They'll be keeping most things to themselves. They'll also develop voter mobilization strategies for the final weeks of the campaign at the very last minute. We'll see.

There's a lot of talk here at the convention of rifts -- Barack Obama on one side, Hillary Clinton on the other. The party is hoping the convention will help it unify. Is there anything you can learn here that might help the SDP back home?

As I said, every party needs to work within its own political culture. But it will be interesting to see if Barack Obama can manage to win the blue-collar vote, the support of the working classes. In Germany it's obviously very important to reach the people who work hard and play by the rules. But that is as far as it goes.

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http://www.worldnetdaily.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=61756

Constitutional republic vs. social democracy

By Samuel L. Blumenthal

Posted: April 17, 2008

As we listen to the three major candidates and try to decode their statements and slogans ("Change we can believe in "or "Yes, we can"), it becomes increasingly obvious that the main issue of this campaign is the nature of our government and whether or not it should be changed.

Changed to what? The Founding Fathers gave us a constitutional republic, which severely limited the power of government. It gave the American people the greatest freedom any people had ever enjoyed, and with that freedom they built the most dynamic, prosperous society in history.

Back in 1933, when Fabian Socialist George Bernard Shaw came to America to lecture us on our deficiencies, he said:

When you came to examine the American Constitution, you found that it was not really a Constitution but only a Charter of Anarchism. It was not an instrument of government: it was a guarantee to the whole American nation that it never should be governed at all. And that is exactly what the Americans want. …

You had perfected a Constitution of negatives to defend liberty, liberty, liberty – life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness – against the only checks on anarchy that could secure them, and fortified it by a Supreme Court which dealt out nothing but prohibitions, and a political party machinery of legislatures and senates, which was so wonderfully devised that when you sent in one body of men to govern the country, you sent in another body of men along with them to prevent their doing it.

Shaw, the socialist, did hit the nail on the head. And there are socialists among us today who want to do away with our constitutional system and change our government into a European style social democracy, which has unlimited power over every aspect of life.

To some extent we are already there, considering all of the government programs since Roosevelt's New Deal that have intruded into every aspect of American life. But the two-party system has remained true to its function: to make it difficult for Congress and state legislatures to enact laws that are too radically removed from our basic form of government. The result is often gridlock, but that's what's supposed to happen when politicians try to impose laws the people don't want. We call them checks and balances.

There is no doubt that both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are on the side of social democracy. Where McCain stands is hard to pin down. He does occasionally sound like a conservative in favor of limited government, but he is not a movement conservative committed to a set of articulated principles. And neither is Bush. They espouse a kind of mushy country club Republicanism that occasionally echoes the principles of government enunciated by our Constitution.

But since everything has changed since 9/11 in the interest of national security, it has become hard to tell what kind of government we actually have. We have a horrendous problem with illegal immigration .

Our economy is bedeviled with enormous debt, inflation, a falling dollar and employment insecurity. We are involved in a costly, frustrating war in Iraq and Afghanistan against Islamic extremism. The price of gasoline is changing driving habits. The government schools are still dumbing down the kids. And the calls for "change we can believe in" makes all conservatives very uneasy about our future.

Does "change we can believe in" mean giving up our national sovereignty for a North American Union to be later linked with the European Union?

Shaw may have called our constitutional system anarchic, but what did he offer in its place? In the same year he spoke, Hitler took control of Germany and got rid of any anarchic tendencies among the German people. The Communists in Russia were starving Ukrainians and applying the merciless dictatorship of the proletariat over every poor Russian.

Are the American people hankering for social democracy? Do they want socialized medicine? Do they want more government regulation and higher taxes?

The Founding Fathers very wisely give us the Bill of Rights as added protection against government tyranny. And computer technology is providing the individual with the power to speak out and be heard. But what must come out of this coming election is some indication of where this country is headed. The present uncertainty is so unnerving that Americans seem to be putting their nation's future and their own on hold. But hopefully, that uncertainty will end next November … or it will become worse.

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http://www.spd.de/menu/1683786

Das Soziale Deutscheland

Willy Brandt

Willy Brandt (christened Herbert Frahm, he took the name of Willy Brandt after emigrating) was born in Lübeck on 18 December 1913 and brought up by his grandfather, a social democratic worker from Mecklenburg. He joined the SPD in 1930. In late March 1933, Brandt fled first to Denmark and then to Oslo, where he worked as a journalist and supported the German resistance. He became a Norwegian citizen in 1940. Influenced by the undogmatic and liberal popular socialism of the Nordic countries, Brandt saw the SPD as a party that would be able to integrate all the democratic socialist forces and set about charting the prospects for the peaceful restructuring of Europe after the defeat of Nazi Germany.

The party executive appointed Brandt its representative in Berlin in 1948, the same year in which he resumed German citizenship. Seats in the Federal Parliament and the Berlin House of Representatives were followed by his election in 1957 as Mayor of Berlin, a post he held until 1966.

Brandt's ascent in the federal party as a representative of the reformist wing (member of the Federal Executive in 1958, Vice-chair in 1962) took place more or less concurrently and was accompanied by setbacks. Brandt had a fine nose for prevailing trends as well as the ability to integrate different political factions within his party. He was the SPD's candidate for the chancellorship in 1961 and again in 1965 but he lost on both occasions.

In 1964, he was elected SPD party chair. In 1966, the SPD entered a grand coalition with the CDU/CSU, in which Brandt was Vice-Chancellor and Foreign Minister.

In 1969, the SPD formed a coalition with the FDP, in which Brandt was Federal Chancellor. In this capacity he laid the foundations of his Ostpolitik, which aimed to regulate relations with the countries and peoples of Eastern Europe. A reliable partnership with the West remained the prerequisite for this policy of peace and rapprochement, however. Brandt also succeeded in instigating some notable internal reforms that were designed to reduce the authoritarian nature of the state and transform the Federal Republic into an enlightened citizen's state. He also prompted his party to rid itself of its last vestiges of traditionalism. As a result, the terms democracy and socialism were merged to form the concept of Democratic Socialism. Following the federal elections of 1972, which endorsed his political agenda, Brandt emerged as a charismatic leader, becoming the symbol of a better Germany and establishing himself as a prominent statesman who commanded international respect (underlined by his award of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1971). Two years later, on 6 May 1974, he resigned as Federal Chancellor in the wake of the espionage affair surrounding Günter Guillaume, a GDR agent who had been a member of his staff. Brandt later came to regard his decision to resign as wrong.

He remained chairman of the SPD, though, and assisted its transformation into a modern popular party. As chairman of the Socialist International, a position to which he had been appointed in 1976, he contributed significantly to the democratisation of Southern Europe. In 1977, he chaired the Independent Commission on International Development Issues (the so-called North-South Commission), which drafted development strategies for global action based on solidarity. Willy Brandt succeeded in recruiting prominent politicians and experts to the North-South Commission. On 12 February 1980, following two years' work, the Commission presented its report, which immediately attracted global attention.

Known as the Brandt Report, the study undertook a review of development policy, calling for the integration of the underprivileged countries of the South into the global economy. The Commission hoped this would lead to the requisite improvements in the economic and social situation of the disadvantaged countries.

After 23 years in office, Brandt stepped down as chairman of the SPD in June 1987. He became honorary chairman of the SPD and also kept his seat in the Federal Parliament. He returned to the forefront of the political arena in 1989. A man who had always considered himself both a German patriot and global citizen, he was one of the driving forces of German reunification.

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http://www.spd.de/show/1753062/071027_Au%DFenpol_Beschluss%20_engl.pdf

Resolution of the SPD Federal Party Congress in Hamburg

A Forward-Thinking Peace Policy

October 26-28, 2007

"...Our decisions in the field of international policy place the worth of each individual at the epicentre and are based upon the hierarchy of values of the constitution, the European Charter of Fundamental Rights, the General Declaration of Human Rights and international law. At the same time, we support the internationally agreed view that civil, political, economic, social and cultural human rights are indivisible and mutually inter-dependent. Even in times of crisis, we accept no concessions in this hierarchy of values: for us, the torture ban is valid absolutely. We remain steadfastly opposed to any attempt to water down this inalienable human right. This also applies to the fight against international terrorism, as it is the only way that it can be conducted with determination and with success.

The Social Democrats act on the assumption of a wide-ranging concept of peace, security and development. Social Democratic peace policy is more than a security policy. We know that in the long run, peace can be achieved only by a package of political, economic, cultural and development cooperation measures, by effective multilateralism and an even-handed international economic and legal order.

Our peace policy takes a preventive approach to the causes of conflict. This means that we include the subjects climate change, global environmental protection and the global fight against poverty as part of our peace and security policy. It is also a matter of urgency for us to enter into a new phase of détente policy, and thus once again make treaty-based international arms control and disarmament into a fundamental organisational principle of international relations.

The United Nations could form the crucial framework for the resolution of these problems. Regional associations such as the OSCE and the European Council, too, have a major contribution to make to preventative conflict resolution. We are committed to the political and social shaping of globalised capitalism. In order to counteract harmful competition between the individual nation States and to open up the opportunities offered by globalisation to all people and countries, we are counting on the further enlargement of the EU and a highly productive system of Global Governance. We know that we can only resolve global challenges by working together.

...Expanding Effective Multilateralism

With a view to effective multilateralism and a world home affairs policy, we want a strong United Nations. Only the UN Security Council has the legitimate authority to decide on international compulsory measures. We stand by this. At the same time, however, the United Nations must be reformed to meet the challenges of the 21st century. The SPD aspires to a strong, internationally-binding legal order and better democratic participation for all regions of the world. If we are to create a fair and socially just world order, the competences of the United Nations must be increased, bunched together and coordinated better.

For this reason, the SPD calls upon the Federal Government to continue in its consistent support of United Nations reform, which will help strengthen the UN and its specialist agencies and to rrange them effectively, further develop international law and allow the regions of the world proportionate participation in decision-making processes. Reform of the UN and extending the membership of the UN Security Council are, for this reason, a matter of urgency. The SPD calls upon the German Federal government to continue to work constructively for this reform and in so doing to stand by Germany’s offer to take on greater responsibility in this.

We support the transatlantic partnership. We share common values and interests. We wish to rebuild our alliance with the USA from the bottom up. In the knowledge that a peaceful world order and sustainable global development can exist only if we work together with the USA, Europe and the USA must agree on common objectives for the central questions of the future. We want to agree on a joint leadership role with the USA in climate protection, develop rules for a fair world order and build upon cultural exchange. We are in favour of an open debate of values with the USA on questions on which we have a difference of opinion, such as the death penalty or Guantanamo.

The transatlantic relationship consists of more than the collective defence organisation, NATO. In talks with our NATO partners, we wish to move away from concentrating on the military and campaign for a political and, if needs be, a broad civil-military approach to conflict resolution. NATO must become more closely involved in higher-level political strategies or those of the UN and improve cooperation on the basis of the division of labour with major civil players and instruments. We do not wish to see a global expansion of NATO.

...3. Creating a Fair World Order

Our basic values of freedom, justice and solidarity do not apply only to Germany and Europe. In the global 21st century, more than ever before, solidarity also encompasses solidarity with people in other parts of the world.

The process of globalisation brings companies, economies and the politics of national and international institutions ever closer together. It is neither possible nor desirable to stop or reverse this process. Creating a fair world order, taking advantage of the opportunities provided by globalisation and helping to fight the dangers is the correct response to the challenge. A fair world order is in our own enlightened interests and is an urgent concern of ours. The SPD wants to take its responsibility. Today, responsible government also means taking on global responsibility.

Eradicating Poverty

It is not just wars but also violent conflicts and terrorism which stand in the way of the creation of a fair world order. Worldwide poverty and increasing inequalities within and between States remain a major evil and conceal major social dynamite. Poverty consolidates conflicts and blows them up into wars. Poverty expresses itself in many forms: famine, under-nourishment, disease, unfulfilled basic requirements, insufficient access to clean drinking water, no opportunity for education or participation, suppression. Poverty is suffering and injustice, which hit the poorest members of society, particularly women and children, the hardest.

...The United Nations’ millennium development with their concrete targets up to the year 2015 must remain binding for the Federal government. We call on the government to ensure that Germany continues to fulfil its international obligations in the future.

...Good Governance - Nationally and Internationally

The implementation of political and social human rights and democracy is of vital importance for a fairer world order. Without human rights, good governance and he active participation of civil society, sustainable development cannot be achieved. The work done by strong non-governmental organisations makes a very mportant contribution to achieving good governance and ensuring its ustainability.

...At nation state level, the issue of observing human rights, good governance and democracy is not a matter of exporting specific governmental models, but of implementing principles which are rooted in international law.

...Another objective for international organisations is good governance and coordination. Good Governance must also be a watchword for the reform of the United Nations. We furthermore urge the German Federal government to verify the conditions in which an initiative to establish an effective World Council for economic, social and environmental policy under the umbrella of the United Nations may succeed.

...A Fair and Socially Just World Economy

Without a socially-oriented world economy targeting balance and fairness, there can be no fair world order. The problem is that political globalisation has not yet attained the same dimensions as economic globalisation. Companies operating worldwide, international financial markets and growing trade flows around the globe are having increasing effects on the working and everyday lives of the people; national political systems have lost influence.

One duty of politics is to preserve and build upon its power to shape, in order to be able to fight infringements of human rights, glaring injustices and social ills. International solutions are required in three areas:

- Improving the opportunities of the developing countries on fairly-governed world markets.

- Implementing internationally-binding social standards to protect workers worldwide.

- Implementing internationally-binding ecological standards for a sustainable world economy and far-sighted energy policy.

The SPD welcomes the initiatives of the Federal government, including in the context of its G8 Presidency, and expressly urges it to campaign for the following measures within its international commitment:

- Support for the developing countries in establishing economic, legal and institutional framework conditions to make wide-ranging and sustainable economic growth a possibility and attract investment,

- The removal of barriers to trade, customs barriers and industrial country subsidies, in order to offer the developing countries a fair chance on the world markets,

- The resumption of the Doha Development Round under the aegis of the WTO,

- Strengthening trade-driven development cooperation,

- Implementing social standards in line with the ILO conventions and OECD guidelines,

- Boosting voluntary initiatives for responsible corporate governance, such as the Global Compact,

- Supporting the developing countries and regional organisations in their environmentally-friendly use of natural resources,

- Supporting programmes to bring about the transparency of financial flows in the raw materials sector, such as the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI).

But at national level, too, further conditions must be created to contribute to a fair and socially-just world economy. For this reason, the SPD calls upon the Federal government to codify provisions which ensure that social and ecological standards are upheld when carrying out the national implementation of the EU public procurement directive.

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http://www.spd.de/show/1683388/240506_SPD_MANIFESTO_eng-2006.pdf

Power for Renewal

Social justice for the twenty-first century: Principles for a new manifesto for the SPD

April 24, 2006

Our world is undergoing upheaval. The Cold War lies behind us; the integration of Europe has created new relationships; and the transformation of the economy is changing both the worklife and everyday life. All this creates new opportunities – and new risks. We social democrats have never been content to rest on our laurels. And we reject the idea that an interventive policy is no longer possible today. Against fatalism and a politics of fear we oppose a value-based politics of confidence and trust.

The Social Democratic Party’s Godesberg Manifesto of 1959 transformed it from a workers’ party into a people’s party. With its Berlin Manifesto of 1989 social democracy assimilated the stimuli of the new social movements – not least the idea of sustainability. The SPD’s first manifesto of the twenty-first century must again provide new answers: new answers to the challenges of Europeanisation, globalization, and social, demographic, and technological change. The time is out of joint: new things are emerging while the old ones slip away only gradually. How can change be combined with stability and social justice? How can we enable renewal and cohesion?

We must not rely on passive adaptation to change but seek actively to guide it. The existence of a wide range of different market economies and welfare states both in Europe and the rest of the world furnishes impressive proof that even today there is considerable room for maneuver at national level.

When the SPD adopted its Berlin Manifesto in December 1989 the extent and the contours of national and European change were only discernible in outline. The fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989 symbolizes the victory of the people of Europe over the Post-War order. The attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, is the symbol of a new era of global conflicts which challenge our world community.

In 1998 the SPD once more took on the responsibility of governing the whole of Germany. Social democrats formed policy in the Bundesländer, cities, administrative districts and municipalities. Our policies accelerated the renewal of our country. The upshot is that the guiding principles of the Berlin manifesto no longer suffice to point us in the right direction. However, the Berlin manifesto can serve as the starting point for a reformulation of social democratic policy for the twenty-first century. The Godesberg manifesto’s basic values of freedom, justice, and solidarity remain. It is not our basic values and goals which are changing, but the political point of departure for their realization.

As the mainstream party of the left in Germany we are conducting the debate about a new basic manifesto for society as a whole and with society as a whole. We are willing to join forces with anyone who shares the values and aims of social democracy. And we stand opposed to any who hold different views. We shall be proactive in the battle of ideas in Germany.

Radical pro-marketeers hold out a dishonest promise of freedom which elevates personal egotism to the status of a moral principle. Today more than ever we are prey to ideas and developments which aim to weaken and disparage the state and radicalize the market economy. The conservatives do not realize that a society based on freedom and equality is possible only when an active and creative politics creates the necessary conditions for it. At the same time, left-wing populists despise people’s desire for freedom and pretend to be able to opt out of the reality of change. We social democrats, in contrast, understand that the world is changing; once again what is needed is to shape change in such a way that a new security becomes possible...

The Surreal Obama IS the REAL EURObama!

noreply@blogger.com (ITSSD Charitable Mission) — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 19:58:00 +0000

I. Obama On the Need for Americans to Sacrifice Their Wealth & Living Standards, in Line With the European Union and its Member States
and consistent with Environmental Extremist Group Demands, 'For the Benefit of Humankind', Via Imposition of National CO2 Emissions Caps, Other Environmental Regulations That Indirectly 'Take' Private Property For 'Public Use' Without Payment of 'Just Compensation', and Indirect and Direct Taxation on Energy Use and Carbon Intensity - (.e., the degree to which Products & Services Incorporate Fossil Fuels in their Manufacture & Processing), all of which will result in Significant Cost Increases for US businesses and individuals.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7673684.stm

EU 'holds firm' on climate goals

BBC

October 16, 2008

EU leaders will maintain their targets and timetable for tackling climate change, despite objections from some nations, the French president has said.

Sarkozy on climate change target

EU leaders will maintain their targets and timetable for tackling climate change, despite objections from some nations, the French president has said.

At a summit in Brussels, Nicolas Sarkozy said "solutions" would be found for those that had expressed concerns.

Some countries have threatened to block a deal agreed last year for EU-wide cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, citing the economic slowdown.

The split over climate change contrasts with EU unity over the banking crisis.

The financial crisis has prompted some countries such as Poland and Italy to argue that they cannot afford to enforce tough emissions targets on their industrial sector.

For those who want the European Union to walk with power and purpose on the world stage this summit is both triumph and tragedy BBC's Mark Mardell in his blog

Mr Sarkozy, whose country holds the EU's rotating presidency, said: "The climate package is so important that we cannot simply drop it, under the pretext of a financial crisis."

Speaking at the close of the meeting, European Commission chief Jose Manuel Barroso said "we are not going to let up on the battle against climate change."

Last year, EU leaders vowed to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 20% by 2020, compared to 1990 levels, and to derive 20% of energy from renewable sources.

However, the BBC's Oana Lungescu, in Brussels, says a finalised agreement by December looks like a tall order, amid darkening prospects for Europe's economy.

Concerns

Europe has moved fast to tackle the financial crisis but it is only starting to count the cost for jobs and economic growth, our correspondent says.

The French president said EU nations should consider a co-ordinated rescue plan to tackle the broader economic crisis as with the financial crisis.

All 27 EU states broadly support a bank rescue plan proposed for the bloc and the holding of a summit on world financial reform, Mr Sarkozy said.

It is now for President Barroso and myself to find solutions for those countries which have expressed concerns Nicolas Sarkozy French president

Eurozone leaders have agreed on a comprehensive package designed to shore up banks, including making more than a 1,000bn euros ($1,366bn) available for interbank loans.

Mr Sarkozy said the EU wanted to launch "a new Bretton Woods summit" in November, referring to the 1944 meeting which led to the creation of the International Monetary Fund and other global institutions.

Other members of the group of eight industrialised nations (G8) have also signed up to the summit.

With a recession looming, some Eastern and central European countries are unhappy at the burden of cuts they will be expected to bear under the existing climate agreement.

They argue that a legacy of inefficient and coal-dependent industry, dating from the Soviet era, has made it much harder for them to achieve big emissions cuts.

Solutions

Mr Sarkozy said he was pushing hard for an agreement on climate change and energy action by the end of the year.

"On the climate package, we have obtained unanimity... It is now for President Barroso and myself to find solutions for those countries which have expressed concerns," Mr Sarkozy said.

In other summit business, talks on a new EU-Russia partnership treaty were postponed, amid continuing concern about Russia's military presence in Georgia. There were divisions about when to resume them.

A decision to revive the failed Lisbon treaty, meant to give the EU more stable institutions in difficult times, is expected to be put on the back-burner until December.

Irish Prime Minister Brian Cowen promised to come up with an action plan by then on the best way to move ahead next year.

EU leaders will maintain their targets and timetable for tackling climate change, despite objections from some nations, the French president has said.

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http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/7662753.stm

Call to maintain climate targets

By Roger Harrabin

BBC Environment Analyst

October 10, 2008

Ed Miliband, the new energy and climate secretary, has urged Europe's leaders to withstand recession fears and maintain climate change ambitions.

It was still possible to cut greenhouse gases in Europe 20% by 2020, he said.

Mr Miliband also argued EU targets would also help the economy by creating new jobs in clean technology.

[BUT WHO WILL PAY FOR THIS?? EUROPEAN TAXPAYERS??]

There were huge gains to be made through efficiency measures which would improve energy security without needing to increase energy imports, he added.

This case is also being made strongly by the French presidency.

Mr Miliband is attending the EU council of energy ministers, a meeting which will set the tone for next week's EU summit, where there will be multiple pressures to water down the climate package in response to the recession.

Aircraft fuel

The energy and climate secretary will propose an element of watering down himself, suggesting aviation should be withdrawn from the EU's targets to increase renewable energy sources in all sectors by 20% by 2020.

He thinks this is irrational because the only existing source of alternative fuel for planes is biofuel, which is itself increasingly blamed for environmental destruction.

[WHAT ABOUT COAL -TO - LIQUIDS FOR JET FUEL??? OOPS, WE CAN'T SPEAK OF PROMOTING ENERGY SECURITY WHEN DISCUSSING CLIMATE CHANGE!]

Otherwise, he argues, the climate package should stand.

"We need to stick to our climate change targets, to stick to our targets on renewables. We also need to show we can tackle climate change in a way that is fair and affordable for ordinary families," he said.

Mr Miliband said he would be continuing the UK's bid for a reduction in VAT on energy-saving goods, a suggestion treated with scepticism by the Germans until now.

He also stressed that climate change policy had to be seen as an opportunity.

"What people are increasingly realising is that energy affordability and climate change come together. If we can find ways of saving energy it cuts their bills but it also contributes to [cutting] our carbon emissions," he said.

The crunch will come next week when Poland and other east European nations will press for the continuation of free allocations of carbon permits for their power sector. Germany and Italy will argue that export sectors should also be handed out free permits.

Both would drive down the cost of carbon permits in the EU emissions trading system and therefore reduce the impetus for industry to make energy efficiencies.

Environmentalists' worries

There is cynicism among environmentalists about the bid from the power firms to be given free permits.

Power firms across the EU are believed to have gained a windfall worth tens of billions of pounds because they have increased their prices to consumers as if they had to buy permits in the EU trading scheme even though they have been receiving the permits free of charge.

Another proposal lodged with the commission would allow some EU sectors, such as transport, to trade away 65% of their carbon targets by buying carbon permits from developing countries.

Environmentalists also warn the EU's claims to lead the world in a new global climate deal next year may be crumbling in the face of the recession.

This fear was raised earlier this week by the economist Lord Stern, author of the Stern Review on climate change.

He said climate should be seen in the same way as the credit crunch, which could have been averted if people had put the right measures in places 10-15 years ago.

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http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=a2RHIj_6hvV0&refer=home

Obama to Declare Carbon Dioxide Dangerous Pollutant (Update1)

[TREATING CARBON-BASED FUELS AS HAZARDOUS MATERIAL WILL STIGMATIZE SUBSTANTIAL SEGMENTS OF THE U.S. ECONOMY AND KILL ANY CHANCE FOR A U.S. ECONOMIC RECOVERY IN THE SHORT-TO-MEDIUM TERM!!]

By Jim Efstathiou Jr.

Bloomberg.com

October 16, 2008

Oct. 16 (Bloomberg) -- Barack Obama will classify carbon dioxide as a dangerous pollutant that can be regulated should he win the presidential election on Nov. 4, opening the way for new rules on greenhouse gas emissions.

The Democratic senator from Illinois will tell the Environmental Protection Agency that it may use the 1990 Clean Air Act to set emissions limits on power plants and manufacturers, his energy adviser, Jason Grumet, said in an interview. President George W. Bush declined to curb CO2 emissions under the law even after the Supreme Court ruled in 2007 that the government may do so.

If elected, Obama would be the first president to group emissions blamed for global warming into a category of pollutants that includes lead and carbon monoxide. Obama's rival in the presidential race, Republican Senator John McCain of Arizona, has not said how he would treat CO2 under the act.

Obama ``would initiate those rulemakings,'' Grumet said in an Oct. 6 interview in Boston. ``He's not going to insert political judgments to interrupt the recommendations of the scientific efforts.''

Placing heat-trapping pollutants in the same category as ozone may lead to caps on power-plant emissions and force utilities to use the most expensive systems to curb pollution. The move may halt construction plans on as many as half of the 130 proposed new U.S. coal plants.

The president may take action on new rules immediately upon taking office, said David Bookbinder, chief climate counsel for the Sierra Club. Environment groups including the Sierra Club and Natural Resources Defense Council will issue a regulatory agenda for the next president that calls for limits on CO2 from industry.

[IN THE EVENT THIS COMES TO PASS, U.S. TAXPAYERS - LARGE CORPORATIONS, SMALL & MEDIUM-SIZED BUSINESSES and INDIVIDUAL LANDOWNERS - COULD VERY WELL RESORT TO THE FILING OF LAWSUITS CHALLENGING PROPOSED AND FINAL FEDERAL AGENCY RULINGS ON MULTIPLE CONSTITUTIONAL AND ADMINISTRATIVE GROUNDS, AS WELL AS, LAWSUITS CHALLENGING THE ACTIVITIES UNDERTAKEN BY ENVIRONMENTAL GROUPS THAT TORTIOUSLY INTERFERE WITH, DISRUPT OR OTHERWISE INTERRUPT ONGOING BUSINESS CONTRACTUAL RELATIONSHIPS AND OPERATIONS.]

`Hit Ground Running'

``This is what they should do to hit the ground running,'' Bookbinder said in an Oct. 10 telephone interview.

Separately, Congress is debating legislation to create an emissions market to address global warming, a solution endorsed by both candidates and utilities such as American Electric Power Co., the biggest U.S. producer of electricity from coal. Congress failed to pass a global-warming bill in June and how long it may take lawmakers to agree on a plan isn't known.

[AMERICAN ELECTRIC POWER CO. & OTHER U.S. CORPORATIONS THAT ENDORSE SUCH LEGISLATION ARE MERELY SEEKING PROTECTIONISM FROM COMPETITION AND COMPENSATION (SUBSIDIZATION) FOR THE SIGNIFICANTLY HIGHER COSTS OF REGULATORY COMPLIANCE THAT THEY WOULD BE FACING AS THE RESULT OF SUCH RULES. THESE COSTS WOULD BE SOMEWHAT DEFRAYED IF THE COMPANIES COULD USE 'EMISSIONS CREDIT OFFSETS' THAT THEY HAD 'BANKED' UNDER THE CURRENT VOLUNTARY CO2 EMISSIONS PROGRAM ESTABLISHED BY THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION BACK DURING 2001 OR 2002.]

``We need federal legislation to deal with greenhouse-gas emissions,'' said Vicki Arroyo, general counsel for the Pew Center on Global Climate Change in Arlington, Virginia. ``In the meantime, there is this vacuum. People are eager to get started on this.''

[THE PEW CENTER ON GLOBAL CLIMATE CHANGE IS HARDLY AN OBJECTIVE SOURCE OF INFORMATION ON THIS SUBJECT MATTER. RATHER, IT CLEARLY HAS A PROGRESSIVE LIBERAL ELITIST ENVIRONMENTAL AGENDA THAT PRIORITIZES PUBLIC ENVIRONMENTAL GOODS OVER EXCLUSIVE PRIVATE PROPERTY RIGHTS.]

An Obama victory would help clear the deadlock in talks on an international agreement to slow global warming, Rajendra Pachauri, head of a United Nation panel of climate-change scientists, said today in Berlin. Negotiators from almost 200 countries will meet in December in Poznan, Poland, to discuss ways to limit CO2.

[THE ABSURDITY OF DR. PACHAURI'S STATEMENTS, THE REPORT'S LACK OF SCIENTIFIC CREDIBILITY and THE POLITICAL GRANDSTANDING UNDERTAKEN BY THE GOOD PROFESSOR & HIS POLITICALLY CORRECT SCIENTIFIC COLLEAGUES IS AS PLAIN AS DAY, AND IT REFLECTS A COMPREHENSIVE PLAN FOR GLOBAL SOCIALISM. As concerns its absurdity, see: Al Gore's Call for Climate Change Disobedience, UK Court's Climate Change Ruling and Lewis Gordon Pugh's North Pole Kayaking 'Do Monty Python Proud'!, ITSSD Journal on Economic Sabotage, at: http://itssdjournaleconomicsabotage.blogspot.com/2008/09/al-gores-call-for-climate-change.html .

`Back in the Game'

``The U.S. has to move quickly domestically so we can get back in the game internationally,'' Grumet said. ``We cannot have a meaningful impact in the international discussion until we develop a meaningful domestic consensus. So he'll move quickly.''

[SOMEONE SHOULD INFORM THE 'ENLIGHTENED' MR. GRUMET THAT THERE IS NO DOMESTIC CONSENSUS ON THIS ISSUE. ERGO, THERE CAN BE NO INTERNATIONAL CONSENSUS ON THIS ISSUE, DESPITE WHAT THE ENVIRONMENTALISTAS SAY AND PRAY FOR IN THE MEDIA.]

Burning coal to generate electricity produces more than a third of energy-related carbon dioxide emissions and half the U.S. power supply, according to the Energy Department. Every hour, fossil-fuel combustion generates 3.5 million tons of emissions worldwide, helping create a warming effect that ``already threatens our climate,'' the Paris-based International Energy Agency said.

[BURNING COAL GENERATES APPROXIMATELY 40-50% OF ALL ELECTRICITY IN THE U.S., IS PERHAPS THE MOST PLENTIFUL AND LEAST COSTLY U.S. NATURAL ENERGY RESOURCE. MAINTAINING PLENTIFUL, LOST COST ENERGY SHOULD BE A NATIONAL PRIORITY ESPECIALLY IN A SEVERE DOWN ECONOMIC CYCLE. WHEN COMBINED WITH NEWLY DEVELOPED AND EMERGING CLEAN COAL TECHNOLOGY THE MINING, EXTRACTION AND REFINEMENT OF COAL INTO LIQUID OR GASIFIED FORMS OF ENERGY IS ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY IF THE U.S. IS TO BOTH RETAIN AND CREATE NEW JOBS AS WELL AS ACHIEVE ENERGY SECURITY.]

[See, e.g., Paul Dreissen, The social responsibility of coal - Relying more on coal generates benefits that are too often ignored, Canadian Free Press (Sept. 3, 2008), reproduced in ITSSD Journal on Energy Security, at: http://itssdenergysecurity.blogspot.com/2008/09/social-responsibility-of-coal.html ].

[NEITHER OBAMA NOR GRUMET WILL PUBLICLY ADMIT THAT THEIR DECISION TO 'PICK WINNERS' IN THE MARKET - i.e., WINDPOWER & SOLAR POWER - WILL COME WITH EXTREME MONETARY & JOBS AND SKILLS COSTS, SINCE THE MAJORITY OF THE COMPONENTS COMPRISING WINDMILLS AND SOLAR PANELS ARE MANUFACTURED OUTSIDE THE U.S. IN OTHER WORDS, THE OBAMA ENERGY PLAN WHICH TOUTS THE CREATION OF '5 MILLION GREEN COLLAR JOBS', WILL ACTUALLY RESULT IN THE OFFSHORING OF WHAT WOULD OTHERWISE BE U.S. ENERGY PRODUCTION/MANUFACTURING JOBS TO CHINA and EASTERN EUROPE. FURTHERMORE, DUE TO THE EXTREME MANUFACTURING SHORTAGE AND BACKLOG OF SUCH COMPONENTS AND THE OBAMA ENERGY PLAN'S FOCUS ON CENTRALIZED ENERGY GENERATION RATHER THAN DECENTRALIZED/INDEPENDENT 'OFF-GRID' WIND AND SOLAR SYSTEMS, THE DEPLOYMENT OF RENEWABLE ENERGY SOURCES WILL NOT RESULT IN ANY NOTICEABLE IMPROVEMENT IN AFFORDABLE U.S. ENERGY & NATIONAL ENERGY INDEPENDENCE FOR SOME TIME, WHILE
TRIGGERING SIGNIFICANT UPFRONT INCREASES IN ENERGY COSTS FOR U.S. CONSUMERS AND BUSINESSES. SO MUCH FOR IMPROVING THE QUALITY OF LIFE FOR AVERAGE AMERICANS!]

The EPA under Bush fought the notion that the Clean Air Act applies to CO2 all the way to the Supreme Court. The law has been used successfully to regulate six pollutants, including sulfur dioxide and ozone. Regulation under the act ``could result in an unprecedented expansion of EPA authority,'' EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson said in July. The law ``is the wrong tool for the job.''

Proponents of regulation are hoping for better results under a new president. Obama adviser Grumet, executive director of the National Commission on Energy Policy, said if Congress hasn't acted in 18 months, about the time it would take to draft rules, the president should.

EPA Authority.

``The EPA is obligated to move forward in the absence of Congressional action,'' Grumet said. ``If there's no action by Congress in those 18 months, I think any responsible president would want to have the regulatory approach.''

States where coal-fired plants may be affected include Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, Texas, Montana, Minnesota, Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Georgia and Florida.

[IN EACH OF THESE STATES, UNDER AN OBAMA ENERGY PLAN, CONSUMER AND BUSINESS ENERGY COSTS WILL RISE SIGNIFICANTLY AND BE PASSED ON DOWN TO OTHER INDUSTRIES THAT CONSUME ENERGY WHICH, IN TURN, WILL RAISE GOODS & SERVICES PRICES. IN OTHER WORDS, THE RESULTING INCREASED ENERGY COSTS WILL TRICKLE THROUGHOUT THE ECONOMY OF EACH SUCH STATE AND REGION.]

The alternative, a national cap-and-trade program created by Congress, offers industry more options, said Bruce Braine, a vice president at Columbus, Ohio-based American Electric. The world's largest cap-and-trade plan for greenhouse gases opened in Europe in 2005.

[DEAR MR. BRAINE, YOU ARE MERELY COVERING YOUR POLITICAL BACKSIDE WITH SUCH A STATEMENT & AGENDA. WHY DON'T YOU TELL THE RATEPAYERS THAT YOUR COMPANY AND ITS AFFILIATES WILL DIRECTLY RAISE THEIR ENERGY COSTS AND INDIRECTLY RAISE THE COST OF GOODS & SERVICES - THEIR COST OF LIVING - i.e., THE TRUTH!! - UNDER OBAMA'S NONTRANSPARENT CLIMATE CHANGE 'CAP & TRADE' SYSTEM, WITH WHICH THE EUROPEANS ARE ALREADY ENAMORED?]

Under a cap-and-trade program, polluters may keep less- efficient plants running if they offset those emissions with investments in projects that lower pollution, such as wind-energy turbines or systems that destroy methane gas from landfills.

McCain `Not a Fan'

``Those options may still allow me to build new efficient power plants that might not meet a higher standard,'' Braine said in an Oct. 9 interview. ``That might be a more cost-effective way to approach it.''

McCain hasn't said how he would approach CO2 regulation under the Clean Air Act. McCain adviser and former Central Intelligence Agency director James Woolsey said Oct. 6 that new rules may conflict with Congressional efforts. Policy adviser Rebecca Jensen Tallent said in August that McCain prefers a bill debated by Congress rather than regulations ``established through one agency where one secretary is getting to make a lot of decisions.''

``He is not as big of a fan of standards-based approaches,'' Arroyo said. ``The Supreme Court thinks it's clear that there is greenhouse-gas authority under the Clean Air Act. To take that off the table probably wouldn't be very wise.''

More Efficient Technologies

How new regulations would affect the proposed U.S. coal plants depends on how they are written, said Bill Fang, climate issue director for the Edison Electric Institute, a Washington-based lobbying group for utilities. About half of the proposed plants plan to use technologies that are 20 percent more efficient than conventional coal burners.

[UNFORTUNATELY, Mr. FANG, 20 PERCENT IS NOT EFFICIENT ENOUGH IN THE EYES OF THE ENVIRONMENTAL EXTREMISTS TO WHOM OBAMA HAS LONG PANDERED.]

``Several states have denied the applicability of the Clean Air Act to coal permits,'' Fang said in an Oct. 10 interview.

In June, a court in Georgia stopped construction of the 1,200- megawatt Longleaf power plant, a $2 billion project, because developer Dynegy Inc. failed to consider cleaner technology.

An appeals board within the EPA is considering a challenge from the Sierra Club to Deseret Power Electric Cooperative's air permit for its 110-megawatt Bonanza coal plant in Utah on grounds that it failed to require controls on CO2. One megawatt is enough to power about 800 typical U.S. homes.

``Industry has woken up to the fact that a new progressive administration could move quickly to make the United States a leader rather than a laggard,'' said Bruce Nilles, director of the group's national coal campaign.

To contact the reporter on this story: Jim Efstathiou Jr. in New York at jefstathiou@bloomberg.net Last Updated: October 16, 2008 09:50 EDT

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http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7657414.stm

Q&A: EU green energy

BBC

October 8, 2008

EU leaders are striving to keep the 27-nation bloc's green energy targets on track amid strains caused by global economic turmoil and fears about unfair competition.

The EU's post-Kyoto targets for cutting greenhouse gases and boosting use of renewables are meant to set an example for the rest of the world. A key part of the plan is the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS).

What are the main arguments for these targets?

Responding to the challenge of climate change is "the ultimate political test for our generation," according to European Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso.

Many regions of Europe are vulnerable to climate change impacts, the European Environment Agency says - especially mountainous areas, coastal zones, the Mediterranean and Arctic.

Climate specialists, including the EEA, say northern Europe is getting wetter and the south drier, Arctic summer sea ice is melting faster than expected, many plant and animal species are moving further north and uphill.

Soaring oil and gas prices have made Europe's reliance on imported fossil fuels much more costly - and provided a strong incentive for developing renewables.

The rising cost of energy has also prompted the European Commission to call for a 20% increase in energy efficiency by 2020.

Yet the challenges are so great that the EU ought to have more ambitious targets, some environmentalists say.

Q. What is the ETS?

A. Launched in 2005, the ETS created a market in carbon emission permits, aimed at giving industry a commercial incentive to reduce greenhouse gases.

Power stations, refineries and other heavy polluters receive permits which can be traded. If an installation's carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions are higher than the number of permits it has, it must buy extra allowances from other installations which are lower CO2 emitters.

The ETS currently covers about 10,000 industrial plants across the EU, accounting for about 40% of the EU's total CO2 emissions. Each permit is equivalent to one tonne of CO2.

The success of the ETS is crucial to the EU achieving its goal of a 20% reduction in emissions by 2020, compared to 1990 levels. That goal will be extended to 30% if a new international agreement is reached.

Q. How will the ETS develop?

A. The EU is now planning for the period 2013-2020. The first phase of the ETS covered 2005-2007, the second phase 2008-2012. The second phase coincides with the Kyoto Protocol time scale. Under the Kyoto deal, the EU is required to cut its CO2 emissions by 8% from 1990 levels by 2012.

In the first and second phases, the ETS only covered CO2, whereas in phase three it will also include nitrous oxide and perfluorocarbons.

In phase three, there will be one EU-wide cap on the number of carbon permits, instead of the current system of national allowances for each member state.

The national allowances have been fiercely debated. Some new member states in Eastern Europe argue that their CO2 caps do not reflect the progress they made in cutting emissions by closing down communist-era industrial plants.

[WHAT PROGRESS?? THEY HAVE WORRIED MORE THAN THEY HAVE ACTED! See: EURObama's Ideal-ist Climate Change Policy, Like Europe's, is NOT 'Real' Change, But More of the Same!!, ITSSD Journal on Energy Security, at: http://itssdenergysecurity.blogspot.com/2008/09/eurobamas-ideal-ist-climate-change.html ].

The current ETS allocates firms a fixed number of free carbon permits. But from 2013, the European Commission says, the power sector will have to buy all its permits. The full auctioning of permits will be phased in gradually for other industrial sectors.

Aviation will be included in the ETS from 2012. Airlines will have to cut emissions by 3% in the first year, compared to 2005, and by 5% from 2013 onwards. The reason for including aviation is that while it accounts for only 3% of EU emissions, it is producing 87% more CO2 now than in 1990.

Q. Is the ETS working?

A. The cost of the ETS to European companies is a major concern as their rivals in the US, China, India and elsewhere do not yet face the same pressure to reduce CO2 emissions.

There are fears that, with the economic downturn forcing firms to cut costs, European jobs could be lost through "carbon leakage" - industry moving operations to ETS-free countries.

But EU leaders see the ETS as an effective tool for the rest of the world to adopt in the global drive to minimise the impact of climate change.

Changes to the ETS have been driven partly by complaints about windfall profits made by the big power companies.

In April 2008 the environment group WWF said the free carbon permit scheme allowed firms to pass on to consumers the cost of cutting emissions. A WWF report said German generators dependent on coal power could make 14bn-34bn euros (£11bn-£26bn) from the free handouts.

[AMERICANS SHOULD BE VERY CONCERNED THAT THE SAME GROUPS THAT THE EUROPEAN COMMISSION RELIES UPON FOR INFORMATION AND CLIMATE CHANGE AND OVERALL ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY ADVICE, WILL ALSO BE INFLUENTIAL IN HELPING OBAMA TO ESTABLISH U.S. CLIMATE CHANGE POLICY!]

The full auctioning of permits is expected to resolve that anomaly. In 2013-2020 the EU member states should be able to generate about 461bn euros from the ETS, according to Linda McAvan MEP, Labour Party spokeswoman on climate change. That revenue could be used to invest in carbon capture technology, renewable energy sources and help for developing countries to expand green energy.

Q. What is carbon capture?

A. Carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology is still in the trial phase, but there are hopes that it can help meet the EU's emission targets.

A pilot project in Germany is the world's first coal-fired power plant to capture and store its own CO2 emissions.

MEPs agree that ETS revenue should be used to finance 12 commercially viable carbon capture plants across Europe, with plans for more in future.

Q. What about CO2 emissions not covered by the ETS?

A. Under the European Commission plan - which is not yet law - sectors not covered by the ETS will have to cut emissions by 10% below 2005 levels by 2020. The commission is proposing specific targets for each member state - some of the new members in Eastern Europe may actually increase their emissions.

Buildings, transport, agriculture and waste disposal are among the sectors covered. If they fail to meet the targets the member states concerned will face stiff penalties.

MEPs have backed a target of 120g of CO2 per kilometre for cars, to take effect from 2012. The current average is 160g/km. Carmakers had urged transitional measures for their industry until 2015. Cars account for about 12% of the EU's overall CO2 emissions.

Q. What are carbon offsets?

A. The Kyoto Protocol allows industrialised countries to generate emission credits through investment in emission reduction projects in developing countries. These "offsets" work through a Clean Development Mechanism (CDM).

Critics say some of these projects are dubious and allow firms to avoid seriously reducing their CO2 emissions at home.

The MEPs' environment committee has voted for tighter monitoring of CDMs and a cap on them - over the whole period 2013-2020 they should only account for up to 8% of member states' 2005 emissions.

Q. What role does the EU envisage for renewables?

A. EU leaders have backed the commission's binding target of 20% of the total energy mix - not just electricity - coming from renewable sources by 2020. The UK's target is 15% by 2020 - but the UK will have to achieve the biggest increase of any country because it is starting from a very low base.

Wind power already provides about 20% of electricity needs in Denmark and 8% in Spain, the commission says.

The EU is committed to 10% of transport fuels coming from biofuels - but only certified biofuels produced in a sustainable way. They must also produce at least 35% less CO2 than existing fuels.

There is widespread concern that the expansion of biofuel production in some countries has jeopardised food security and helped push up food prices. Critics also say that in some cases, the cost of biofuel production - including deforestation - means little or no CO2 emissions cut is achieved.

===================================================================

II. Obama on the Need for Social & Economic Parity ('Wealth Redistribution'), Rather Than Social, Economic & Technological Growth

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2008/oct/14/fairy-tale-candidate/

Fairy-tale candidate

By James Carter and James Miller III

The Washington Times

Tuesday, October 14, 2008

COMMENTARY:

Once upon a time and far, far away from mainstream America, lived a U.S. senator named Barack Obama. Mr. Obama had a gift, a truly wondrous gift. He could spin troublesome facts into political gold. And perhaps, with enough spinning, he could even spin himself into the White House.

Bill Clinton understood this. He called Mr. Obama's spin "the biggest fairy tale I've ever seen." Like other fairy tales, this one requires a total suspension of disbelief. Jack (of Jack and the Beanstalk fame) had his magic beans. Mr. Obama has his magic facts. Consider the following so-called facts:

-- Magic Fact No. 1: Senator Obama will cut income taxes "for 95 percent of working families, 95 percent."

It would be truly magical to be able to cut income taxes on 95 percent of working families when only 68 percent of tax filers actually pay the federal income tax. According to the Internal Revenue Service, of the 136 million income tax returns filed in 2006, 43 million returns reported positive adjusted gross income but had no income tax liability because of assorted deductions, exemptions and tax credits.

So how do you give a tax cut to someone who doesn't pay income taxes? Mr. Obama proposes a massive program of "refundable tax credits." Those on the receiving end would simply get a check from the federal government. In other words, they would pay a "negative tax."

By wrapping a thoroughly liberal position - larger welfare benefits - in the mantle of tax cuts, Mr. Obama has very nearly managed to neutralize one of the defining issues of this presidential campaign. If that sleight of hand isn't magic, we don't know what is.

-- Magic Fact No. 2: Mr. Obama pays "for every dime" of his proposals.

According to the nonpartisan National Taxpayers Union Foundation, Mr. Obama has offered 73 proposals that would collectively increase federal spending $365.6 billion annually. That's literally a $1 billion-a-day spending increase. And, unfortunately, that figure doesn't include the cost of Mr. Obama's 88 other spending proposals for which no reliable cost estimates exist.

How does Mr. Obama propose to pay for these new and expanded spending programs? He begins by squeezing defense spending. He would then repeal "the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans." (Never mind that the Bush tax cuts are already scheduled to expire and that the revenue is already included in the government's budget forecasts.) Finally, he would "close corporate loopholes, [and] stop providing tax cuts to corporations that are shipping jobs overseas."

These steps would not come close to paying for the senator's spending proposals. Assuming they offset $100 billion of new spending, paying for the other $265.6 billion (still ignoring the cost of Mr. Obama's other 88 programs) would require an across-the-board income tax increase of 19 percent. And, of course, this figure does not reflect the tax increase that would be necessary to pay for Mr. Obama's "tax cuts."

The IRS reported earlier this year that the top-earning 5 percent of taxpayers shouldered 60 percent of the federal income tax burden in 2006. If Mr. Obama insists upon having a tiny fraction of Americans shoulder the cost of his spending and tax proposals, the tax increase on those taxpayers would have to be huge - far larger than the 19 percent tax increase described above. This would slow investment, employment and economic growth - and, yes, total governmental receipts.

Sen. Hillary Clinton once threatened, "We're going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good." Perhaps she would have been Mr. Obama's ideal running mate after all.

-- Magic Fact No. 3: Economists overwhelming favor Mr. Obama's economic policies.

The Obama campaign likes to say it has the support of professional economists. Yet, that "fact" is based on two, methodologically flawed polls circulating the Internet. True enough, majorities of those surveyed said they favor Mr. Obama's economic policies. What else would you expect from a poll where Democrat responders outnumbered Republicans by nearly 3-to-1? Only 17 percent of the surveyed economists were Republican. In the second poll, Democrats outnumbered Republicans nearly 5-to-1. Only 10 percent of the respondents were Republican. Meanwhile, more than 500 economists from across the country, including five Nobel Laureates, have signed a statement supporting Sen. John McCain's economic plan. (For the text of the statement and a complete list of the signatories, see http://www.economistsformccain.com/.)

The fairy tale candidate may yet become the fairy tale president. But will the story end with "and the American people lived happily ever after?"

James E. Carter, a deputy assistant secretary of the Treasury from 2002 to 2006, is an economist with the U.S. Senate. James C. Miller III served as President Reagan's budget director from 1985 to 1988 and is now a senior adviser at Husch Blackwell Sanders, LLP.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/07/opinion/07tue1.html

The Crisis Agenda

Editorial

New York Times

October 7, 2008

As stocks cratered on Monday and lending and borrowing remained frozen, the Bush administration rushed to implement the $700 billion bailout enacted on Friday. The Treasury Department said that it would soon post help-wanted ads on its Web site for asset managers to run the program and that because of the urgency, the hiring may be “through other than full and open competition.”

Is it any wonder that the markets lack confidence? One business day after the bailout was enacted, and it already had a tilting-at-windmills quality.

That is why it is vital that Barack Obama and John McCain, one of whom will inherit a real mess, address the financial crisis in real detail at their debate Tuesday night.

The most immediate question is how the crisis will affect their plans and promises — because it will.

At the first presidential debate, on Sept. 26, Mr. Obama at least acknowledged that the crisis would force him to prioritize more carefully on government spending. But then he said “we can’t shortchange” energy independence, health care reform or investing in education and infrastructure. Pressed further, he said that within those broad categories, programs may have to be delayed or deferred but offered no details.

Mr. McCain brushed aside the crisis, saying that “no matter what” the nation has to cut federal spending and “examine every agency of government” — the same prescriptions he always offers.

Then Mr. McCain boasted about killing a $6.8 billion weapons contract, an act of no relevance to the financial crisis.

The big issue for each candidate is not spending, per se, but how the crisis will affect their promises on taxes. Mr. Obama has said that he would raise taxes on the wealthy, starting next year, to help restore fairness to the tax code and to pay for his spending plans. With the economy tanking, however, it’s hard to imagine how he could prudently do that. He should acknowledge the likelihood of having to postpone a tax increase and explain how that change will affect his plans. Then, he can promise to raise those taxes as soon as the economy allows.

Mr. McCain has an even tougher job. To be straight with voters, he would have to acknowledge that the centerpiece of his economic plan — to permanently extend the Bush tax cuts beyond their expiration in 2011 and to add billions of dollars of new tax breaks — is impossible. If he went ahead with those plans, the national debt would explode, undermining the borrowing that the nation must undertake to finance the bailouts.

We would like to hear the candidates tell Americans how they will stand up for homeowners. Mr. Obama supports amending the bankruptcy code so courts can modify troubled mortgages. Mr. McCain does not, clinging to the fiction that the mortgage industry will somehow, someday, voluntarily rework most of the junk loans.

Americans deserve to hear much more detail about how the candidates would reform the financial system to prevent another crisis like this one. Saying that they’re in favor of more and better regulation is not enough. Again, Mr. Obama has the edge over Mr. McCain, who until recently was a committed deregulator.

In particular, the candidates need to say what rules they would support to rein in derivatives, like the $62 trillion market in credit default swaps, the complex and unregulated financial bets that led to the bailouts of Bear Stearns and American International Group. Swaps were exempted from regulation in 2000 by legislation pushed through by then-Senator Phil Gramm, Mr. McCain’s economic guru. [BUT THIS LEGISLATION WAS APPROVED BY A NUMBER OF PROMINENT DEMOCRATIC SENATORS AS WELL]. Re-regulation of derivatives involves imposing vastly more transparency on derivative traders and investors, which they are sure to resist, and establishing exchanges or clearinghouses where regulators can monitor trading on an ongoing basis.

Substantive answers to the financial crisis are not the stuff of sound bites. It is time for the candidates to rise to the occasion.

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http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=OGExY2UzNjQ5YjAyNWUzZmI2MDQyNmU4MmU2NGI%203ZDg=

Obama’s Tax-Plan Disaster - The candidate’s “soak the rich” tax rates will do widespread economic harm

By Cesar V. Conda

National Review Online

October 16, 2008

Here’s an unusual campaign promise: I pledge to take action as president to drive down stock prices, discourage investment, and deepen the recession. Who has promised this? Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, albeit not in so many words.

With the stock market in crisis mode and the economy in a pronounced slump, would any economist — even the most extreme liberal Keynesian — advocate increasing taxes? Of course not.

But contrary to economic commonsense, Obama is proposing to do exactly that by raising tax rates on America’s small businesses and investors.

Specifically, Obama wants to raise taxes on income, capital gains, and dividends for families earning more than $250,000 annually. Under his plan, the top two marginal tax rates will increase from 33 to 36 percent and from 35 to 39.6 percent, while both the capital-gains tax and dividend tax will rise from 15 to 20 percent. According to the plan, the extra revenues generated by these tax increases will be redistributed to lower- and middle-income people through a hodge-podge of refundable tax credits. In the meantime, these “soak the rich” tax rates will do widespread economic harm.

First, Obama’s tax-rate increases on income will fall heavily on small businesses, which create the majority of net new jobs. Here’s why: According to Internal Revenue Service data, half of all business income is taxed at individual rather than corporate tax rates, and about two-thirds of all flow-through business income is earned by small-business owners with annual incomes exceeding $200,000. The bottom line: Up to one-third of all business income is taxed at the two marginal rates Obama wants to raise.

Second, history demonstrates the economic folly of raising capital-gains taxes at any time, and the economic benefit of keeping them permanently low. By influencing the incentives for people to invest, the capital-gains tax directly impacts the demand for — and value of — equities. Similarly, it influences the rate of investment, particularly in new, high-risk ventures. Between 1969 and 1978 capital-gains tax rates rose from 25 percent to 35 percent. Across the same period stock prices and venture-capital investment declined. A 1978 economic study by economist Michael Evans of Chase Econometrics Associates found that “the sharp declines in the stock market in 1969-1970, and 1977-1978 are due in large part to the Tax Reform Acts of 1968 and 1976.” Initial public stock offerings (IPOs) — an important measure of new venture-capital investment — also declined in this period, from an annual average rate of nearly $2 billion between 1969 and 1972 to an average of $225 million between 1975 and 1978.

When capital-gains tax rates were cut in 1979 and 1982, the results were just as predictable: Equity values rose along with investment commitments to new ventures.

Conversely, when capital-gains tax rates were increased from 20 to 28 percent in 1986, the rate of IPOs stagnated.

About a decade later President Bill Clinton signed legislation that chopped the capital-gains tax rate back down to 20 percent. And once again economic growth, investment, jobs, and federal tax receipts all increased. (David Wyss of Standard & Poor’s DRI, an economic consulting firm, has produced a study documenting these incentive effects.)

Yet despite this progress, the current capital-gains tax rate — 15 percent for individuals — is still too high. Many foreign countries tax capital gains at much lower rates, putting the U.S. at a competitive disadvantage. According to the American Council of Capital Formation, the U.S. is currently in the middle of the 30-member OECD pack in terms of taxing capital gains. Fourteen OECD countries do not tax capital gains at all.

Third, Obama’s plan to raise taxes on dividends will negatively impact business investment, the retirement income of seniors, and finally economic growth. When a corporation issues common stock to finance new job-creating investment, the returns on that investment are taxed twice, once at the corporate level and then again at the individual level when dividends are received by shareholders. This double tax on dividends encourages businesses to rely on debt rather than equity to finance new investment, a strategy that can weaken their financial condition.

The 2003 dividend tax cut from 35 to 15 percent reduced these economic distortions and provided incentives for companies to pay out dividends rather than retain their earnings. As a result, dividend payments were estimated to have increased by 20 percent.

But Obama’s proposed increase in the dividend tax would reverse this healthy trend. It also would disproportionately impact America’s seniors by taking a bigger bite out of their taxable dividends while reducing both the quality of dividend payments and the value of the stocks that produce them.

According to the American Association of Retired Persons, “Of the nearly $150 billion in dividends that were reported on tax returns in 2000, people aged 65 and older received a highly disproportionate share (48 percent).” Near-retirees also received a big share of dividend income (29 percent), as did those so-called “rich” families that make more than $250,000 a year.

According to the AARP study, more than one-third (37.3 percent) of dividend income went to retirees with incomes in excess of $200,000. Simply put, raising taxes on investment is never a good idea. A 2008 study by the Center for Data Analysis found that fully repealing the 2003 capital-gain and dividend tax-rate reductions would reduce employment by 270,000 jobs, cut real GDP by $44 billion, and decrease after-tax personal income by $113 billion in a single year.

On the other hand, by maintaining low tax rates and cutting certain tax rates that remain too high, as John McCain proposes to do, the economy will remain poised for growth. Looking long-term, McCain proposes to lock in the Bush tax rates of 2003 and slash corporate tax rates. For the short-term, he proposes to cut the capital-gains tax in half for a two-year period, from 15 to 7.5 percent, a stimulus measure that would spark an immediate boost in equity values. To be fair, Obama is not calling for a full repeal of the 2003 tax cuts on income and investment, but the tax hikes he has in mind are toxic enough. His tax plan has even drawn a rebuke from the editors of the New York Times, who wrote that with “the economy tanking … it’s hard to imagine how [Obama] could prudently [raise taxes on the wealthy].” And while Obama has hinted that he would consider delaying his proposed tax increases if the economy is in recession, who really thinks a President Obama and a Democratic Congress will prioritize lower taxes over new spending?

The Times is right and Barack Obama is wrong. Now is precisely the wrong time to hike taxes — especially on entrepreneurs and investors.—

Cesar Conda, a former economic and domestic policy advisor to Vice President Dick Cheney and former Gov. Mitt Romney, is a principal of Navigators LLC, a Washington-based issues management firm.

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http://itssdjournalpoliticalsurrealism.blogspot.com/2008/10/silly-obama-rabbit-dont-you-know-that.html
OBAMA FIRES A 'ROBIN HOOD' WARNING SHOT

By CHARLES HURT Bureau Chief

New York Post

October 15, 2008

IT'S A LEAK! Barack Obama tells Ohio plumber Joe Wurzelbacher he intends to "spread the wealth around."

WASHINGTON - You won't find it in his campaign ads, but Barack Obama let slip his plans to become a modern-day Robin Hood in the White House, confiscating money from the rich to give to the poor. [OBAMAHOOD!!]

Conservatives yesterday ripped Obama after he was caught on video telling an Ohio plumber that he intends to take the profits of small-business owners and "spread the wealth around" to those with lesser incomes.

The fracas over Obama's tax plan broke out Sunday outside Toledo when Joe Wurzelbacher approached the candidate.

Wurzelbacher said he planned to become the owner of a small plumbing business that will take in more than the $250,000 amount at which Obama plans to begin raising tax rates.

"Your new tax plan is going to tax me more, isn't it?" the blue-collar worker asked.

After Obama responded that it would, Wurzelbacher continued: "I've worked hard . . . I work 10 to 12 hours a day and I'm buying this company and I'm going to continue working that way. I'm getting taxed more and more while fulfilling the American Dream."

"It's not that I want to punish your success," Obama told him. "I want to make sure that everybody who is behind you, that they've got a chance for success, too.

Then, Obama explained his trickle-up theory of economics.

"My attitude is that if the economy's good for folks from the bottom up, it's gonna be good for everybody. I think when you spread the wealth around, it's good for everybody."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/george-spyros/joe-the-plumber-uber-roun_b_135230.html

Critics said Obama let the cat out of the bag.

"It's clear that his main goal is redistribution of wealth, not growth," said Andy Roth with the anti-tax group Club for Growth. "He's perfectly happy to destroy wealth as long as he can redistribute it."

Obama has been meticulous, Roth said, to conceal the "socialistic" nature of his tax plans. "But every once in a while, he lets it slip," he said.

Republican candidate John McCain yesterday charged that Obama's comment was telling.

"This explains how Senator Obama can promise an income-tax cut for millions who aren't even paying income taxes right now," he said in Pennsylvania.

"My plan isn't intended to force small businesses to cut jobs to pay higher taxes so we can 'spread the wealth around.' My plan is intended to create jobs and increase the wealth of all Americans."

===================================================================

III. Obama on the Fundamental Social & Political Change That Must Be Undertaken Within America And Abroad, Including a Change in America's World View From Unipolar to Multipolar

[See, e.g.: Eurobama Seeks Support From Green EU Social Welfare Regulatory State to 'Change' America, ITSSD Journal on Pathological Communalism, at: http://itssdpathologicalcommunalism.blogspot.com/2008/08/eurobama-seeks-support-from-green-eu.html].

http://www.itssd.org/Kogan%2017%5B1%5D.2.pdf
See: THE EXTRA-WTO PRECAUTIONARY PRINCIPLE: ONE EUROPEAN “FASHION” EXPORT THE UNITED STATES CAN DO WITHOUT, 17
TEMPLE POLITICAL & CIVIL RIGHTS LAW REVIEW 2, 491-604 (2008)

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http://www.nypost.com/seven/10142008/postopinion/opedcolumnists/the_o_jesse_knows_133450.htm?page=0

THE O JESSE KNOWS - JACKSON ON OBAMA'S AMERICA

By Amir Tahiri

New York Post Opinion

October 14, 2008

EVIAN, FRANCE

PREPARE for a new America: That's the message that the Rev. Jesse Jackson conveyed to participants in the first World Policy Forum, held at this French lakeside resort last week.

He promised "fundamental changes" in US foreign policy - saying America must "heal wounds" it has caused to other nations, revive its alliances and apologize for the "arrogance of the Bush administration."

The most important change would occur in the Middle East, where "decades of putting Israel's interests first" would end.

Jackson believes that, although "Zionists who have controlled American policy for decades" remain strong, they'll lose a great deal of their clout when Barack Obama enters the White House.

"Obama is about change," Jackson told me in a wide-ranging conversation. "And the change that Obama promises is not limited to what we do in America itself. It is a change of the way America looks at the world and its place in it."

Jackson warns that he isn't an Obama confidant or adviser, "just a supporter." But he adds that Obama has been "a neighbor or, better still, a member of the family." Jackson's son has been a close friend of Obama for years, and Jackson's daughter went to school with Obama's wife Michelle.

"We helped him start his career," says Jackson. "And then we were always there to help him move ahead. He is the continuation of our struggle for justice not only for the black people but also for all those who have been wronged."

Will Obama's election close the chapter of black grievances linked to memories of slavery? The reverend takes a deep breath and waits a long time before responding.

"No, that chapter won't be closed," he says. "However, Obama's victory will be a huge step in the direction we have wanted America to take for decades."

Jackson rejects any suggestion that Obama was influenced by Marxist ideas in his youth. "I see no evidence of that," he says. "Obama's thirst for justice and equality is rooted in his black culture."

[WELL, THE PROOF MAY BE IN THE PUDDING! ARE THEY BOTH NOT SOMEWHAT RELATED? See: What Do the 'Chicago 7', Surrealism and Barack Obama Have in Common? They Aren't Really Healers: Each Romanticizes Radical Counter-Cultural Change!!, ITSSD Journal on Political Surrealism at: http://itssdjournalpoliticalsurrealism.blogspot.com/2008/05/what-do-chicago-7-surrealism-and-barack.html .

But is Obama - who's not a descendant of slaves - truly a typical American black?

Jackson emphatically answers yes: "You don't need to be a descendant of slaves to experience the oppression, the suffocating injustice and the ugly racism that exists in our society," he says.

"Obama experienced the same environment as all American blacks did. It was nonsense to suggest that he was somehow not black enough to feel the pain."

Is Jackson worried about the "Bradley effect" - that people may be telling pollsters they favor the black candidate, but won't end up voting for him?

"I don't think this is how things will turn out," he says. "We have a collapsing economy and a war that we have lost in Iraq. In Afghanistan, we face a resurgent Taliban. New threats are looming in Pakistan. Our liberties have been trampled under feet . . . Today, most Americans want change, and know that only Barack can deliver what they want. Young [NAIVE, UNINFORMED & INEXPERIENCED] Americans are especially determined to make sure that Obama wins."

He sees a broad public loss of confidence in the nation's institutions: "We have lost confidence in our president, our Congress, our banking system, our Wall Street and our legal system to protect our individual freedoms. . . I don't see how we could regain confidence in all those institutions without a radical change of direction."

Jackson declines to be more concrete about possible policy changes. After all, he insists, he isn't part of Obama's policy team. Yet he clearly hopes that his views, reflecting the position of many Democrats, would be reflected in the policies of an Obama administration.

On the economic front, he hopes for "major changes in our trading policy."

"We cannot continue with the open-door policy," he says. "We need to protect our manufacturing industry against unfair competition that destroys American jobs and creates ill-paid jobs abroad."

[THE UNFAIR COMPETITION ABOUT WHICH REVEREND JACKSON SPEAKS HAS LESS TO DO WITH THE LACK OF EXPENSIVE LABOR LAWS & NON-SCIENTIFIC & COSTLY ENVIRONMENTAL OVER-REGULATION SIMILAR TO THAT NOW OCCURRING WITHIN THE EUROPEAN UNION (AS OPPOSED TO THE U.S.) THAT DEVELOPING COUNTRIES WISELY DO NOT ADOPT. ACTUALLY, THE UNFAIR COMPETITION HAS TO DO MUCH WITH GOVERNMENTS INDIRECTLY SUBSIDIZING THEIR CURRENCIES, AND THE COST OF MANUFACTURING AND LABOR TO MAINTAIN CHEAP DEVELOPING COUNTRY PRODUCT PRICES. IN ADDITION THERE ARE DIRECT SUBSIDIES PROVIDED TO DEVELOPING COUNTRY FARMERS & MANUFACTURERS THAT INCREASE THEIR PROFITS RELATIVE TO U.S. COMPETITORS. THE TYPE OF TRADE PROTECTIONISM THAT JACKSON & OBAMA ARE CALLING FOR IS VERY POLITICALLY DANGEROUS. See: Trade Expert Criticizes Obama & Blue Party's Prescription for Economic Change: Adoption of the European Trade Strategy Known as 'Export-Protectionism', ITSSD Journal on Disguised Trade Barriers, at: http://itssddisguisedtradebarriers.blogspot.com/2008/09/trade-expert-criticizes-obama-blue.html ; OBAMA-BROWN-MICHAUD Non-Tariff Trade Barrier Act Likely to Devastate US Economy, Trigger a Global Trade War & Endanger World Peace, ITSSD Journal on Disguised Trade Barriers, at: http://itssddisguisedtradebarriers.blogspot.com/2008/06/us-trading-partners-beware-obama.html ].

Would that mean an abrogation of the NAFTA treaty with Canada and Mexico?

Jackson dismisses the question as "premature": "We could do a great deal without such dramatic action."

His most surprising position concerns Iraq. He passionately denounces the toppling of Saddam Hussein as "an illegal and unjust act." But he's now sure that the United States "will have to remain in Iraq for a very long time."

What of Obama's promise to withdraw by 2010? Jackson believes that position will have to evolve, reflecting "realities on the ground."

"We should work with our allies in Iraq to consolidate democratic institutions there," he says.

"We must help the people of Iraq decide and shape their future in accordance with their own culture and faith."

On Iran, he strongly supports Obama's idea of opening a direct dialogue with the leadership in Tehran. "We've got to talk to tell them what we want and hear what they want," Jackson says. "Nothing is gained by not talking to others."

Would that mean ignoring the four UN Security Council resolutions that demand an end to Iran's uranium-enrichment program? Jackson says direct talks wouldn't start without preparations.

"Barack wants an aggressive and dynamic diplomacy," he says. "He also wants adequate preparatory work. We must enter the talks after the ground has been prepared," he says.

Jackson is especially critical of President Bush's approach to the Israel-Palestine conflict.

"Bush was so afraid of a snafu and of upsetting Israel that he gave the whole thing a miss," Jackson says. "Barack will change that," because, as long as the Palestinians haven't seen justice, the Middle East will "remain a source of danger to us all."

"Barack is determined to repair our relations with the world of Islam and Muslims," Jackson says. "Thanks to his background and ecumenical approach, he knows how Muslims feel while remaining committed to his own faith."

Amir Taheri's next book, "The Persian Night: Iran Under the Khomeinist Revolution," is due out next month

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http://www.blackcommentator.com/275/275_btl_relative_truth_wwwpd.html

The Relative Truth Of This Presidential Election Is "WWWPD" (What Would White People Do?) - Between the Lines

By Anthony Asadullah Samad

The Black Commentator

May 1 , 2008 - Issue 275

The Pennsylvania Primary unveiled the stark realities of what this Presidential election is about - in terms of the other candidates, the media and, of course, the electorate. It’s no secret I’m for Barack Obama, but I’m also for fair play. I’m also for genuine processes. I have an aversion to disingenuous processes and this national election is beginning to look pretty disingenuous. Watching the media frame lies as “episodes” and close races as “big victories” is overwhelming. It reminds me of the disingenuous periods of American history where we were told if we were hardworking and honest, got education - we would be equal; then if we got political power (right to vote), we would be equal, when neither were true in the absolute sense since economics has always been the real equalizer. Now Obama has the kind of money that no black political candidate has ever amassed, by the most number of contributors ever amassed, he still can’t get equal treatment. To act as if race didn’t have an impact on Pennsylvania (as Ed Rendell said it would) and that codified racial messages haven’t become dominant themes in this election that both Clinton and McCain are playing to (and benefiting from) is simply disingenuous. Rendell knew what some white people would do.

The sliding truth “goal posts” on the Democratic side and the “selective amnesia” on the Republican side are going to undermine America’s system and the lack of integrity that the country has in the global community will evidence itself on the domestic front. In the final analysis, this election is going to test the moral compass of the dominate population (69%) in this country as to whether or not they’ve moved past race and are prepared to do what’s right AND just. To many of them, the truth is relative. Part of the socio-political justice problem in America is we (Black Americans, and everybody else) never know what we’re dealing with when it comes to integrity of white people on hidden racial biases. Like any other race, there’s good, and there’s bad, then there’s mostly indifferent who tolerate the bad and obliterate the good.

Moral suasion has never moved the majority of whites. That’s a historical fact. It didn’t in the abolitionist of slavery, and it didn’t in the abolishment of segregation. The next test will be if they accept the moral candidacy of someone who has emerged as the people’s choice to lead. I don’t believe this query is subjective. It’s based on the reaction of the largest number of people to participate in the primary election - in the history of this country. We all know, when voting day comes, white voters - many who consider themselves “Christians” - are going to determine Obama’s political fate. Popular culture has a way of interjecting religious justice in our daily decisions by wearing things labeled WWJD, subliminally asking ourselves in times of challenge or trial, “What Would Jesus Do?” To know how the Democratic nomination, and the subsequent general election, is going to play out, we simply have to ask ourselves, WWWPD (What would White People Do?). A clear decision has become clouded. Everyone is nervous because we, of all people, know white’s history on racial questions.

First, a disclaimer; I’m not talking about all white people. We know Barack has broad white support, particularly among Post-Civil Rights Era whites who came of age after the race (civil rights [1950s/1960s], affirmative action [1970s/early 1980s], white backlash [late 1980s/1990s]) movements in this country and whose prism isn’t framed in racial context. And even if this campaign weren’t as realized as it has become, who can claim all support from old versus the young, conservative versus liberal, Christian versus Agnostic? Whites are no more a monolith than Blacks are. I’m just talking about the ones that are being disingenuous about their hidden biases and their irrational choices. They’re the ones that claim they want change, but not “that kind” of change, or claim they want to do what’s in the best interest of the country but look past the kind of politics that got the country in the state it’s in. This election has become exactly what those who have run this country (for two hundred years, in various iterations) want it to be, an illusion of change that reinforces the same political realities of this nation and the status quo choices that lie therein. The rich and powerful in this nation will morph themselves into anything to retain power. They will paint any picture, and create any scenario - true or not, to frame themselves into something sympathetic to the masses. Finally and most critically (or controversially), the status quo makes the truth a lie and a lie the truth to where truth is a relative engagement in how losers becomes winners and how some people are able to disguise their biases (not very effectively) to justify irrational political choices not in their political or cultural interests. Voila! relativity!!!

The false truths that continue to undermine a “change election” are beginning to be pervasive. The thousands that Obama draws in comparison to the hundreds the other two draw who are being misrepresented by “stagers” who put young people behind candidates and polls create false illusions of WWYPD (what would young people do?) in the general election. Watching this relative truth game is debilitating, as the Clintons continue to twist truth the way they always have (starting with “I smoked, but I didn’t inhale” in 1991) and McCain acts like he doesn’t know what’s going on after labeling himself “the Straight Talk Express” for much of his career. The reality of Hillary Clinton’s political fate is rooted in a falseness that gives her more “life chances” than a cat has lives, more false scenarios than any practical political scientist would suggest is logical, more false media forecasts than any ethical media would report and more time to create false issues about the things that don’t really matter. The reality of John McCain’s political fate is rooted in being able to hold the lies that the Bush Administration has told in order to get enough party support to play the “alternative choice” to a woman and, of course, the unspeakable - having to make a decision that most white Americans (and truth be told - black Americans) never thought they would have to face, the prospect of choosing a legitimate black Presidential nominee. So the truth becomes a lie.

Most know (and acknowledge) that Hillary won’t win. Not that she can’t, if she were the nominee, but she won’t be the nominee - not if the Democrats’ nomination process has any integrity, or if the truth becomes the lie. The Democratic Party created the proportional delegate process. Now Clinton wants winner take all or a big state consideration, or a “blue state” - anything but what the rules say. The Florida/Michigan situation, which the Democratic National Committee defined, is now being manipulated just to make her seem as if she is equal to Obama.

The media effort to keep her in the race has resorted to the Clintons lying and the media soft-soaping it, or the media becoming complicit in the lie itself. Never, in recent history, has a candidate who was caught in a bold-faced lie not lost public confidence. The Clintons were caught in two: Hillary on the Bosnia crossfire, and Bill on the time she told it. Obviously, some voters in Pennsylvania didn’t care what she said - they weren’t going to vote for Obama anyway, and exits polls of nearly 30% of them said if he gets the nomination, they’re voting for McCain. Very telling about what white people would do if Obama wins the nomination, and it’s not exclusive to Pennsylvania voters.

Before the Pennsylvania primary, most all the pundits stated that Clinton needed to win that primary “large,” meaning by 20 points or more. In fact, they said she had to win all the remaining primaries in the 60-65% range just to pull close by the end of the primaries. If Obama won just 40% of the remaining primaries, even with re-votes in Florida and Michigan, she would never catch him. So the bar became the “double digit” victory for Hilary not to bow out. On election night, their claimed 10 point victory sufficed as meeting the “double digit” bar she needed to stay in, when in fact, the victory wasn’t a double digit. The final result was 9.2% (www.electionreturns.state.pa.us). Yet, the media still allows Clinton to lie about the double digit victory, and no one wants to talk about what happened to the 25 point lead. They would rather talk about why he hasn’t “put her away.” Remember, he’s the underdog (even as the frontrunner).

The primaries were set up for her - she was supposed to put him away. But truth about what was supposed to happen (a Clinton nomination), has become a lie about what hasn’t happened (Obama closing the nomination). The relative truth has us now guessing what will happen next and expectation is, if Obama loses the nomination (or has it stolen) - to Blacks, it’s viewed as “white folk just being folk” when comes to the issue of race. They’ll never tell that’s what it is, but it is. When nearly one of three Hilary voters (28%) say they’ll vote for McCain if she doesn’t get the nomination (when the norm in past elections is 10%), what else could it be besides racism?

[IS THIS THE ONLY EXPLANATION FOR NOT WANTING TO VOTE FOR OBAMA?? IF SO, THEN HE & HIS SUPPORTERS ARE WITHOUT DOUBT APPEALING TO PEOPLES' SYMPATHIES & PLAYING THE 'RACE CARD'!]

The goal posts will continue to shift, and the game will change, according to how one can pick at what Obama says, or a surrogate says, or a preacher says, or some long ago associate once said - none of which has anything to do with what Barack is saying - in how to change the nation.

I’m not convinced some people want change in this country. The real question is how many whites want the change Barack represents. Just as when slavery and segregation’s end came, some white people will not be ready for it. Barack’s nomination/election will depend on what fair white people will do. The rest will continue to support the relative truth we’ve come to know as America.

Silly Obama Rabbit - Don't You Know That 'Tricks' (Socialist Acts Like Those of Robin Hood and Brazil's President Lula) Are For Kids??

noreply@blogger.com (ITSSD Charitable Mission) — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 13:50:00 +0000

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNUJsJMWB5I

A 1960's Trix Cereal Commercial

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohS3biUqVK0&feature=related

Trix Cereal - "Yeah Yeah Yeah" (Commercial, 1977)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MEGke8kzeZM&feature=related

80's Trix Cereal Commercial 4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePxtbRIK5iY&feature=related

80's Trix Cereal Commercial

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7Yi5Kgrt6g&feature=related

Trix Cereal Commercial 1991 - New Fruit Shapes [But Same Old Trix]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NuhIEqc9NRI&feature=related

Trix cereal commercial: The Genie & The Rabbit (1992)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7TbCYL_0RM&feature=related

TRIX Rabbit Commercial 2006

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PROGRESSIVE WARHAWK LIBERALS:

http://www.imdb.com/video/hulu/vi535756825/ Robin Hood: Manly Men In Tights Who Rob From the Rich and Give to the Poor (1993)

http://www.imdb.com/video/hulu/vi284098585/

Robin Hood: Men in Tights - [THE TRUE MEANING OF A TAX HAIRCUT / CIRCUMCISION]

http://www.imdb.com/video/hulu/vi435093529/
Robin Hood: Men in Tights - White Men Can't Jump

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http://www.nypost.com/seven/10152008/news/politics/obama_fires_a_robin_hood_warning_shot_133685.htm

ROBAMAHOOD
OBAMA FIRES A 'ROBIN HOOD' WARNING SHOT

By CHARLES HURT Bureau Chief

New York Post

October 15, 2008

IT'S A LEAK! Barack Obama tells Ohio plumber Joe Wurzelbacher he intends to "spread the wealth around."

WASHINGTON - You won't find it in his campaign ads, but Barack Obama let slip his plans to become a modern-day Robin Hood in the White House, confiscating money from the rich to give to the poor. [ROBAMAHOOD!!]

Conservatives yesterday ripped Obama after he was caught on video telling an Ohio plumber that he intends to take the profits of small-business owners and "spread the wealth around" to those with lesser incomes.

The fracas over Obama's tax plan broke out Sunday outside Toledo when Joe Wurzelbacher approached the candidate.

Wurzelbacher said he planned to become the owner of a small plumbing business that will take in more than the $250,000 amount at which Obama plans to begin raising tax rates.

"Your new tax plan is going to tax me more, isn't it?" the blue-collar worker asked.

After Obama responded that it would, Wurzelbacher continued: "I've worked hard . . . I work 10 to 12 hours a day and I'm buying this company and I'm going to continue working that way. I'm getting taxed more and more while fulfilling the American Dream."

"It's not that I want to punish your success," Obama told him. "I want to make sure that everybody who is behind you, that they've got a chance for success, too.

Then, Obama explained his trickle-up theory of economics.

"My attitude is that if the economy's good for folks from the bottom up, it's gonna be good for everybody. I think when you spread the wealth around, it's good for everybody."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/george-spyros/joe-the-plumber-uber-roun_b_135230.html

Critics said Obama let the cat out of the bag.

"It's clear that his main goal is redistribution of wealth, not growth," said Andy Roth with the anti-tax group Club for Growth. "He's perfectly happy to destroy wealth as long as he can redistribute it."

Obama has been meticulous, Roth said, to conceal the "socialistic" nature of his tax plans. "But every once in a while, he lets it slip," he said.

Republican candidate John McCain yesterday charged that Obama's comment was telling.

"This explains how Senator Obama can promise an income-tax cut for millions who aren't even paying income taxes right now," he said in Pennsylvania.

"My plan isn't intended to force small businesses to cut jobs to pay higher taxes so we can 'spread the wealth around.' My plan is intended to create jobs and increase the wealth of all Americans."

Meanwhile, a New York Times/CBS poll last night showed Obama moving into a commanding 53-39 percent lead.

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http://www.nypost.com/seven/10152008/postopinion/editorials/obama_tells_the_tax_truth_133633.htm

OBAMA FIRES A 'ROBIN HOOD' WARNING SHOT

An unscripted moment with an Ohio plumber produced a startling confession from Barack Obama Sunday: The Democrat's "middle-class tax cut" is in fact a scheme to "spread the wealth around."

Obama dropped the mask long enough to tell the truth to Toledo plumber Joe Wurzelbacher - who had asked the Democratic nominee why he wanted to jack up his taxes just for "fulfilling the American dream."

"I'm getting ready to buy a company that makes $250,000 to $280,000 a year," Wurzelbacher had told Obama. "Your new tax plan is going to tax me more, isn't it?"

"It's not that I want to punish your success," Obama replied. "I just want to make sure that everybody who is behind you, that they've got a chance for success, too . . . When you spread the wealth around, it's good for everybody."

At last! The truth outs!

Obama's plan isn't about sinking hooks into Wall Street CEOs and other fat cats, as he usually says. Fact is, there's not enough of them to raise the cash necessary to finance his other grand plans.

No, to do that, he'll have to go after ambitious working-class guys like Wurzelbacher - who's been a plumber for 15 years and is looking to better himself and his family while just maybe creating a few jobs.

The American Dream?

Wurzelbacher personifies it - but Barack Obama seems determined to tax it to death and be done with it, period.

That's been the case all along, of course. What's different is that the Democrat finally said so.
Heretofore, [LIKE ROBIN HOOD] Obama has sought to paint himself as a tax-cutter - claiming he'll slash taxes for 95 percent of Americans. [ROBAMAHOOD]

As we noted yesterday, that's a flat-out lie - not least because nearly half of all tax filers pay no income tax at all. So how can he "cut" their taxes if they don't pay any to begin with?

Answer: tax "credits."

To wit, in part:

* A $1,000 "make work pay" credit.
* A $4,000 college-tuition credit.
* A $6,000 child-care credit.
* A $1,100 bump in the earned-income tax credit.

These aren't to be income-tax deductions - which would be worthless to those who pay no income taxes.

These are to be checks from Washington - with the subsidies expected to grow to more than $1 trillion in 10 years.

That's a massive transfer of wealth.

How does Obama justify it?

"Fairness," he says.

But that's an absurdly radical view of what's "fair."

Remember, Obama's tax hikes target folks who already bear the brunt of the burden: The top 20 percent of earners already pay 69 percent of all federal taxes - and 88 percent of income taxes.

(Contrast that with John McCain's call yesterday for real tax cuts - halving the capital-gains levy, scrapping taxes on unemployment benefits altogether - designed to prime the economic pump.)

Monday, Obama promised a tax policy that would restore "a sense of fairness and balance that will give every American a fair shot at the American dream."

But just a day before, he told Joe Wurzelbacher the truth: No American dream for you, buddy!
Nor anybody else, it seems.

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http://www.abpi.org.br/empauta/segunda/160407.pdf

http://www.itssd.org/References/mainstream-media/FazerPapeldeRobinHoodnaoecorreto-ZeroHora.pdf

To Play the Role of Robin Hood is Not Correct

Apparently, the Brazilian Government of President Lula is sensitive about being portrayed as a modern day Robin Hood. Its Ministry of Foreign Relations posted the text of the article noted above on its website. This posting is accessible at:

http://www.itssd.org/References/Government/FazerPapeldeRobinHoodNaoeCorreto-ZeroHora-BrazilianMinistryofExteriorRelations.pdf ;

http://www.mre.gov.br/portugues/noticiario/nacional/selecao_detalhe3.asp?ID_RESENHA=329736

English Translation:

Reporter - Daily Election of National Notice - 22/Abril/2007
Zero Hour
4
Subject: Economy
Heading: 1b “To play role of Robin Hood is not correct”
Date: 16/04/2007
Credit:
Event

Interview: Lawrence Kogan, president of the Institute for the Commerce, Standardization and Sustainable Development of U.S.A.

Zero Hour - How the formal complaint of the United States against done China last week,
that it involves intellectual questions of law, must affect the treatment of the subject in
the world?

Lawrence Kogan - the question taken to the World-wide Organization of Comércio (OMC)
is in part politics and legal part. Still it is in the first phase. But it has the effect to make
China to perceive as this question is important. Perhaps in the case of the fake and the
piracy, the Chinese government is making of account that it does not see. These activities
represent job for many people, but this does not become them correct.

ZH - How it is possible to deal with justice the copyright in rich and poor countries, since
the chances in the area are very different?

Kogan - the property right precedes the question of the copyright. If it will not have
protection, the people will not have interest in developing rights in this area. The poor
persons have ideas, but they do not know as to unlock this knowledge and to place it in
the market - they do not have legal mechanisms and contacts in the universe of the
businesses. Thus, they do not perceive the benefits.

ZH - How it evaluates you the initiative of Brazil to make agreements to manufacture
remedies, especially anti-AIDS?

Kogan - In U.S.A. and the law of the OMC, it is established that, when a government
takes a patent on behalf of the public interest, it has to pay indemnity. Brazil threatened
to break the licenses, and this reduced the value of the products. This is not just. It is
understandable that the governments want accessible prices, the American law also
foresees the generic ones, but after a period of three the six years. Brazil did not respect
this period. All we understand that it is important to guarantee access for the people, but to play role of Robin Hood is not the certain way.

[FOR MORE INFORMATION ABOUT HOW BRAZIL'S PRESIDENT LULA ACTS LIKE ROBIN HOOD, WHICH U.S. PRESIDENTIAL ASPIRANT BARACK OBAMA ALSO ASPIRES TO DO - ROBAMAHOOD - SEE:

http://itssdinternationaliprights.blogspot.com/2008/05/itssd-presidents-law-review-article-on.html

ITSSD President's Law Review Article on Brazil's IP Opportunism Prompts Media/Industry Attention, Brazilian Government Response & Law School Symposium, ITSSD Journal on Intellectual Property Rights

http://www.itssd.org/Publications/ForcedLicensingofDrugPatentsReflectsIPCounterfeitingEffortsonWorldStage-WLF06-22-07kogan.pdf

Lawrence Kogan, FORCED LICENSING OF DRUG PATENTS REFLECTS “IP COUNTERFEITING” EFFORTS ON WORLD STAGE, Washington Legal Foundation (6/22/07)

Europe Should Beware that its Endorsement of EURObama is as Good as a 'Pig in a Poke'

noreply@blogger.com (ITSSD Charitable Mission) — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 18:45:00 +0000

The following blog entry should be read with the expression, 'A Pig in a Poke', in mind. A very old expression, a 'Pig in a Poke' means:

"An offering or deal that is foolishly accepted without being examined first...'Don't buy a pig in a poke' might seem odd and archaic language. It's true that the phrase is very old, but actually it can be taken quite literally and remains good advice. The advice being given is 'don't buy a pig until you have seen it'. This is enshrined in British commercial law as 'caveat emptor' - Latin for 'let the buyer beware'. This remains the guiding principle of commerce in many countries and, in essence, supports the view that if you buy something you take responsibility to make sure it is what you intended to buy."

"A poke is a small sack or bag and is the origin of the word pocket. The word is still in use in several English-speaking countries, notably Scotland and USA. A poke is just the sort of bag that would be useful for carrying a piglet to market. A pig that's in a poke may turn out to be no pig at all. If a merchant tried to cheat by substituting a lower value animal, the trick could be uncovered by letting the cat out of the bag. The advice has stood the test of time and people have been repeating it for getting on for five hundred years, maybe longer. Fraser's Magazine (1858) reprinted a piece from Richard Hill's (or Hilles') Common-place Book, 1530, which gave this advice to market traders: "When ye proffer the pigge open the poke."

[See: Pig in a Poke, Phrasefinder at: http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/282900.html ].

[IF THIS IS SO, WHY THEN DOESN'T BRITISH PRIME MINISTER GORDON BROWN FOLLOW HIS COUNTRY'S OWN ADVICE??? HIS FAILURE TO DO SO MAY PERHAPS BE THE REASON WHY HIS POLL NUMBERS ARE SO LOW!]

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[EURObama Returns From His European Vacation With A New European Family?

http://news.yahoo.com/s/politico/20080910/pl_politico/13312

Poll: US-Europe relations need Obama

Yahoo News

By Alexander Burns

Wed Sep 10, 9:26 AM ET

By significant margins, Europeans have high hopes for a potential Obama administration, according to a Transatlantic Trends poll of 12 European countries.

Forty-seven percent of Europeans believe an Obama victory in November would lead to a better relationship between the United States and Europe, versus just 5 percent who think Obama would weaken the trans-Atlantic relationship

[AND, THE U.S. BLUE PARTY MUST BELIEVE THAT THE EUROPEAN UNION'S SUPPORT FOR OBAMA IS NECESSARY IN ORDER FOR HIM TO WIN THE U.S. PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION. See: Eurobama Seeks Support From Green EU Social Welfare Regulatory State to 'Change' America, ITSSD Journal on Pathological Communalism at: http://itssdpathologicalcommunalism.blogspot.com/2008/08/eurobama-seeks-support-from-green-eu.html ].

By comparison, only 11 percent think Sen. John McCain would strengthen European-American relations if he were elected president. More than half of respondents said a McCain administration would keep relations between the United States and Europe in roughly the condition they are now.

The poll, commissioned by the German Marshall Fund and conducted by the firm TNS Opinion from June 4-28, queried at least a thousand respondents in each of a dozen countries, including Germany, France, Poland, Slovakia and Turkey.

The survey’s release Wednesday follows the news of a BBC poll, conducted by the GlobeScan service and published Tuesday, showing that in 17 of 22 nations tested, respondents across the globe expected an Obama win would improve American relations with the rest of the world. [AT WHAT COST - LOSS OF AMERICAN'S CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS???]

It also comes on the heels of a report Tuesday that Gordon Brown, the British prime minister, intends to publish a column praising Obama’s response to the troubled real estate market. In an unorthodox step for a foreign leader, Brown is expected to argue: “In the electrifying U.S. Presidential campaign, it is the Democrats who are generating the ideas to help people through more difficult times.”

[ARE THESE THE IDEAS THAT PRIME MINISTER BROWN IS REFERRING TO?? IN OTHER WORDS, IS GORDON BROWN, WHO DISPENSED WITH THE NEED TO HOLD A PUBLIC PLEBSCITE ENTITLING BRITISH CITIZENS TO VOTE ON WHETHER THE UK SHOULD RATIFY THE EU CONSTITUTION, BECAUSE HE KNEW WHAT WAS BEST FOR THEM, OF THE SAME MIND AND SPIRIT AS BARACK OBAMA AND HIS LIBERAL DEMOCRATIC ELITES, WHO BELIEVE THAT LIBERAL 'CHANGE', CONSISTENT WITH EUROPE'S IDEAS FOR CENTRALIZED WELFARE STATE BUREAUCRACY, GLOBAL GOVERNANCE, AND LOST NATIONAL SOVEREIGNTY, IS IN THE BEST INTERESTS OF ALL AMERICANS??]

[See: UK Labor Party Willing to Give-Away Country's Sovereignty to EU; Does the US Democratic Party Wish to Do the Same for America??, ITSSD Journal on Pathological Communalism, at: http://itssdpathologicalcommunalism.blogspot.com/2008/04/uk-labor-party-willing-to-give-away.html .]

[See: Charting The Evolution of the Berlin-Paris-Brussels 'Homo Bureaucrat Federalis', ITSSD Journal on Economic Freedom, at: http://itssdeconomicfreedom.blogspot.com/2008/08/charting-evolution-of-berlin-paris.html ].

[See: Gordon Brown Wants 'Next' Democratic President to Submit America's Unique Constitution and National Sovereignty to Global Governance (UN/EU) Override, ITSSD Journal on Economic Freedom, at: http://itssdeconomicfreedom.blogspot.com/2008/04/gordon-brown-wants-next-democratic.html ].

According to the Transatlantic Trends report, Brown’s upbeat assessment of the Democratic presidential nominee is shared by the majority of his country: 75 percent of British respondents said they had a favorable or very favorable opinion of Obama.

Among Europeans more generally, that number was only slightly lower: 69 percent said they had a favorable impression of the Illinois senator.

[AMERICANS, LIKE THE IRISH, SHOULD DO WHAT EUROPEANS WANT, NON?]

[See: The Irish People Have Spoken: NO EU TREATY; EU Commission & US Democratic Congress BEWARE!!, ITSSD Journal on Economic Freedom, at: http://itssdeconomicfreedom.blogspot.com/2008/06/irish-people-have-spoken-no-eu-treaty.html ].

[See: What Aspect of the Irish 'NON' Do the Brussels & Paris Philosopher Kings Not Understand?, ITSSD Journal on Economic Freedom, at: http://itssdeconomicfreedom.blogspot.com/2008/07/what-aspect-of-irish-non-do-brussels.html ].

McCain’s favorability ratings are considerably lower, with just 26 percent of Europeans giving him the thumbs up. He is also significantly less well-known than Obama: 29 percent of respondents did not render an up-or-down judgment on the Republican nominee, compared with just 19 percent who had no impression of Obama.

It is hardly shocking that Obama would be better liked in Europe than his opponent, given that McCain is a member of the same political party as President Bush.

[IN OTHER WORDS, SINCE OBAMA AND PRIME MINISTER GORDON BROWN ARE ESSENTIALLY OF THE SAME POLITICAL PARTY, IT IS HARDLY SHOCKING THAT McCAIN IS LESS LIKED BY THE LABOR PARTY IN BRITAIN AND BY OTHER GREEN & SOCIAL[IST] DEMOCRATIC PARTIES IN CONTINENTAL EUROPE].

The president has consistently received dismal poll ratings from abroad, and in 2004 a GlobeScan survey showed Europeans favored the election of Sen. John F. Kerry by similarly wide margins — 74 percent to 7 percent in Norway, 74 percent to 10 percent in Germany and 64 percent to 5 percent in France.

[IS THIS WHAT KERRY HAD PLANNED AND OBAMA NOW CONSIDERS? ECO-TOWNS? See: Gordon Brown Gives New Meaning To Marxist Central Planning in British Eco-Towns, ITSSD Journal on Economic Freedom, at:

http://itssdeconomicfreedom.blogspot.com/2008/03/httpnews.html ].

It is also no surprise that Europeans would be more familiar with Obama than with McCain. In late July, Obama toured several European nations as part of a weeklong trip [EUROPEAN VACATION] abroad, giving a speech in Berlin that attracted an audience in the hundreds of thousands.

Yet even as the Transatlantic Trends poll highlights Obama’s popularity in Europe, it outlines some of the diplomatic hurdles that any American president will face, regardless of party.

While 80 percent of Americans call it very or somewhat desirable for the United States to “exert strong leadership in world affairs,” just 33 percent of Europeans say the same. A quarter of European respondents called an assertive United States “very undesirable.”

[THIS CLEARLY REFLECTS EUROPE'S PREDICTION: AN OBAMA PRESIDENCY WOULD WEAKEN U.S. SOVEREIGNTY, STRENGTH & INFLUENCE ABROAD.]

While a majority of Europeans — 55 percent — said the United States and the European Union have close enough values to make diplomatic cooperation possible, they’re still less confident about it than Americans, 67 percent of whom said the United States and the EU could tackle international issues together.

And some persistent diplomatic disagreements, such as resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, also remain: Europeans expressed considerably less positive feelings about the state of Israel than did Americans.

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[IS GORDON BROWN VYING TO SERVE AS OBAMA'S EUROPEAN MENTOR? AND, IS THIS THE TYPE OF CENTRAL PLANNING THAT OBAMA HAS IN MIND??]

[See Also: Brown's 'Get Fit' Towns: Kim Jong-il Would Be Proud, ITSSD Journal on Economic Freedom, at: http://itssdeconomicfreedom.blogspot.com/2008/01/browns-get-fit-towns-kim-jong-il-would.html ].

[See: Gordon Brown Gives New Meaning To Marxist Central Planning in British Eco-Towns, ITSSD Journal on Economic Freedom, at:
http://itssdeconomicfreedom.blogspot.com/2008/03/httpnews.html ].

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http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article4152196.ece

Gordon Brown's futuristic eco-towns to fine residents for driving out of city limits

By Jill Sherman

UK Timesonline

June 17, 2008

Motorists living in Gordon Brown's futuristic green communities face fines for driving their cars out of town, under radical proposals being drawn up by ministers, The Times has learnt.

Residents of the largely pedestrianised eco-towns may also be expected to park their cars at the outskirts and walk or cycle to their homes, up to ten minutes away.

These are among possible ways being discussed with ministers to meet a government target to cut car use in eco-towns by half. Detailed planning proposals will be published next month, a senior Whitehall official said.

The proposals could include a fee for a permanent car space at the edge of town, charges for driving out at peak congestion times, or penalties for taking a car out of town above a set number of agreed journeys.

The official emphasised that the rules would be adapted for more rural areas, where there was less public transport. “But outside Cambridge or near Stansted airport, for example, where there are strong transport links, you could be charged for driving out [of the eco-town],” the official said.

The proposals, which are also being discussed with developers, are part of a plan to cut carbon emissions within up to ten eco-towns to be built from 2013. They are also key to the Prime Minister's ambition to build three million new homes by 2020, 30 per cent of which will be affordable.

The towns of between 5,000 and 20,000 homes each will be mainly pedestrianised, with cycle lanes and a few highways with limits of 15mph (24km/h). The houses, built on narrow lanes, surrounded by gardens, parks and waterways, will have no garages or parking spaces — just a cycle rack, under plans modelled on European schemes, such as Vauban, a neighbourhood in Freiburg, Germany.

Town plans will differ, but most shops, schools and GP surgeries will be within walking or cycling distance. People usually reliant on cars will have a far more difficult journey — walking to the edge of towns to get their car, driving it back to pick up shopping, with few parking spaces available, unloading at home and then taking the car back to the edge.

A free minibus will tour round the high streets to shops, schools and GPs' surgeries and stop within five minutes' walk of every home. Residents will be able to consult in their homes an electronic board, which displays bus times and flashes an alert when one is approaching.

Fifteen potential sites have been shortlisted, including Pennbury, Leicestershire; Hanley Grange, Cambridgeshire; Weston Otmoor, Oxfordshire; and Ford, West Sussex. A final list of up to ten will be announced in October, with five to be built by 2016.

Each town is expected to be carbon-neutral, but the Government has bowed to developers' concerns that the highest criteria (Level 6) for zero-carbon homes could add £30,000 to building costs. Caroline Flint, the Housing Minister, told The Times yesterday that, until 2016, the new homes could be built at the much lower Level 3, provided that this was balanced by other energy reducing measures. “We are in negotiations with developers and hope many of them will go further,” she said.

She admitted that the key to the design would be the ability to plan towns with walkways and cycle paths, so that cars would be used less. “It's not about banning cars, but about reducing reliance on cars,” Ms Flint said.

Other “eco-measures” include plans to install underground vacuum recycling, where residents have chutes for different types of waste, which is then automatically taken to a recyling centre on site. Solar panels and wind turbines will be used for power, as well as biomass boilers, fuelled by wood chips from the surrounding forests. Electric vehicles charged from shops and schools would also be encouraged.

Most of the 15 shortlisted areas were put forward by developers, and there has been widespread opposition by councils and residents, who claim that the towns are an excuse for sprawling developments to meet a housing shortage. The first consultation period for the 15 ends in two weeks and residents are planning protests. Some claim that the carbon emissions produced to build the towns will outstrip the benefits, while others fear that they will be marooned on car-free campuses built on greenfield sites.

Glimpse of [CENTRAL GOVERNMENT CONTROLLED BUREAUCRATIC] future

— Penalties for cars driving out of eco-towns in peak times and exceeding journey limits
— Electronic noticeboards in homes to give bus times and locations
— Wood from local forests will be used to fuel biomass boilers
— Recycled waste will be processed underground after being sorted in household chutes
— Residents with electric cars will be able to charge their vehicles in shops and schools

Psychoanalyzing the Great Obama: Messiah or Empty Suit?

noreply@blogger.com (ITSSD Charitable Mission) — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 01:47:00 +0000

Messiah or Macbeth?

By Robert Stein, Ph.D.

Messiah or empty suit? Rarely do politicians exclusively fit into one of these categories. In many respects, Barack Obama is unlike any recent American presidential candidate. Aside from his obvious mixed racial ancestry, one has to return to the early days of the republic to find someone with so varied an early developmental history in non-traditional American settings. Yet, his chaotic childhood is quite similar to that of Bill Clinton. Both lost fathers, both were very close to their mothers and both had step-fathers who were less than stellar father substitutes. Both were academic overachievers and both have an ability to connect with people.

But whereas Clinton had a relatively stable geographic residence, Obama lacked that until later in his childhood. Whereas Clinton’s identity as a white southerner was incontrovertible, Obama was essentially a black face in a white home. His mother’s frequent travels, had a profound impact on the development of his identity and contributed to his chameleon-like belief system.

Obama, lacks a solid internal figure of both his father and mother. Although he speaks glowingly of his mother, as with many children with absent parents, they tend to hold idealized images which are out of sync with reality. Lacking internal parent images (he admits his conflicted feelings for his grandparents[1]), he relies on others to firm up his own identity. Despite a commitment to radical leftist ideas from early adulthood, he has easily jettisoned the more obvious external trappings when his candidacy became viable.

Charles Steele Jr. of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference lamented that Obama lacked “slave blood” early in the campaign. This ironic twist highlighted initial opposition by the African-American establishment. If elected, Obama will owe much to the near unanimous support of the American black community. Yet, his early childhood and adolescent environment bears little resemblance to those of multi-generational inner-city African-Americans. Although his commitment to leftist causes protected him from being called an oreo, it might be more appropriate to describe Obama as “cookies & cream” - mostly white, with chunks of black tossed in.

In his writings, he yearns for a link to his father’s African ancestry, a link he will never achieve. In fact both his African and African-American identities have been painstakingly constructed and emerged out of his adolescent rebellion against a white grandfather who he admits didn’t understand him[2]. As an impressionable young man still searching for a nurturing father substitute, he began attending Rev. Wright’s church with its leftist Liberation Theology. For 20 years, Wright participated in all of Obama’s important family events. He even provided the inspiration for Obama’s book, “The Audacity of Hope”. In “Dreams From my Father” he quotes Wright’s statement “white folks greed runs a world in need[3]”. Ironically he cannot exclude himself from that condemnation. If not for his marriage to a genuine African-American he would have difficulty claiming to be one.

This conflict goes to the heart of his identity confusion reflected in the inexorable belief that he, rather than the policies he advocates or the actions he takes, is “the bridge” between black and white. Yet bridges, suspended as they are between two summits, cannot claim firm allegiance to either side, while constantly in danger of collapsing into the gulf they span. They are always alone.

Those of us more concerned with the substance of Obama’s positions than the romance of his quest, are inevitably disappointed by his speeches. It is unlikely this will change. On the one hand, Obama knows his radical views are not held by a majority of American voters, so he dare not explicitly state them. On the other, he is reluctant to firmly lock himself into a position, because ultimately he isn’t entirely sure what he truly believes.

This is an essential component of Obama’s repeated attempts to lecture from both sides of an issue. Being far more polished and poetic than John Kerry, he never uses such oxymorons as, “I voted for it, before I voted against it.[4] He will, as he did in his acceptance speech, advocate 2nd Amendment gun rights, while simultaneously emphasizing the need for gun control[5] or endorsing a death penalty moratorium while criticizing the Supreme Court ruling barring the death penalty for child rapists[6].

All of this contributes to an amazing tone-deafness, to which his true believers are blind. Being himself the “bridge” and the “channel” by which racial harmony will appear, he sees himself as exempt from the usual rules. Accused of being a “rock star”, he simply dismisses the charge while giving his convention speech in a rock star venue, with the trappings of a Greek temple.

Accused of lacking substance in his proposals, he gives an acceptance speech high on drama, high on visual effects, high on image and short on specifics, while decrying his opponent for daring to challenge him on being short of specifics.

Predicting people’s behavior is a difficult proposition even with an established prior history of conduct. Obama’s responses have to give even the most seasoned observer pause as to how he will react in the meat grinder of the presidency. Politician’s can be notoriously sociopathic and superficial. But in Obama’s case he appears to lack some of the more protective features associated with being calculating.

The outcome of close elections often hinges on intangibles and external events. Obama may win. However, once in office, he will initially be a president who is repeatedly outmaneuvered by both political allies and opponents. After all, “the devil is in the details”. But, given his lack of an underlying identity and the centrality of a belief in himself as icon, there is no way to predict what final form his mission will take. It might be quite a surprise to even his most ardent supporters.

[1] elections.foxnews.com/2008/03/21/ferraro-offended-by-comparison-to-pastor-wright/
[2] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/barack-obama-my-america-777620.html
[3] http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0708/11542.html
[4] “The 87 billion (dollars) For It"
[5] www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/06/AR2008040601652.html
[6] http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2008-06-25-scotus-child-rape_N.htm

APOLLOBAMA, PATRON GOD OF THE ARTS, THE GIFT OF PROPHECY ('CHANGE'), HEALING & CLEANSING IS DELIVERED TO BLUE PARTY ON TEMPLE MOUNT

noreply@blogger.com (ITSSD Charitable Mission) — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 23:13:00 +0000

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1050017/Obama-God-Democrats-build-temple-Barack.html

Obama God! Democrats build a temple for Barack

By Peter Mckay In Denver

Times UK

29th August 2008

Barack Obama was mocked in the American press yesterday for making the most important speech of his life on a set decked out like an ancient temple.

Finally nominated as the first black candidate for the U.S. presidency, he moved the Democratic Party Convention from the conference hall to an 80,000-seater football stadium for his landmark address.

His challenge was to turn his trademark soaring rhetoric into simple ideas to improve the lives of hard-pressed American families. But the Greek pillars of his backdrop prompted ridicule before he stood up to speak early today.

The New York Post portrayed him mocked up in the style of Frankie Howerd's toga-clad TV romp Up Pompeii!, threatening to tip this historic moment into bathos - the Greek term for dignity descending into farce.

And rival John McCain's camp was quick to make more fun of him. Republican spokesman Danny Daz called the set - designed by Britney Spears's concert team - 'the Temple of Obama' and observed sarcastically: 'It's only appropriate that Barack Obama would descend from the Heavens and spend a little time with us mere mortals.' [YES WE CAN!]

Held at Denver's Invesco Field stadium at Mile High, home of the Denver Broncos, the extravagant event before a full audience and tens of millions of TV viewers was also to feature performances by Stevie Wonder and Sheryl Crow.

American Idol contestant Jennifer Hudson was to sing the national anthem.

Democrats wondering if the kitsch setting wasn't a mistake are comforted by the thought that John F Kennedy's nomination acceptance event was held at the Los Angeles Coliseum, and it too was ridiculed.

Party officials fearing what Americans might think of 'Obamapolis' say privately that it was dreamed up before his recent 'rock star' visit to Berlin, where he drew a crowd of 200,000 - and Republican criticism for being out of touch with ordinary Americans.

Had they anticipated that, the affair in Colorado would have been more low-key.

McCain's set next week in St Paul, Minnesota, is stark by comparison: He'll speak before a giant stars and stripes.

But for Obama, the Greek columns had a twin appeal: his speech came 45 years to the day since civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr's historic 'I have a dream' address at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, which also boasts Greek pillars. And Lincoln is America's favourite president - especially for blacks, whom he released from slavery.

With Americans proving resistant to Obama's appeal, his task was to pull off a speech with the same historic impact as Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, while addressing the 'kitchen table' concerns that voters are worrying about.

Obama seeks to stand up for what are called the 'middle classes' - what in Britain we would call the hard-working poor. He promises to turn the economy around and make the nation safer.
But his grandiose style lends itself to accusations of hubris - the Greek word for pride before a fall - and he was advised to keep things simple as he made an impassioned call for change. [YES WE CAN!]

However, Obama also had to top Bill Clinton's barnstorming performance on Wednesday night.
The former president, who had described Obama privately as 'a roll of the dice' as a presidential prospect, now oozed warmth for Barack - far more so than wife Hillary the night before.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory?id=5660266

Obama Speech Stage Resembles Ancient Greek Temple

ABC News

August 26, 2008

DENVER (Reuters) - Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama's big speech on Thursday night will be delivered from an elaborate columned stage resembling a miniature Greek temple.

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http://www.hikenow.net/GreekGodApollo-Delphi.html

THE SANCTUARY OF APOLLO - DELPHI

http://www.in2greece.com/english/historymyth/mythology/names/apollo.htm

APOLLO, THE GREEK GOD

"[Greek] Patron god of the Arts, the gift of prophecy and also connected with light (which in Greek also can be translated illumination). ['THE ONE'] He was born on the island Delos by Leto, a Titan's daughter, and Zeus. The island was to be the most sacred of islands, and ruins of many temples can still be seen there. His sister was Artemis, the goddess of hunting and protecter of young women.

After he killed the huge snake Python [HILLARY CLINTON] in Delphi by the mountains Parnassus, the site was dedicated to him. There, the Omphalos, the navel, stood - a point believed by the ancient Greeks to be the centre of the earth. [DENVER MILE HIGH STADIUM] His oracle there was a place many people, commonmen and rulers, came to consult the priestess, Pythia, [MICHELLE OBAMA?] about their future."

"...In many ways, Apollo personified the perfect man according to ancient Greek standards: he would entertain the other gods by playing the lyre, and he was also a brilliant archer and runner, considered to be the first winner at the Olympic Games. He protected young men, was a god of agriculture and also was a healer. He was also thought to be the most beautiful of gods."

"...Apollo can easily be considered one of the most important gods in Greek mythology. Seven was Apollos holy number, and he was connected to the calendar. The tripod was one of his symbols, and he was often referred to as Phoibos = the cleanser."

Does EURObama Share Francis Bacon's & Spain's Surreal Passion for Animal Rights? Will Great Apes Be Entitled to Universal Healthcare in America?

noreply@blogger.com (ITSSD Charitable Mission) — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 13:39:00 +0000

http://www.guggenheimcollection.org/site/artist_work_md_10_4.html

Guggenheim Museum on Francis Bacon's Passion for the Apes

Study for Chimpanzee, March 1957

"Although Francis Bacon is best known for his alienated and often hideously distorted human figures, animals are the subject of at least a dozen of his canvases. He rarely worked from nature, preferring photographs, and for images of animals he often consulted Eadweard Muybridge’s Animals in Motion, Marius Maxwell’s Stalking Big Game with a Camera in Equatorial Africa, and pictures from zoological parks. Intrigued by the disconcerting affinities between simians and human beings, he first compared them in 1949 in Head IV (Man with a Monkey) (formerly Collection Geoffrey Gates, New York), in which a man’s averted face is concealed by that of the monkey he holds.

Like his human subjects, Bacon’s animals are shown in formal portraits or candid snapshots in which they are passive, shrieking, or twisted in physical contortions. The chimpanzee in the Peggy Guggenheim work is depicted with relative benevolence, though the blurring of the image, reflecting Bacon’s interest in frozen motion and the effects of photography and film, makes it difficult to interpret the pose or expression. In composition and treatment it is close to paintings of simians executed in the fifties by Graham Sutherland, with whom Bacon became friendly in 1946. The faint, schematic framing enabled Bacon to “see” the subject better, while the monochrome background provides a starkly contrasting field that helps to define form." (See: Guggenheim Museum Francis Bacon Collection, supra.

------------------

[ IS THERE REALLY MORE HERE THAN MEETS THE EYE??]

Man with a Monkey 1949 Francis Bacon

(For information about surrealist artist Francis Bacon, See: Francis Bacon, Gay Guys into Art History, at:

http://tribes.tribe.net/gayarthistory/thread/0d395bbd-c400-4639-b19d-2a18a911bf83 ).

"What Bacon’s painting constitutes is a zone of indiscernibility, or undecideability between man and animal. Man becomes animal, but now without the animal becoming spirit at the same time, the spirit of man, the physical spirit presented in the mirror as Eumenides or Fate. It is never a combination of forms, but rather the common fact: the common fact of man and animal. Bacon pushes this to the point where even his most isolated figure is already a coupled figure, man is coupled with his animal in a latent bullfight. This objective zone of indiscernibility is the entire body, but the body insofar as it is flesh or meat...The painter is certainly a butcher, but he goes to the butcher's shop as if it were a church, with the meat as the crucified victim (the Painting of 1946). Bacon is a religious painter only in butcher's shops." Gilles Deleuze, Body, Meat, Spirit; The Logic of Sensation, Continuum, 2004." See: Art Gallery of Alex Alien, at:

------------------

"...Likewise, in 'Figure With Monkey' from 1951, a man and monkey are separated by a fence painted from a blur of diagonal hatching marks in brilliant purples and deep blues. The man reaches up for the animal, and the hand and mouth meet in a confusing few swaths of fleshy colored paint. Is this gentle touching or biting? And, for that matter, who is caged, man or monkey?" (See: Screaming in Paint - Exhibit Plumbs Depths of Bacon's Unsettling Works, By MARY LOUISE SCHUMACHER mschumacher@journalsentinel.com
Posted: Jan. 26, 2007), at: http://www.jsonline.com/story/index.aspx?id=557375 ).

----------------------

Head I, 1948

"Bacon was an apolitical, good-for-nothing gambler with no principles to blind him to reality. And that is why it fell to him to acknowledge the real meaning of the atrocities whose photographic evidence appeared all over the world with the defeat of Germany. At the time he painted Head I, in 1948, 'responsible' people were busy separating the depravities of Auschwitz from accounts of mass murder inside the USSR. Humanism was still the watchword of the left. So here, in Bacon's appalling painting, is what he thought of humanism: a disintegrated face fused with the baying head of a baboon. There is little point in wallowing in the brilliance of Bacon if you don't recognise him as a moralist first and last. The way Head I is painted brings me out in goosebumps: the pleasure of this horror is immense. A matted blackness, a congealed, cloacal texture of extruded pigments, creates the picture's claustrophobia. The thin transparent veil of purple flesh that hangs in this darkness seems caught at the moment of explosion, in the instant it evaporates... We must learn to love the mortal monkey. What is the alternative? " Jonathan Jones, The beast within; The Guardian, Tuesday August 9, 2005. (See Art Gallery of Alex Alien, supra.)

---------------------------------

Study for a Chimpanzee 1957

"There's a picture of a screaming chimpanzee - a simian form with bared mouth - that goes to the core of Bacon's work. If you then look at Head 1 from 1948 and Head 2 from 1949, say, both are half-animal, half human, as if morphing between forms. There was no difference to Bacon. He knew humans were animals: primal and confrontational. You see it also in his figures of screaming popes. He always saw the animal in man, even in in the supreme pontiff. There's that ambiguity with Bacon: you don't know if you're witnessing a scream of pain, anger or release. I think probably that's why Bacon was such a great artist.." Michael Peppiatt, Great British Bacon, Radio Times, 19-25 March, 2005. (See: Art Gallery of Alex Alien, supra).

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http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1704179,00.html

Obama Pledges Support for Animal Rights

By AP/NEDRA PICKLER

TIME/CNN

Jan. 16, 2008

(HENDERSON, Nev.) — Democrat Barack Obama says he won't just be a president for the American people, but the animals too.

"What about animal rights?" a woman shouted out during the candidate's town hall meeting outside Las Vegas Wednesday after he discussed issues that relate more to humans, like war, health care and the economy.

"I think how we treat our animals reflects how we treat each other," he said. "And it's very important that we have a president who is mindful of the cruelty that is perpetrated on animals."

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http://www.catanna.com/obama-animal-welfare.htm

Barack Obama - Animal Welfare Advocate

While speaking in Henderson, Nevada, Democrat Barack Obama says he won't just be a president for the American people, but the animals too. "What about animal rights?" a woman shouted out during the candidate's town hall meeting outside Las Vegas after he discussed issues that relate more to humans, like war, health care and the economy.

Obama responded that he cares about animal rights very much, "not only because I have a 9-year-old and 6-year-old who want a dog." He said he sponsored a bill to prevent horse slaughter in the Illinois state Senate and has been repeatedly endorsed by the Humane Society. "I think how we treat our animals reflects how we treat each other," he said. d it's very important that we have a president who is mindful of the cruelty that is perpetrated on animals." as reported by Associated Press.

Indeed, Senator Barack Obama pledges support for nearly every animal protection bill currently pending in Congress, and he says he will work with executive agencies such as the U.S. Department of Agriculture to make their policies more humane. He has written and spoken of the important role animals play in our lives, as companions in our homes, as wildlife in their own environments, and as service animals working with law enforcement and assisting persons with disabilities.

Obama also comments on the broader links between animal cruelty and violence in society:

"I've repeatedly voted to increase penalties for animal cruelty and violence and, importantly, to require psychological counseling for those who engage in this behavior as part of the punishment. In addition to being unacceptable in its own stead, violence towards animals is linked with violent behavior in general, especially domestic violence, and we need to acknowledge this connection and work to treat it. Strong penalties are important and I support them, but we know that incarceration alone can't solve all our problems. As president, I'd continue to make sure that we treat animal cruelty like the serious crime it is and address its connection to broader patterns of violence."

During Barack Obama’s eight years as an Illinois state senator he voted in favor of at least twelve animal protection laws.

These included state legislation to:

- allow creation of pet trusts to provide for long-term care of companion animals;

- to upgrade penalties for cruelty to animals, to require psychological counseling for people who abuse animals;

- to require veterinarians to report suspected acts of cruelty and animal fighting;

- to ban slaughter of horses for human consumption—significant because Illinois was one of only two states (with Texas) where horse slaughter plants operated;

- to create additional restrictions to make it more difficult for puppy mills to operate.

He voted to end the federal funding of horse slaughter in 2005, and he is currently a co-sponsor of new legislation to stop horse slaughter and the export of horses for human consumption.

He co-sponsored legislation to upgrade the federal penalties for dogfighting and cockfighting, and he is a co-sponsor of new legislation to ban the possession of fighting dogs and being a spectator at a dogfight.

He signed a letter requesting increased funds for the enforcement of the Animal Welfare Act, Humane Methods of Slaughter Act, and the federal animal fighting law, and he also sent a letter to the National Zoo expressing his concern for the care of Toni the elephant.

He has joined the fight against puppy mills, and appears in A Rare Breed of Love: The True Story of Baby and the Mission She Inspired to Help Dogs Everywhere ,a new book by Jana Kohl about her rescued dog, Baby, who survived a decade in a puppy mill.

And Obama has said that "as a condition for letting me run for President, my daughters Malia and Sasha extracted a promise from Michelle and I that they could get a dog after the election, win or lose. So they're heavily invested in this campaign, if only for it to be over so we can get our dog."

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http://hslf.typepad.com/political_animal/2007/12/the-president-3.html

The Presidential Files: Barack Obama and the Dog-acity of Hope

Democratic Senator Barack Obama's 2006 book, "The Audacity of Hope," is a story about his dogged optimism in the future. But it's his other work of writing—this one in response to a Humane Society Legislative Fund questionnaire—that has given dogs and other animals hope in this country.

At this time, three other presidential candidates—John Edwards, Dennis Kucinich, and Bill Richardson—have issued campaign statements telling voters where they stand on animal welfare. Obama's statement is a welcome addition, and it is an indicator of the growing importance of humane issues in presidential politics. We hope the other presidential candidates will let voters know where they stand on animal issues, too.

In his questionnaire response, Obama pledges support for nearly every animal protection bill currently pending in Congress, and he says he will work with executive agencies such as the U.S. Department of Agriculture to make their policies more humane. He writes of the important role animals play in our lives, as companions in our homes, as wildlife in their own environments, and as service animals working with law enforcement and assisting persons with disabilities.

Obama also comments on the broader links between animal cruelty and violence in society: "I've repeatedly voted to increase penalties for animal cruelty and violence and, importantly, to require psychological counseling for those who engage in this behavior as part of the punishment.

In addition to being unacceptable in its own stead, violence towards animals is linked with violent behavior in general, especially domestic violence, and we need to acknowledge this connection and work to treat it. Strong penalties are important and I support them, but we know that incarceration alone can't solve all our problems. As president, I'd continue to make sure that we treat animal cruelty like the serious crime it is and address its connection to broader patterns of violence."

In his eight years as an Illinois state senator, Obama voted for at least a dozen animal protection laws that came up during that time. He supported measures, among others, to allow the creation of pet trusts to provide for the long-term care of companion animals; to upgrade the penalties for cruelty to animals; to require psychological counseling for people who abuse animals; to require that veterinarians report suspected acts of cruelty and animal fighting; and to ban the slaughter of horses for human consumption—which was significant because, at the time, Illinois was one of only two states (with Texas) where horse slaughter plants operated.

After being elected to the U.S. Senate in 2004, Obama has continued his record of support for animal protection laws. He voted to end the federal funding of horse slaughter in 2005, and he is currently a co-sponsor of new legislation to stop horse slaughter and the export of horses for human consumption. He co-sponsored legislation which was enacted this May to upgrade the federal penalties for dogfighting and cockfighting, and he is a co-sponsor of new legislation to ban the possession of fighting dogs and being a spectator at a dogfight. He signed a letter requesting increased funds for the enforcement of the Animal Welfare Act, Humane Methods of Slaughter Act, and the federal animal fighting law, and he also sent a letter to the National Zoo expressing his concern for the care of Toni the elephant.

Senator Obama scored 20 percent on the 2005 Humane Scorecard because he voted to end horse slaughter, but at the time, had not yet co-sponsored bills dealing with animal fighting, puppy mills, or downer livestock, or signed the enforcement funding letter. His score improved to 60 percent on the 2006 Humane Scorecard, as he signed onto the animal fighting bill and the funding letter. For 2007, Obama will receive credit on the scorecard for co-sponsoring the animal fighting and horse slaughter legislation, but he has not yet co-sponsored major animal welfare bills such as the Pet Safety and Protection Act.

While Obama has said that he supports the rights of hunters and sportsmen, he has not gone out of his way to stress the point, and has not—as some other candidates have—dressed up in camo and gunned down animals with the television cameras in tow. Obama's personal interactions with animals, in fact, appear to be much more humane. He has joined the fight against puppy mills, and will appear in a new book by my friend Jana Kohl about her rescued dog, Baby, who survived a decade in a puppy mill.

Now that's a photo op I'd like to see.

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http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article4220884.ece

Apes get legal rights in Spain, to surprise of bullfight critics

Thomas Catan in Madrid

Times OnlineUK

Spain is to become the first country to extend legal rights to apes, wrongfooting animal rights activists who have long campaigned against bullfighting in the country.

In what is thought to be the first time a national legislature has granted such rights to animals, the Spanish parliament’s environmental committee voted to approve resolutions committing the country to the Great Apes Project, designed by scientists and philosophers who say that humans’ closest biological relatives also deserve rights.

The resolution, adopted with crossparty support, calls on the Government to promote the Great Apes Project internationally and ensure the protection of apes from “abuse, torture and death”. “This is a historic moment in the struggle for animal rights,” Pedro Pozas, the Spanish director of the Great Apes Project, told The Times. “It will doubtless be remembered as a key moment in the defence of our evolutionary comrades.”

Reactions to the vote were mixed. Many Spaniards were perplexed that the country should consider it a priority when the economy is slowing sharply and Spain has been rocked by violent fuel protests. Others thought it was a strange decision, given that Spain has no wild apes of its own.

Animal rights?

Monkey talk

In an editorial yesterday, the Madrid daily El Mundo noted that the only apes in Spain were “the ones that could cross over from Gibraltar”, and questioned why the country should become “the principal flag-bearer of the apes” cause. “With the problems that Spanish farmers and fishermen are experiencing, it is surprising that members of Congress should dedicate their efforts to trying to turn the country of bullfighting into the principal defender of the apes,” it wrote.

Spain’s conservative Popular Party also complained that the resolution sought to give animals the same rights as humans — something that the Socialist Government denies. Some critics questioned why Spain should afford legal protection from death or torture to great apes but not bulls. But Mr Pozas said that the vote would set a precedent, establishing legal rights for animals that could be extended to other species. “We are seeking to break the species barrier — we are just the point of the spear,” he said.

The resolutions will outlaw harmful experiments on great apes, though activist say that they have no knowledge of any being carried out in Spain. It will also make keeping great apes for circuses, TV commercials or filming a criminal offence.

Keeping apes in zoos will remain legal, [HALLELUJAH!!] but conditions for the 350 apes in Spanish zoos will have to improve. Animal rights activists say that 70 per cent of apes in Spanish zoos live in sub-human conditions. The philosophers Peter Singer and Paola Cavalieri founded the Great Ape Project in 1993, saying that hominids such as chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans should enjoy the right to life and freedom and not to be mistreated.

The ape world

-- In addition to humans there are three genera of great apes: gorillas, chimpanzees and orang-utans

— The first two are confined to Africa, while the third occurs in South-East Asia

— Humans and chimps share 99 per cent of their active genetic material

— 7,300 Sumatran orang-utans remain in the wild

— The mountain gorillas of the Democratic Republic of Congo have dwindled to 700, and the Cross River gorilla is believed to number only 250

— The UN predicts that some species of great ape could be extinct within a generation
Sources: The World Atlas of Great Apes; Times archives

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http://www.newsmax.com/insidecover/spain_apes_rights/2008/06/26/107595.html?s=al&promo_code=6505-1

Spain Gives Rights to Apes

June 26, 2008

Spain’s parliament on Wednesday voiced its support for the rights of great apes to life and freedom, Reuters reports.

Spain adopted this new policy at the behest of the "Great Apes Project," a plan developed, in part, by Peter Singer and other philosophers and scientists who say the animals deserve the same rights as their closest genetic relatives.

[ARE APE RIGHTS NOW EQUIVALENT WITH HUMAN RIGHTS]

Australian-born Singer, dubbed the “godfather” of animal rights, has stirred up controversy by asserting, among other things, that Christianity is a “problem” for the animal rights movement.

A professor of bioethics at Princeton University's Center for Human Values, Singer attacks "speciesism," which he defines as the belief that being a member of a certain species "makes you superior to any other being that is not a member of that species." He has also stated that a "severely disabled" infant may be killed up to 28 days after its birth if the parents deem the baby's life is not worth living.

Spain’s environmental committee of parliament approved the resolution with cross-party support. If the resolution becomes law, it will mean that potential experiments on apes will be banned within a year. In addition, apes used for commercial purposes, filming or circuses would also become illegal.

"This is a historic day in the struggle for animal rights and in defense of our evolutionary comrades, which will doubtless go down in the history of humanity," Pedro Pozas, Spanish director of the Great Apes Project, tells Reuters.

We have no knowledge of great apes being used in experiments in Spain, but there is currently no law preventing that from happening," Pozas notes.

Apes in Spanish zoos, of which there are currently 315, will remain legal, according to the legislation, but living conditions reportedly will improve substantially.

[SIMIAN RIGHTS OR ECONOMIC SABOTAGE??? Will EURObama provide animal rights extremists with the same liberties and freedom of speech as they exercise in the European Union?? See: ITSSD Journal on Economic Sabotage, at: http://itssdjournaleconomicsabotage.blogspot.com/].

For Obama, Picasso's Surrealism Has Strong Aesthetic & Political Undertones: What Would 'Reality' Mean to an Obama Administration?

noreply@blogger.com (ITSSD Charitable Mission) — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 12:26:00 +0000

http://money.aol.com/special/lifestyles-of-2008-presidential-candidates?icid=100214839x1203389166x1200134264

In a recent article entitled, Lifestyles of the 2008 Presidential Candidates - How Our Potential Presidents Live in Real Life, AOL Money and Finance (June 3, 2008), Democratic Presidential Candidate Barack Obama reveals that one of his ''personal heroes' is famous Spanish Surrealist artist Pablo Picasso.

According to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, "The artistic genius of Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) has impacted the development of modern and contemporary art with unparalleled magnitude. His prolific output includes over 20,000 paintings, prints, drawings, sculptures, ceramics, theater sets and costumes that convey a myriad of intellectual, political, social, and amorous messages. His creative styles transcend realism and abstraction, Cubism, Neoclassicism, Surrealism, and Expressionism." See Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) at: http://www.metmuseum.org/TOAH/HD/pica/hd_pica.htm .

Similarly, Encyclopedia Britannica reflects that,

"Although Picasso never became an official member of the group, he had intimate connections with the most important art movement between the two world wars, Surrealism. The Surrealist establishment, including its main propagandist, André Breton, claimed him as one of their own, and Picasso's art gained a new dimension from contact with his Surrealist friends...

... Life and career » Surrealism

Although Picasso never became an official member of the group, he had intimate connections with the most important art movement between the two world wars, Surrealism. The Surrealist establishment, including its main propagandist, André Breton, claimed him as one of their own, and Picasso’s art gained a new dimension from contact with his Surrealist friends, particularly the
writers. Inherent in Picasso’s work since the Demoiselles were many elements that the official circle advocated. The creation of monsters, for instance, could certainly be perceived in the disturbing juxtapositions and broken contours of the human figure in Cubist works; Breton specifically pointed to the strange Woman in a Chemise (1913).

("In 1931, Universal Studios released the movie 'Frankenstein,' in which the monster as most of us recognise him today made his first appearance. The 1934 drawing appears to contain an inverted double portrait of Frankenstein's monster derived from this movie...

Picasso, who was often described as a monster, loved the cinema and probably saw the 1931 'Frankenstein' soon after its release in France. It appears clear from the drawing that he went on to identify a number of symbolic associations between himself and the monster and identified other symbolic associations between the monster and Hitler's Aryan Superman. Frankenstein's monster, like Oedipus and Picasso, were all in a sense responsible for the destruction of their fathers*. All three also Picasso symbolically, Oedipus by self infliction and suffered a form of blindness; Frankenstein's monster because at first his eyes were too sensitive to light. All three also underwent a form of crucifixion; Picasso symbolically, Oedipus when he is exposed by his father, the monster when he is created as well as when he dies under the sign of a burning cross. Finally, all three also experienced a form of exile; Picasso at the turn of the century in Paris and again in the 1930's as a protest against Franco, Oedipus by his own edict and the monster by being violently ostracised from the day of his creation." See Mark Harris, The Picasso Conspiracy, Symbolism in the 1934 Drawing - Frankenstein, at: http://web.org.uk/picasso/toc.html http://web.org.uk/picasso/symbolism.html http://web.org.uk/picasso/frankenstein.html ).

[IS GLOBAL WARMING SUCH A MONSTER??]

Moreover, the idea of reading one thing for another, an idea implicit in Synthetic Cubism, seemed to coincide with the dreamlike imagery the Surrealists championed.

What the Surrealist movement gave to Picasso were new subjects—especially erotic ones—as well as a reinforcement of disturbing elements already in his work...the effect of distortion on the emotions of the spectator can also be interpreted as fulfilling one of the psychological aims of Surrealism (drawings and paintings of the Crucifixion, 1930–35).

In the 1930s Picasso, like many of the Surrealist writers, often played with the idea of metamorphosis.

For example, the image of the minotaur, the monster of Greek mythology—half bull and half human—that traditionally has been seen as the embodiment of the struggle between the human and the bestial, becomes in Picasso’s work not only an evocation of that idea but also a kind of self-portrait.

Finally, Picasso’s own brand of Surrealism found its strongest expression in poetry. He began writing poetry in 1934, and during one year, from February 1935 to the spring of 1936, Picasso virtually gave up painting. Collections of poems were published in Cahiers d’Art (1935) and in La Gaceta de Arte (1936, Tenerife), and some years later he wrote the Surrealist play Le Désir attrapé par la queue (1941, Desire Caught by the Tail).

...After the war Picasso resumed exhibiting his work, which included painting and sculpture as well as work in lithography and ceramics. At the Autumn Salon of 1944 (“Salon de la Liberation”) Picasso’s canvases and sculpture of the preceding five years were received as a shock. This plus the announcement that Picasso had just joined the Communist Party led to demonstrations against his political views in the gallery itself...

... Because Picasso’s art from the time of the Demoiselles was radical in nature, virtually no 20th-century artist could escape his influence. Moreover, while other masters such as Matisse or Braque tended to stay within the bounds of a style they had developed in their youth, Picasso continued to be an innovator into the last decade of his life."

See: Pablo Picasso, Surrealism, at Encyclopædia Britannica.com at: http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-59635/Pablo-Picasso ; and
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/459275/Pablo-Picasso .

Could the Reports Claiming that Barack Obama has Communist Party Ties be True??

noreply@blogger.com (ITSSD Charitable Mission) — Tue, 27 May 2008 11:34:00 +0000

[This photo image of communist revolutionary Che Guevara is said to come from one of Barack Obama's campaign offices. Could this be true?

Research reveals that "Ernesto "Che" Guevara (May 14, 1928 – October 9, 1967), commonly known as Che Guevara, El Che, or simply Che, was an Argentine Marxist revolutionary, politician, author, physician, military theorist, and guerrilla leader. His stylized image also later became a countercultural symbol worldwide. As a young medical student, Guevara travelled through Latin America and was transformed by the endemic poverty he witnessed. His experiences and observations during these trips led him to conclude that the region's inequalities were a result of monopoly capitalism, neo-colonialism, and imperialism, with the only remedy being world revolution. This belief prompted his involvement in Guatemala's social revolution under President Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán, whose eventual CIA-assisted overthrow solidified Guevara’s radical ideology."

"Later, in Mexico, he joined and was promoted to commander in Fidel Castro’s 26th of July Movement, playing a pivotal role in the successful guerrilla campaign to overthrow the U.S.-backed Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista.[1] After the Cuban revolution, Guevara served in many prominent governmental positions, including President of the National Bank and “supreme prosecutor” over the revolutionary tribunals and executions of suspected war criminals from the previous regime. Along with traveling to meet world leaders on behalf of Cuban socialism, he was a prolific writer and diarist: his published work includes a manual on the theory and practice of guerrilla warfare. Guevara left Cuba in 1965 to incite revolutions first in an unsuccessful attempt in Congo-Kinshasa and then in Bolivia, where he was captured with help of the CIA and executed."

See: Wikipedia at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Che_Guevara .]

[WHY WOULD BARACK OBAMA SUPPORTERS HANG A PICTURE OF CHE GUEVARA IN THEIR CAMPAIGN HEADQUARTERS?? WHAT KIND OF REVOLUTION DOES BARACK OBAMA CALL FOR???]

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=65066

ELECTION 2008Report: Obama mentored by Communist Party figureInvestigations show ties to radicals who shaped him, helped launch his political career

Posted: May 22, 200811:40 pm Eastern

By Jerome R. Corsi

Barack Obama had extensive ties with extreme anti-American elements, including agents of the Moscow-controlled Communist Party USA, in Hawaii and Chicago, according to two new reports released yesterday in Washington, D.C., by two experienced internal security investigators.
Investigative journalist Cliff Kincaid and Herbert Romerstein, a former investigator with the U.S. House Committee on Un-American Activities, presented evidence Obama was mentored, while attending high school in Hawaii, by Frank Marshall Davis, an African-American poet and journalist who was also a CPUSA member.

The authors, in a separate report, document Obama's ties to radicals in Chicago who helped launch his career.

In a paper entitled "Communism in Hawaii and the Obama Connection," the authors document that in 1948, Davis decided to move from Chicago to Honolulu at the suggestion of what they describe as two "secret CPUSA members," actor Paul Robeson and Harry Bridges, the head of the International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen Union, or ILWU.

In Chicago, Davis had worked for the Chicago Star newspaper; in Honolulu, he was hired as a reporter for the Honolulu Record, both identified by Kincaid and Romerstein as "communist front newspapers."

In his autobiography, "Dreams from My Father," Obama discusses the influence a mentor identified in the book only as "Frank" had on his intellectual development.
Obama described Frank as a drinking companion of his grandfather, who had boasted of his association with African-American authors Richard Wright and Langston Hughes during the time Frank was a journalist in Chicago.

Romerstein, in addition to having served as investigator with the U.S. House Committee on Un-American Activities, served in the same capacity with the House Committee on Internal Security and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. He was the head of the Office to Counter Soviet Disinformation for the U.S. Information Agency. Romerstein is also co-author of the influential book "The Venona Secrets: Exposing Soviet Espionage and America's Traitors," which included extensive documentation of the communist activities of Roosevelt administration staffer Alger Hiss.

Kincaid is the founder and president of America's Survival Inc., an independent watchdog group that monitors the U.N. and international terrorism. He is also editor of Accuracy in Media's AIM Report.

Are you a member of the Communist Party?

Kincaid and Romerstein quote Kathryn Takara of the University of Hawaii, who wrote a dissertation on the life of Frank Marshall Davis, confirming Davis was a significant influence on Obama when the senator attended Punahou prep school in Hawaii from 1975 to 1979
A transcript of a 1956 hearing before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee discovered by internal security affairs researcher and writer Max Friedman showed Davis took the Fifth Amendment when asked by the subcommittee if he was or had ever been a member of the Communist Party.

In the second report, "Communism in Chicago and the Obama Connection," Kincaid and Romerstein present evidence supporting their contention the SDS organization from which the Weather Underground organization and radicals Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dorhn came, received financial contributions from the CPUSA, which in turn receive its funding from Moscow.

Obama's run for the Illinois state Senate was launched by a fundraiser organized at Ayers' and Dorhn's Chicago home by Alice Palmer. Palmer had named Obama to succeed her in the state Senate in 1995, when she decided to run for a U.S. congressional seat.

Nine years before Palmer picked Obama to be her successor, she was the only African-American journalist to travel to the Soviet Union to attend the 27th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, according to an article Palmer wrote in the CPUSA newspaper, People's Daily World, June 19, 1986.

"There has been no explanation of why Ayers et al. played a role in launching Obama's political career," Kincaid wrote.

Kincaid and Romerstein present documentation that Tom Hayden, another major figure in the SDS, is today one of four principal initiators of the "Progressives for Obama" movement, which calls for ending the war in Iraq "as quickly as possible, not in five years."

According to Kincaid and Romerstein, U.S. Peace Council executive committee member Frank Chapman "blew the whistle on communist support for Obama's presidential bid and his real agenda" in a letter to the People's Weekly World after Obama's win in the Iowa Democratic Party caucuses.

"Obama's victory was more than a progressive move; it was a dialectical leap ushering in a qualitatively new era of struggle," Chapman wrote. "Marx once compared revolutionary struggle with the work of the mole, who sometimes burrows so far beneath the ground that he leaves no trace of his movement on the surface.

Kincaid and Romerstein wrote, "The clear implication of Chapman's letter is that Obama himself, or some of his Marxist supporters, are acting like moles in the political process. The suggestion is that something is being hidden from the public."

Isn't It Surreal How Obama & Clinton Are Employing Psychology Tactically to Evoke Unconscious Voter Emotions and Illusions??

noreply@blogger.com (ITSSD Charitable Mission) — Sun, 25 May 2008 18:36:00 +0000

http://www.newsweek.com/id/137548

Unconscious Votes: predictions of political psychology have held up pretty well on the campaign trail.

By Sharon Begley

Newsweek

May 17, 2008

"Give the democrats of West Virginia points for honesty. As Hillary Clinton romped to a landslide of 67 to 26 percent over Barack Obama in the primary, 20 percent of voters in exit polls said that race was an important factor in their choice—triple the percentage of earlier primaries. Of those, 80 percent voted for Clinton, making clear what they meant by "important." Obama's "black supremacist" minister concerns her, one woman told my colleague Suzanne Smalley. Another found Obama's "background, his heritage" suspicious. Both said they'd vote for John McCain over Obama."

"The 2008 campaign has been subjected to more psychological analysis than Woody Allen. The top Democratic candidates asked psychology researchers for input, as did the national party, several state parties and the House and Senate Democratic caucuses. The 2007 book "The Political Brain," by psychologist Drew Westen of Emory University, became a must-read for strategists, and so far it looks as though they got their money's worth: key predictions of political psychology have held up pretty well on the campaign trail. Voters are driven more by emotions than by a cold-eyed, logical analysis of a candidate's record and positions; witness the legions of anti-immigration Republicans who pulled the lever for McCain. Ten-point plans (Clinton) don't move voters as powerfully as inspirational oratory (Obama). And unconscious motivations are stronger than conscious ones. This last finding might explain the growing role of racism in the campaign as well as the persistent "happiness gap" between liberals and conservatives—both of which will matter in November."

"In March, when I wrote about research showing that people ignore race if another salient trait is emphasized, scientists agreed that Obama had to convey that "he is one of us." That "us" could be Democrats, family men, opponents of the Iraq invasion, enemies of politics as usual. Instead, opponents (and the media) began playing up his "otherness"—not wearing a flag pin, belonging to a black church, having an exotic name. And Obama began slipping, losing support among blue-collar white voters in particular."

"It may seem paradoxical, but to stop the bleeding Obama needs to talk about race more often and more explicitly. "Only 3 or 4 percent of people today consciously endorse racist sentiments," says Westen. "But there are residues of prejudice at the unconscious level, and they aren't difficult to activate if you know how to do it. Our better angels on race tend to be our conscious rather than our unconscious values and emotions." It is those conscious brain circuits that Obama needs to keep activating, says Westen, "by talking about racism openly and attacking those who say white America will never vote for a black for president. Appeal to people's conscious values." That has a good chance of keeping unconscious racism at bay, brain studies show. Even more effective, combine direct talk about racism with an "I am like you" message, which leads the brain to focus on categories other than race. "Make it about 'us'," says Westen. "Talk about how we feel angry if a black fireman gets promoted ahead of us for no reason but affirmative action. Talk about how it's natural to look at someone different from us and ask, does he share my values, can he understand me?""

"Intelligent adults don't like being told that something as important as their vote is strongly shaped by emotions and the unconscious. But if "The Selling of the President" didn't prove the point 40 years ago, an upcoming study showing the tight embrace of ideology and emotion might."

"In a 2006 survey by the Pew Research Center, 47 percent of conservative Republicans described themselves as "very happy," but only 28 percent of liberal Democrats did. That led columnist George F. Will to write that "liberalism is a complicated and exacting, not to say grim and scolding, creed. And not one conducive to happiness." But political psychologist John Jost of New York University suspected that something else might explain the happiness gap. He and Jaime Napier analyzed data on people's self-reported level of contentment and their political views. The right-left happiness gap existed not only in the United States but in nine other countries, too. In part, that's because conservatives are more likely to be older, married and religious, all of which increase happiness."

"But those traits explained only part of the gap. What accounted for the rest was how people viewed social and economic inequality, the scientists will report next month in the journal Psychological Science. People who agreed that "it is not really that big a problem if some people have more of a chance in life than others," for instance, and "this country would be better off if we worried less about how equal people are," were happier than those who disagreed. The latter tend to be liberals, who are less likely than conservatives to see inequality as the result of a fair and legitimate system in which, say, people are losing their homes to foreclosure because they greedily got mortgages they couldn't afford/didn't deserve, not because they were misled by lenders. As foreclosures and gas prices rise between now and November, hitting have-nots harder than haves, the happiness gap will only grow. And if poli-psych teaches us anything, it is that profound unhappiness with the status quo leaves voters open to profound change."

What Do the 'Chicago 7', Surrealism and Barack Obama Have in Common? They Aren't Really Healers: Each Romanticizes Radical Counter-Cultural Change!!

noreply@blogger.com (ITSSD Charitable Mission) — Sun, 25 May 2008 14:39:00 +0000

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_10_(film)
"Chicago 10 is a 2007 partly animated film written and directed by Brett Morgen and tells the story of the Chicago Seven. The film features...an animated reenactment of the trial based on transcripts and rediscovered audio recordings. It also contains archive footage of [ANTI-WAR RADICALS] David Dellinger, Abbie Hoffman, William Kunstler, Jerry Rubin, Bobby Seale, and Leonard Weinglass, and of the protest and riot itself. The title is drawn from a quote by Rubin, who said, 'Anyone who calls us the Chicago Seven is a racist. Because you're discrediting Bobby Seale. You can call us the Chicago Eight, but really we're the Chicago Ten, because our two lawyers went down with us.'" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Seven

"The Chicago Seven were seven (originally eight, when they were known as the Chicago Eight) defendants charged with conspiracy, inciting to riot and other charges related to protests that took place in Chicago, Illinois on the occasion of the 1968 Democratic National Convention...The 1968 Democratic National Convention, held in late August – convened to select the party's candidates for the November 1968 Presidential election – was the scene of massive demonstrations protesting the Vietnam War, which was at its height. Thousands of people showed up with signs and banners, music, dancing and poetry."

"The original eight protester/defendants, indicted by the grand jury on March 20, 1969, were Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, David Dellinger, Tom Hayden, Rennie Davis, John Froines, Lee Weiner, and Bobby Seale. The defense attorneys were William Kunstler and Leonard Weinglass of the Center for Constitutional Rights. The judge was Julius Hoffman. The prosecutors were Richard Schultz and Tom Foran. The trial began on September 24, 1969, and on October 9 the United States National Guard was called in for crowd control as demonstrations grew outside the courtroom. Early in the course of the trial, Black Panther Party activist Bobby Seale hurled bitter attacks at Judge Hoffman in court, calling him a "fascist dog," a "pig," and a "racist," among other things. Seale had wanted the trial postponed so that his own attorney, Charles Garry, could represent him (as Garry was about to undergo gallbladder surgery); the judge denied the postponement, and refused to allow Seale to represent himself, leading to Seale's verbal onslaught. When Seale refused to be silenced, the judge ordered Seale bound and gagged in the courtroom, citing a precedent from the case of Illinois v. Allen. (This was alluded to in Graham Nash's song, 'Chicago', which opened with: 'So your brother's bound and gagged, and they've chained him to a chair'). Ultimately Judge Hoffman severed Seale from the case, sentencing him to four years in prison for contempt, one of the longest sentences ever handed down for that offense in American history at that time."

"...On February 18, 1970, all seven defendants were found not guilty of conspiracy, two (Froines and Weiner) were acquitted completely, and five were convicted of crossing state lines with the intent to incite a riot. Those five were each sentenced to five years in prison and fined $5,000 on February 20, 1970...All of the convictions were reversed by the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit on November 21, 1972, on the grounds of bias by the judge and his refusal to permit defense attorneys to screen prospective jurors for cultural and racial bias (Case citation 472 F.2d 340). The Justice Department decided not to retry the case. During the trial, all the defendants and both defense attorneys had been cited for contempt and sentenced to jail, but all of those convictions were also overturned. The contempt charges were retried before a different judge, who found Dellinger, Rubin, Hoffman and Kunstler guilty of some of the charges, but opted not to sentence the defendants to jail or fines. Of the eight police officers indicted in the matter, seven were acquitted, and charges against the eighth were dismissed."

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[THE FOLLOWING ENTRY REFLECTS ASPECTS OF SURREALISM INSOFAR AS 'ART IMITATES LIFE, WHICH IMITATES ART...]

http://www.chicagoreader.com/features/stories/historynow/

In his 'mash-up documentary' Chicago 10, Brett Morgen wants to erase the distance between 1968 and 2008

By JR Jones

Chicago Reader

February 28, 2008

"As a Chicagoan in my early 40s, I find that the 1968 Democratic convention and the ensuing conspiracy trial are at my fingertips yet far beyond my grasp...Chicago 10, an electrifying new 'mash-up documentary' by Brett Morgen, vividly reconstructs the battles on the street and in the courtroom, and it couldn’t come at a more opportune moment...Then as now, a big-hatted Texan had led the country into an ill-considered war and was about to shuffle off into history with U.S. forces still mired in a foreign civil conflict. Then as now, the Democratic Party was embroiled in a hotly contested presidential race, with two antiwar upstarts, Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy, vying for the nomination against Vice President Hubert Humphrey. If Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton continue to duke it out through the summer, this year’s Democratic convention could be the most chaotic since then. (Coincidentally the gathering, scheduled for August 25 through 28 in Denver, will precisely mark the 40th anniversary of Chicago’s four days of violence.)"

"The 1968 convention changed the city, the Democratic Party, and the nation. The overkill on Michigan Avenue may be a source of shame now, but at the time a majority of Americans supported the first Mayor Daley and the police for cracking down on protesters. After more than a decade of civil rights demonstrations, antiwar marches, and rioting in U.S. cities, the political pendulum had begun to swing back to the right, and Richard Nixon rode it straight into the Oval Office with a campaign that promised to restore law and order to the country. The bloodshed in Chicago also fractured the American left into a liberal wing that still believed in nonviolence and a radical wing that resolved to pursue more aggressive tactics. With Humphrey’s defeat, the great era of American liberalism, which had started with Franklin Roosevelt’s election in 1932 and peaked with the Voting Rights Act of 1965, began its long, steep decline."

"...The Democrats are still feeling the aftershocks of ’68 today. Back then, only 13 states held Democratic primaries, and Humphrey skipped them all, taking advantage of the party machinery to wrap up the nomination. That fueled the rage of the demonstrators, and as news of their being beaten and gassed filtered into the International Amphitheater, delegates approved a convention plank to reform the nominating process...After the landslide defeat of the liberal George McGovern in 1972 and Ted Kennedy’s failed 1980 primary challenge to President Carter, whom Ronald Reagan easily defeated that November, party centrists struck back by creating unelected, uncommitted “superdelegates” to check the insurgents. Superdelegates helped shut down Gary Hart, who ran against establishment candidate Walter Mondale in 1984, and they may yet do the same to Barack Obama. For Chicago, the convention is a stain that will never wash away. The second Mayor Daley brought the Dems back in 1996, neatly contained pesky protesters at sanctioned demonstration sites, and smoothly orchestrated Bill Clinton’s coronation as the uncontested nominee—yet just the words 'Democratic convention' still conjure images of cops busting heads and Richard J. Daley shouting at Senator Abraham Ribicoff after the senator took the convention podium to denounce “Gestapo tactics on the streets of Chicago.”

"...You won’t learn any of this from Chicago 10, because Morgen isn’t interested in measuring the distance between 1968 and 2008—he wants to erase it. When his movie opened the Sundance Film Festival a year ago, he told the audience his objective was to 'mobilize the youth in this country to stop the fucking war.' Archival footage shows the MC5 rocking out in Lincoln Park, but the music is Rage Against the Machine’s version of “Kick Out the Jams,” and other key moments feature tunes by Eminem or the Beastie Boys. Scenes of the conspiracy trial are drawn from court transcripts, but Morgen has dramatized them with motion-capture animation that turns yippie activists Hoffman and Rubin into freaky superheroes. 'The idea of ‘yippie’ was that politics needed to be fun,' Morgen told USA Today. 'If you want to mobilize people, it’s not fun just walking around with a placard over your head. Turn it into a party, turn it into a concert—and that’s what they did.'”

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[THE FOLLOWING LISTSERV REFLECTS FORMER UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO CONSTITUTIONAL LAW PROFESSOR BARACK OBAMA'S EFFORTS TO TAP INTO & INCITE ANTI-WAR EMOTIONS THROUGH CAREFUL INDIRECT REFERENCES TO & INNUENDOS ABOUT THE IRAQ WAR].

http://blogs.chicagoreader.com/daily-harold/2006/09/25/right-terrified-obama/

"After graduating from Harvard Law School, and serving as president of the Harvard Law Review, Obama taught at the University of Chicago Law School for about a decade, and I know him from his time as a colleague here."

The Right is Terrified of Obama, citing University of Chicago Law Professor Cass Sunstein

By Harold Henderson

The Daily Harold

September 25, 2006

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http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/marxism/2005w13/msg00070.htm

Marxism mailing list archive

To: Marxmail marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: [Marxism] How Barack Obama and MoveOn support Senator Byrd
From: lshan lshan@xxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 29 Mar 2005 11:53:33 -0500

"I just received a message from MoveOn calling for support to Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia for his opposition to the Iraq War. Eli Pariser quotes Byrd as follows: 'I truly must question the judgment of any President who can say that a massive unprovoked military attack on a nation which is over 50% children is 'in the highest moral traditions of our country.' This war is not necessary at this time.' Byrd's position is for getting the UN in and the U.S. out. However, unlike Kerry, he did vote against the $87 billion appropriate in October 2003."

Most interesting is Barack Obama's letter of support. Obama does not have a single word about Byrd's opposition to the invasion and occupation of Iraq. His skillful reference to Byrd's opposition to the invasion and occupation of Iraq consists of:

'He [Byrd] has spoken out passionately against a Bush foreign policy that has alienated our allies throughout the world.'

Thus Obama connects to the antiwar opposition through MoveOn and Senator Robert Byrd, while never stating opposition to Iraq invasion and occupation for himself."

However, at one time, Obama posted the following on his web site:

"I don't oppose all wars ... What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war. What I am opposed to is the cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other arm-chair, weekend warriors in this Administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne...What I am opposed to is the attempt by political hacks like Karl Roves to distract us from a rise in the uninsured, a rise in the poverty rate, a drop in the median income ... to distract us from corporate scandals and a stock market that has just gone thru the worst month since the Great Depression...That's what I'm opposed to. A dumb war. A rash war. A war based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics .... "

That apparently was enough for Obama. On June 5, 2003, Chicago activist and writer Bruce Dixon noted:

"For a while the whole speech could be found on Obama's campaign web site, a key statement of principle for a serious US Senate candidate in an election season when the President's party threatens the world with permanent war and pre-emptive invasion, and cows US citizens with fear mongering, color coded alerts, secret detentions and the abrogation of constitutional liberties. Although Obama may have appeared at meetings of other citizens opposed to the war or let them use his name, no further public statements from the candidate on these important issues have appeared."

"Then, a few weeks ago, Barack Obama's heartfelt statement of principled opposition to lawless militarism and the rule of fear was stricken without explanation from his campaign web site, and replaced with mild expressions of 'anxiety'. 'Dixon quotes the 'new' Obama from Obama's website:

'But I think [people are] all astonished, I think, in many quarters, about, for example, the recent Bush budget and the prospect that, for example, veterans benefits might be cut. And so there's discussion about that, I think, among both supporters and those who are opposed to the war. What kind of world are we building?' And I think that's - the anxiety is about the international prospects and how we potentially reconstruct Iraq. And the costs there, then, tie in very directly with concerns about how we're handling our problems at home."

Dixon comments: "His passion evaporated, a leading black candidate for the US Senate mouths bland generalities on war, peace and the US role in the world. Barack Obama, professor of constitutional law, is mum on the Patriot Act, silent about increased surveillance of US citizens, secret searches, and detentions without trial. His campaign literature and speeches ignore Patriot Act 2, which would detain US citizens without trial, strip them of their nationality and deport them to - wherever, citizens of no nation."

from Brian Shannon

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http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/pen-l/2002m05.4/msg00189.htm

http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/culture/breton.htm

http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mypage.htm

Surrealism, Freud and Trotsky

Columbia University Professor Louis Proyect

(February 2002)

[LOUIS PROYECT HAS BEEN QUOTED IN WIKIPEDIA AS MAKING THE FOLLOWING STATEMENT: "The answer to global warming is in the abolition of private property and production for human need. A socialist world would place an enormous priority on alternative energy sources. This is what ecologically-minded socialists have been exploring for quite some time now." Louis Proyect, Columbia University] See: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Global_warming .

"Surrealist leader and poet André Breton was a life-long Trotskyist...Surrealism emerged in the aftermath of WWI. Along with the Dadaism that prepared the way for it, it was a rejection of bourgeois values, especially the rationalism that supposedly accounted for the wholesale destruction of life and property just concluded. It attacked the pretensions of high art, while retaining many of the painterly flourishes of earlier generations. When Marcel Duchamp painted a moustache on the Mona Lisa in the Dadaist "L.H.O.O.Q" in 1919, he captured the spirit of this movement. In many ways, it was to the radicalization of the 1920s as people like Abby Hoffman and the Fugs were to the 1960s radicalization."

"While Surrealist painting tended to avoid any obvious engagement with the class struggle, the writers were deeply involved with radical politics. Breton and Louis Aragon were prominent CP [Communist Party] intellectuals. As the Stalin-Trotsky fight divided poets as well as activists, Aragon became an apologist for Stalin, while Breton chose Trotskyism. Trotsky, who saw proletarian art and socialist realism as inimical to the goals of the 1917 revolution, found a natural ally in Breton and wrote a manifesto for artistic freedom that Breton circulated under his own name. Even if Surrealist fiction and poetry had the same cloistered and solipsistic quality as the paintings, Breton and others issued thousands of proclamations taking positions on the Spanish Civil War and other burning questions."

["I CHANGE"]

"Reflecting the multifaceted character of the 1960s radicalization, and long before it "corrected" itself with the turn toward industry, the American Trotskyist movement published Franklin Rosemont's Breton collection titled "What is Surrealism: Selected Writings". Along with books like Frank Kofsky's "Black Nationalism and the Revolution in Jazz," it was a short-lived bid by a sectarian group to show that it was hip. No such pretensions exist nowadays."

"...'Of contemporary psychology, surrealism retains that which tends to give a scientific basis to research into the origin and mutation of ideological images. In this sense it has attached a particular importance to Freud's investigations into the processes of dreaming and, more generally, to all of Freud's work which is the clinically based exploration of unconscious life.' While the Marxist elements of surrealism remained underdeveloped, Freud's "insights" informed nearly everything that both the writers and painters produced. It is important to understand that surrealism did not take a literal-minded and clinical approach to Freud's theories. For the most part, it did not look at psychoanalysis as a means to achieving mental health, something largely unattainable in bourgeois society in any case. Instead, they saw it as a way of tapping into the deep psychic reservoirs that can produce memorable art. More to the point, mental illness--and hysteria in particular--was a normal response to the insanity of capitalist society. Their notions on this relationship anticipated not only R.D. Laing but the postmodernism of Deleuze-Guattari and Lacan."

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http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/culture/breton.htm

Surrealism in the United States

By Columbia University Professor Louis Proyect

October 27, 2002

"A few months ago I posted an article about []Surrealism, Freud and Trotsky []
(http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/culture/breton.htm) that relied heavily on Franklin Rosemont's collection of Andre Breton's writings titled "What is Surrealism."

"This Pathfinder book belongs on the shelf of anybody who is interested in the intersection between revolutionary politics and avant-garde art and literature. Now thanks to Autonomedia Press (and especially editor Jim Fleming--a Marxmail subscriber who sent me a review copy), we have a volume that belongs on the same shelf. I refer to []Surrealist Subversions: Rants, Writings and Images by the Surrealist Movement in the United States.[] Edited and introduced by Ron Sakolsky, this volume contains articles that originally appeared in the journal of Rosemont's Chicago Surrealist Group titled [] Arsenal/Surrealist Subversion,[] and kindred publications."

"In my first article, I mentioned that surrealism had taken root in the USA in the 1940s largely through the auspices of a magazine titled VVV. Among the editors was Martinique poet and playwright Aimé Césaire who articulated a surrealist version of Black Nationalism that influenced many black intellectuals, including esteemed contemporary African-American historian Robin D.G. Kelley whose articles can be found in [] Surrealist Subversions.[] Another editorial board member at VVV was Philip Lamantia, who was to become best known as a leading figure of the new poetry of the 1940s and 50s that included the beats and the San Francisco Renaissance writers. It would not be much of a stretch to argue that Lamantia represents a link in the chain between the counter-culture of the 1930s and that of the 1960s. He eventually hooked up with Arsenal, along with fellow beat poet and African-American Ted Joans. It is also not too far of a stretch to see Rosemont's journal as constituting a link between the an important sector of the contemporary radicalization that began in the 1960s with earlier strands going back to the 1930s and earlier, with the left wing of the beat generation constituting an important bridge between the two epochs."

"Ron Sakolsky's introduction does a fine job of identifying both the importance of Franklin Rosemont in keeping the surrealist tradition alive and the particular circumstances of his conversion to this radical cultural movement that will be instantly recognizable to anybody from the generation of baby boomers who rejected everything that American consumerism stood for."

"... Among the most intriguing articles in Rosemont's collection is Robin D.G. Kelley's []Freedom Now Sweet: Surrealism and the Black World.[] His recently published "Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination" expands on many of the themes first found in this 1998 lecture delivered at the U. of North Carolina. Kelley says:

"'Surrealism may have originated in the West, but it is rooted in a conspiracy against Western Civilization. Surrealists frequently looked outside of Europe for ideas and inspiration, turning most notably to the "primitives" under the heel of European colonialism. Indeed, what later became known as the Third World turned out to be the source of the surrealists' politicization during the mid-1920s. The Paris Surrealist Group and the extreme left of the French Communist Party were drawn together in 1925 by their support of Abd-el-Krim, leader of the Rif uprising against French colonialism in Morocco. In tracts like "Revolution Now and Forever!" the surrealists actively called for the overthrow of French colonial rule. That same year, in an "Open Letter" to writer and French ambassador to Japan, Paul Claudel, the Paris group announced: "We profoundly hope that revolutions, wars, colonial insurrections, will annihilate this Western civilization whose vermin you defend even in the Orient." Seven years later, the Paris group produced its most militant statement on the colonial question to date. Titled "Murderous Humanitarianism" (1932) and drafted mainly by Rene Crevel and signed by (among others) André Breton, Paul Eluard, Benjamin Péret, Yves Tanguy, and the Martinican surrealists Pierre Yoyotte and J. M. Monnerot, it was first published in Nancy Cunard's massive anthology, Negro (1934), and recently reprinted in the "Surrealism: Revolution Against Whiteness" issue of the journal Race Traitor. The document is a relentless attack on colonialism, capitalism, the clergy, the Black bourgeoisie, and hypocritical liberals. Arguing that the very humanism upon which the modern West was built also justified slavery, colonialism and genocide, they called for action: "we surrealists pronounced ourselves in favor of changing the imperialist war, in its chronic and colonial form, into a civil war. Thus we placed our energies at the disposal of the revolution, of the proletariat and its struggles, and defined our attitude towards the colonial problem, and hence towards the color question.'"

"...Although Richard Wright's "Native Son" has most often been associated with the proletarian novel of the 1930s, Kelley makes a convincing case that surrealism was also a strong influence on the African-American author and CP'er. He notes that Wright discusses the importance of surrealism in his unpublished "Memories of My Grandmother," especially as an aid to understanding African American folk culture. He found the blues structure to be analogous to the surrealist's use of the "exquisite corpse," a term that captures the mystery of the chance encounter or what Breton called "objective chance." (Trotsky was never comfortable with this aspect of surrealist thought and told Breton, "Comrade Breton, your interest in phenomena of objective chance does not appear clear to me. Yes, I know well that Engels referred to this notion, but I ask myself if, in your case, it isn't something else. I am not sure you aren't interested in keeping open [his hands described a little space in the air] a little window on the beyond." For Kelley, the connections between surrealism and black culture revolve essentially around the imperative to reject Western Civilization, especially those aspects which lead to the annihilation of precapitalist society and beliefs either through forced cultural assimilation or through the open use of weapons of mass destruction, like the poison gas the Spanish government used against the Rif rebels in Morocco in the 1920s. Kelley writes:

"'Wright's engagement with surrealism seems to parallel that of many other Black intellectuals. They have found in surrealism confirmation of what they already know--for them it is more an act of recognition rather than a revolutionary discovery. Ted Joans wrote Breton that he "chose" surrealism because he recognized its fundamental ideas and camaraderie in jazz. Wifredo Lam said he was drawn to surrealism because he already knew the power of the unconscious having grown up in the Africanized spirit world of Santeria. Aime Cesaire insists it was surrealism that brought him back to African culture. In a 1967 interview he explained, "Surrealism provided me with what I had been confusedly searching for. I have accepted it joyfully because in it I have found more of a confirmation than a revelation." Surrealism, he explained, helped him to summon up powerful unconscious forces. "This, for me, was a call to Africa. I said to myself: it's true that superficially we are French, we bear the marks of French customs; we have been branded by Cartesian philosophy, by French rhetoric; but if we break with all that, if we plumb the depths, then what we will find is fundamentally Black.'"

"Since the Chicago Surrealist Group had such a strong orientation to black culture, helped no doubt by the Black Nationalist explosion of the 1960s, it should come as no surprise that their work overlapped to a considerable degree with the work of scholars associated with "Race Traitor," especially David Roediger who not only writes important scholarly examinations of the problem of racism in the working class like "The Wages of Whiteness" but who has contributed frequently to various journals in his capacity as a committed surrealist."

"...Although I agree with many of the insights found in this collection, I tend to differ on one important question. For Rosemont and his comrades, anarchism is attractive because it lacks the stodginess of the Leninist tradition. Since Lenin conceived of the revolutionary party as the political equivalent of the division of labor being introduced into the modern factory system, it is no wonder that a young radical like Rosemont might find this type of activism off-putting. For traditions such as anarchism, Toni Negri-style autonomism and Guy DeBord's Situationism, there is a strong tendency to see the organizational forms of today prior to the revolution as anticipating somehow the future classless society. For example, in the section titled "Dreaming Revolution," we find an article by Martha Sonnenberg titled "New Desires, New Revolutionary Potentials."

"'The development of movements of Black people, of women, of prisoners ms important to the potential of surrealism....They are living illustrations of how concepts which, at one point in time, exist only as ideal thoughts, can become real and materialized in people's lives. The destruction of old concepts of beauty, of reason and logic, of emotion, of sexuality, of age and time, and the creation of new ones in their places, is being accomplished by mass numbers of people. New definitions of human relationships and of human capacity, which surrealists in the 1920s and 30s were struggling for on a theoretical and artistic level, are being lived by people today. These movements are the realization of the potentials of the past, just as they create new potentials to be fulfilled in the future.'"

"Alas, I am afraid that this is far too much to expect from revolutionary politics. I tend to think of the revolutionary movement as the equivalent for our class of the vast array of institutions that govern and enforce the bourgeoisie's class rule, from the army to the CIA to the various think tanks that promote the inevitability of capitalism. One does not get involved with such outfits in order to have fun, but in order to advance the interests of the class you are loyal to. This is the function of the revolutionary party we need so desperately."

Does Obama's Call for 'Change' Target Popular Fears & Self-Doubt, Encourage Collectivism & Aim to Incite a New '60's-Type Counter-Cultural Revolution?

noreply@blogger.com (ITSSD Charitable Mission) — Sat, 24 May 2008 17:41:00 +0000

http://books.google.com/books?id=bQkOVGW8FFEC&pg=PA52&dq=political+surrealism&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=0_0&sig=HM3xioJyfbxmkZI_u76GmIPINig#PPA52,M1
Surrealism and the Political Physiognomy of the Marvellous

By Raymund Spiteri

in Surrealism, Politics and Culture, Raymund Spiteri and Donald LaCoss Eds. (Ashgate Publ. Ltd. (c) 2003) Chap. 3, at pp. 52-54.

[Physiognomy is "a theory based upon the idea that the assessment of the person's outer appearance, primarily the face, may give insights into one's character or personality. The term physiognomy can also refer to the general appearance of a person, object or terrain, without reference to its implied or scientific characteristics. Physiognomy is not a strict science, but rather a method of analysis that proponents say indicates a variety of correlations in its subjects. Hence, physiognomy is not used as the basis of biological or psychological theory. Physiognomic applications can be considered folk science or pseudoscience, and were once used with other tools of scientific racism, in order to promote discriminatory ideas...[S]cientific correlation physiognomy...[reflects the belief that there are] rough statistical correlations between physical features (especially facial features) and character traits due to a person's physical preferences that are caused by corresponding character traits, such that gene mixing causes the correlations; this type of physiognomy is therefore allegedly based on genetic determinism of character. Although this form of physiognomy has generally been disproven as well, the concept has been revived as personology, which is premised on the (widely deemed pseudoscientific) idea that different physical makeups correlate with different behaviors."] Wikipedia, at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physiognomy .]

[DISCERNING READERS SHOULD CONSIDER HOW DEEP BARACK OBAMA'S APPEAL FOR 'CHANGE' RUNS CONSIDERING THAT IT COULD ENTAIL RADICAL REFORMATION OF LONG-STANDING, TIME-PROVEN SCIENTIFIC, ECONOMIC, SOCIAL, POLITICAL AND LEGAL PROTOCOLS WITHOUT THE FAINTEST NOTION OF THE LIKELY OUTCOME OF SUCH 'CHANGE'. DISCERNING READERS SHOULD ALSO CONSIDER HOW THOROUGHLY BARACK OBAMA HAS STUDIED THE 'PROBLEMS' OR 'MARKET-FAILURES' THAT REQUIRE 'CHANGE'. AS WITH PHYSIOGNOMY, IT WOULD NOT BE PRUDENT TO CALL FOR 'CHANGE' BASED ON SURFACE-LEVEL PERCEPTIONS OF THE 'NEED FOR CHANGE'. MERELY 'BELIEVING' THAT THERE IS A NEED FOR 'CHANGE' WITHOUT PROOF OF A SERIOUS PROBLEM, OR MERELY 'BELIEVING' THAT 'CHANGE' CAN BE SUCCESSFULLY EXECUTED WITHOUT EVIDENCE OF PRIOR SUCCESSES AND/OR ADEQUATE PREPARATION TO MITIGATE PROBABLE DAMAGE, IS NOT ENOUGH. ISN'T THE BURDEN OF PROOF ON THE AGENT OF 'PROPOSED CHANGE' TO ESTABLISH WHY CHANGE IS NECESSARY IN THE FIRST PLACE - THE EXISTENCE OF A PROBLEM - AND HOW THE PRESCRIBED CHANGE WILL RESOLVE THE PROBLEM - A SOLUTION. OTHERWISE 'CHANGE' WOULD OCCUR ONLY FOR 'CHANGE-SAKE', AND THAT COULD BE DANGEROUS. IT WOULD ARGUABLY BE AKIN TO CONDUCTING AN EXPERIMENT WITH EVERY AMERICAN'S FUTURE, WOULDN'T IT??]

“In his perspicacious [acute mental vision or discernment] essay of 1929, Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligensia,[1] Walter Benjamin identified the political import of Surrealism in what he called ‘profane illumination’. He located an instance of this illumination in the Surrealist experience of the marvellous, exemplified in the urban narratives of Andre Breton's Nadja (1928)and Louis Aragon's Paysan de Paris (1926).

According to Benjamin, Breton 'can boast an extraordinary discovery in Nadja:

'He was the first to perceive the revolutionary energies that appear in the 'outmoded' in the first iron constructions, the first factory buildings, the earliest photos, the objects that have begun to be extinct, grand pianos, the dresses of five years ago, fashionable restaurants when the vogue has begun to ebb from them. the relation of these things to revolution...'

...Benjamin distinguished here between revolutionary 'experience' and revolutionary 'action', fully aware that Surrealists continued to hesitate in the face of the discipline of political militancy. Although this distinction echoed previous critiques of Surrealism's political position - notably that of Pierre Naville, a former editor of La Revolution Surrealiste, who posed a stark choice between anarchistic revolt and communist revolution in La Revolution et les Intellectuels: Qu'est-ce que faire les surrealistes? (1926) - Benjamin differed in that he did not simply advocate joining the Communist Party as the only solution.

When Benjamin returned to this theme at the close of his essay, he located the articulation between political action and the experience of the marvellous in what he called the 'image-realm'...Surrealism's political lesson was 'to discover in the realm of political action a realm reserved one hundred percent for images'. His description deserves to be quoted at length:

'[...] in all cases where an action puts forth its own image and exists absorbing and consuming it, where nearness looks with its own eyes, the long sought image-realm is opened, the world of universal and integral actualities where the 'best room' is missing - the realm [...] in which the individual, or whatever else we wish to throw to them, with dialectical justice, so that no limb remains unrent. Nevertheless - indeed, precisely after such dialectical annihilation - this will be a realm of images and, more concretely, of bodies. For it must in the end be admitted: metaphysical materialism ]...] cannot lead without rupture to anthropological materialism. There is a residue. The collective is a body, too. And the physis that is being organized for it in technology can, through all its political and factual reality, only be produced in that image-realm to which profane illumination initiates us. Only when in technology body and image-realm so interpenetrate that all revolutionary tension becomes bodily collective innervation, all bodily innervation of the collective becomes revolutionary discharge, has reality transcended itself to the extent demanded by the 'Communist Manifesto.''

Benjamin advances a materialist account of the imagination in this passage. The image-realm is opened at a moment of political and cultural crisis in which hegomonic articulations - that is, the traditional oppositions between action and contemplation, individual and collective, mind and body, technology and nature, etc. - collapse and the conceptual constellations of technological society are rearticulated through the space of images and bodies. Significantly, the image-realm performs a double function: it not only constitutes the collective as a political agent, but it also furnishes the matrix through which the collective articulates its political struggle and challenges the hegemony of official culture...Benjamin's discussion of the image-realm helps illuminate the vexed question of Surrealism's relation to revolutionary politics."

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http://www.surrealismcentre.ac.uk/publications/papers/journal2/acrobat_files/matheson_review.pdf

BOOK REVIEW OF:

Surrealism, Politics and Culture

By Raymond Spiteri and Donald LaCoss (Eds.)

BOOK REVIEW BY Neil Mattheson (2004) in

Papers of Surrealism Issue 2 summer 2004

"In their introduction to this collection, Raymond Spiteri and Donald LaCoss take issue with what they view as the prevailing wisdom on Surrealism’s involvement in politics..."

"Robert Short’s classic account The Politics of Surrealism, 1920-36, written in 1966 and reprinted in this collection, plays a pivotal role within it. Short’s crisply written and much-cited essay is posed as the orthodoxy which the rest of the collection seeks to challenge or expand upon, though in many ways it refuses to be confined to that role. While Short’s account is one of the heroic ‘failure’ of the Surrealist political enterprise, it is a failure premised upon the movement’s attempt ‘to associate its intellectual, artistic and moral preoccupations with the aims of international Communism.’ But as Short also makes clear, this failure and the breach with organised communism did not mean that Surrealism abandoned the political path. In fact, political participation continued throughout the history of the movement, as for example in Surrealist anti-fascist activity, involvement in the Spanish Republic as well as Surrealist participation in the short-lived revolutionary movements Contre-Attaque and the Féderation internationale de l'art révolutionnaire indépendant (FIARI). The Surrealists’ failure was therefore quite specifically that of failing to attain their goal of bringing together ‘spiritual revolution’ with that of international communism, such that, after 1935, the ‘group’s artistic and political activities were definitively separated.’ Short is also acutely aware of the slippery problem of defining Surrealist political activity and suggests that the term ‘politics’ might be a misnomer in this context, given the movement’s broad restriction of its activity to the stage of agitation and that the Surrealists either ‘rejected or were incapable of the sustained application which commitment demanded.’"

"...In his own contribution to this volume, ‘Surrealism and the Political Physiognomy of the Marvellous,’ Raymond Spiteri draws upon Walter Benjamin’s concept of the ‘image realm’ in order to explore some of Surrealism’s complex involvement in revolutionary politics and to analyse the tangled interrelationship of culture with politics. Spiteri juxtaposes two ‘failed encounters’ of Surrealism within social space – Breton’s short-lived encounter with Nadja in October 1926, and the group’s tortuous attempts between 1926 and 1927 to join the PCF – and treats Breton’s writing of Nadja (1928) towards the end of 1927 as a kind of ‘working through’ of those two encounters. Spiteri’s analysis of Nadja focuses upon Breton’s deployment of photographs in that volume, which provides, he argues, a concrete example of Benjamin’s notion of the ‘image-realm,’ where the images ‘seem to trace Surrealism’s trajectory across the social space, suspended between the fields of culture and politics.’ However, Breton’s appeal to the concept of the ‘marvellous’ ultimately fails to bridge the gap between imagination and action, and fails to transform latent possibility into concrete revolutionary action. A close reading of Nadja, Spiteri concludes, reveals Surrealism’s ‘profound ambivalence’ towards political action, but that the encounter can nonetheless be conceived as successful to the extent that it facilitates the manifestation of the ‘political’ within Surrealism. Surrealist political activism, Spiteri argues, ‘rarely managed to escape the orbit of culture’ and its engagement with revolutionary politics consequently ‘assumed the form of a series of missed or failed encounters.’"

"...Robin Adèle Greeley, in her analysis of the relationship established between Breton and Trotsky in Cárdenas’s Mexico in 1938, points to the neglect by scholars of the historical and ideological impact of Trotsky’s thinking upon Surrealism. Greeley’s essay takes as its focus the manifesto ‘For An Independent Revolutionary Art’ (1938), drafted by Breton and Trotsky (though signed, for reasons of political expediency, by Breton and Rivera), in order to tease out the very different attitudes towards the role of culture held by the two men, with Breton according to culture a far more autonomous status in relation to the economic order than did Trotsky. For Greeley it is ‘Surrealism’s dedication to cultural theory’ that marks its ‘fundamental opposition to Trotsky’s more orthodox Marxism,’ and we could add that it is surely Breton’s unbending insistence upon individual liberty and cultural autonomy – ‘Aucune autorité, aucune contrainte, pas la moindre trace de commandement!’ – that pre-determined the failure of the movement’s rapprochement with organized politics."

"...With regard to Surrealism’s postwar political record, Donald LaCoss in his essay ‘Attacks of the Fantastic,’ challenges the arguments of the movement’s opponents in 1945, that Surrealism had abandoned political activism and had instead immersed itself in escapist utopianism, mythological themes and an obsession with the occult. LaCoss views Breton’s turn to utopianism as integral to Surrealism’s postwar radical politics and focuses in particular upon the role of Fourier’s thought in that project, considered not in terms of any practical ‘manual’ of social subversion, but rather for the work’s ‘potentially liberating effect upon the imagination.’ What also appealed to Surrealism in Fourier’s thought, LaCoss argues, is Fourier’s concern with the psychosocial – his concern with behavioural motivation and with creativity."

"...In the concluding essay of this collection, ‘Failure and Community: Preliminary Questions on the Political in the Culture of Surrealism,’ Michael Stone-Richards returns to the key question of the way in which the political is to be framed in relation to Surrealism. For Stone-Richards, considering the failure of Breton and Bataille in 1935 to present in Contre-Attaque a valid alternative to organised communism, Surrealism’s ‘failure’ needs to be viewed within the context of ‘the larger failure of European political culture’ during the 1930s (totalitarianism, Stalinism, Nazism), and the political thought of Breton and Bataille must also be seen as part of ‘the re-thinking of the conditions of the political’ of the time (for example in the work of Heidegger) in an effort to get beyond the present impasse. Drawing upon Jules Monnerot’s La Poésie moderne et le sacré (1945), a text admired by Breton, Stone-Richards also points to the centrality of the collective experience to the Surrealist movement, ‘an association,’ says Stone-Richards, ‘based upon solidarity, and election,’ where such solidarity serves to create an ‘ethical space’ enabling movement towards ‘a possible political realm.’ Stone-Richards further contends that, following the debacle with the PCF, ‘Surrealism gradually defined for itself a more ethically-based notion of protest ... which opposed itself to institutionalized forms of politics,’ as for example in the assumption of an attitude of ‘refusal.’ Thus, while this enables the customary accounts of the failure of Surrealist politics in this period (Short, Lewis) to be criticised as ‘too simple,’ such a judgement demands a re-configuration of our conception as to what constitutes ‘the political,’ more particularly a shift from political activism into the territory of what is more usually considered the realm of ethics."

[DISCERNING READERS FAMILIAR WITH BARACK OBAMA'S PREVIOUS SPEECHES AND THE COLLECTIVIST UNITED NATIONS DOCTRINE OF SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT WHICH CALLS FOR DRASTIC 'CHANGE' TO PROTECT THE ENVIRONMENT WILL NOTE AN ADDITIONAL PARALLEL BETWEEN OBAMA TERMINOLOGY, UNITED NATIONS TERMINOLOGY, EUROPEAN UNION TERMINOLOGY AND THE TERMS EMPLOYED BY THE SURREALIST MOVEMENT: 'SOLIDARITY'; ETHICS'; COLLECTIVISM; ESCAPIST UTOPIANISM].

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[THE FOLLOWING EXTRACT BRIEFLY DISCUSSES THE AMERICAN SURREALIST MOVEMENT'S TIES TO THE 1960's COUNTER-CULTURE 'RADICALISM'].

"Although T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and Ezra Pound had introduced symbolist techniques into American poetry in the 1920s, surrealism, the major force in European poetry and thought in Europe during and after World War II, did not take root in the United States. Not until the 1960s did surrealism (along with existentialism) become domesticated in America under the stress of the Vietnam conflict. During the 1960s, many American writers -- W.S. Merwin, Robert Bly, Charles Simic, Charles Wright, and Mark Strand, among others -- turned to French and especially Spanish surrealism for its pure emotion, its archetypal images, and its models of anti- rational, existential unrest. Surrealists like Merwin tend to be epigrammatic, as in lines such as: 'The gods are what has failed to become of us / If you find you no longer believe enlarge the temple.' Bly's political surrealism harshly criticized American values and foreign policy during the Vietnam era in poems...Mark Strand's surrealism, like Merwin's, is often bleak; it speaks of an extreme deprivation. Now that traditions, values, and beliefs have failed him, the poet has nothing but his own cavelike soul..."

See: American Poetry Since 1945: Experimental poetry, in An Outline of American Literature, From Revolution to Reconstruction, By Kathryn VanSpanckeren,

University of Groningen (last updated May 2005), at: http://www.let.rug.nl/usa/lit/ch7_p4.htm .

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[THE FOLLOWING ENTRY IS EXTRACTED FROM THE WEBSITE OF THE SURREALIST MOVEMENT IN THE UNITED STATES. IT SPEAKS TO THE ISSUES OF 'SELF-IDENTITY' & SELF-DOUBT', WHICH APPARENTLY, BARACK OBAMA'S OWN AUTO-BIOGRAPHY AND MEDIA INTERVIEWS REVEAL AS AN ONGOING CHALLENGE FOR THE SENATOR. FURTHERMORE, IT IS PERHAPS THE MAIN ISSUE THAT MR. OBAMA HAS EMPLOYED IN AN EFFORT TO 'CONNECT WITH' THE AMERICAN PUBLIC FOR PURPOSES OF INFLUENCING THEM OF THE NEED FOR RADICAL 'CHANGE', AND THE ADOPTION OF BROAD, ABSTRACT, ALL-ENCOMPASSING GLOBAL 'HUMANISTIC' CHANGE THAT EMPHASIZES COMMUNALITY, 'SAMENESS', EQUALITY, PARITY. THEREFORE, DISCERNING READERS WILL WANT TO REVIEW THE FOLLOWING ENTRY FOR ITS PENETRATING INSIGHTS.]

http://www.surrealistmovement-usa.org/pages/revolution.html

See: The Surrealist Movement in the United States

"The Surrealist Movement in the United States includes the Chicago Surrealist Group and its many participants scattered from coast to coast. Formed in the summer of 1966 with the encouragement of André Breton and the Surrealist Group in Paris, as well as the surrealists of many other countries, the Chicago Surrealist Group has carried on its wide-ranging research and agitation uninterruptedly ever since; the group has long been recognized as one of the most active, innovative and prolific in the international surrealist movement. As the Chicago-based group attracted more and more collaborators from other cities, its publications increasingly appeared under the name Surrealist Movement in the U.S. Radically different from other websites "about" surrealism—the great majority of which contain nothing but misinformation—this site is the voice of the Surrealist Movement itself."

http://www.surrealistmovement-usa.org/pages/revolution.html

See: Surrealism: Revolution Against Whiteness

"With an unbroken continuity from 1924 down to the present day, the surrealist movement has helped develop not only a revolutionary critique of whiteness but also new forms of revolutionary action against it...As a historically constructed social formation, the notion of a "white race" appears as ideology, mirage, hoax, con-game, racket, swindle: an altogether malevolent piece of duplicity and horror. But for those who buy it and sell it, whiteness is what Richard Wright once called a powerful "psychological reality," a commodity fetishized into a pattern of belief, custom, law'n'order. Millions of those who are deceived into thinking they are white are unhappy about it, but don't quite know how to divest themselves of this debilitating delusion. How to quit being white—how to release the latent but repressed yearning to abandon the absurdity of whiteness and to become truly human at last—is one of the burning questions of the age."

"For many Europeans and Americans of European descent, being surrealist has been one way of not being white—indeed, a way of actively undermining the white mystique and of sabotaging the repressive machinery that props it up. From the surrealist point of view, traditional anti-racist strategies—education against prejudice; support for civil rights; boycotts; picket lines; etc.—however important, clearly are not enough. The fact that white privilege is an inherently irrational phenomenon is proof that it cannot be overcome by rational means alone. Nothing less than surrealist revolution can abolish whiteness once and for all. Surrealist intervention in this domain has always emphasized the active imagination, in keeping with John Brown surrealism's fundamental aim: the realization of poetry in everyday life. Of course it also involves revolutionary criticism, integral subversion, aggressive humor, and direct action. In poetry as in life, surrealism embodies the utmost fraternization and solidarity across the color-line as well as relentless struggle against the very existence of the color-line, and against all those who enforce it or tolerate it. "

"As we emphasized in our declaration on the Los Angeles Rebellion of April-May 1992,* whiteness corrupts and derails every impulse toward freedom, so that no solution can be found to any social problem without solving the problem of whiteness. Everyone knows that white supremacy is the single biggest obstacle to working class emancipation. It is also the major stumbling-block in the way of women's equality, for white supremacy is inherently androcentric. There are of course female white supremacists—a large part of today's "women's movement" is afflicted with this malady—but such women truly are no more than cheerleaders of the white male power structure. Can anyone doubt that overcoming whiteness is indispensable to women's liberation?"

"Similarly, it is no accident that the people most responsible for devastating the Earth's wild places, poisoning the air and water, driving uncountable species of animals and plants to extinction and otherwise wrecking the planet, are those who think of themselves as white. Only when humankind is free of the stifling burden of whiteness will we be able to develop a non-exploitative, ecologically sound relationship to the Earth and all its inhabitants. With rare exceptions, however, the organizations that currently pass themselves off as the "environmental movement" in this country are as devoted to white supremacy (and to capitalism) as the giant corporations whose depredations they pretend to oppose."

"As surrealists, we are especially interested in how the 'white problem' turns up in language, images, myth, symbols, popular culture, everyday life, the whole field of human expression. However, our goal at all times is to attack and abolish whiteness and its institutions—to attack and abolish the whole social/ political/economic/cultural system that has made whiteness the hideous emblem of the worst oppression the world has ever had to endure."

"With this presentation of the concrete experience of surrealists past and present in the worldwide struggle against white supremacy, we hope above all to provoke and inspire readers to develop their own abolitionist imaginations in new directions, and more generally to stimulate discussion and debate with all who uphold the motto 'Treason to Whiteness is Loyalty to Humanity.'"

THE CHICAGO SURREALIST GROUP

Chicago, April 1998

Surrealism Aimed to Revolutionize Life and Art, is Part of 20th Century American Culture: Does Obama's Rhetoric Reflect Such Imagery of 'Change'?

noreply@blogger.com (ITSSD Charitable Mission) — Sat, 24 May 2008 15:02:00 +0000

http://www.slate.com/id/2061761

Ceci N'est Pas Surrealism: Even if you don't know Surrealism, it knows you

By Carol Kino

Slate Magazine

February 19, 2002

"[...There's a major difference between the little-s and big-S surrealisms: Our everyday use of the term shows how much we owe to the artistic movement of the same name, but it also glosses over its aims and accomplishments. If nothing else, the current explosion of historical Surrealism may help clarify the matter.

Even those who know something about Surrealism (the movement) often get it somewhat muddled. Because the best-known Surrealists are Salvador Dalí (he of the melting watches) and René Magritte (famed for "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" and men in bowler hats), many believe today that their goal was to concoct wacky, fantastical imagery. Au contraire. Like many early 20th-century art movements, Surrealism aimed to revolutionize life and art both—in this case, by accessing the subconscious and recording the results.

...Guillaume Apollinaire coined the term "surrealism" in 1917 to describe a spontaneous verbal creation—one that was beyond, or "sur," reality. In the next few years, several creative types vied to expand the term into a full-fledged movement that would incarnate the Zeitgeist. But the one who won out was André Breton, a minor poet and surgeon who published his first "Manifesto of Surrealism" in 1924. In it, Breton denounced "the reign of logic" and applauded Picasso and Freud (whose work at that stage was barely known in France). He gave Surrealism a historical pedigree, which included the Marquis de Sade, Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire, and Arthur Rimbaud.

...In fact, Surrealism, together with its precursor, Dada, is generally regarded as a reaction to the climate of despair that surrounded World War I, when it seemed as though Europe's social and technological advances had culminated in nothing greater than its own self-destruction. With Dada, which began in New York and Zurich, artists protested with "actions" and other activities designed to disrupt the status quo (like Marcel Duchamp's classic gambit—displaying a urinal as art). Surrealism, which began in Paris, took this radical impulse in a more positive and creative direction.

...Surrealism, which began in Paris, took this radical impulse in a more positive and creative direction. Surrealism was more of a religion or philosophy than an artistic style. Its artists—including Dalí, Max Ernst,

Yves Tanguy, and the poets Jacques Prévert and Paul Eluard, among others—valued any technique that would allow them to make work automatically, the better to freely associate and thereby reach into the collective unconscious. Collage was a favored method. So was Exquisite Corpse, derived from a party game: One person would begin a drawing or a sentence, cover it, and pass it on to others to be continued and completed. They also developed many other automatic methods, like decalcomania, in which watercolor was pressed between two pieces of paper to make a Rorschach-like blot, and frottage, a pencil-on-paper rubbing of an object to which one felt attracted.

...Perhaps because of Breton's medical background, the movement also had a quasi-scientific bent: Its first office was called "The Central Bureau of Surrealist Research," to which the public was invited to voice their views and find out more. They even passed out advertising fliers that bore slogans like "Parents! Tell your children your dreams" and "If you love love, you'll love Surrealism."

...the truly fascinating thing about Surrealism is that American cultural life as we know it today would not be possible without it. Most of our visual culture, including music videos, television, and advertising, remains permeated by its typically disjunctive imagery, its knee-jerk desire to shock, and its fixation upon sexuality and the subconscious. Tabloid front pages, with their dummied-up composite photographs, frequently resemble Surrealist collages. Movies, too, owe much to the movement...

...What's even more surprising is that the Surrealists may well be responsible for the most purportedly rational aspect of the modern world: our obsession with polls.

...This happened nearly 10 years before statisticians like George Gallup began to quantify public-opinion gathering as a science and nearly three decades before Masters and Johnson started their grand study of human sexual relations. Of course, in recent months, we have come to value the common good over individualism and are perhaps more bent on rediscovering humanist values rather than challenging what's left of the status quo. Curiously enough, however, Breton foretold this, too. In 1960, he reflected: 'The sickness that the world exhibits today differs from the one exhibited in the 1920s. ... In France, for example, the mind was threatened back then with coagulation, whereas today it's threatened with dissolution. ... It's perfectly obvious that such a situation calls for different reactions from today's youth.'

[DISCERNING READERS SHOULD SERIOUSLY REFLECT ON WHETHER PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE BARACK OBAMA'S CALL FOR CHANGE, 'FOR CHANGE SAKE', REFLECTS ANYTHING MORE THAN A NUANCED, SUBLIME ATTEMPT TO REIGNITE THE POLITICAL RADICALISM OF 1960'S AMERICA, WITH ITS ANTI-BUSINESS, ANTI-SCIENTIFIC, ANTI-WAR, ANTI-STATUS QUO, ANTI-INDIVIDUALIST SURREALIST, AESTHETIC, UTOPIAN ETHICS, NON??].

Is Obama's Presidential Campaign Slogan 'Change We Can Believe In' Tied to the Transnational Surrealist Movement of the Early 20th Century?

noreply@blogger.com (ITSSD Charitable Mission) — Fri, 23 May 2008 17:57:00 +0000

"I'M ASKING YOU TO BELIEVE. Not just in my ability to bring about real change in Washington...I'm asking you to believe in yours".

Barack Obama Campaign '08 Website, at: http://www.barackobama.com/index.php

"I want to campaign the same way I govern, which is to respond directly and forcefully with the truth,"~ Barack Obama, 11/08/07, at: http://factcheck.barackobama.com/

Mr. Obama's logo has received accolades from members of the public interested in its 'symbolism'. At least one citizen has remarked,

"Yesterday afternoon, I waited at a red light behind a car with an Obama bumper sticker, and I was really impressed with Obama's logo. The capital O in his surname becomes an encompassing circle, which symbolizes both social communion and the integration of the self. The rising sun symbolizes birth and rebirth; the beginning of a season of growth; the banishment of darkness. Consider how fitting it is that the synoptic gospels state the women found the empty tomb at dawn in the springtime. The encompassing circle also fits with this, as it symbolizes the birth canal, through which new life enters the world. The plowed field symbolizes nature's bounty (which obviously belongs equally to us all) and reminds us of our debt to those who work to bring that bounty to our tables. It evokes quiet pride in the hearts of small town and rural Americans and strikes a chord of back-to-the-land longing in the hearts of post-hippie environmentalists."

See: Raymund Eich, Houston, The Transhuman Comedy -Raymund Eich's freelance futurism for fun and profit, at: http://www.sff.net/people/raymund/2008/04/obamas-logo.html .

It seems that the Mr. Obama and his campaign have focused more on conveying empty 'symbolism' and fostering 'belief' in any 'possible' future other than that which it deems likely to follow from the present, than on sharing with the American public the reality of today and the likely options for probable future outcomes. In other words, Mr. Obama has intentionally not been very clear about what 'changes' he envisions and why they are necessary. What is his true agenda? What are his ultimate objectives? Why has he not been forthcoming about his 'new' ideas for 'change'? What is Mr. Obama truly hiding through is opaque and oblique references to 'change you can believe in'? How many of Mr. Obama's idea's are actually 'new'?

One of the most remarkable aspects of the radical 'change' advocated by Mr. Obama is its unlimited and undefined breadth and scope - for all intensive purposes GLOBAL in magnitude. In fact, the radical 'change' called for by Mr. Obama appears to be common 'change for change-sake', NOT 'change' for the betterment of the U.S.

To reiterate, it is arguable that 'Obama Change' is merely for 'change from the status quo' - in culture, science, economics, law and politics. In this regard, 'Obama Change' can be compared with and linked back to the popular 'Surrealist Movement' of the early 20th century which encompassed the political, social and economic spheres of transnational society. Most people are familiar with surrealist art. For example:

However, as is clear from a recent article appearing in the French magazine Le Monde Dipomatique, the Surrealist Movement is much, much more than just art. Rather, it is comprised of a transnational political movement that sought change at any cost for any reason against any status quo.

"It is almost impossible to paint a true picture of surrealism, one that respects the breadth of its debates and the limitlessness of its boundaries, reconstructs the movement in all its aberrant and contradictory glory and does justice to the depth of its artistic, social and political speculations. It is easy to lose our bearings, limit the scope of word or gesture, and let the door of fantasy swing closed. If its magic cannot be depicted for what it is - fleeting, shifting, fugitive - what is left? Since surrealism was not only an artistic movement but also a moment in political history and a passionate human adventure, how can it slot neatly into the curatorial or academic category of art history? The formal, aesthetic view will triumph and the political dimension be pushed aside as irrelevant to formal considerations. This obliteration of the faintest trace of surrealism’s political programme is contrary to the nature of the movement and the works it inspired."

...To sweep the movement’s active ambitions aside is to destroy both the dream and its harvest and render them ineffectual, or diverting. As André Breton wrote in The Political Position of Surrealism (1935): “Those modern poets and artists . . . who consciously aspire to work towards a new and better world must at all costs struggle against the current that seeks to sweep them away to a place where they become mere entertainers whom the bourgeoisie can define as they please (just as they tried to redefine Baudelaire and Rimbaud as Catholic poets once they were dead).”

"Once surrealism receded into history, critics lost sight of its black cloak of revolt and humour, its adolescent rage and imperious desire to change the world. During the late 1920s surrealists fiercely opposed colonialism and discussed whether to join the communist party; throughout the 1930s they fought against fascism and Stalinism; during the second world war they were involved in the French resistance; in the 1950s they joined the anarchists; in 1960 they signed the Manifesto of the 121 (supporting the right to refuse to fight in the war in Algeria); they were involved in the revolutionary events of 1968. Successive surrealist groups gave their hearts to (or at least participated in) all the major political debates of the 20th century, including Jean-Paul Sartre’s call for engagement. By ignoring surrealism’s revolutionary vocation and the political commitment of the painters and poets who made it live, museums, collectors, critics and historians have forced it into the narrow mould of a movement whose sole purpose was to manufacture works of art."

"...Surrealism’s heritage, if it must have one, surely lies in this duty to reject, in its unique way of looking at the world, in a philosophy that reconciled action and dream. It has nothing to do with the triviality of a deliberate and profitable scheme to produce artworks..."

"...Our days are numbered, our identity is fixed, our imagination and our sexuality are limited; the horizon is closing in on us when it should be opening out to let the night of dreams encroach on day. A sense of wonder cannot be taught, it can only be created from endlessly renewed freedom and fury. Perhaps it has become almost an obscenity to mention revolution or class struggle. But there are still disturbing echoes to the words that Breton wrote in 1925, in issue 4 of La Révolution surréaliste: “Our hands cannot cling tightly enough to the rope of fire that stretches up the black mountain. Who is this who wants to use us and make us contribute to the abominable comfort of this world? Let it be known: we want no part in mankind’s attack on mankind. We have no civic convictions. In the current state of society in Europe, we remain committed in principle to any revolutionary activity whatsoever, even if its roots are in class struggle, provided only that it goes far enough.”

See: Vincent Gille, Surrealism in the Real World, Le Monde Diplomatique (May 19, 2005), at:

http://mondediplo.com/2005/05/19surrealism .