by Andrew Bard Schmookler

Confronting the Paradox
 

The goal is no less than to defeat the evil that, in recent years, has risen to ascendancy in America. Finding the optimal strategy for achieving this is no small challenge.

In part, it’s a challenge because, in matters of the spirit, the reality is always so complex and many layered that it is beyond our capabilities to understand fully. In part, it’s because when a cultural system has been so swept up into pathology as ours has lately in America, the disease is likely to have infiltrated even the thoughts and feelings of those who wish to cure the system. It behooves us, therefore, not to be driven by our impulses but to think and proceed with care.

One of the complexities of the present challenge is that we are now called upon to accomplish two things simultaneously which are in contradiction with each other. On the one hand, we must wage and win the battle against the Bushite forces, taking away their power, discrediting them in the eyes of the public, driving the evil spirit they represent back into the recesses of the American cultural system. On the other hand, we must erase the deep and destructive imprint these forces have left on America, and an important part of that imprint is the pervasiveness of conflict and division in our social and political processes.

We must, that is, both wage war and build peace.

On the one hand, there is good reason for the passion that many of us feel about going after these Bushites to bring them low. We are rightly enraged at their lies, their crimes, their arrogance, their wanton disregard of any value other than sating their lust for power and wealth without limits. It is doubtful that any holders of the highest offices of the land have ever, in the course of more than two centuries of American history, been more deserving of impeachment. And so lawless has this administration been that even impeachment may not satisfy all the rightful demands of justice.

What are your feelings toward humanity, meaning toward people in general? That is, what do you feel when you look at, or think about, the mass of humankind? What has shaped your feelings? Have they ever changed, and if so what changed them? Are you glad about what you feel toward people generally, or do you wish you felt something different?

by Andy Goodall

The “fear” being instilled via the private media about Socialism of the 21st Century may have had its effects on rabid opposition types, but investors continue to buy stock in Venezuelan private companies.

One traditional aspect to look at is the stock exchange. This is where confidence in the economic future is most acutely expressed (at least for private businesses). The IBC Index of the Caracas Stock Exchange has just breached the 59,000 point barrier on January 5th 2007. This is an historical high and as with all stock market indices indicates confidence in the future of the economy and the prospects for private industry.

The phenomenon of the huge rises seen in the IBC Index receives no, or scant coverage in the media in Venezuela. For example, when the Dow Jones surpassed its record high of 11,700 and then the 12,000 barrier, headlines were apparent in the privately owned media in Venezuela. When the IBC Index passed its historical high of 31,000 in the run up to the December presidential elections, no mention was made that the index was breaking into new ground. The number was simply reported. Do you ever get the feeling that there’s something rotten in that State of Denmark, as Shakespeare wrote in “Hamlet”?

Injustice in Jena as Nooses Hang From the "White Tree"
by Bill Quigley
All white jury sitting before white judge agrees with white prosecutor and all white witnesses and convicts black youth in racially charged high school criminal case.

In a small, still mostly segregated, section of rural Louisiana, an all white jury heard a series of white witnesses called by a white prosecutor testify in a courtroom overseen by a white judge in a trial of a fight at the local high school where a white student who had been making racial taunts was hit by black students.

Waivering Morals: An Army of Cons
by C. L. Cook
Fitting following five years of criminality in Iraq recruiters would entertain more frequently allowing recently released felons into the Army fold.

From America's vast captured populations, (an area where the United States can honestly boast being "Number One") the range of aspirants the Army will consider able for service was recently broadened.

PEJ News - C. L. Cook - Slithered back recently into the lexicon of the Bush administration, Israel's Ohmert crowd, and their supporters in the corporate media, a new meme to help you better understand what the dated, "War on Terror" really means, and what it demands of the citizenry: "Islamo-Fascism," and its interchangeable synonyms, "Islamic Fascism," and "Islamic Terrorism" are the action phrases of the day, and as with much of the language heard coming from these actors over the past years, the au courant terms describe best their authors' values and methods.

By Chris Floyd

Robert F. Kennedy would have been 81 today. Tonight, the BBC will air a documentary about his 1968 assassination detailing the strong, credible evidence of a CIA role in the killing. The autopsy and ballistic evidence have long discredited the idea that the usual "lone nut" Sirhan Sirhan was responsible, or solely responsible for the murder. The Guardian has more in this article by the film's director, Shane O'Sullivan: Did the CIA kill Bobby Kennedy?

Again, as we mentioned the other day in a piece about Jim Webb, there is no point in hero-worshipping any politician. RFK spent his career as a ruthless, ball-breaking operative. He began as a happy camper in Joe McCarthy's brutal band of hard-right thugs; and later, as Attorney General (an appointment of mind-boggling, unprecedented nepotism, perhaps the most flagrant conflict-of-interest in American political history, at least until Dick Cheney's wartime pocketing of fat checks from Halliburton), Kennedy shredded civil liberties and constitutional safeguards with a reckless, savage glee that John Ashcroft could only dream of. (Again, Alberto Gonzales, the willing enabler of aggressive war and torture, has probably outstripped RFK in this regard.) He played the same role in his brother's administration that George W. Bush played in his father's: draconian enforcer of loyalty to the family's political fortunes, which trumped any and all other values.

Bob Woodward has long been the voice of the American Establishment – or of certain quadrants of it, at any rate. When Richard Nixon's criminal depredations and mental instability had gone too far and it was decided to rein him in, former military intelligence officer Woodward was there as a safe pair of hands to receive the damning revelations of "Deep Throat" and help bring down the Nixon presidency. When the Establishment decided it was best to throw in with the Bush Faction's aggressive militarism after 9/11 – lots of big money to be made out of war and fear, and those tax cuts were just too sweet to pass up -- Woodward was there again, with a series of stories and books which, as Michiko Kakutani notes in the New York Times, "depicted the president — in terms that the White House press office itself has purveyed — as a judicious, resolute leader, blessed with the 'vision thing' his father was accused of lacking and firmly in control of the ship of state."

Women, kids, old, sick most at risk in Iraq, says Reuters. To which we say: Ho-hum.  Old news. We've killed hundreds of thousands of these weaklings already, been killing them for years, with sanctions, bombs, snipers, chaos, deprivation, whatever. Who cares? You know what's really important? If Jim Baker can "seal his legacy in the realm of statesmen" by spraying enough perfume on the shitheap that Junior Bush has made of Iraq so that the high and mighty of the American Establishment can slither out of the mire without smelling too bad.

That's what it's all about, baby, that's the kind of thing that counts. How a lifelong, bloodstained bagman can become a "second Disraeli." How Hillary and Obama can nuance their positions to squeeze maximum political mileage out of the American-made mass slaughter in Iraq. How many he-man poses John McCain can strike on his knees as he grovels to the slavering extremists he thinks will make him president.

That's where the focus of our political discourse will be from here on out. (With frequent side dishes of stern condemnation of the worthless Iraqis for "failing" us, of course.) This time next year – when U.S. forces have either high-tailed it "over the horizon" into Kuwait or else are hunkered down in the (supposedly) permanent bases from which the Bush-Cheney faction have always intended to plunder the spoils of the hydra-headed war they've engendered – the chattering classes that control the public debate will still be chewing the clot-smeared rags of the Beltway power game.

Will the U.S. ever leave Iraq? Official policy promises an eventual departure, while warning of the dire consequences of a "premature" withdrawal.