Flexible Reality
Thursday, June 10, 2004
Talkingpointsmemo Post
(June 10, 2004 -- 02:21 PM EDT // link // print)
Even back home they're starting to wonder. This from an editorial in yesterday's Houston Chronicle ...
The United States' moral authority to call for the rule of law and respect for human rights has been undermined by legal machinations the Bush administration undertook to justify torturing prisoners taken in the war on terror.
Administration officials have attempted to downplay the significance of a March 6, 2003, Justice Department memorandum that concluded that, as commander in chief in time of war, President George W. Bush is bound neither by federal law nor the tenets of the Geneva Conventions that ban torture as a means of extracting information from detainees.
The March memo asserts that interrogators could inflict severe pain on a detainee with impunity as long as the intent was something other than to torture. An interrogator would be culpable only if he knew his actions would inflict suffering that is severe enough to induce "prolonged" physical or mental effects. An interrogator would be immune from punishment if he believed he acted to prevent a larger harm, the lawyers determined.
The memos were obviously concocted to defend acts that are clearly beyond the bounds of a civilized nation.
The memos support the view that the prisoner abuses uncovered at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq were not merely the grave mistakes of a few soldiers, but resulted from policies formed at the highest levels of government. They strengthen concerns about how detainees at Guantanamo and in Afghanistan are being treated.
As I suggest today in The Hill, I think we're actually pretty far past that point.
We're like contestants on Wheel of Fortune with a long phrase spelled out in front of us with maybe one or two letters missing. We know what the letters spell. It's obvious. We just don't have the heart to say it out loud.
-- Josh Marshall
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Living in Suburbia, Married to a Machine
By A. O. SCOTT
NY Times Review
Published: June 11, 2004
The Stepford Wives," Frank Oz's madcap re-engineering of a dusty, second-rate thriller from 1975, opens with a montage of happy housewives and their household gadgets. Making fun of images like these — smiling women in Eisenhower-era perms and evening gowns swooning over their automated kitchen cabinets — has become such a tiresome pop-culture staple that you may wonder if the movie, which opens today nationwide, has anything new to say about feminism, suburbia or consumer society. The answer is not really, but it does manage to fire off a handful of decent jokes and a few sneaky insights before losing its nerve and collapsing into incoherence.
The source for both this film and the earlier one, which starred Katharine Ross and Paula Prentiss, is a slim, efficient novel by Ira Levin that uses the conventions of suspense fiction as a vehicle for allegory and social satire. Mr. Levin's Stepford, Conn., was a pleasant middle-class suburb whose menfolk, threatened by the rather mild feminism of their wives, killed them off and replaced them with subservient, sexually compliant robots.
The first "Stepford Wives" exploited the horror-movie implications of this premise, rather than its comic possibilities. Mr. Oz and Paul Rudnick, the screenwriter, swerve maniacally in the opposite direction, whipping up a gaudy, noisy farce that perpetually threatens to spin out of control and eventually does. The music, by David Arnold, is full of overdone, campy melodrama, like an Elmer Bernstein score for a Three Stooges picture. The performances — in particular that of Glenn Close as Stepford's robot matriarch — are both sly and overstated, giving Mr. Rudnick's sneaky one-liners a chance to be heard amid the cacophonous silliness.
Needless to say, a lot has changed in 30 years: now, Stepford is a gated subdivision full of late-model S.U.V.'s and sprawling stone McMansions, where a gay couple is welcomed and where everyone is white. (In Mr. Levin's novel a black family had just come to town, but I guess they've moved away.) Sexual politics have also come a long way. Joanna Eberhart, who dabbled in photography when she was played by Ms. Ross, is now, in the person of Nicole Kidman, the ruthless, ambitious head of a television network. Fired in the wake of a reality-show disaster, Joanna has a quick nervous breakdown and is then spirited off to Stepford by her nebbishy, beta-male husband, Walter (Matthew Broderick).
In the earlier "Stepford," the flight from New York was implicitly motivated by fear of urban chaos and social collapse. This time, though, the Eberharts are fleeing from the soul-emptying consequences of their own ambition, seeking out the cozy simplicity of an affluent world in which no one seems to have, or to need, a job. The husbands, a collection of lumpy, khaki-wearing dweebs (with the exception of Christopher Walken, their guru of old-school masculinity), congregate in the clubby headquarters of the Men's Association, which is also where their robot workshop is housed. The wives, meanwhile, cheerfully perform their household and bedroom duties, steered by personalized brass remote-control devices wielded by their owners — er, mates.
Though Joanna is repelled by the empty-headed obedience of the Stepford wives, she also wants to repair the damage that her career has inflicted on her husband and children. This damage is mentioned rather than shown, and the repair work is highly theoretical, since children in Stepford are only slightly more visible than black people. There is, however, a schticky pair of token Jews, played by Jon Lovitz and Bette Midler, whose character, until she is robotized, is a slovenly, loud-mouthed novelist and one of Joanna's few friends.
Mr. Rudnick is best at forging tiny verbal darts that tickle more than they sting. (Late in the game, Joanna discovers that one of the robot-designers once worked for AOL. "Is that why the women are so slow?" she asks.) Occasionally, as in the film's clever, cautionary view of gay marriage, you might intuit a crackle of genuine satire, but for the most part "The Stepford Wives" is as cheerful and inoffensive as its title characters. Every time you think it might be venturing toward social criticism, it pulls back into homily and reassurance, refusing to tell anyone in the audience anything she — or he — might not want to hear.
There are, of course, some real tensions and resentments embedded in this story — the hard choices facing ambitious women, the immaturity and misogyny that surge through so much popular culture, a rampaging materialism that makes the Stepford of 1975 look like a kibbutz — but the movie, especially in its disastrous and nonsensical final act, works as hard as it can to suppress them.
"The Stepford Wives" is, in other words, the opposite of satire. It is intended not to provoke but to soothe, to tell us, once again, that we can have it all, that nobody's perfect, and that if there is trouble in the world, or in our own homes, it's nothing we need to worry our pretty little heads about.
"The Stepford Wives" is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). It has some strong language and sexual references.
THE STEPFORD WIVES
Directed by Frank Oz; written by Paul Rudnick, based on the book by Ira Levin; director of photography, Rob Hahn; edited by Jay Rabinowitz; music by David Arnold; production designer, Jackson Degovia; produced by Scott Rudin, Donald De Line, Edgar J. Scherick and Gabriel Grunfeld; released by Paramount Pictures. Running time: 110 minutes. This film is rated PG-13.
WITH: Nicole Kidman (Joanna Eberhart), Matthew Broderick (Walter Kresby), Bette Midler (Bobbie Markowitz), Jon Lovitz (Dave Markowitz), Christopher Walken (Mike Wellington), Faith Hill (Sarah Sunderson) and Glenn Close (Claire Wellington).
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U.S. Wrongly Reported Drop in World Terrorism in 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: June 11, 2004
WASHINGTON, June 10 - The State Department acknowledged Thursday that it was wrong in reporting that terrorism declined worldwide last year, a finding the Bush administration had pointed to as evidence of its success in countering terror.
Instead, the number of incidents and the toll in victims increased sharply, the department said. Statements by senior administration officials claiming success were based "on the facts as we had them at the time; the facts that we had were wrong," Richard A. Boucher, the State Department spokesman, said.
When the report was issued April 29, senior administration officials used it as evidence that the war was being won. J. Cofer Black, coordinator of the State Department's Counterterrorism Office, cited the 190 acts of terrorism in 2003, down from 198 in 2002, as "good news" and predicted the trend would continue. Richard L. Armitage, the deputy secretary of state, said at the time, "You will find in these pages clear evidence that we are prevailing in the fight." His office did not respond Thursday to a request for a statement on disclosures that some of the findings were inaccurate. The erroneous report, titled "Patterns of Global Terrorism," said that attacks declined last year to the lowest level in 34 years and dropped 45 percent since 2001, Mr. Bush's first year as president, when 346 attacks occurred.
Among the mistakes, Mr. Boucher said, was that only part of 2003 was taken into account.
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said Thursday that the errors were partly the result of new procedures for collecting data. "I can assure you it had nothing to do with putting out anything but the most honest, accurate information we can," Mr. Powell said said.
"Errors crept in that, frankly, we did not catch here," he said of the report, which showed a decline in the number of attacks worldwide in 2003.
Representative Henry A. Waxman, Democrat of California, said this week that the administration had refused to address his contention that the findings were manipulated for political purposes. Mr. Waxman wrote to Mr. Powell in May asking for an explanation.
Mr. Boucher said the department was preparing a reply. "We wanted to make sure that we give the congressman the best and most accurate picture of what we know and what's going on as we can," he said.
"When we are sure we have the new facts, the right facts, we will prepare an appropriate analysis and give you our assessment at that moment," Mr. Boucher said.
He said the errors began to become apparent in early May. "We got phone calls from people who were going through our report and who said to themselves, as we should have said to ourselves: 'This doesn't feel right. This doesn't look right.' And who started asking us questions," he said.
Zo vats rong mit dat?
Catskills Casino Advances in Deal Between Tribe and StateBy CHARLES V. BAGLI
NY Times
Published: June 11, 2004
A $500 million Las Vegas-style casino in the Catskills moved significantly closer to reality yesterday when the Pataki administration signed an agreement with the Cayuga Indian Nation, settling the tribe's 200-year-old claim to 64,000 acres in upstate New York in exchange for casino revenues.
If it is built, the casino in Monticello in Sullivan County will be the closest one to New York City, only 90 miles away, and will dwarf the four Indian gambling halls already operating in the state. With analysts estimating that it could pull in $1 billion a year in revenues, the casino would most likely pose significant competition to the Atlantic City gambling resort and the Foxwoods casino in Connecticut.
The agreement is a major step forward in a 30-year effort to use gambling to revive the Catskill Mountains resort area once known as the borscht belt.
"The agreement would allow us to move forward with plans to establish the first of three new casinos in the Catskills, which would create thousands of new jobs and provide a tremendous boost to the region's economy," Gov. George E. Pataki said in a statement released yesterday afternoon.
Monday, June 07, 2004
Ban on Subway Photography Prompts Underground Protest
By ALAN FEUER
Published: June 7, 2004
At a protest by photographers, you see things like a guy taking pictures of a guy taking pictures of a few more guys taking pictures of one another. There was such a protest yesterday, but it might take hundreds of pages to describe it, given all the pictures that were taken, each one worth at least a thousand words.
The photographers - about 100 of them - gathered to express their outrage at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority's proposed ban on taking pictures in the subway system. Meeting at Grand Central Terminal, they rode the trains for upward of an hour, shutters clicking, flashes popping, in a filmed rebuke to the idea that photography is somehow a national security threat.
"The point is really to make everyday people wake up and realize that photographers are not terrorists," said Joe Anastasio, who organized the event. "In the last few years, photographers near anything vaguely important have been getting harassed."
Mr. Anastasio went on to tell the story of a friend who took his wife's picture near the Whitestone Bridge, only to be called in for questioning by the police. He told another of a man caught snapping pictures at a Metro-North station who was interrogated for nearly two hours by authorities at the scene.
"The paranoia," he said, "has gone a little too far."
The transit authority's proposal, posted on its Web site, says the agency is planning to adopt "a general prohibition against photography and videotaping in the system." The agency is soliciting public comment on the ban and plans to vote on the proposal in the next few months.
"It's a security measure," said a spokeswoman for the agency, Deirdre Parker. "It was suggested by the N.Y.P.D."
Mr. Anastasio and his fellow photographers said it was ridiculous that pictures of the subway might somehow make the trains unsafe. After all, they said, there are thousands of subway photographs already on the Internet.
"The subway is so well documented that what's the point?" asked Jean Miele, a fine art and commercial photographer. "This sort of thing makes us less free, not safer."
Presidential Power: Above the Law?
(June 07, 2004 -- 01:25 PM EDT)The Wall Street Journal has an extraordinary article in today's edition. The Journal has taken to making an article a day open to the public for bloggers and others to link to. The article describes a confidential Pentagon report providing legal rationales and interpretations by which US personnel could use torture and methods of near-torture in contravention of various international treaties and US laws. The bulk of the arguments rest on arguments of 'necessity' and the powers of the president as commander-in-chief. They also go into some depth about how people acting at the president's order could avoid prosecution for demonstrably criminal acts.
The article is well worth reading for this alone.
But that whole discussion is different in kind from one passage in the report. I quote from the piece ...
To protect subordinates should they be charged with torture, the memo advised that Mr. Bush issue a "presidential directive or other writing" that could serve as evidence, since authority to set aside the laws is "inherent in the president."
So the right to set aside law is "inherent in the president". That claim alone should stop everyone in their tracks and prompt a serious consideration of the safety of the American republic under this president. It is the very definition of a constitutional monarchy, let alone a constitutional republic, that the law is superior to the executive, not the other way around. This is the essence of what the rule of law means -- a government of laws, not men, and all that.
Now, we know that presidents sometimes break laws and they frequently bend them, if only in cases where the laws don't seem to anticipate a situation the president finds himself confronting. There is even an argument that the president can refuse to enforce laws he deems unconstitutional.
But there is no power inherent in the president simply to set aside the law. Richard Nixon famously argued that "when the president does it that means that it is not illegal." But the constitutional rulings emerging out of Watergate said otherwise. And history has been equally unkind to his claim.
Now, there are some possible exceptions -- ones of an extra-constitutional nature. If memory serves, Thomas Jefferson -- when he was later thinking over the implications of his arguably unconstitutional Louisiana Purchase (and again this is from memory -- so perhaps someone can check for me) -- argued that the president might find himself in a position in which he might have the right or even the duty to disregard the law or some stricture of the constitution in the higher interests of the Republic.
Jefferson's argument, however, wasn't that the president had the prerogative to set aside the law. It was that the president might find himself in a position of extremity in which there was simply no time to canvass the people or a situation in which there was no practicable way to bring the relevant information before them. In such a case the president might have an extra-constitutional right (if there can be such a thing) or even an obligation to act in what he understands to be the best interests of the Republic.
The clearest instance of this would be a case where the president faced a choice between letting the Republic be destroyed or violating one of its laws.
But that wasn't the end of his point. Having taken such a step, it would then be the obligation of the president to throw himself on the mercy of the public, letting them know the full scope of the facts and circumstances he had faced and leave it to them -- or rather their representatives or the courts -- to impeach him or indict those who had taken it upon themselves to act outside the law.
As I recall Jefferson's argument there was never any thought that the president had the power to prevent future prosecutions of himself or those acting at his behest. Indeed, such a follow-on claim would explode whatever sense there is in Jefferson's argument.
If you see the logic of Jefferson's argument it is not that the president is above the law or that he can set aside laws, it is that the president may have a moral authority or obligation to break the law in the interests of the Republic itself -- subject to submitting himself for punishment for breaking its laws, even in its own defense. Jefferson's argument was very much one of executive self-sacrifice rather than prerogative.
Somehow I don't think that's what this White House has in mind.
-- Josh Marshall
Krugman on Reagan vs Bush Tax Policy
The Great TaxerNY Times Op-Ed
By PAUL KRUGMAN
June 8, 2004
Over the course of this week we'll be hearing a lot about Ronald Reagan, much of it false. A number of news sources have already proclaimed Mr. Reagan the most popular president of modern times. In fact, though Mr. Reagan was very popular in 1984 and 1985, he spent the latter part of his presidency under the shadow of the Iran-Contra scandal. Bill Clinton had a slightly higher average Gallup approval rating, and a much higher rating during his last two years in office.
We're also sure to hear that Mr. Reagan presided over an unmatched economic boom. Again, not true: the economy grew slightly faster under President Clinton, and, according to Congressional Budget Office estimates, the after-tax income of a typical family, adjusted for inflation, rose more than twice as much from 1992 to 2000 as it did from 1980 to 1988.
But Ronald Reagan does hold a special place in the annals of tax policy, and not just as the patron saint of tax cuts. To his credit, he was more pragmatic and responsible than that; he followed his huge 1981 tax cut with two large tax increases. In fact, no peacetime president has raised taxes so much on so many people. This is not a criticism: the tale of those increases tells you a lot about what was right with President Reagan's leadership, and what's wrong with the leadership of George W. Bush.
The first Reagan tax increase came in 1982. By then it was clear that the budget projections used to justify the 1981 tax cut were wildly optimistic. In response, Mr. Reagan agreed to a sharp rollback of corporate tax cuts, and a smaller rollback of individual income tax cuts. Over all, the 1982 tax increase undid about a third of the 1981 cut; as a share of G.D.P., the increase was substantially larger than Mr. Clinton's 1993 tax increase.
The contrast with President Bush is obvious. President Reagan, confronted with evidence that his tax cuts were fiscally irresponsible, changed course. President Bush, confronted with similar evidence, has pushed for even more tax cuts.
Mr. Reagan's second tax increase was also motivated by a sense of responsibility — or at least that's the way it seemed at the time. I'm referring to the Social Security Reform Act of 1983, which followed the recommendations of a commission led by Alan Greenspan. Its key provision was an increase in the payroll tax that pays for Social Security and Medicare hospital insurance.
For many middle- and low-income families, this tax increase more than undid any gains from Mr. Reagan's income tax cuts. In 1980, according to Congressional Budget Office estimates, middle-income families with children paid 8.2 percent of their income in income taxes, and 9.5 percent in payroll taxes. By 1988 the income tax share was down to 6.6 percent — but the payroll tax share was up to 11.8 percent, and the combined burden was up, not down.
Nonetheless, there was broad bipartisan support for the payroll tax increase because it was part of a deal. The public was told that the extra revenue would be used to build up a trust fund dedicated to the preservation of Social Security benefits, securing the system's future. Thanks to the 1983 act, current projections show that under current rules, Social Security is good for at least 38 more years.
But George W. Bush has made it clear that he intends to renege on the deal. His officials insist that the trust fund is meaningless — which means that they don't feel bound to honor the implied contract that dedicated the revenue generated by President Reagan's payroll tax increase to paying for future Social Security benefits. Indeed, it's clear from the arithmetic that the only way to sustain President Bush's tax cuts in the long run will be with sharp cuts in both Social Security and Medicare benefits.
I did not and do not approve of President Reagan's economic policies, which saddled the nation with trillions of dollars in debt. And as others will surely point out, some of the foreign policy shenanigans that took place on his watch, notably the Iran-contra scandal, foreshadowed the current debacle in Iraq (which, not coincidentally, involves some of the same actors).
Still, on both foreign and domestic policy Mr. Reagan showed both some pragmatism and some sense of responsibility. These are attributes sorely lacking in the man who claims to be his political successor.
Remembering Pres. Reagan: by The Center for American Progress
RONALD REAGANA Nation Remembers
Flags are being flown at half mast today, as President Ronald Reagan, the 40th president of the United States, died Saturday after a decade-long battle with Alzheimer's disease. His death brought the expected outpouring of editorials and obituaries, running the gamut from Peggy Noonan's reverent "Thanks from a Grateful Country," to the more critical piece by Slate's Timothy Noah. The prevailing view championed the man's complicated legacy, as seen in three major pieces in the NYT, LAT and WP.
He was lauded for his role in ending the Cold War and for projecting a never-failing sense of optimism which restored faith in the American presidency in a nation still scarred by Vietnam and Watergate. The papers also noted some of the darker sides of his presidency, like record deficits and unemployment, the scandal of Iran-Contra, his poor record on civil rights and the environment and the debacle in Lebanon. Positive and negative, one overall theme to Reagan's success as a president emerges. While Ronald Reagan had deeply held commitments, he was also able to see when a policy was not working and shift course. America's current leaders would be well served to learn this valuable lesson from the Gipper.
ETERNAL OPTIMIST: Perhaps Ronald Reagan's greatest legacy may be his never-failing optimism. The LAT writes, "His sunny self-assurance, his insistence that there really were simple answers to difficult problems, his knack for actually making things happen -- all were soothing changes for a country that had endured Vietnam, Watergate, a presidential resignation, an energy crisis, double-digit inflation and the seizing of American hostages in Iran in the course of one tumultuous decade."
ADAPTING ON TAXES: President Reagan presided over a massive tax cut, on the theory that tax cuts "would unleash such a wave of economic growth" that government income would actually rise. However, when the deficit exploded and money was tight, the "1981 tax cut was followed by Reagan-blessed tax increases in almost every ensuing year of his presidency."
Contrast this with the current administration: In February, William Gale and Peter Orszag of the Brookings Institution wrote, "This year's US budget proves that George W. Bush is no Ronald Reagan." Even in light of skyrocketing deficits, "Bush has steadfastly kept to his tax-cutting agenda and resists any suggestion that the costs of defending the nation against terrorism or fighting the war in Iraq are a reason to raise taxes."
ADAPTING ON THE ENVIRONMENT: Reagan was not known as an environmental president; he disastrously appointed anti-environmentalist James Watt as Secretary of the Interior. "After Watt was purged, however," writes the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, "Reagan signed into law bills protecting 1.9 million acres of wilderness in Washington and Oregon. He signed legislation creating the Mount St. Helens National Volcanic Monument."
ADAPTING TO THE COLD WAR: President Reagan was known for his hard line against communism, calling the Soviet Union the Evil Empire. However, in his second term, Reagan combined diplomatic and military strength to create a relationship with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev which ultimately led to nuclear weapon limits and the end of the Cold War. While President Bush adopted similar language by coining the phrase "Axis of Evil," he has failed to adequately address the threats posed by Iraq, Iran and North Korea.
EUROPE THEN AND NOW: The WP reports, according to commentators and historians, although his lack of foreign policy credentials made much of Europe nervous after he ascended to the presidency, President Reagan was able to win the respect of Europeans through his "commitment to winning the Cold War and his willingness to work peacefully to bring about the demise of the Soviet Union," ultimately convincing the global community the United States had their best interests at heart. The go-it-alone policy of President George W. Bush has "inspired a similar mixture of fear, concern and, at times, contempt among Europeans."
FUTURE LEGACY OF ACCOUNTABILITY: Following the Marine barracks in Lebanon and the Iran Contra scandal, President Reagan took responsibility, saying, "this happened on my watch" and "If there is to be blame...it properly rests here in this office and with this president. And I accept responsibility for the bad as well as the good."
Why don't we arrest Chalabi?
Josh Marshall and Brad DeLong are wondering why Chalabi hasn't been arrested in connection with his apparent gift to the Iranians of one of our most precious secrets: that we'd broken the Iranians' codes.
It's a good question, but it has a simple answer: Chalabi didn't break any of our laws.
He's not an American. He didn't have a security clearance. He's a Shi'a Iraqi and the head of a political party the INC, and he owes loyalty to (in some order) his country, his sect, and his party. If he persuaded some of the neocons that he was "one of us," that was a sharp move on his part and a mistake on theirs, but, as Lincoln would have noticed, calling an Iraqi an American doesn't make him one.
Since Chalabi owes no loyalty to the United States, he is, as purely logical matter, incapable of betraying the United States. And it's not a crime for a foreign national who has never signed a security agreement to do whatever he likes with information someone hands him. (If there were evidence Chalabi had paid for the information of stolen it, that would be a different matter; then he would arguably be a spy, and criminally chargeable as such. But so far there's no evidence of that.)
So it was neither disloyal nor illegal for him to take information some American official gave him and use it as seemed best to him for the good of his country, his party, his sect, and himself. If he acted contrary to the interests or laws of Iraq, that's for the Iraqis to decide.
But it was illegal (though not, I'm sure, subjectively disloyal) for the American official, whoever he was, to share such a sensitive secret with a foreigner. And that's why it was illegal: foreigners aren't to be trusted with such secrets.
Similarly, if Chalabi did in fact help con the United States into liberating his country from a tyrant that's something he can legitimately brag about. (Though it was somewhat impolitic of him to do so as volubly as he did.) Deception is, after all, a legitimate tool of diplomacy. If Franklin deceived the court of Louis XVI into providing help to the American Revolution, would anyone call that misconduct on Franklin's part?
What seems to have happened here is that Chalabi remembered where his loyalties lay, while his neocon sponsors forgot. He conned them. Their bad, not his.
Sunday, June 06, 2004
Langston Hughes - Let America Be America Again
Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.
(America never was America to me.)
Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed--
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.
(It never was America to me.)
O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.
(There's never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this "homeland of the free.")
Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?
And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?
I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery's scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek--
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.
I am the young man, full of strength and hope,
Tangled in that ancient endless chain
Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!
Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!
Of work the men! Of take the pay!
Of owning everything for one's own greed!
I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.
I am the worker sold to the machine.
I am the Negro, servant to you all.
I am the people, humble, hungry, mean--
Hungry yet today despite the dream.
Beaten yet today--O, Pioneers!
I am the man who never got ahead,
The poorest worker bartered through the years.
Yet I'm the one who dreamt our basic dream
In the Old World while still a serf of kings,
Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,
That even yet its mighty daring sings
In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned
That's made America the land it has become.
O, I'm the man who sailed those early seas
In search of what I meant to be my home--
For I'm the one who left dark Ireland's shore,
And Poland's plain, and England's grassy lea,
And torn from Black Africa's strand I came
To build a "homeland of the free."
The free?
Who said the free? Not me?
Surely not me? The millions on relief today?
The millions shot down when we strike?
The millions who have nothing for our pay?
For all the dreams we've dreamed
And all the songs we've sung
And all the hopes we've held
And all the flags we've hung,
The millions who have nothing for our pay--
Except the dream that's almost dead today.
O, let America be America again--
The land that never has been yet--
And yet must be--the land where every man is free.
The land that's mine--the poor man's, Indian's, Negro's, ME--
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.
Sure, call me any ugly name you choose--
The steel of freedom does not stain.
From those who live like leeches on the people's lives,
We must take back our land again,
America!
O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath--
America will be!
Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain--
All, all the stretch of these great green states--
And make America again!
Let's Not Get All Mushy Now About This...
The Reagan YearsHow Soon We Forget Real Corruption
Gleeful charges by Republicans that Whitewater is comparable to Watergate and that the Clinton Administration is more corrupt than any recent administration are ludicrous when compared to the actual record of corruption in the Reagan-Bush administration and when it is noted that the charges against Clinton result from goings-on in Arkansas long before he became President.
With Reagan, scandals occured while he was President. Pulitzer-prize winning journalist Haynes Johnson's book, 'Sleep-Walking Through History: America in the Reagan Years' (1991, Doubleday), chronicles the U.S.'s fall from dominant world power to struggling debtor nation during the Reagan years. Johnson says 'two types of problems typified the ethical misconduct cases of the Reagan years, and both had heavy consequences to citizens everywhere.
One stemmed from ideology and deregulatory impulses run amok; the other, from classic corruption on a grand scale.' 'By the end of his term, 138 administration officials had been convicted, had been indicted, or had been the subject of official investigations for official misconduct and/or criminal violations. In terms of number of officials involved, the record of his administration was the worst ever.' (P. 184).
'Reagan's customary response to instances of wrongdoing by aides was to criticize those who brought the charges or to blame the media that reported them.' 'Three great scandals stained the Reagan record," and they all involved the age-old form of corruption formed by the connection between money and politics. What distinguished them in the Reagan years was the number of buyers and sellers involved, and the amount of money there was to be made. The sheer volume of both had multiplied beyond any previous measure.
Presidential Legacy: "Using a far looser standard that included resignations, David R. Simon and D. Stanley Eitzen in Elite Deviance, say that 138 appointees of the Reagan administration either resigned under an ethical cloud or were criminally indicted. Curiously Haynes Johnson uses the same figure but with a different standard in 'Sleep-Walking Through History: America in the Reagan Years: 'By the end of his term, 138 administration officials had been convicted, had been indicted, or had been the subject of official investigations for official misconduct and/or criminal violations. In terms of number of officials involved, the record of his administration was the worst ever.'"
