Tuesday, March 20, 2007

CPU

From today's NYT about the Communist Party USA donating a ton of old records to a library...

stern commands about how good party members should behave (no charity work, for instance, to distract them from their revolutionary duties).


That line is very revealing, showing the inversion of radical values for ideological gains.

As he leaves the Kremlin, Minor notices two men drive up in limousines. “A few months ago they were ‘bloodthirsty minions of predatory capital,’ ” he writes, “But now they are ‘people’s commissaries’ and ride in the fine automobiles as before, live in the fine mansions.” They rule “under red silk flags to protect them from all disorders. They have learned the rose smells as sweetly under another name.”


And the above should have been more apparent to more people. Hell, I realized that as a teenager, how the "classless" society actually had a political class and the workers -- just as supposedly democratic America is similarly deceived; we're no more democratic than the USSR was classless.

Anarchists wrote about this in the 20s, but nobody paid them attention. Hopefully this record dumping will reveal the hypocrisy of the Communists.

Monday, March 19, 2007

Shitquita slips on a banana peel

Emphasis added...

Chiquita Admits to Paying Terrorists
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By MATT APUZZO Associated Press Writer

March 19,2007 | WASHINGTON -- Banana company Chiquita Brands International admitted in federal court Monday that, for years, it paid terrorists to protect its Colombian banana-growing operations.

The company pleaded guilty to one count of doing business with a terrorist organization. The plea is part of a deal with prosecutors that calls for a $25 million fine.

The agreement ends a lengthy Justice Department investigation into the company's financial dealings with right-wing paramilitaries and leftist rebels the U.S. government deems terrorist groups.

Prosecutors say the Cincinnati-based company and several unnamed high-ranking corporate officers agreed to pay about $1.7 million between 1997 and 2004 to the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, known as AUC for its Spanish initials.

The AUC has been responsible for some of the worst massacres in Colombia's civil conflict and for a sizable percentage of the country's cocaine exports. The U.S. government designated the right-wing militia a terrorist organization in September 2001.

Prosecutors said the company made the payments in exchange for protection for its workers. In addition to paying the AUC, prosecutors said, Chiquita made payments to the National Liberation Army, or ELN, and the leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, as control of the company's banana-growing area shifted.

Chiquita stock has risen sharply since the deal was announced last week. Company shares were trading down 6 cents at $13.46 in midmorning trading on the New York Stock Exchange.

Wednesday, March 14, 2007

Scandal-go-round

Wow, so much rotten stuff is going on right now, it's hard to keep up, so I'm just going to eat popcorn and watch. I posted my tart GOP circular trust on Salon today, for fun, basically lampooning how the reactionaries operate on issues:

  1. What can't be forgotten gets refuted.
  2. What can't be refuted gets ignored.
  3. What can't be ignored gets challenged.
  4. What can't be challenged gets distorted.
  5. What can't be distorted gets forgotten.
Repeat as often as necessary, until the offending reality goes away. They apply that to everything in the service of their ideology. It plays into that great line from awhile ago...

...According to Mr. Suskind, "The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' " The aide told Mr. Suskind, "That's not the way the world really works anymore. We're an empire now, and when we act we create our own reality."


Might Makes Right, 21st Century-style!

Monday, March 12, 2007

Tweedledum and Tweedledumber

Democrats roll over, play dead with war provisions, while Republicans stand tall, ignoring reality.

Dems Abandon War Authority Provision

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

By DAVID ESPO and MATTHEW LEE Associated Press Writers

March 12,2007 | WASHINGTON -- Top House Democrats retreated Monday from an attempt to limit President Bush's authority for taking military action against Iran as the leadership concentrated on a looming confrontation with the White House over the Iraq war.

Officials said Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other members of the leadership had decided to strip from a major military spending bill a requirement for Bush to gain approval from Congress before moving against Iran.

Conservative Democrats as well as lawmakers concerned about the possible impact on Israel had argued for the change in strategy.

The developments occurred as Democrats pointed toward an initial test vote in the House Appropriations Committee on Thursday on the overall bill, which would require the withdrawal of U.S. combat troops from Iraq by Sept. 1, 2008, if not earlier. The measure provides nearly $100 billion to pay for fighting in two wars, and includes more money than the president requested for operations in Afghanistan and what Democrats called training and equipment shortages.

The White House has issued a veto threat against the bill, and Vice President Dick Cheney attacked its supporters in a speech, declaring they "are telling the enemy simply to watch the clock and wait us out."

House GOP Leader John Boehner of Ohio issued a statement that said Democrats shouldn't count on any help passing their legislation. "Republicans will continue to stand united in this debate, and will oppose efforts by Democrats to undermine the ability of General Petraeus and our troops to achieve victory in the Global War on Terror," he said.

Iran, Iran so far away

I just heard on NPR that they're doing a story about how a big chunk of the Iranians involved in that country's nuclear program were trained in the US in the 70s, back when Shah-ruled Iran was effectively our "51st state." So, once again, our ridiculous Cold War policies bit us on the ass.

Again, you ask? Yes. Consider that our funding of the Afghan rebels against Russia in the late 70s and early 80s created what eventually became Al Qaeda, it's another example of policy run amok, and coming back to hurt us. What next?

Saturday, March 10, 2007

"Bitch Gene" Isolated?

I'm sure people will be all over this, trying to create a happy pill...

'Angry Gene' Could Help Spur Hostility
Women with this DNA more likely to feel, express anger, study finds
By Randy Dotinga, HealthDay Reporter

FRIDAY, March 9 (HealthDay News) -- A new study suggests that a variation in their genes could make some women more angry and hostile, potentially leading to medical problems such as heart disease.

The research, which looks at genes that affect the brain, is still in its early stages. But the study's lead author said it could help scientists get a better handle on how genetics, emotions and health are connected for both women and men.

"We are attempting to put together a thousand-piece puzzle regarding heart diseases," said Indrani Halder, a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Pittsburgh. "This study identifies one component of this puzzle -- that higher anger and aggression could partly be genetic."

In the study, Halder and colleagues tracked 550 women of European descent, looking for connections between a gene connected to serotonin levels in the brain and their levels of hostility and anger.

Halder is scheduled to report her findings Friday at the annual meeting of the American Psychosomatic Society, in Budapest, Hungary.

The researchers found that the angriest women were most likely to have variations in a gene that affects serotonin receptors on brain cells. "In essence, this gene makes an important protein that helps nerve cells communicate," Halder said.

Other studies have suggested that human emotions are affected by genes that control other aspects of the brain's processing of serotonin, noted Dr. James Grisolia, a neurologist at Scripps Mercy Hospital in San Diego.

"Serotonin function within the brain has many effects, both in men and women," Grisolia said. "Serotonin plays a key role in sleep, emotional state and physical well-being. Men and women walk into my office on a daily basis with anxiety, depression or physical complaints such as insomnia, dizziness, or memory loss that respond to selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors [SSRIs], Prozac being the most famous and Lexapro the most currently prescribed, that functionally increase serotonin activity."

What about a genetic treatment -- maybe even a pill -- that would make women (and men) less angry and hostile?

"As with any other genetic study, our results need to be replicated in other larger samples to make definitive conclusions," Halder said. "The same gene may also be important for understanding anger and aggression in men. But men have only one X chromosome -- where this gene is located -- compared to women, who have two X chromosomes."

Edward C. Suarez, an associate research professor at the Duke University Health System, said the research suggests that "elevated levels of hostility and aggression are associated with genetic variations that may play in a role in the development of some chronic medical conditions."

Overall, "our understanding of the role genes play in behavior and personality is in the early stages of research, and the true picture is likely to reflect a complicated network comprised of both genetic and environmental influences, along with gender, age and other factors," Suarez added. "The results of this study are a step toward unraveling these associations. [But] it is likely that no one gene determines how we behave or determines our personality."

Thursday, March 8, 2007

Gorillas in the Midst

The NYT has a great article...

In Lice, Clues to Human Origin and Attire

Now, the article mostly focuses on how humans have three lice species: head, body, and pubic, and how the body louse points to the gradual loss of human fur, and how that led to the body louse's evolution, since it shelters not in skin, but in clothes.

But, and the NYT kind of skips around this delicately, I find it most interesting that the gorilla louse and the human pubic louse are related, given the rather intimate way that this louse is passed from host to host.

Even bleaker for the human reputation, the pubic louse, which gets its dates and residence-swapping opportunities when its hosts are locked in intimate embrace, does not seem to be a true native of the human body. Its closest relative is the gorilla louse (Don't even think about it.)

...

"The transfer doesn't have to be sexual," he said, "but presumably it does require a reasonably blose contact."


Yes, it would appear plausible that our ancestors were the bitches of gorillas, gentle reader. If being descended from apes (or, as they like to say, "monkeys") isn't enough of an indignity for the fundamentalists, then being the possible fuckbuddies of gorillas has to be even worse a blow to the pride of the human species.

I think it's funny. The article points out that our head lice are apparently related to the chimp louse, and our pubic lice to the gorilla louse, with the body louse being our own special type that adapted to our relatively furless biological real estate.

So, our heads belonged to the chimps, but our asses apparently belonged to the gorillas. Which makes sense, really -- gorillas are far stronger than humans, way stronger than our ancestors would've been. Bahaah!

Music: Suede, "Animal Nitrate"

Wednesday, March 7, 2007

Don't Spit On Me

SLATE keeps writing about the apocryphal accounts of returning Vietnam War soldiers getting spat on, trying to get to the bottom of it, like whether it actually happened or not. Turns out, despite it being "common knowledge," it's a harder story to unravel than it would appear to be, given how widespread awareness of it is.

That's what makes it suspect to me. There are a couple of ways to go with it, and SLATE is going at it in one direction, trying to determine if it's an urban legend or if it actually happened. But what I think is more interesting is this: assuming it actually happened, who did it, and why?

The assumption, of course, is that it's those nasty left-wingers who did it, like hateful, uhhh, hippies -- little Mansonian wannabes spitting on the babykilling troops the Right faithfully supported in the Vietnam War. That itself is an urban legend, this faithful support of the Right, where the troops are concerned. It seems that the Right loves war, and is less fond of soldiers. At least that's how they conduct themselves in practice.

And what makes me think this is the conduct of the Right with regard to the current War in Iraq.

For all of their cries to "Support the Troops" it's abundantly clear that the Republican leadership tried to wage this war on the cheap, and despite all of the money they've greenlit for the Pentagon, it appears that a lot of it is ending up in contractors' pockets (sometimes literally!) instead of going to support the troops in the field. The Walter Reed scandal that's brewing reveals that the GOP leadership (and keep in mind that these wrongs were known well before the 2006 elections) has been screwing over the troops who've returned, offering them substandard care when it's offered at all.

What's more, their vicious, partisan attacks on John Kerry, Max Cleland, Al Gore, and other Democratic veterans' records -- really, any Democrat veteran of prominence has had their courage and experience challenged, with cruelty and brutality. Never mind that the current GOP leadership is packed with chickenhawks -- men with deferments piled up like their rivals' Purple Hearts, men who evaded service in the Vietnam War. They are as shameless as they are ruthless in their attacks on the patriotism and valor of Democrats who actually served in the Vietnam War.

And those attacks aren't even confined to Democratic veterans -- think of how viciously the GOP went after John McCain, who was a POW, for God's sake, and who clearly suffered during his time in captivity. The Bush League went after McCain ruthlessly, and McCain himself is not popular with the GOP rank-and-file. Passing odd for people who supposedly "support the troops."

Now, the GOP has been haunted by the so-called Vietnam Syndrome, the reluctance of the US to engage in foreign wars, because of the resultant social unrest caused by them. To the Right, Vietnam "spoiled" American war-making, perhaps irrevocably. Given that their foreign and domestic policy has increasingly been focused around enemy imagery (Communists, Liberals/Progressives, Unionists, Secularists, Terrorists, in rough chronology since the early 50s), war-making is absolutely central to their conception of politics. That's how they end up "strong on defense" and are habitual funders of Big Military, at least on the contractor level. Maybe it's the dominance of Leo Strauss's approach to ideology in their elite ranks.

Given the Rightist Cold War rhetoric about "losing" countries to Communism (as if they were theirs to lose), I can't help but think that the Right had to have been unfuriated by the failure of the US to win the Vietnam War, which would've flown into the face of every doctrine of American exceptionalism that the Right holds dear -- in fact, in some circles, it still pisses them off, gets them saying that the war wasn't lost, that the US actually won, or that the Left sabotaged support for the war, leading to the failure of the objectives. Vietnam is still very much with us, even as we slog on in Iraq. George Bush I was convinced he'd licked the Vietnam Syndrome in Gulf War I, and George II was apparently motivated to finish the job in Gulf War II.

Someone had to be blamed for the failure to win in Vietnam. The GOP is notorious for its "Blame the Victim" politics -- ideologically, it does this across the board, time and again: the poor are to blame for their poverty, women who're raped had it coming, countries that get ravaged by free market economics are the fault of their stupid populaces, and so on. Defend the ideology, blame the victim; that is their approach. The prison abuse scandals were another example of this, really -- the GOP sought to protect the framers of the prison abuse policy, while punishing the practitioners of it, the ground-level troops who actually did it. Deniability at the top, responsibility at the bottom. That is the GOP way.

So, you have Vietnam veterans returning from a failed war, and you have pissed-off Rightists who're angry at them for blowing the war, you have a movement that is centered on hatred, warmongering, enemy imagery, and blaming the victim -- the returning veterans would have been a target of opportunity for angry reactionaries: "You lost us the war; you let Vietnam go Red! You failed us! You worthless pinkos!" *spitooey*

It's logical to me, it makes sense.

The antiwar movement, also known as the peace movement, was largely sympathetic to the plight of the soldiers, wanted them to be brought home in a war that they thought shouldn't have been fought to begin with. It was the prowar Right who thought the Vietnam War was justified, not the antiwar Left -- so the motive is there for the Right to have taken out its anger on returning veterans, whereas the Left would've seen the veterans as victims of a bad policy. See the difference? If the policy isn't bad, then you have to blame the people who carried it out for screwing up -- that's the Right's view: somebody's to blame, because our motives are unassailable. From the Left's more rational perspective, if the policy was bad to begin with, then blaming the soldiers is useless -- you have to put pressure on the policymakers, where it belongs.

And that's exactly what the Left has been doing in the Iraq War. They've been putting the focus again and again on the leadership of this war, while expressing tireless and vocal support for the troops. People on the Left were hostile to LBJ and Nixon in their conduct of the Vietnam War, while people on the Right were hostile to the peace movement and, I suspect, to the soldiers for "losing Vietnam." The Right has been saying it supports the troops, but its actions have put the lie to that statement, in their understaffed, undersupported, overcontracted war of opportunity in Iraq. And what's more, the Right has defected in its support of the war -- but only because we're not winning it. The (unfortunately largely ineffectual) Left opposed the war from the outset, while the (unfortunately politically dominant at the time) Right only opposed the war in Iraq when it was clear that the war was not being won. Sunshine patriotism reveals itself once again.

The interesting thing to me is that the antiwar movement for Iraq is tiny compared to the prowar movement that currently exists, so the Right won't be able to blame the Left for sabotaging the war effort, because the Press was on board for the war, the Left was nearly nonexistent and marginalized, and the Democrats were mostly meekly on board with Bush's War, at least until 2006. So, who will the Right blame this time around for the failure to win in Iraq? That remains to be seen.

But with regard to Vietnam, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that, if any spitting on veterans was done, it was done by reactionaries who spat, and not liberals, not progressives, not hippies, not peace activists. They did it to communicate their contempt for the troops for losing a front in the War on Communism that was central to their ideology.

And there's one more point that's almost overlooked because of its conspicuous absence: given the shamelessness of the American Right in political warfare, fabricating whatever it can't find, trumpeting what it does find -- the Republican Noise Machine, right? How is it that these apocryphal and seemingly widespread spitting on the troops accounts aren't at all well-documented? If they actually happened, I think the Right would be parading them out endlessly. But instead, the Right isn't doing that.

That is terribly suspect to me, because if it was an actual weapon they could use against the Left, they would use it. That is how they work.

But they don't do it -- rather, it just sort of exists in the pop culture, without support. And so I think, if it happened, then either: 1) if it was perpectuated by the Left, it wasn't widespread, and was blown way out of proportion by the Right wing as a way of attacking the Left's patriotism; or 2) it was perpetrated by the Right wing themselves, and they know this, which is why they haven't run with that football to the endzone.

To my eyes, the Right had the motive to take it out on the returning Vietnam veterans for losing the war in Vietnam.

The GOP pursues a very kiss up/kick down kind of policymaking, and I can see their rank-and-file taking it out on returning vets far more than I can see some rabid flower children going after them.

Anyway, that's my thought on that.

Tuesday, March 6, 2007

This is huge. Arlen Specter

From SLATE...

Specter Detector
U.S. attorney scandal update: Who's to blame for those alarming Patriot Act revisions?
By Dahlia Lithwick
Posted Monday, March 5, 2007, at 6:58 PM ET

The U.S. attorneys purge scandal is heating up. The House and Senate have convened hearings for Tuesday, promising an orgy of named names and pointed fingers. Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., now admits what he once denied: that he may have had a hand in the removal of New Mexico's U.S. attorney. And the senior Justice Department official who personally canned the U.S. attorneys has just announced the date of his resignation.

But as the political scandal spreads, the question at its heart gets less and less public attention: Who changed the Patriot Act to make it easier to replace U.S. attorneys without oversight, and how did it happen with nobody looking?

U.S. attorneys are well aware that they serve at the president's pleasure, but new wording in the Patriot Act made it worth the president's while to fire a big, fat lot of them and hire a group of new ones. And while certainly half the scandal is that the Justice Department did that—let eight U.S. attorneys go, seemingly for no reason—we seem to have forgotten that even without the mass firings, this law had been changed in the sneakiest way imaginable.

The background: When Congress reauthorized the Patriot Act last year, it included little-noticed language that changed the way U.S. attorneys would be appointed if their predecessors were removed in the middle of their term. Under the old regime, interim U.S. attorneys needed to be confirmed by the Senate after 120 days. If they weren't, federal district judges could select their replacement. The new language removed both judicial and congressional oversight of the interim U.S. attorneys, letting DOJ anoint them indefinitely. This served three important goals: consolidating presidential power, diminishing oversight, and ensuring that "interim" prosecutors had permanent jobs.

On Feb. 6, when the Senate held hearings on the issue of prosecutorial independence, former judiciary committee Chairman Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., proudly claimed to have been as clueless as the rest of us. Denying New York Democratic Sen. Charles Schumer's claim that he or his staff had "slipped the new provision into the Patriot Act in the dead of night," Specter asserted, "The first I found out about the change in the Patriot Act occurred a few weeks ago when Sen. [Dianne] Feinstein approached me on the floor."

Specter added that he only looked into how the provision was altered after Feinstein told him about it. As he explained, "I then contacted my very able chief counsel, Michael O'Neill, to find out exactly what had happened. And Mr. O'Neill advised me that the requested change had come from the Department of Justice, that it had been handled by Brett Tolman, who is now the U.S. attorney for Utah, and that the change had been requested by the Department of Justice because there had been difficulty with the replacement of a U.S. attorney in South Dakota."

Thus, at least according to Specter, O'Neill had merely been following orders from the Department of Justice when he snuck new language into the Patriot Act that would consolidate executive branch authority. Huge relief there.

Now, it's not necessarily outrageous that Sen. Specter didn't know what his subordinate slipped into the legislation. The Patriot Reauthorization was a long and hotly debated bill. While one might hope that the committee chairman would have read the legislation, you can understand that he might skip a clause or two in the melee. But this was not some minor technical amendment. It was a substantial enhancement of executive power. So, Specter now finds himself in an exceedingly strange position: His staff either lied to him or misled him about what he acknowledges to be a significant legal change. He himself observed at that same hearing: "I did not slip it in and I do not slip things in. That is not my practice. If there is some item which I have any idea is controversial I tell everybody about it."

So, Specter concedes that the item is controversial. He denies knowing about it. That implies it was O'Neill who slipped the new language in, and misled Specter and the Senate. And yet, at least as far as I can tell, nobody in power has said a word about O'Neill's conduct, and not one iota of blame has been laid at his doorstep. Joe Conason noted in Salon last month that 1) O'Neill is a former Clarence Thomas clerk, and 2) he joined Specter's staff at the same time Specter was fighting accusations of being wobbly in his fealty to the White House.

The Justice Department has been quite clear that this change was needed to do away with judicial incursions into an executive function: They felt it improper that judges were effectively making executive-branch appointments. And it now seems that either the DOJ snookered O'Neill, O'Neill snookered Specter, or Specter snookered his colleagues. But any way you slice it, the executive seems to have encroached on congressional turf in order to expand executive turf.

Whether Specter actually knew that O'Neill was carrying water for Karl Rove and turned a blind eye, or whether he was duped by O'Neill may never be known. But either way, it seems to me that Specter's office has done terrible damage to the very notion of independent and co-equal branches of government in this affair, and has yet to be called to account for it. Given that respect and esteem for co-equal independent branches of government is one of the senator's sacred cows, it's doubly ironic that no one has questioned him on this.

It's a good thing that the ousted U.S. attorneys will testify before the House and the Senate. It will clear up a good deal of confusion about the Justice Department's claim that there was something wrong with their job performance. But it seems to me that that's precisely 50 percent of the scandal here. And there are some other folks deserving of subpoenas as well. Mr. O'Neill and Mr. Tolman spring to mind. The outrage isn't merely that the Justice Department abused its power to hire and fire. The real scandal is that it rewrote federal laws to do so, yet nobody seems to know who did it or why.

The World is Watching

And it doesn't like what it sees. We outscored North Korea, for god's sake! Also, this is serious for Israel. The greatest way to secure our countries is through our global reputation, not through militarism. That's why we need to pursue healthy economic power and diplomacy -- soft power, in other words, versus the dead-end of endless military spending.

Of course, the insane neocons will take these poll results as "proof" that the world is screwed, and the US policy is sound, blah blah blah. But they're totally wrong.


U.S. Draws Negative Ratings in Poll
- - - - - - - - - - - -

March 05,2007 | LONDON -- Israel, Iran and the United States were the countries with the most negative image in a globe-spanning survey of attitudes toward 12 major nations. Canada and Japan came out best in the poll, released Tuesday.

The survey for the British Broadcasting Corp.'s World Service asked more than 28,000 people to rate 12 countries -- Britain, Canada, China, France, India, Iran, Israel, Japan, North Korea, Russia, the United States and Venezuela -- as having a positive or negative influence on the world.

Israel was viewed negatively by 56 percent of respondents and positively by 17 percent; for Iran, the figures were 54 percent and 18 percent. The United States had the third-highest negative ranking, with 51 percent citing it as a bad influence and 30 percent as a good one. Next was North Korea, which was viewed negatively by 48 percent and positively by 19 percent.

Canada had the most positive rating in the survey, with 54 percent viewing it positively and 14 percent negatively. It was followed by Japan and France.

Respondents were also asked their views of the 27-member European Union; 53 percent saw it as positive and 19 percent as negative.

Britain, China and India were viewed more positively than negatively, while Russia had more negative than positive responses. Opinion on Venezuela was evenly split.

"It appears that people around the world tend to look negatively on countries whose profile is marked by the pursuit of military power," said Steven Kull, director of the University of Maryland's Program on International Policy Attitudes, which conducted the research along with pollster GlobeScan.

"Countries that relate to the world primarily through soft power, like France and Japan and the EU in general, tend to be viewed positively," he added.

Pollsters questioned about 1,000 people in 27 different countries, including the U.S., Britain, France, Germany, Russia, China, India, Brazil, Mexico and Australia; as well as four predominantly Muslim countries: Egypt, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates and Indonesia; and two countries with large Muslim populations: Lebanon and Nigeria.

The respondents were interviewed in person and over the phone from November to mid-January. The margin of error ranges from 3.1 percent to 4.9 percent, depending on the country.

Monday, March 5, 2007

Impeach Bush, Already

I agree with this essay in the Nation. Seems like so many Americans either embrace an ideological view of democracy, like America(tm) -- that is, that America is inherently democratic (a very, very dangerous sentiment, very easily manipulated), or else an uninformed, apathetic view (very postmodern, no?) that those in power won't listen to us. But sovereignty lies not with the representatives, or the parties, but with the people. And if the people are unhappy with what's going on, they can do something about it.

I suspect an honest, bottom-up drive for impeachment would find the various power brokers in America(tm) getting very pissed off. Of course the White House would object, but Congress, and certainly the Media and perhaps Lobbyists would all close ranks. Given how tainted the Supreme Court has been by Federalist Society judicial hacks, I doubt they'd get behind any kind of impeachment move.

So, there'd be the people, with whom sovereignty resides, and all the insitutions of governance and power factions that have benefited from the status quo. An interesting fight, if an uphill battle for the people. We may see fights like that increasingly over time, as the disconnect between the political class and the populace it rules grows ever wider.

As much as economic class is overlooked in American society, the existence of a political class (which is inextricably tied to economic class) -- anyway, that makes people uncomfortable. We're moving past a time when the two-party duopoly can honestly be expected to cover all political opinions. The two parties basically ignore what they can't co-opt or embrace. The liberals are taken for granted by the Democrats, just as much as the fundamentalists are taken for granted by the GOP. If those groups still stay within the existing parties and expect change, they're largely fooling themselves.

Anyway, I think any impeachment effort against Bush will be doomed, but it's just another example of the sickness of our system-as-is, versus health -- more so that people think that impeachment somehow threatens this country, when it's exactly the other way around. If somebody's not following the Constitution that they swore to uphold, it's time to impeach them, already.

Sunday, March 4, 2007

Boy, George

You know things are bad for the Bush League when they toss out a press release showing that Bush is capable of changing his mind.

Bush Isn't an Idiot, No, Seriously, He's Not

Whatever.

Thursday, March 1, 2007

Those darned ultranationalists

Normally I don't like posting news articles in lieu of a regular post, but this is very typical of classic US Cold Warrior policy; I may pepper it with bracketed comments...

CIA papers reveal 1950s Japan coup plot
By JOSEPH COLEMAN, Associated Press WriterWed Feb 28, 6:52 PM ET

Declassified documents reveal that Japanese ultranationalists with ties to U.S. military intelligence plotted to overthrow the Japanese government and assassinate the prime minister in 1952.

[I can't remember if I've written about it here or elsewhere, but "ultranationalist" is one of those euphemisms they use for "fascist" -- drives me bananas, because it camouflages the reality of the policies. The US doesn't support fascists! We support ultranationalists!]

The scheme — which was abandoned — was concocted by militarists and suspected war criminals who had worked for U.S. occupation authorities after World War II, according to CIA records reviewed by The Associated Press. The plotters wanted a right-wing government that would rearm Japan.

The CIA files, declassified in 2005 and publicized by the U.S. National Archives in January, detail a plot to oust the pro-U.S. prime minister, Shigeru Yoshida, and install a more hawkish government led by Ichiro Hatoyama.

The CIA, in papers released under an act of the U.S. Congress to declassify documents related to Japanese war crimes, said the plotters were led by Takushiro Hattori, a former private secretary to Hideki Tojo, the wartime prime minister hanged as a war criminal in 1948.

Two CIA documents said the plot reportedly had the support of 500,000 people in Japan, and that the group planned to use a contact who controlled a faction inside the National Safety Agency — a precursor to the Defense Ministry — to help launch the coup.

The files reviewed by the AP strongly suggest the Americans were unaware of the plot until after it had been dropped. The plot was developed after the U.S. postwar occupation of Japan ended in April 1952, and the CIA files say American financial support for Hattori's group had dried up by then.

Still, the documentary evidence of the plot illustrates the violent potential of the right-wing, anti-communist cabal that had worked under the U.S. occupation authority's "G-2" intelligence wing in the early days of the Cold War in the late 1940s and early 50s. The CIA operated separately from the G-2.

"Since the beginning of July 1952, plans for a coup d'etat have been initiated among a group of ex-purgees including former military officers. The leader of the group is ex-Colonel Hattori Takushiro," said an Oct. 31, 1952 report, which claimed "this report is the first to mention a definite rightist plan involving violence."

[Ironically, this kind of cabal was very similar to the various dictatorial regimes the US fostered, protected, and promoted throughout the world in its Cold War.]

"The original plan of the group was to engineer a coup d'etat, including the assassination of Prime Minister Yoshida Shigeru on account of his hostile attitude toward depurgees and nationalists," the CIA document said.

According to the document, Hattori colleague Masanobu Tsuji talked the group out of the coup, urging it to focus instead on countering the Socialist Party. The files say the group then decided it would not stage a coup as long as Yoshida's conservative Liberal Party remained in power.

However, the group still considered violence an option, the files say.

"The group is considering the possibility of some minor assassination attempt in lieu of a coup d'etat," the Oct. 31, 1952 document said.

Hattori and others had worked under the aegis of Maj. Gen. Charles Willoughby, the anti-communist G-2 chief. During the occupation, Willoughby was considered the second most powerful American after his boss, Gen. Douglas MacArthur.

Some group members were considered choice war crimes trial targets after the war.

Tsuji had been wanted for involvement in the Bataan Death March of 1942, in which thousands of Americans and Filipinos perished. Another group associate was Yoshio Kodama, a war profiteer and mob boss who was deeply involved in procuring materials — often illegally — for the Japanese military machine.

[These were guys we were working with. Nice.]

Neither of them was prosecuted for war crimes.

The Japanese militarists joined U.S.-supported missions to spy on communists in Japan, infiltrate agents into Soviet and North Korean territory, and recruit Japanese mercenaries to protect Taiwan from communist forces in mainland China, declassified documents show.

[The usual American faustian bargain -- forgiving fascists if they'd work for us against those pesky communists!]

The CIA files, however, say the operations were riddled with intelligence leaks, hobbled by a lack of competent agents, and deeply compromised by rivalries among the rightists themselves. The agents' top priorities, the documents say, were profits and an eventual resurgence of a militarist Japan.

The assassination plot detailed in the CIA files came at a difficult time for Hattori's group.

The departure of Willoughby from Japan in 1951 as the U.S. occupation wound down deprived the rightists of their leading American patron and paymaster. Meanwhile, Yoshida was openly hostile to Hattori's push for rearmament.

"The government attitude toward the Hattori group has been increasingly antagonistic, and the group has lost influence since the departure of General Willoughby," said a CIA document dated April 18, 1952.

[Wow! You mean the exit of the American presence weakened the coup plotters' position? Wow.]

Yoshida was pushed out of office peacefully in 1954 and replaced by Hatoyama, but the ultrarightist dream of resurrecting a militarist Japan never happened. The 1947 pacifist constitution bars Japan from warfare and has never been amended.

[I imagine the Cold Warriors would've rather had a militarized, neo-fascist Japan as a buffer against China and Russia. Creeps. Glad their scheme didn't work out. And look how Japan improved by NOT embracing the usual American coup-and-assassination-centric approach to governance in client countries!]