December 2008 archive

 

It’s late.  Do you know where your thread is?

For anyone who hasn’t been around for a couple of days, we are discussing and trying to create a petition drive in the continuing quest for justice (or as close as we can get) for the crimes of Bushco.

Of course we want this effort to be as wide spread and effective as possible, so spending a few days developing it seems like a good idea. Some folks have helped work on the language, others have offered lists of suggestions on who to contact, and sharon/conchita has put me in touch with Bob Fertik over at Democrats.com (please click through and sign their petition re Nadler’s resolution to prevent pardons) and he has expressed support and willingness to work together. And many folks made the completely correct point that we need to tighten it up and make it more succinct. NL has proposed a general(?) meme of “Are we going to let them get away with it?” Good stuff!

In a comment though, Bruce brought up something that I think is very important, the concept of asking for a Special/Independent Prosecutor. So today’s question is….should we make the focus of the petition a request for a Special/Independent Prosecutor? Or keep it as a more general plea for action? This starts to get us into more specific options. Do we want to present such options in the petition? Should we include a paragraph suggesting options such as an investigatory Congressional Commission, (such as was used in Watergate) a prosecutor, (Patrick Fitzgerald?) or perhaps even the idea of a Truth Commission? Or make it more of a personal, general plea/demand to the new AG without suggesting these options?

And of course, what other suggestions and input have y’all come up with? Tomorrow I will try to pull all of this info together and publish a sort of State of the Petition statement that we can then start spreading around to the wider net for input.

Below the fold is the current draft. Please have at it with more suggestions and please feel free to do your own rewrite and publish it in a comment or as an essay. I am NOT at the peak of my game right now, so please jump in and take up my considerable slack!

Who is this guy? What is this guy?

I have long argued and have written much the past few days in particular that Obama’s past statements and actions, especially as indicated by his latest picks for a foreign policy team, show him to be a center-right imperialist/empire-ist who will simply do the bidding of, or at least be heavily constrained by, a combination of oil companies, corporate oligarchy and foreign policy establishment.

That he will be exactly that, at least when it comes to foreign policy, “war on terror” memes, and the likelihood of him continuing the imperialist policies of the past six or more decades that are creating the very terrorism that the “war on terror” started by George Bush so misguidedly and murderously has done.

Have progressives been suckered into supporting a President who will really govern from the ‘center-right’, and who is an imperialist hawk in sheeps clothing? A very good salesman, in other words, who has been very successful at coopting and defanging progressives and the antiwar movement?

I’m far from alone in my thinking about this. But hang in here for a bit. There’s an opposing viewpoint coming, further down.

As far back as July 2007 Ira Chernus, Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder and author of Monsters To Destroy: The Neoconservative War on Terror and Sin wrote, in an article published at Tom Engelhardt’s TomDispatch: Democratic Doublespeak on Iraq:

   …what does it mean to “leave Iraq”? Here’s where most of the Democratic candidates come smack up against that hard place. There is a longstanding bipartisan consensus in the foreign-policy establishment that the US must control every strategically valuable region of the world — and none more so than the oil heartlands of the planet. That’s been a hard-and-fast rule of the elite for some six decades now. No matter how hard the task may be, they demand that presidents be rock-hard enough to get the job done.

   So whatever “leave Iraq” might mean, no candidate of either party likely to enter the White House on January 20, 2009 can think it means letting Iraqis determine their own national policies or fate.

   …

   So the Democratic front-runners must promise voters that they will end the war — with not too many ideologically laden ifs, ands, or buts — while they assure the foreign-policy establishment that they will never abandon the drive for hegemony in the Middle East (or anywhere else). In other words, the candidates have to be able to talk out of both sides of their mouths at the same time.

Damn! Odetta’s gone. And only three weeks before her, Miriam Makeba.

Two strong Black women, each an inherent part of the tide of liberation that swept Africa and America in the 1960s. More than that, each a gravitational force in her own right, helping pull that tide higher and further. It is hard for those not around in those long gone days to understand how much it meant to have Black women in the public eye standing up for themselves–simply by doing that, they were standing up for all Black women, and for a better world.

And neither stopped there. Both were actively political, in the best sense of the word. They lent their voices to the Black freedom struggle in the US and to the battle to smash apartheid and settler rule in South Africa. They sang songs of the oppressed and they sang songs of freedom.

And they did it for their whole lives, their whole lives. The threat they posed to the high and mighty meant they had to face redbaiting, blacklisting and exile. It never stopped them.

Nor did age. When Miriam Makeba suffered her fatal heart attack last month, she was on stage, performing in Italy at a benefit to support anti-mob journalist Roberto Saviano! Odetta’s last big concert, sung from a wheelchair, was at the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival in the Bay Area in October.

There’s plenty of Odetta and plenty of Miriam Makeba available at YouTube, to help you meet or remember these two remarkable women. I have chosen to close with another video, a trance-y instrumental by a new Cali duo, sonic manipulators Rabid Kangaroo. They first saw her, I understand, at that Bay Area festival and were inspired to compose this and crank out the video in three weeks.

Crossposted from Fire on the Mountain