Short Notice: Vote for A Special Prosecutor For Busy/Cheney Today On The Obama Site

The site will ask you to sign in before it will accept your vote (see below) or question.

Richard

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: <theteam@peaceteam.net>
Date: Wed, Dec 31, 2008 at 5:38 PM
Subject: Short Notice: Vote for A Special Prosecutor For Busy/Cheney Today On The Obama Site
To: activist.thepen@gmail.com

VOTE FOR THE SPECIAL PROSECUTOR QUESTION NOW ON THE OBAMA SITE

We all understand the historical urgency and imperative of holding Bush and Cheney accountable for their grave crimes against our own country and all of humanity.

And we haven't got alot of time to move on the particular action in this alert so please go to the Obama change site TODAY (voting closes 12/31 at midnight), where there is already a question calling for a special prosecutor, and

1.  Sign in at http://change.gov/openforquestions

2.  Search for "Fitzgerald"

3.  This will display several similar questions, so look carefully for "Bob Fertik" (who started the question)

4.  Look right for the checkbox, mouseover it so it goes from white to dark, then click to cast your vote

And let's all vote for the SAME question (don't start another new one) and demonstrate to our new incoming administration that letting the crimes of the past slide without retribution is NOT an option.

THEN GET YOUR NEW CONVICT DICK & W CAP TO DEMONSTRATE WITH

As we in the White House accountability movement look forward, whether it's impeachment, federal prosecution, or state by state prosecutions as a last resort, the key work is "convict".  And that is why we are introducing a new cap to wear to continue to carry the ball with that says "CONVICT DICK & W" in red, white and blue.  If you want to be one of the first to get one of these new caps please submit the page below.

New Convict Dick & W Cap:  http://www.usalone.com/convict_cap.php

We are not setting a price for these.  You can have one for a contribution of any amount.  We just want to put as many out there as possible.  And we will have much more news for you soon about planned actions to pressure prosecutors at all levels to step up to the plate and do their duty.

We are in this thing for the long haul, folks.  The criminal dictators of the future can only be constrained by pursuing prosecution NOW of the criminal dictators of the present and past.  In some cases it has taken many years of work by dedicated activists to bring criminal former heads of state to justice.

We the people will never forget the crimes of the Bush/Cheney administration.  How can we?  Their willful disasters will cripple our economy, our military, every aspect of our government and our own personal lives for many years to come.  But if we just continue to speak out, someday soon enough there WILL be prosecutors at some level who will have the integrity, backbone and determination to do what Congress to their eternal shame did not.

Please take action NOW, so we can win all victories that are supposed to be ours, and forward this alert as widely as possible.

If you would like to get alerts like these, you can do so at http://www.usalone.com/in.htm

Or if you want to cease receiving our messages, just use the function at http://www.usalone.com/out.htm

One click action page to stop Bush pardons

Hi, Impeachment Person,

Lots of pardons are in the works. The idea is to slam-dunk them on January 19 the moment before the bell.

 

The Pen petition system below will not send a message to a newly elected congressman, so you might want to tell Jim Himes separately that you oppose pardons--if, as I have reason to believe, you do.

Richard

--------- Forwarded message ----------
From: The Pen <activist.thepen@gmail.com>
To: grandmab38@juno.com
Date: Wed, 24 Dec 2008 07:52:04 -0800
Subject: Cheney Admits To War Crimes Because His Pardon Is Already In His
Christmas Stocking.  Please Speak Out For Lumps Of Coal.
Message-ID: <AABEXFTA8ACSLWZ2@mx07.dca.untd.com>


Speak Out Against The Planned Bush Blanket Pardons BEFORE They Can
Happen

Pay no attention to the handful of Christmas pardons granted by Bush.
This is mere political window dressing to distract from the bumper
crop of blanket absolutions, including one for himself, scheduled to
be released just before midnight on Jan 19th. Cheney would not so
arrogantly be bragging on TV about how he authorized torture if it
were not so.

But there is a resolution in Congress, H.Res. 1531, preemptively
condemning any such move if we can just get enough members of
Congress to sponsor it (already 10 so far). Many of you have
submitted a action page on this already. Please do it again,
especially if your representative did not hear you the first time.

Action Page To Stop The Bush Pardons:
http://www.usalone.com/hres1531.php

Each action page you submit is another lump of coal in Cheney's
stocking. Some have speculated on the possibility of post
inauguration impeachment, especially considering the fact that many
insiders are waiting until then to spill the beans. Maybe they don't
want to get bumped off in asuspicious plane crash like Mike Connell.
But a self pardon at the very last minute would certainly be grounds
for some kind of action, perhaps even impeachment, if and only if
Congress would react and take action immediately.

So we will still continue to distribute the impeachment message items
until the very last minute as well. If you did not get one of the
original navy blue "IMPEACH CHENEY?" caps, which was the original
"question" hat, we still have some of those which you can get from
the return page of the action page above. And of course we have the
orange "IMPEACH BOTH!!!" caps (the "answer" hat). If you wear one and
a friend wears the other that is especially effective. Or you can
request a copy of the Impeachment Play DVD, either from that same
return page, or here is the link directly for all three.

Impeachment Caps and DVDs:
http://www.usalone.com/impeach_caps_dvds.php

In any case we need to get ready to raise a renewed hue and cry when
the expected happens on January 19th. How hard could it be to get
members of Congress to simply raise their hand and declare that a
presidential self pardon, let alone pardon of his criminal
co-conspirators, is maybe not such a good idea? If we are to draw the
line anywhere, this is where is must be drawn.

And let us look forward to the day when we will have real
representatives in Washington, for a change, because we never stopped
speaking out.

Please take action NOW, so we can win all victories that are supposed
to be ours, and forward this alert as widely as possible.

If you would like to get alerts like these, you can do so at
http://www.usalone.com/in.htm

Or if you want to cease receiving our messages, just use the function
at http://www.usalone.com/out.htm

usalone287b:94155

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Patrick Cockburn: The Iraqi Victory

"How many deaths does it take till he knows

that too many people have died?

The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind,

the answer is blowing in the wind."

 

So sang Bob (Dylan) Zimmerman in 1963. The answer then was "two million more, and even that's not enough." Will a million more in Iraq be enough? How long will it take for us to learn to obey the international laws that WE wrote?
Richard

 

 

On November 27 the Iraqi parliament voted by a large majority in favor of a security agreement with the US under which the 150,000 American troops in Iraq will withdraw from cities, towns and villages by June 30, 2009 and from all of Iraq by December 31, 2011. The Iraqi government will take over military responsibility for the Green Zone in Baghdad, the heart of American power in Iraq, in a few weeks time. Private security companies will lose their legal immunity. US military operations and the arrest of Iraqis will only be carried out with Iraqi consent. There will be no US military bases left behind when the last US troops leave in three years time and the US military is banned in the interim from carrying out attacks on other countries from Iraq.

 

The Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA), signed after eight months of rancorous negotiations, is categorical and unconditional. America's bid to act as the world's only super-power and to establish quasi-colonial control of Iraq, an attempt which began with the invasion of 2003, has ended in failure. There will be a national referendum on the new agreement next July, but the accord is to be implemented immediately so the poll will be largely irrelevant. Even Iran, which had furiously denounced the first drafts of the SOFA saying that they would establish a permanent US presence in Iraq, now says blithely that it will officially back the new security pact after the referendum. This is a sure sign that Iran, as America's main rival in the Middle East, sees the pact as marking the final end of the US occupation and as a launching pad for military assaults on neighbours such as Iran.

 

Astonishingly, this momentous agreement has been greeted with little surprise or interest outside Iraq. On the same day that it was finally passed by the Iraqi parliament international attention was wholly focused on the murderous terrorist attack in Mumbai. For some months polls in the US showed that the economic crisis had replaced the Iraqi war as the main issue facing America in the eyes of voters. So many spurious milestones in Iraq have been declared by President Bush over the years that when a real turning point occurs people are naturally sceptical about its significance. The White House was so keen to limit understanding of what it had agreed in Iraq that it did not even to publish a copy of the SOFA in English. Some senior officials in the Pentagon are privately criticizing President Bush for conceding so much to the Iraqis, but the American media are fixated on the incoming Obama administration and no longer pays much attention to the doings of the expiring Bush administration.

 

The last minute delays to the accord were not really about the terms agreed with the Americans. It was rather that the leaders of the Sunni Arab minority, seeing the Shia-Kurdish government of prime minister Nouri al-Maliki about to fill the vacuum created by the US departure, wanted to barter their support for the accord in return for as many last minute concessions as they could extract. Some three quarters of the 17,000 prisoners held by the Americans are Sunni and they wanted them released or at least not mistreated by the Iraqi security forces. They asked for an end to de-Baathication which is directed primarily at the Sunni community. Only the Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr held out against the accord to the end, declaring it a betrayal of independent Iraq. The ultra-patriotic opposition of the Sadrists to the accord has been important because it has made it difficult for the other Shia parties to agree to anything less than a complete American withdrawal. If they did so they risked being portrayed as US puppets in the upcoming provincial elections at the end of January 2009 or the parliamentary elections later in the year.

 

The SOFA finally agreed is almost the opposite of the one which US started to negotiate in March. This is why Iran, with its strong links to the Shia parties inside Iraq, ended its previous rejection of it. The first US draft was largely an attempt to continue the occupation without much change from the UN mandate which expired at the end of the year. Washington overplayed its hand. The Iraqi government was growing stronger as the Sunni Arabs ended their uprising against the occupation. The Iranians helped restrain the Mehdi Army, Muqtada's powerful militia, so the government regained control of Basra, Iraq's second biggest city, and Sadr City, almost half Baghdad, from the Shia militias. The prime minister Nouri al-Maliki became more confident, realizing his military enemies were dispersing and, in any case, the Americans had no real alternative but to support him. The US has always been politically weak in Iraq since the fall of Saddam Hussein because it has few real friends in the country aside from the Kurds. The leaders of the Iraqi Shia, 60 per cent of the total population, might ally themselves to Washington to gain power, but they never intended to share power with the US in the long term.

 

The occupation has always been unpopular in Iraq. Foreign observers and some Iraqis are often misled by the hatred with which different Iraqi communities regard each other into underestimating the strength of Iraqi nationalism. Once Maliki came to believe that he could survive without US military support then he was able to spurn US proposals until an unconditional withdrawal was conceded. He could also see that Barack Obama, whose withdrawal timetable was not so different from his own, was going to be the next American president. Come the provincial and parliamentary elections of 2009, Maliki can present himself as the man who ended the occupation. Critics of the prime minister, notably the Kurds, think that success has gone to his head, but there is no doubt that the new security agreement has strengthened him politically.

 

It may be that, living in the heart of the Green Zone, that Maliki has an exaggerated idea of what his government has achieved. In the Zone there is access to clean water and electricity while in the rest of Baghdad people have been getting only three or four hours electricity a day. Security in Iraq is certainly better than it was during the sectarian civil war between Sunni and Shia in 2006-7 but the improvement is wholly comparative. The monthly death toll has dropped from 3,000 a month at its worst to 360 Iraqi civilians and security personnel killed this November, though these figures may understate the casualty toll as not all the bodies are found. Iraq is still one of the most dangerous places in the world. On December 1, the day I started writing this article, two suicide bombers killed 33 people and wounded dozens more in Baghdad and Mosul. Iraqis in the street are cynical about the government's claim to have restored order. "We are used to the government always saying that things have become good and the security situation improved," says Salman Mohammed Jumah, a primary school teacher in Baghdad. "It is true security is a little better but the government leaders live behind concrete barriers and do not know what is happening on the ground. They only go out in their armoured convoys. We no longer have sectarian killings by ID cards [revealing that a person is Sunni or Shia by their name] but Sunni are still afraid to go to Shia areas and Shia to Sunni."

 

Security has improved with police and military checkpoints everywhere but sectarian killers have also upgraded their tactics. There are less suicide bombings but there are many more small 'sticky bombs' placed underneath vehicles. Everybody checks underneath their car before they get into it. I try to keep away from notorious choke points in Baghdad, such as Tahrir Square or the entrances to the Green Zone, where a bomber for can wait for a target to get stuck in traffic before making an attack. The checkpoints and the walls, the measures taken to reduce the violence, bring Baghdad close to paralysis even when there are no bombs. It can take two or three hours to travel a few miles. The bridges over the Tigris are often blocked and this has got worse recently because soldiers and police have a new toy in the shape of a box which looks like a transistor radio with a short aerial sticking out horizontally. When pointed at the car this device is supposed to detect vapor from explosives and may well do so, but since it also responds to vapor from alcohol or perfume it is worse than useless as a security aid.

 

Iraqi state television and government backed newspapers make ceaseless claims that life in Iraq is improving by the day. To be convincing this should mean not just improving security but providing more electricity, clean water and jobs. "The economic situation is still very bad," says Salman Mohammed Jumah, the teacher. "Unemployment affects everybody and you can't get a job unless you pay a bribe. There is no electricity and nowadays we have cholera again so people have to buy expensive bottled water and only use the water that comes out of the tap for washing." Not everybody has the same grim vision but life in Iraq is still extraordinarily hard. The best barometer for how far Iraq is 'better' is the willingness of the 4.7 million refugees, one in five Iraqis who have fled their homes and are now living inside or outside Iraq, to go home. By October only 150,000 had returned and some do so only to look at the situation and then go back to Damascus or Amman. One middle aged Sunni businessman who came back from Syria for two or three weeks, said: "I don't like to be here. In Syria I can go out in the evening to meet friends in a coffe bar. It is safe. Here I am forced to stay in my home after 7pm."

 

The degree of optimism or pessimism felt by Iraqis depends very much on whether they have a job, whether or not that job is with the government, which community they belong to, their social class and the area they live in. All these factors are interlinked. Most jobs are with the state that reputedly employs some two million people. The private sector is very feeble. Despite talk of reconstruction there are almost no cranes visible on the Baghdad skyline. Since the Shia and Kurds control of the government, it is difficult for a Sunni to get a job and probably impossible unless he has a letter recommending him from a political party in the government. Optimism is greater among the Shia. "There is progress in our life, says Jafar Sadiq, a Shia businessman married to a Sunni in the Shia-dominated Iskan area of Baghdad. "People are cooperating with the security forces. I am glad the army is fighting the Mehdi Army though they still are not finished. Four Sunni have reopened their shops in my area. It is safe for my wife's Sunni relatives to come here. The only things we need badly are electricity, clean water and municipal services." But his wife Jana admitted privately that she had warned her Sunni relatives from coming to Iskan "because the security situation is unstable." She teaches at Mustansariyah University in central Baghdad which a year ago was controlled by the Mehdi Army and Sunni students had fled. "Now the Sunni students are coming back," she says, "though they are still afraid."

 

They have reason to fear. Baghdad is divided into Shia and Sunni enclaves defended by high concrete blast walls often with a single entrance and exit. The sectarian slaughter is much less than it was but it is still dangerous for returning refugees to try to reclaim their old house in an area in which they are a minority. In one case in a Sunni district in west Baghdad, as I reported here some weeks ago, a Shia husband and wife with their two daughters went back to their house to find it gutted, with furniture gone and electric sockets and water pipes torn out. They decided to sleep on the roof. A Sunni gang reached them from a neighboring building, cut off the husband's head and threw it into the street. They said to his wife and daughters: "The same will happen to any other Shia who comes back." But even without these recent atrocities Baghdad would still be divided because the memory of the mass killings of 2006-7 is too fresh and there is still an underlying fear that it could happen again.

 

Iraqis have a low opinion of their elected representatives, frequently denouncing them as an incompetent kleptocracy. The government administration is dysfunctional. "Despite the fact," said independent member of parliament Qassim Daoud, "that the Labor and Social Affairs is meant to help the millions of poor Iraqis I discovered that they had spent only 10 per cent of their budget." Not all of this is the government's fault. Iraqi society, administration and economy have been shattered by 28 years of war and sanctions. Few other countries have been put under such intense and prolonged pressure. First there was the eight year Iran- Iraq war starting in 1980, then the disastrous Gulf war of `1991, thirteen years of sanctions and then the five-and-a-half years of conflict since the US invasion. Ten years ago UN officials were already saying they could not repair the faltering power stations because they were so old that spare parts were no longer made for them.

 

Iraq is full of signs of the gap between the rulers and the ruled. The few planes using Baghdad international airport are full foreign contractors and Iraqi government officials. Talking to people on the streets in Baghdad in October many of them brought up fear of cholera which had just started to spread from Hilla province south of Baghdad. Forty per cent of people in the capital do not have access to clean drinking water. The origin of the epidemic was the purchase of out of date chemicals for water purification from Iran by corrupt officials. Everybody talked about the cholera except in the Green Zone where people had scarcely heard of the epidemic. .

 

The Iraqi government will become stronger as the Americans depart. It will also be forced to take full responsibility for the failings of the Iraqi state. This will be happening at a bad moment since the price of oil, the state's only source of revenue, has fallen to $50 a barrel when the budget assumed it would be $80. Many state salaries, such as those of teachers, were doubled on the strength of this, something the government may now regret. Communal differences are still largely unresolved. Friction between Sunni and Shia, bad though it is, is less than two years ago, though hostility between Arabs and Kurds is deepening. The departure of the US military frightens many Sunni on the grounds that they will be at the mercy of the majority Shia. But it is also an incentive for the three main communities in Iraq to agree about what their future relations should be when there are no Americans to stand between them. As for the US, its moment in Iraq is coming to an end as its troops depart, leaving a ruined country behind them.On November 27 the Iraqi parliament voted by a large majority in favor of a security agreement with the US under which the 150,000 American troops in Iraq will withdraw from cities, towns and villages by June 30, 2009 and from all of Iraq by December 31, 2011. The Iraqi government will take over military responsibility for the Green Zone in Baghdad, the heart of American power in Iraq, in a few weeks time. Private security companies will lose their legal immunity. US military operations and the arrest of Iraqis will only be carried out with Iraqi consent. There will be no US military bases left behind when the last US troops leave in three years time and the US military is banned in the interim from carrying out attacks on other countries from Iraq.

 

The Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA), signed after eight months of rancorous negotiations, is categorical and unconditional. America's bid to act as the world's only super-power and to establish quasi-colonial control of Iraq, an attempt which began with the invasion of 2003, has ended in failure. There will be a national referendum on the new agreement next July, but the accord is to be implemented immediately so the poll will be largely irrelevant. Even Iran, which had furiously denounced the first drafts of the SOFA saying that they would establish a permanent US presence in Iraq, now says blithely that it will officially back the new security pact after the referendum. This is a sure sign that Iran, as America's main rival in the Middle East, sees the pact as marking the final end of the US occupation and as a launching pad for military assaults on neighbours such as Iran.

 

Astonishingly, this momentous agreement has been greeted with little surprise or interest outside Iraq. On the same day that it was finally passed by the Iraqi parliament international attention was wholly focused on the murderous terrorist attack in Mumbai. For some months polls in the US showed that the economic crisis had replaced the Iraqi war as the main issue facing America in the eyes of voters. So many spurious milestones in Iraq have been declared by President Bush over the years that when a real turning point occurs people are naturally sceptical about its significance. The White House was so keen to limit understanding of what it had agreed in Iraq that it did not even to publish a copy of the SOFA in English. Some senior officials in the Pentagon are privately criticizing President Bush for conceding so much to the Iraqis, but the American media are fixated on the incoming Obama administration and no longer pays much attention to the doings of the expiring Bush administration.

 

The last minute delays to the accord were not really about the terms agreed with the Americans. It was rather that the leaders of the Sunni Arab minority, seeing the Shia-Kurdish government of prime minister Nouri al-Maliki about to fill the vacuum created by the US departure, wanted to barter their support for the accord in return for as many last minute concessions as they could extract. Some three quarters of the 17,000 prisoners held by the Americans are Sunni and they wanted them released or at least not mistreated by the Iraqi security forces. They asked for an end to de-Baathication which is directed primarily at the Sunni community. Only the Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr held out against the accord to the end, declaring it a betrayal of independent Iraq. The ultra-patriotic opposition of the Sadrists to the accord has been important because it has made it difficult for the other Shia parties to agree to anything less than a complete American withdrawal. If they did so they risked being portrayed as US puppets in the upcoming provincial elections at the end of January 2009 or the parliamentary elections later in the year.

 

The SOFA finally agreed is almost the opposite of the one which US started to negotiate in March. This is why Iran, with its strong links to the Shia parties inside Iraq, ended its previous rejection of it. The first US draft was largely an attempt to continue the occupation without much change from the UN mandate which expired at the end of the year. Washington overplayed its hand. The Iraqi government was growing stronger as the Sunni Arabs ended their uprising against the occupation. The Iranians helped restrain the Mehdi Army, Muqtada's powerful militia, so the government regained control of Basra, Iraq's second biggest city, and Sadr City, almost half Baghdad, from the Shia militias. The prime minister Nouri al-Maliki became more confident, realizing his military enemies were dispersing and, in any case, the Americans had no real alternative but to support him. The US has always been politically weak in Iraq since the fall of Saddam Hussein because it has few real friends in the country aside from the Kurds. The leaders of the Iraqi Shia, 60 per cent of the total population, might ally themselves to Washington to gain power, but they never intended to share power with the US in the long term.

 

The occupation has always been unpopular in Iraq. Foreign observers and some Iraqis are often misled by the hatred with which different Iraqi communities regard each other into underestimating the strength of Iraqi nationalism. Once Maliki came to believe that he could survive without US military support then he was able to spurn US proposals until an unconditional withdrawal was conceded. He could also see that Barack Obama, whose withdrawal timetable was not so different from his own, was going to be the next American president. Come the provincial and parliamentary elections of 2009, Maliki can present himself as the man who ended the occupation. Critics of the prime minister, notably the Kurds, think that success has gone to his head, but there is no doubt that the new security agreement has strengthened him politically.

 

It may be that, living in the heart of the Green Zone, that Maliki has an exaggerated idea of what his government has achieved. In the Zone there is access to clean water and electricity while in the rest of Baghdad people have been getting only three or four hours electricity a day. Security in Iraq is certainly better than it was during the sectarian civil war between Sunni and Shia in 2006-7 but the improvement is wholly comparative. The monthly death toll has dropped from 3,000 a month at its worst to 360 Iraqi civilians and security personnel killed this November, though these figures may understate the casualty toll as not all the bodies are found. Iraq is still one of the most dangerous places in the world. On December 1, the day I started writing this article, two suicide bombers killed 33 people and wounded dozens more in Baghdad and Mosul. Iraqis in the street are cynical about the government's claim to have restored order. "We are used to the government always saying that things have become good and the security situation improved," says Salman Mohammed Jumah, a primary school teacher in Baghdad. "It is true security is a little better but the government leaders live behind concrete barriers and do not know what is happening on the ground. They only go out in their armoured convoys. We no longer have sectarian killings by ID cards [revealing that a person is Sunni or Shia by their name] but Sunni are still afraid to go to Shia areas and Shia to Sunni."

 

Security has improved with police and military checkpoints everywhere but sectarian killers have also upgraded their tactics. There are less suicide bombings but there are many more small 'sticky bombs' placed underneath vehicles. Everybody checks underneath their car before they get into it. I try to keep away from notorious choke points in Baghdad, such as Tahrir Square or the entrances to the Green Zone, where a bomber for can wait for a target to get stuck in traffic before making an attack. The checkpoints and the walls, the measures taken to reduce the violence, bring Baghdad close to paralysis even when there are no bombs. It can take two or three hours to travel a few miles. The bridges over the Tigris are often blocked and this has got worse recently because soldiers and police have a new toy in the shape of a box which looks like a transistor radio with a short aerial sticking out horizontally. When pointed at the car this device is supposed to detect vapor from explosives and may well do so, but since it also responds to vapor from alcohol or perfume it is worse than useless as a security aid.

 

Iraqi state television and government backed newspapers make ceaseless claims that life in Iraq is improving by the day. To be convincing this should mean not just improving security but providing more electricity, clean water and jobs. "The economic situation is still very bad," says Salman Mohammed Jumah, the teacher. "Unemployment affects everybody and you can't get a job unless you pay a bribe. There is no electricity and nowadays we have cholera again so people have to buy expensive bottled water and only use the water that comes out of the tap for washing." Not everybody has the same grim vision but life in Iraq is still extraordinarily hard. The best barometer for how far Iraq is 'better' is the willingness of the 4.7 million refugees, one in five Iraqis who have fled their homes and are now living inside or outside Iraq, to go home. By October only 150,000 had returned and some do so only to look at the situation and then go back to Damascus or Amman. One middle aged Sunni businessman who came back from Syria for two or three weeks, said: "I don't like to be here. In Syria I can go out in the evening to meet friends in a coffe bar. It is safe. Here I am forced to stay in my home after 7pm."

 

The degree of optimism or pessimism felt by Iraqis depends very much on whether they have a job, whether or not that job is with the government, which community they belong to, their social class and the area they live in. All these factors are interlinked. Most jobs are with the state that reputedly employs some two million people. The private sector is very feeble. Despite talk of reconstruction there are almost no cranes visible on the Baghdad skyline. Since the Shia and Kurds control of the government, it is difficult for a Sunni to get a job and probably impossible unless he has a letter recommending him from a political party in the government. Optimism is greater among the Shia. "There is progress in our life, says Jafar Sadiq, a Shia businessman married to a Sunni in the Shia-dominated Iskan area of Baghdad. "People are cooperating with the security forces. I am glad the army is fighting the Mehdi Army though they still are not finished. Four Sunni have reopened their shops in my area. It is safe for my wife's Sunni relatives to come here. The only things we need badly are electricity, clean water and municipal services." But his wife Jana admitted privately that she had warned her Sunni relatives from coming to Iskan "because the security situation is unstable." She teaches at Mustansariyah University in central Baghdad which a year ago was controlled by the Mehdi Army and Sunni students had fled. "Now the Sunni students are coming back," she says, "though they are still afraid."

 

They have reason to fear. Baghdad is divided into Shia and Sunni enclaves defended by high concrete blast walls often with a single entrance and exit. The sectarian slaughter is much less than it was but it is still dangerous for returning refugees to try to reclaim their old house in an area in which they are a minority. In one case in a Sunni district in west Baghdad, as I reported here some weeks ago, a Shia husband and wife with their two daughters went back to their house to find it gutted, with furniture gone and electric sockets and water pipes torn out. They decided to sleep on the roof. A Sunni gang reached them from a neighboring building, cut off the husband's head and threw it into the street. They said to his wife and daughters: "The same will happen to any other Shia who comes back." But even without these recent atrocities Baghdad would still be divided because the memory of the mass killings of 2006-7 is too fresh and there is still an underlying fear that it could happen again.

 

Iraqis have a low opinion of their elected representatives, frequently denouncing them as an incompetent kleptocracy. The government administration is dysfunctional. "Despite the fact," said independent member of parliament Qassim Daoud, "that the Labor and Social Affairs is meant to help the millions of poor Iraqis I discovered that they had spent only 10 per cent of their budget." Not all of this is the government's fault. Iraqi society, administration and economy have been shattered by 28 years of war and sanctions. Few other countries have been put under such intense and prolonged pressure. First there was the eight year Iran- Iraq war starting in 1980, then the disastrous Gulf war of `1991, thirteen years of sanctions and then the five-and-a-half years of conflict since the US invasion. Ten years ago UN officials were already saying they could not repair the faltering power stations because they were so old that spare parts were no longer made for them.

 

Iraq is full of signs of the gap between the rulers and the ruled. The few planes using Baghdad international airport are full foreign contractors and Iraqi government officials. Talking to people on the streets in Baghdad in October many of them brought up fear of cholera which had just started to spread from Hilla province south of Baghdad. Forty per cent of people in the capital do not have access to clean drinking water. The origin of the epidemic was the purchase of out of date chemicals for water purification from Iran by corrupt officials. Everybody talked about the cholera except in the Green Zone where people had scarcely heard of the epidemic. .

 

The Iraqi government will become stronger as the Americans depart. It will also be forced to take full responsibility for the failings of the Iraqi state. This will be happening at a bad moment since the price of oil, the state's only source of revenue, has fallen to $50 a barrel when the budget assumed it would be $80. Many state salaries, such as those of teachers, were doubled on the strength of this, something the government may now regret. Communal differences are still largely unresolved. Friction between Sunni and Shia, bad though it is, is less than two years ago, though hostility between Arabs and Kurds is deepening. The departure of the US military frightens many Sunni on the grounds that they will be at the mercy of the majority Shia. But it is also an incentive for the three main communities in Iraq to agree about what their future relations should be when there are no Americans to stand between them. As for the US, its moment in Iraq is coming to an end as its troops depart, leaving a ruined country behind them.

 

See more stories tagged with: bush, iraq

Patrick Cockburn is the author of 'The Occupation: War, resistance and daily life in Iraq', a finalist for the National Book Critics' Circle Award for best non-fiction book of 2006. His new book 'Muqtada! Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shia revival and the struggle for Iraq' is published by Scribner.

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Gift ideas from Yuganta Press

Are you looking for meaningful gifts to give during the holiday season—at bargain-basement prices?

 

Yuganta Press recommends two of its recent publications:

 

Health Proxy by Robert Roth

&

The Slow News of Need by Richard Duffee.

 

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In contrast to the exquisite and interminable explorations of private sensibility in the American poetry of the last fifty years—confessional, narcissistic preoccupations, often couched in linguistic mystifications—Duffee's writing, ever fresh, ever direct, ever concrete, looks outward, opening onto an expansive swath of action and reflection, of behavior and being. His passion for the human is endless. "Poetry," he says, "is the speech of living people about the most important experiences of their real lives."

 

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Naomi Wolf at Westport Library 7:30 tonight

Hi--

You know Naomi Wolf, who wrote "The End of America" (by which she meant the USA) outlining the 10 standard steps for turning a republic into a fascist state? She's talking at the Westport Library tonight at 7:30. Want to hear her in person? It's free.

 

If you want a ride from the Stamford area, call me at 588-0161 or send me an email by 6:30; I'll be leaving by 7pm, earlier if I have people to pick up.

Richard Duffee

Thousands of Indian farmers are committing suicide

Hi Again, Impeachment Person,

This article Remy Chevalier forwarded to me. The issues closely related to the issues of the article on death by malnutrition in Haiti. Here the problem is that our government has been entirely unwilling to regulate the activities of US corporations overseas even when the corporations are committing negilgent manslaughter. We have an obligation to demand the creation of institutions that will prevent this kind of behavior, punish the individuals and organizations committing it, and compensate families who have lost their livelihood and the lives of their family members because of it. This can be done by national law and by the creation of international legal institutions. The US has the power to do both and we are negligent not to do either.

 

Again, kindly write Obama.  

Richard  

 

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Remy Chevalier <remyc@prodigy.net>
Date: Mon, Nov 24, 2008 at 6:52 PM
Subject: [FairfieldCountyGreens] Thousands of Indian farmers are committing suicide
To: End Secrecy List <endsecrecy@yahoogroups.com>, FairfieldCountyGreens <FairfieldCountyGreens@yahoogroups.com>, LuMag List <LuMag@yahoogroups.com>

The GM genocide: Thousands of Indian farmers are committing suicide after using genetically modified crops

By Andrew Malone
3rd November 2008

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1082559/The-GM-genocide-Thousands-Indian-farmers-committing-suicide-using-genetically-modified-crops.html

When Prince Charles claimed thousands of Indian farmers were killing themselves after using GM crops, he was branded a scaremonger. In fact, as this chilling dispatch reveals, it's even WORSE than he feared.

The children were inconsolable. Mute with shock and fighting back tears, they huddled beside their mother as friends and neighbours prepared their father's body for cremation on a blazing bonfire built on the cracked, barren fields near their home.

As flames consumed the corpse, Ganjanan, 12, and Kalpana, 14, faced a grim future. While Shankara Mandaukar had hoped his son and daughter would have a better life under India's economic boom, they now face working as slave labour for a few pence a day. Landless and homeless, they will be the lowest of the low.

Human tragedy: A farmer and child in India's 'suicide belt'

Shankara, respected farmer, loving husband and father, had taken his own life. Less than 24 hours earlier, facing the loss of his land due to debt, he drank a cupful of chemical insecticide.

Unable to pay back the equivalent of two years' earnings, he was in despair. He could see no way out.

There were still marks in the dust where he had writhed in agony. Other villagers looked on - they knew from experience that any intervention was pointless - as he lay doubled up on the ground, crying out in pain and vomiting.

Moaning, he crawled on to a bench outside his simple home 100 miles from Nagpur in central India. An hour later, he stopped making any noise. Then he stopped breathing. At 5pm on Sunday, the life of Shankara Mandaukar came to an end.

As neighbours gathered to pray outside the family home, Nirmala Mandaukar, 50, told how she rushed back from the fields to find her husband dead. 'He was a loving and caring man,' she said, weeping quietly.

'But he couldn't take any more. The mental anguish was too much. We have lost everything.'

Shankara's crop had failed - twice. Of course, famine and pestilence are part of India's ancient story.

But the death of this respected farmer has been blamed on something far more modern and sinister: genetically modified crops.

Shankara, like millions of other Indian farmers, had been promised previously unheard of harvests and income if he switched from farming with traditional seeds to planting GM seeds instead.

Distressed: Prince Charles has set up charity Bhumi Vardaan Foundation to address the plight of suicide farmers

Beguiled by the promise of future riches, he borrowed money in order to buy the GM seeds. But when the harvests failed, he was left with spiralling debts - and no income.

So Shankara became one of an estimated 125,000 farmers to take their own life as a result of the ruthless drive to use India as a testing ground for genetically modified crops.

The crisis, branded the 'GM Genocide' by campaigners, was highlighted recently when Prince Charles claimed that the issue of GM had become a 'global moral question' - and the time had come to end its unstoppable march.

Speaking by video link to a conference in the Indian capital, Delhi, he infuriated bio-tech leaders and some politicians by condemning 'the truly appalling and tragic rate of small farmer suicides in India, stemming... from the failure of many GM crop varieties'.

Ranged against the Prince are powerful GM lobbyists and prominent politicians, who claim that genetically modified crops have transformed Indian agriculture, providing greater yields than ever before.

The rest of the world, they insist, should embrace 'the future' and follow suit.

So who is telling the truth? To find out, I travelled to the 'suicide belt' in Maharashtra state.

What I found was deeply disturbing - and has profound implications for countries, including Britain, debating whether to allow the planting of seeds manipulated by scientists to circumvent the laws of nature.

For official figures from the Indian Ministry of Agriculture do indeed confirm that in a huge humanitarian crisis, more than 1,000 farmers kill themselves here each month.

Simple, rural people, they are dying slow, agonising deaths. Most swallow insecticide - a pricey substance they were promised they would not need when they were coerced into growing expensive GM crops.

It seems that many are massively in debt to local money-lenders, having over-borrowed to purchase GM seed.

Pro-GM experts claim that it is rural poverty, alcoholism, drought and 'agrarian distress' that is the real reason for the horrific toll.

But, as I discovered during a four-day journey through the epicentre of the disaster, that is not the full story.

Death seeds: A Greenpeace protester sprays milk-based paint on a Monsanto research soybean field near Atlantic, Iowa

In one small village I visited, 18 farmers had committed suicide after being sucked into GM debts. In some cases, women have taken over farms from their dead husbands - only to kill themselves as well.

Latta Ramesh, 38, drank insecticide after her crops failed - two years after her husband disappeared when the GM debts became too much.

She left her ten-year-old son, Rashan, in the care of relatives. 'He cries when he thinks of his mother,' said the dead woman's aunt, sitting listlessly in shade near the fields.

Village after village, families told how they had fallen into debt after being persuaded to buy GM seeds instead of traditional cotton seeds.

The price difference is staggering: £10 for 100 grams of GM seed, compared with less than £10 for 1,000 times more traditional seeds.

But GM salesmen and government officials had promised farmers that these were 'magic seeds' - with better crops that would be free from parasites and insects.

Indeed, in a bid to promote the uptake of GM seeds, traditional varieties were banned from many government seed banks.

The authorities had a vested interest in promoting this new biotechnology. Desperate to escape the grinding poverty of the post-independence years, the Indian government had agreed to allow new bio-tech giants, such as the U.S. market-leader Monsanto, to sell their new seed creations.

In return for allowing western companies access to the second most populated country in the world, with more than one billion people, India was granted International Monetary Fund loans in the Eighties and Nineties, helping to launch an economic revolution.

But while cities such as Mumbai and Delhi have boomed, the farmers' lives have slid back into the dark ages.

Though areas of India planted with GM seeds have doubled in two years - up to 17 million acres - many famers have found there is a terrible price to be paid.

Far from being 'magic seeds', GM pest-proof 'breeds' of cotton have been devastated by bollworms, a voracious parasite.

Nor were the farmers told that these seeds require double the amount of water. This has proved a matter of life and death.

With rains failing for the past two years, many GM crops have simply withered and died, leaving the farmers with crippling debts and no means of paying them off.

Having taken loans from traditional money lenders at extortionate rates, hundreds of thousands of small farmers have faced losing their land as the expensive seeds fail, while those who could struggle on faced a fresh crisis.

When crops failed in the past, farmers could still save seeds and replant them the following year.

But with GM seeds they cannot do this. That's because GM seeds contain so- called 'terminator technology', meaning that they have been genetically modified so that the resulting crops do not produce viable seeds of their own.

As a result, farmers have to buy new seeds each year at the same punitive prices. For some, that means the difference between life and death.

Take the case of Suresh Bhalasa, another farmer who was cremated this week, leaving a wife and two children.

As night fell after the ceremony, and neighbours squatted outside while sacred cows were brought in from the fields, his family had no doubt that their troubles stemmed from the moment they were encouraged to buy BT Cotton, a geneticallymodified plant created by Monsanto.

'We are ruined now,' said the dead man's 38-year-old wife. 'We bought 100 grams of BT Cotton. Our crop failed twice. My husband had become depressed. He went out to his field, lay down in the cotton and swallowed insecticide.'

Villagers bundled him into a rickshaw and headed to hospital along rutted farm roads. 'He cried out that he had taken the insecticide and he was sorry,' she said, as her family and neighbours crowded into her home to pay their respects. 'He was dead by the time they got to hospital.'

Asked if the dead man was a 'drunkard' or suffered from other 'social problems', as alleged by pro-GM officials, the quiet, dignified gathering erupted in anger. 'No! No!' one of the dead man's brothers exclaimed. 'Suresh was a good man. He sent his children to school and paid his taxes.

'He was strangled by these magic seeds. They sell us the seeds, saying they will not need expensive pesticides but they do. We have to buy the same seeds from the same company every year. It is killing us. Please tell the world what is happening here.'

Monsanto has admitted that soaring debt was a 'factor in this tragedy'. But pointing out that cotton production had doubled in the past seven years, a spokesman added that there are other reasons for the recent crisis, such as 'untimely rain' or drought, and pointed out that suicides have always been part of rural Indian life.

Officials also point to surveys saying the majority of Indian farmers want GM seeds  -  no doubt encouraged to do so by aggressive marketing tactics.

During the course of my inquiries in Maharastra, I encountered three 'independent' surveyors scouring villages for information about suicides. They insisted that GM seeds were only 50 per cent more expensive - and then later admitted the difference was 1,000 per cent.

(A Monsanto spokesman later insisted their seed is 'only double' the price of 'official' non-GM seed - but admitted that the difference can be vast if cheaper traditional seeds are sold by 'unscrupulous' merchants, who often also sell 'fake' GM seeds which are prone to disease.)

With rumours of imminent government compensation to stem the wave of deaths, many farmers said they were desperate for any form of assistance. 'We just want to escape from our problems,' one said. 'We just want help to stop any more of us dying.'

Prince Charles is so distressed by the plight of the suicide farmers that he is setting up a charity, the Bhumi Vardaan Foundation, to help those affected and promote organic Indian crops instead of GM.

India's farmers are also starting to fight back. As well as taking GM seed distributors hostage and staging mass protests, one state government is taking legal action against Monsanto for the exorbitant costs of GM seeds.

This came too late for Shankara Mandauker, who was 80,000 rupees (about £1,000) in debt when he took his own life. 'I told him that we can survive,' his widow said, her children still by her side as darkness fell. 'I told him we could find a way out. He just said it was better to die.'

But the debt does not die with her husband: unless she can find a way of paying it off, she will not be able to afford the children's schooling. They will lose their land, joining the hordes seen begging in their thousands by the roadside throughout this vast, chaotic country.

Cruelly, it's the young who are suffering most from the 'GM Genocide'  -  the very generation supposed to be lifted out of a life of hardship and misery by these 'magic seeds'.

Here in the suicide belt of India, the cost of the genetically modified future is murderously high.

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Children dying in Haiti

Hi, Impeachment Person,

I pass this article on to you--and the next one--because I believe every human being has a right not to suffer malnutrition and the diseases it causes. Henry Shue, in his book "Basic Rights" argues with perfect logic that human rights create obligations for every one of us to create the institutions that will actually deliver human rights.

 

In the 1970's this country committed itself to giving 0.7% of our GDP in official development aid. We have never delivered more than 20% of that, and we have spent the money primarily on supporting US military bases abroad--building things like golf courses--while making sure that 80% of the money goes to US corporations. The article below chronicles a typical result of our neglect. 

 

If you want to help immediately, you can of course donate to

www.doctorswithoutborders.org. But that's mere charity. It makes life a PRIVILEGE for which one is supposed to beg, and every time one again falls into destitution, one is supposed to again find the wherewithal to again find and notify the right person to beg from. These children are not supposed to be dependent on whether a few of us notice their plight and condescend to help a little. These children have a RIGHT not to die this way and we have the OBLIGATION to prevent their deaths. Please write to Obama and tell him you are sick and tired of our avoiding our obligations and that you want us to stop death by hunger now and for good. 

 

Richard Duffee      

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: <a.gronowicz@att.net>
Date: Tue, Nov 25, 2008 at 9:27 AM
Subject: USGP-INT Children dying in Haiti
To: usgp-int@gp-us.org

Aid workers: 26 malnourished children die in Haiti

Published: 11/20/08, 11:48 AM EDT
By JONATHAN M. KATZ

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AP) - At least 26 severely malnourished children have died in recent days in Haiti, and aid groups fear many more deaths unless more help comes quickly to this impoverished Caribbean country.

At least 65 other severely malnourished children have been treated on site or evacuated to hospitals, said Max Cosci, who heads the Belgian contingent of Doctors Without Borders in Haiti.

Hunger contributed to deaths likely caused by diarrhea, fever and other conditions over a two-week period but medical teams arrived too late to determine how each child died, Cosci said. The doctors did rule out a disease epidemic, however.

One evacuee, a 7-year-old girl abandoned by her family, died while being treated, Cosci told The Associated Press on Wednesday.

"The situation is extremely, extremely fragile and dangerous," Cosci said.

At a makeshift malnutrition ward at a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Port-au-Prince, about 10 emaciated children with swollen stomachs, sunken eyes and bleached hair are being given emergency care. Several have swollen faces, typical of kwashiorkor, a protein-deficiency disorder.

Five-year-old Mackenson Duclair teetered around the concrete floor on broomstick legs. He weighed just 9 kilograms (19.8 pounds), and that was after days of drinking enriched milk. Doctors weighed a girl with a wide yellow bow in her hair, her emaciated arms and legs dangling as she hung from a strap attached to a scale.

Haiti, the Western Hemisphere's poorest country, has been hit by spiraling food costs, which resulted in riots last spring, and then hurricanes and tropical storms that crippled food production.

U.N. World Food Program spokeswoman Hilary Clarke said she fears many more could have died in isolated parts of Haiti. Workers from the U.N., Haiti's government and other aid groups are visiting towns accessible only by foot or donkey, searching for pockets of malnutrition. "The question is how many of these pockets are there," Clarke said.

Copyright 2008 Associated Press. All rights reserved.
This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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Steve Fournier on Detroit

U$A Inc.

November 15th, 2008

If the United States government acquired the facilities for big-time automotive manufacturing and committed the nation to operate such an enterprise, employing factory workers and producing motor vehicles, it might make an interesting experiment in post-capitalist economics. We could manufacture the government fleet and transform it. We might provide for employee governance of day-to-day operations and a US government board to oversee the business, for example, or we might make it an independent agency. It could work if our factories made decent cars that were worth the cost of production, something the US for-profit sector hasn't been able to do.

What we wouldn't want would be a joint venture between government and private manufacturers for mutual profit. Public policy would have to run in favor of the government-sponsored enterprise and against competitors. That would signal the end of open markets in the automotive business and in every other industry in which government dabbled.

Private parties would have access to the federal treasury in such a scheme, and profits would be guaranteed. Try to imagine the new ways businessmen would find to corrupt public officials with the proceeds. We can see it already in government contracting, most recently with the conviction of a senior member of the US Senate, soon to join a contingent of congressmen in the federal slammer. With the government's acquisition of a share of private business, rich profiteers would wield greater influence than ever before over public institutions, public assets, and public employees.

Government participation in private business has been tried before. It was a mainstay of the National Socialist agenda in prewar Germany. So successful was the experiment that the Third Reich eventually turned conquered populations into a supply of slave labor for German business. The Nazi government's military adventures in Europe quickly became a profit-center for privileged capitalists, creating new incentives for a policy of conquest and occupation.

Another problem with public-private enterprise is selecting what to invest in. We seem to be concentrating everything on failing industries. The proposed partnership with GM and Ford is on the table, but the ink is dry on the deal with banking and finance. Finance used to be a conservative enterprise. Decisions were made with great deliberation and for the long term. Risks were kept to a minimum, largely because of the regulatory structure imposed on the industry after the crash of 1929.

With the rise of right-wing government and the corruption of conservatism by big money, predators gradually took over, detailing moles to Congress and the executive. Their mission: to destroy the regulatory framework that had kept racketeers at bay for 60 years. Facilitated by corrupt voices in the commercial media and both major political parties, the mission was accomplished.

Drunk with deregulation, banks and other financial networks defied tradition and ethical practice, bidding up assets with easy money, grabbing their profits up front and handing them out promptly to rich folks and their acolytes in organized crime, banking and government. These are the people we've just gone into partnership with. A better idea might have been to take control of all of the assets of an insurance company, for instance, and use the corporate infrastructure, including employees, to administer a single-payer health insurance plan.

And what about car manufacturing? The decision-makers in that industry bet everything on the filthy, wasteful technologies of the 20th Century and the foolish habits of a small number of sociopathic drivers. If the public ever accepts a stake in this, we become responsible for maintaining a market for the internal combustion engine, whose utility, outside of racing, is history. Moving a ton of steel at 90 miles per hour is so wasteful as to border on criminal conduct, and yet that's what the US car industry is peddling. It's unfortunate that the personal craving for speed and power, now obsolete, generates the principal livelihood of a considerable proportion of the working class. This is a model of economic instability, and it's an industry without a future.

Aren't we throwing good money after bad when we keep these failed concerns going just so people can go to work every day? Might as well invest in the buggy whip industry or horseshoe nail futures. Manufacturing concerns that trade on brand identification instead of quality and progress should perish along with the owners that spawned them, and banks that embraced the new model–get the money up front and damn the long term–should go the same way. Businesses that stuck to basics will survive without help, and they will take up whatever slack is created by the failure of their cutting-edge competitors. This is natural selection, where mortality makes for stronger institutions and a hardier economy.

BUILD A MOVEMENT TO BREAK THE BAILOUT

German Tedesco forwards this:

--- On Wed, 11/12/08, CFACP - BreakTheBailout.com <action@freshaircleanpolitics.net> wrote: From: CFACP - BreakTheBailout.com <action@freshaircleanpolitics.net> Subject: BUILD A MOVEMENT TO BREAK THE BAILOUT To: german@allamericanlimoservice.com Date: Wednesday, November 12, 2008, 2:02 PM PLEASE FORWARD AND BUILD A MOVEMENT TO BREAK THE BAILOUT Dear German, This week the Federal Reserve refused to identify the recipients of almost $2 trillion of emergency loans from American taxpayers or the troubled assets the central bank is accepting as collateral. And, AIG, the insurance giant made infamous for having a $450,000 party for their executives after receiving their first bailout check eight weeks ago is now getting more money from the U.S. Treasury - taxpayers are now giving them a total of $150 billion. Well, we've had enough. And, we know that the only way we are going to Break the Bailout and create an economy for the people and not the banksters is to get organized and work together. So, the Campaign for Fresh Air and Clean Politics has started a transpartisan coalition - the Break the Bailout campaign - visit www.BreakTheBailout.com to see what we're planning. Essentially, we're going to build a community, a citizen's movement, to fight for the economy we want and to Break the Bailout. We're going to be delivering blowback on the bailout to elected officials who are supposed to represent the people - the voters who put them in office - not big banks and Wall Street. We know the country is outraged and we're going to redirect that outrage into constructive action. We're going to educate the voters on what the bailout really means and organize them to demand change. Here's what we want you to do: Take action today, Break the Bailout tomorrow (1) PLEDGE - We're holding a MONEYBOMB on December 7, 2008 to show elected officials we're serious. Pledge today by filling out the "please pledge now" form on www.BreakTheBailout.com, then come back and join us on December 7 - the moneybomb day - to make your donation and watch the collections mount up. Become a Bailout Breaker! (2) Build community. Our adversaries act together, and so must we. (3) Get the word out. Help the American people to understand what is being done to them. Educate. Publicize. (4) Identify the persons responsible. Prepare voter guides and other educational materials telling people where their congresscritters stand on the bailout scam. (5) Be an activist. Let these people know they're not going to get away with it. Break the Bailout is going to be at the international conference being held this weekend in Washington, DC -- join us if you can. We'll be there with our allies from Break the Matrix to film the event and interview people working to break the bailout. You can watch the coverage and interviews on our website. And, on Monday at 8 PM eastern we will be inaugurating a new Internet television show entitled Break the Bailout. Acting alone, we can achieve nothing; acting together, we can change everything. Join us today. Sincerely, Kevin Zeese Executive Director Campaign for Fresh Air & Clean Politics Co-Founder Break the Bailout

© BreakTheBailout.com 2842 N. Calvert Street, Baltimore, MD 21218 Click here for unsubscribe options

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Please act to impeach Bush before the pardons start

HI!,

For a congressional representative, refusal to impeach at this point is likely to be based on the desire that future administrations have the same unconstitutional freedom of action Bush and Cheney have given themselves. The belief that we need an imperial presidency that can violate the law at will is founded on the belief that we are entitled to operate an empire--which can never be done by the means of limited government a republic allows. That Congress, even at this extremity, still refuses to impeach should be the single most alarming fact of the last eight years. 

 

The Democrats are now in a perfect position to organize impeachment. Even if the current Congress does not want to, the next Congress can. The in-coming Congress should start organizing itself now so that it can impeach between January 3 when it enters office and January 20 when Bush and Cheney leave. It can be done: many charges are patently clear, and the impeachment of Andrew Johnson took only 10 days.    

Richard Duffee: please see below and click on the link.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: HUTCH <info@impeachthem.com>
Date: Fri, Nov 14, 2008 at 8:54 AM
Subject: Everybody please do this today
To: HUTCH <info@impeachthem.com>

IMPEACH BUSH
Before He
Pardons Himself

http://www.impeachthem.com/?q=node/2220

A murderous "leader"

usalone.com — 14 November 2008 — According to Seymour Hersh there is a conga line of insiders waiting until January 20th to spill the beans on the gross criminality of the George Bush-Dick Cheney administration. Waiting . . . because if they did it now the two of them would be tarred and feathered on the way out the door.

— BUT WE PEOPLE DO NOT HAVE TO WAIT.

WE CAN AND MUST DEMAND THE IMMEDIATE IMPEACHMENT both Bush and Cheney for what is already known. At the very least the defiance of congressional subpoenas at the behest of the White House is an open and shut case for accountability now.

Impeach Now Action Page: http://www.usalone.com/impeach_now.php

PROSECUTE ALL OF THEM!

Because as his final constitutional insult, his final spit in the face to the American people and all rule of law, it is transparently obvious that Bush is planning the most wholesale and wrongful pardon of the worst political criminals in American history, his whole criminal gang, INCLUDING himself.

And don't think that is not their precise plan. Please, what power has Bush NOT abused? What heinous, self-serving, shameless and dishonest act has he ever shied away from, when he was torturing and eavesdropping and lying us into wars of corporate aggression. Does anyone doubt that is what he is planning on doing?

And when you submit this action page, you will have one last chance to get one of the "Impeach Both!!!" caps, which after January 20th will no longer be available from us for love or for money.

Impeach Now Action Page: http://www.usalone.com/impeach_now.php

Will Congress now act? That is not the yardstick of the worth of our activism. We speak out because we must speak out, whether we are heeded or not. Let history record that we spoke out until the last minute to the eternal shame of those who did not. Because when enough of us speak out at once, the worst thing that can possibly happen is that we are building the progressive base for the REAL change of the future.

So Bush most certainly is planning on pardoning himself. And all the right wing lock down ideologues in the corporate controlled media will call it "healing." Let's all make nice with war criminals? Shall we all make nice with the gang rape of our economy, our environment and our Constitution? We think not.

And one more thing. You know that come January 20th the right wing will start calling for the impeachment of our new president, over a endless litany of the most ridiculous of trivial trifles. In fact it has already started even though he has not even taken office. If they are so hot on impeaching someone, let them speak out now, when it truly is called for, or shut the hell up in 66 days.

Please TAKE ACTION NOW, so we can win all victories that are supposed to be ours, and forward this alert as widely as possible.

Copyright © 14 November 2008 The People's Email Network

Not Later

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Thank you absolutely to infinity and beyond.

Warm regards, solidarity,
love and the kitchen sink,
with high hopes for all our
futures, forever and a day,

POP

Stuart Hutchison
info@impeachthem.com
HUTCH. 973.406.7827

Cell 862.226.6939

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Wayne NJ 07470-5639

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