Finally, the Democrats are getting aggressive about Iraq and spending, with Senator Ted Kennedy leading the charge. Others are backing his play, but he has certainly gotten all of the media attention, and quite a few Republican attacks.
Senator Kennedy raises valid points:
1. We were deceived as a nation by the President and his cronies. The Iraq War was a boondoggle begun solely to benefit the President and his followers.
2. There is little accounting of where the money spent on Iraq is going. Even the White House doesn't really know. That $87 billion could fix a lot of problems here at home, not to mention the Defense budget blown on the invasion itself.
3. The President must come forth for an accounting on this issue.
Seems fair enough to me. Read the full story on Senator Kennedy's remarks below:
AP: Kennedy Says Iraq War Case a 'Fraud'
Thu Sep 18, 6:31 PM ET Add Politics - AP to My Yahoo!
By STEVE LeBLANC, Associated Press Writer
BOSTON - The case for going to war against Iraq (news - web sites) was a fraud "made up in Texas" to give Republicans a political boost, Sen. Edward Kennedy (news, bio, voting record) said Thursday.
In an interview with The Associated Press, Kennedy also said the Bush administration has failed to account for nearly half of the $4 billion the war is costing each month. He said he believes much of the unaccounted-for money is being used to bribe foreign leaders to send in troops.
He called the Bush administration's current Iraq policy "adrift."
The White House declined to comment Thursday.
The Massachusetts Democrat also expressed doubts about how serious a threat Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) posed to the United States in its battle against terrorism. He said administration officials relied on "distortion, misrepresentation, a selection of intelligence" to justify their case for war.
"There was no imminent threat. This was made up in Texas, announced in January to the Republican leadership that war was going to take place and was going to be good politically. This whole thing was a fraud," Kennedy said.
Kennedy said a recent report by the Congressional Budget Office (news - web sites) showed that only about $2.5 billion of the $4 billion being spent monthly on the war can be accounted for by the Bush administration.
"My belief is this money is being shuffled all around to these political leaders in all parts of the world, bribing them to send in troops," he said.
Of the $87 billion in new money requested by President Bush (news - web sites) for the war, Kennedy said the administration should be required to report back to the Congress to account for the spending.
"We want to support our troops because they didn't make the decision to go there ... but I don't think it should be open-ended. We ought to have a benchmark where the administration has to come back and give us a report," he added.
Kennedy said the focus on Iraq has drawn the nation's attention away from more direct threats, including al-Qaida, instability in Afghanistan (news - web sites) or the nuclear ambitions of North Korea (news - web sites).
"I think all of those pose a threat to the security of the people of Massachusetts much more than the threat from Iraq," Kennedy said. "Terror has been put on the sidelines for the last 12 months."
Kennedy was one of 23 senators who voted last October against authorizing Bush to use military force to disarm Iraq.
Earlier this year, he supported a Democratic amendment that would have delayed most of the president's proposed tax cuts, and most spending increases, until the administration provided cost estimates for the Iraq war. The amendment failed.
Despite the political and diplomatic wrangling of the past few months, it is important to remember that the United States and France have a long association built on friendship and comradeship in arms. They fought for us, we fought for them, we've fought each other.
The problem recently is that they have refused to blindly follow the lead of American politicians when those politicans clearly believed that they would and should do so.
Recently it has been proven that the french were right about Saddam Hussein - no links to al-Qaeda (but links to anti-Israel terrorists) and no WMDs. Which makes you wonder what all the ruckus was about.
Bill Moyers gets right to the point:
September 19, 2003 CONTRIBUTOR ARCHIVES
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Bill Moyers Commentary on the Ties that Bind: France and the U.S.
BUZZFLASH SPECIAL GUEST CONTRIBUTION
by Bill Moyers
We were in France last week. Seven old friends. One more reunion while there's time. We had a lot of catching up to do -- grandkids and all that.
On our last day drove a couple of hours out of Paris to visit for the first time some places we had heard about, long ago, from WWI veterans who were still around when we were growing up. The Marne River, Chateau-Thierry. Belleau Woods -- it was at these places, in the summer of 1918, that young Americans fresh from the United States were thrown into battle during the German Army's last great drive of the war, aimed at Paris itself. So fierce was the fighting that it took American Marines a month, at the loss of over half their men, to capture a single square mile -- the crucial strongpoint at Belleau Wood, defended by seasoned German troops who were astounded at how fiercely the Americans fought. By summer's end the Kaiser's army had been thrown back, Paris was spared, and the war would soon be over. Of the 310,000 Americans who took part in the action that summer, 67,000 were casualties...including the poet Joyce Kilmer and Quentin Roosevelt, the son of a president. Nothing was ever found of 1060 of the missing, their blood and bone mingled now in the fertile soil of the Marne Valley vineyards.
High above that valley, on a hill once marked by trenches and shell holes, stands a monument of 24 mighty columns and two heroic-size figures. Their hands are clasped -- a tribute, reads the inscription, to the French and American troops who fought here, and a lasting symbol of "the friendship and cooperation" between the two countries. A short drive away, we stopped at the American Protestant Church and studied the stained glass window showing General Blackjack Pershing, commander of the American Expeditionary Force in France, being greeted by General Lafayette. It's only the artist's fancy, of course. LaFayette was from another era -- the French nobleman who persuaded the French king to send 6000 troops to the aid of George Washington and who then led the army that cornered and whipped the British at Yorktown, securing the American revolution. Legend has it that when General Pershing set foot on French soil he had America's debt to France on his mind, and reputedly said: "Lafayette, we are here."
France and America have been allies for a long time now. The sentiment runs deep, despite differences over Iraq today.
Our taxi driver in Paris was listening to American jazz when he stopped for us. The owner of the little restaurant in the old bohemian district of Montmarte wore an American T-shirt and played American ballads while we had our lunch. A young Swedish woman, working in France, invited us to join with her French friends in a moment of silence on the anniversary of 9/11.
So the French were perplexed when a picture of President Bush appeared in newspapers last week. They didn't understand America's bellicosity, or why the President turns a deaf ear to others. They also think we're fighting the war against terrorism in the wrong way -- alone -- and in the wrong place -- Iraq.
In his column this week, The New York Times columnist Tom Friedman was tough on the French. He says France is becoming our enemy -- trying to foil our policy in the Middle East. But the French aren't alone in thinking America has become the lone ranger of the world.
Last week, even the Financial Times of London -- pro-American, pro-business, conservative to the bone -- threw up its hands in despair at Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rice. This is, said the lead editorial, a team whose "instinctive and ideological tendency" from the start has been "to regard international consultation and cooperation as a burdensome bore or intolerable constraint." Don't they know, the paper asked, that "alone the U.S. is far more vulnerable than it likes to believe, while in concert with free nations, it is far more powerful than even it can imagine."
This is something to think about on the battlefields of France. You think about the times we've helped each other, and how we still need each other to confront global terrorism. So you want to celebrate our ties, and nurture them. And that's what we did. We found an outdoor restaurant in a small village and ordered the specialty of the house. French fries. The real thing. French fries. As American as apple pie.
-Bill Moyers
From NOW with Bill Moyers
Friday, September 18, 2003, 9pm ET on PBS
(check local listings at http://www.pbs.org/now/sched.html)
BUZZFLASH SPECIAL GUEST CONTRIBUTION
Fr. Andrew Greeley hits the nail right on the head:
Big lie on Iraq comes full circle
September 19, 2003
BY ANDREW GREELEY Advertisement
Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's propaganda chief (director of communications, in the current parlance), once said that if you are going to lie, you should tell a big lie. That may be good advice, but the question remains: What happens when people begin to doubt the big lie? Herr Goebbels never lived to find out. Some members of the Bush administration may be in the process of discovering that, given time, the big lie turns on itself.
The president has insisted that Iraq is the central front in the war on terrorism, a continuation of the administration's effort to link Iraq to the attack on the World Trade Center. While almost three-quarters of the public believe that Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the attack, the polls after the president's recent speech show that less than half believe that Iraq is the ''central front'' of the war on terrorism. Moreover, the majority believe that the war has increased the risk of terrorism. A shift is occurring in the middle, which is neither clearly pro-Bush nor clearly anti-Bush. The big lie is coming apart.
There is not and never has been any evidence that Iraq was involved in the 9/11 attack. None. The implication of such involvement was an attempt to deceive, a successful attempt at the big lie.
I'm not sure that the president knows it is a lie, however.
Also, the weapons of mass destruction story was never true. It now appears that Saddam panicked in 1995 when his sons-in-law defected to Jordan and revealed the truth about his weapons development. He immediately ordered the destruction of all the evidence. The U.N. team before the war would have no more found any weapons than the Americans after the war.
Again, I'm not sure that the president knew the weapons argument was false. Perhaps some of his advisers believed it, or, as the Irish say, half-believed it. However, the American people now seem to suspect that they haven't been told the truth.
Why, then, did the United States invade Iraq if the reasons given for the war were so problematic? It would seem that the answer was the same as the reason as for climbing Mt. Everest: Iraq was there. The administration recited the ''war on terror'' mantra as a pretext for doing something that its intellectuals had wanted to do for years. No one in the administration expected that such a war would lead to more dangers of terrorism rather than less. The mantra has been used as an excuse for many things, from the Patriot Act to drilling for oil in Alaska. It won the 2002 election for the Republicans. It is supposed to win the presidential election next year. Will the big lie work? Perhaps, though it would seem that some are growing skeptical about its constant repetition.
Moreover, the corollary mantra, which says that Americans must make sacrifices to win the war on terror, is also in trouble. Who makes the sacrifices? The rich Americans celebrating their tax ''refunds''? The Republican leadership who have few if any sons and daughters in harm's way? Giant corporations like Dick Cheney's Halliburton or Bechtel? No, the sacrifices will be made mostly by the sons and daughters of the poor and the working class who must fight the war. Jessica Lynch joined the army so she could get money for a college education. Her roommate Lori Piestewa, who was killed in action, joined because she was a Native American single mother who needed the money to raise her two children.
There will be sacrifices made by schoolchildren who depend on state and local money, which has disappeared into the ''war effort,'' the elderly who will not benefit from prescription drug reform; the working men whose overtime pay the president wishes to cut; the chronically unemployed whose jobs have disappeared, and the future generations who will have to work to pay off the president's huge debt.
''War on terror'' is a metaphor. It is not an actual war, like the World War or the Vietnamese or Korean wars. It is rather a struggle against fanatical Islamic terrorists, exacerbated if not caused by the conflict in Palestine. When one turns a metaphor into a national policy, one not only misunderstands what is going on, one begins to slide toward the big lie. One invades Iraq because one needed a war.
We finally traded in the reliable old Jeep Wrangler on something a little more comfortable, stylish, and fuel efficient. This one has to get us through Heather's law school and my PhD.
The Jeep was solid and fun, but I think we were both ready for something that held four people and had good climate control and a smooth ride.
Did you know that if you are overheard making statements critical of the President that you could receive a visit from the United States Secret Service? Or that being seen reading something on a foreign language web site could cause you to receive a visit from the Federal Bureau of Investigations? Or that discussing bomb icons in a computer game over the telephone could cause the police to show up? Or that your access to an attorney could be withheld during questioning?
Believe it or not, all of these things have happened to American citizens in the United States in the past two years. These events are part of an alarming trend in the use of law enorcement powers granted under the USA Patriot Act. Despite what the Federal government ants you to believe, Patriot was not debated before Congress, it is not limited to terror investigations, and is not limited to foreign nationals. If you seem different, suspicious, or vocal about political opinions, you are at risk.
This is nothing I haven't said before. Repeatedly.
Why am I bringing up the Bush Administrations out and out disregard for the First, Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments to the Constitution? Because Attorney General John Ashcroft, who seems to be channeling Joseph Stalin, is traversing the nation touting the successes of the Patriot Act, his support for the First Amendment, and the need for even broader powers under Patriot II, also known as the Defense Security Enhancement Act.
The ACLU and other have put together some fairly damning information about how the Department of Justice is using Patriot to go after common ordinary criminals and how it is conducting seminars for law enforcement professionals on how they should use its provisions to investigate regular crimes.
The President, Attorney General, and other administration officials are all trying to sell the "war on terrorism" and the invasion of Iraq as ways to defend "Freedom" and "Democracy"against the evils of Islamist terrorism, but the methods they have chosen leave me wondering: Who is going to protect Freedom and Democracy from the Bush Administration?
For Those Who Wish to Dissent: Speech, Silence and Patriotism
By Sara Paretsky
Chicago Tribune
Sunday 21 September 2003
A cloud of unknowing surrounds St. Johns College in Santa Fe, Andrew O'Connor and his long interrogation by Albuquerque police and the Secret Service in February 2003. O'Connor was removed from the college library by police after he made negative comments about President Bush in an online chat room. But since he was ultimately released without being charged, he clearly had not threatened the president's life. What he said, how the police and Secret Service knew he said it, and the gag order on the college to keep people from talking about his arrest, are all shrouded in silence.
Similarly, we don't know what a New Jersey library user was reading the day another patron called the police to report that the man was looking at a foreign-language Web page. But the man was hauled off for questioning, held without being allowed to call his home or a lawyer, and then released without being charged. We also don't know why the FBI arrived at a California student's home hours after she talked on the phone about bomb icons in a video game she was playing.
The only thing we do know is that all these acts by police and FBI are legal under the USA Patriot Act. A few years ago, I was almost arrested in the middle of the night. The police stopped a hit man just before he reached his target. The hit man had a card with my name and the title of one of my books on the seat next to him, and the police were sure I was involved. But they had to get a warrant, and the assistant state's attorney wouldn't issue it. Today, though, the cops could just come and get me. And U.S. Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft thinks that's fine.
In fact, as Ashcroft has taken his dog-and-pony show on the road, he's been saying that not only is it good for the police to arrest me, or library patrons, or college students, without needing to show probable cause, they should have even more power. They should be able to search all our records, and to hold us without bail when they do arrest us. He says those of us objecting are "raising the phantom of lost liberty," and we're giving "ammunition to America's enemies."
I grew up in Kansas during the shadow of the Cold War, when religion and patriotism were conflated and we attended daylong revivals of religion and daylong lectures on patriotism. The local paper pilloried my parents for questioning the revivals, printing their phone number and urging readers to call them-- which happened for some months, usually in the middle of the night. A popular high school teacher had to resign because he was doing a PhD in Russian history--and only a communist would study Russia. In the larger society, Martin Luther King Jr. was hounded with lies claiming he was a communist, and Dashiell Hammett, who wrote "The Maltese Falcon," spent six months in prison for refusing to name names to the infamous House Un-American Activities Committee. Hammett's publishers even bowed to pressure from the House and briefly took his books out of print.
These days, the chill-silencing winds of my childhood are starting to blow at gale force again. I am a frightened citizen right now, more scared than I've been since the first few weeks after Sept. 11, 2001. The situation in post-war Iraq seems to be creating, not eliminating, new sources of terror, while the nation's worst blackout on Aug. 14 shows how vulnerable we are. And Ashcroft's response is to say that any questions about his policies, any questions about governmental lies, secrets or silences, is tantamount to treason.
When I started writing my most recent book, "Blacklist," it was under the shadow of the attack on the Twin Towers. I started writing it soon after Sept. 11--maybe too soon, when I was still feeling numbed and shocked. I started with my detective, V.I. Warshawski, in that state--it was the only way I could write, by having her express the reality of my feelings--the feelings we all had two years ago. During the 18 months it took me to write the book, the powers of the Patriot Act and the actions of the U.S. attorney general began frightening me almost as much as Al Qaeda.
Silence and speech are the hallmarks of my work: who can speak, what can they say, who will listen to them? In "Blacklist," V.I. gets penned into a smaller and smaller space by an array of business and political leaders who call on the power of the Patriot Act to silence her. She finally figures out a strategy to wriggle out of danger. But in the real world today, I don't know how someone would evade the police and political forces V.I. faces--I don't know how I would.
I think of Patrick Henry's cry to the Burgesses, "Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" and William Lloyd Garrison's cry to slavery forces, "I am in earnest. I will not equivocate; I will not excuse; I will not retreat a single inch; and I will be heard." I don't want ever to face the choice the U.S. Congress gave Dashiell Hammett: choose between prison and betraying my friends. I don't want to be pilloried in the papers, as my parents were, or have my books blacklisted. But even more, I hope if I am put to the test for my beliefs, I will be strong enough to stand with our true patriots, with Patrick Henry and William Lloyd Garrison, with Dashiell Hammett--and my parents.
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Sara Paretsky is a mystery novelist
You'd think that would be self-evident, right? Of course I'm not talking about the obvious dissimilarities here. I'm talking abour Conodoleeza Rice, PhD's assertion that the guerrilla war in post-war Iraq is the same scenario as that found in post-war Germany. She particularly references the WerWolfen, groups of Nazi partisans that were supposed ot enagge in a guerrilla movement along the lines of the french resistance, but meaner. She's wrong, and she knows it.
Before she became National Security Adviser, Dr. Rice wrote a book on post-war Germany, so she should be well aware of the circumstances there, and the plentiful differences between Iraq and Germany.
So what's the big deal? Dr. Rice, in an effort to defend the ongoing combat effort in Iraq, came out and tried to equate the two different situations. Dr. Rice has pretty much foregone any intimation that her academic credentials should be respected, because whe is raning pretty far from accepted truth.
http://slate.msn.com/id/2087768/
On the second anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, I'm not sure what to say. I'm quite conflicted. I'm saddened by the deaths and injuries caused by the attacks, outraged at the perpetrators, and appalled by the actions of the United States government.
I certainly can't put my thoughts and emotions into comprehensible words without being offensive to at least someone. I hate this feeling, just as I hate the way the President uses the tragedy of the day to further his own ends.
The blatant misrepresentation of who was behind the attacks and what is being done about them continues, most recently with a U.S. Army General in Iraq connecting the occupation by his men of a former Saddam Presidential Palace with the "war on terrorism" this morning on Good Morning America.
I should probably stop here.
On to some links:
Nathan Newman tries to put the 3,000 deaths in the attacks into perspective, while saying that he still mourns the tragedy. Check it out for an eye opener.
To see the world's reaction, check out this image gallery, link provided by Atrios. Please note the reactions in countries opposed to our war in Iraq and our treatment of Muslims. Criticism of France and Russia should bear in minf that Jaques Chirac was devastated and the flags at the Kremlin flew at half-staff. All of this goodwill has been squandered by the Bush Administrations tactics and stances since September 11th, 2001.
Finally, check out the restrictions on our liberties and abuses against foreigners in our borders -- we are on ur way to becoming that which we hate.
This time it's Donal Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense claiming that criticism and debate of U.S. policies in Iraq helps our enemies.
It seems to me that Republicans trot this argument out every time they want to use their misguided definition of patriotism to silence their critics, and they are using the blood of our soldiers to accomplish it.
Mr. Rumsfeld, along with his allies, appear to be sadly deficient in two important areas. The first is obviously the First Amendment to the Constitution, which should be forcibly tattooed to the foreheads of every politician in the nation. The second is the American history of dissension during wartime.
The First Amendment obviously protects the ability of Americans to publicly disagree with the government. It is specifically not restricted by time of war or national emergency. This ensures that Americans can continue to debate war policies and aims.
Our history shows that we have used our First Amendment rights, sometimes quite vociferously, during time of war. This was true during the Civil War after President Lincoln suspended Habeas Corpus, it was true during World War II, and it was definitely true of Vietnam.
Part of the problem with Mr. Rumsfeld and his ilk is that their memories of the effects of mass protest during Vietnam are skewed. Press coverage, debate, and protests did not defeat us. Our mis-understanding of the nature of the war we were fighting, including the nature of our opponent and our choice of tactics defeated us.
The Bush Administration needs to get over this self-inflicted pose that any disagreement with their policies is treason, and they need to stomp on those of their followers that perpetrate this garbage.
The state of Florida is pushing some sort of twisted agenda with its Character First! training of state employees in DCF and some county positions, I'm just not sure what it is.
Some are convinced that the training is designed to push conservative Christian beliefs in what should be a secular setting. I'm not sure about that, because I didn't catch any explicit references to God in the Orlando Sentinel article about it. What I did see was a push toward docility, passivity, and unquestioning aceptance of those in positions of authority.
The claims that this is rooted in a religious setting are based on two things:
1. The Character Training Institute's provide a program is patterned after one by conservative Christian evangelist Bill Gothard.
2. DCF's secretary Jerry Regier argued the Bible supports "smiting" children to discipline them and that women should be "workers at home" to be near their children.
I'm not sure you can directly correlate this into a government pushing religion, but there are supposedly direct correlations between all of the 49 points each uses.
I think some of the points may be a problem, though. The Sentinel had three examples:
* Meekness versus Anger -- Yielding my personal rights and expectations with a desire to serve.
* Obedience versus Willfulness -- Quickly and cheerfully carrying out the direction of those who are responsible for me.
*Flexibility versus Resistance -- Willingness to change plans or ideas according to the direction of my authorities.
Sounds authoritarian to me, or at least a value system designed to undermine Democracy and keep people in power. Maybe I'm reding things that aren't there into it, but these days I'm very suspicious when government agencies start telling people to shut-up and just go along.
Here's the text of Al Gore's speech criticizing President Bush's policies, particularly the tax cut and war in Iraq. If Al had been like this during the campaign, the election wouldn't have been close enough for the U.S. Supreme Court to steal it.
Former Vice President Al Gore
Remarks to MoveOn.org
New York University
August 7, 2003
-AS PREPARED-
Ladies and Gentlemen:
Thank you for your investment of time and energy in gathering here today. I would especially like to thank Moveon.org for sponsoring this event, and the NYU College Democrats for co-sponsoring the speech and for hosting us.
Some of you may remember that my last formal public address on these topics was delivered in San Francisco, a little less than a year ago, when I argued that the President's case for urgent, unilateral, pre-emptive war in Iraq was less than convincing and needed to be challenged more effectively by the Congress.
In light of developments since then, you might assume that my purpose today is to revisit the manner in which we were led into war. To some extent, that will be the case - but only as part of a larger theme that I feel should now be explored on an urgent basis.
The direction in which our nation is being led is deeply troubling to me -- not only in Iraq but also here at home on economic policy, social policy and environmental policy.
Millions of Americans now share a feeling that something pretty basic has gone wrong in our country and that some important American values are being placed at risk. And they want to set it right.
The way we went to war in Iraq illustrates this larger problem. Normally, we Americans lay the facts on the table, talk through the choices before us and make a decision. But that didn't really happen with this war -- not the way it should have. And as a result, too many of our soldiers are paying the highest price, for the strategic miscalculations, serious misjudgments, and historic mistakes that have put them and our nation in harm's way.
I'm convinced that one of the reasons that we didn't have a better public debate before the Iraq War started is because so many of the impressions that the majority of the country had back then turn out to have been completely wrong. Leaving aside for the moment the question of how these false impressions got into the public's mind, it might be healthy to take a hard look at the ones we now know were wrong and clear the air so that we can better see exactly where we are now and what changes might need to be made.
In any case, what we now know to have been false impressions include the following:
(1) Saddam Hussein was partly responsible for the attack against us on September 11th, 2001, so a good way to respond to that attack would be to invade his country and forcibly remove him from power.
(2) Saddam was working closely with Osama Bin Laden and was actively supporting members of the Al Qaeda terrorist group, giving them weapons and money and bases and training, so launching a war against Iraq would be a good way to stop Al Qaeda from attacking us again.
(3) Saddam was about to give the terrorists poison gas and deadly germs that he had made into weapons which they could use to kill millions of Americans. Therefore common sense alone dictated that we should send our military into Iraq in order to protect our loved ones and ourselves against a grave threat.
(4) Saddam was on the verge of building nuclear bombs and giving them to the terrorists. And since the only thing preventing Saddam from acquiring a nuclear arsenal was access to enriched uranium, once our spies found out that he had bought the enrichment technology he needed and was actively trying to buy uranium from Africa, we had very little time left. Therefore it seemed imperative during last Fall's election campaign to set aside less urgent issues like the economy and instead focus on the congressional resolution approving war against Iraq.
(5) Our GI's would be welcomed with open arms by cheering Iraqis who would help them quickly establish public safety, free markets and Representative Democracy, so there wouldn't be that much risk that US soldiers would get bogged down in a guerrilla war.
(6) Even though the rest of the world was mostly opposed to the war, they would quickly fall in line after we won and then contribute lots of money and soldiers to help out, so there wouldn't be that much risk that US taxpayers would get stuck with a huge bill.
Now, of course, everybody knows that every single one of these impressions was just dead wrong.
For example, according to the just-released Congressional investigation, Saddam had nothing whatsoever to do with the attacks of Sept. 11. Therefore, whatever other goals it served -- and it did serve some other goals -- the decision to invade Iraq made no sense as a way of exacting revenge for 9/11. To the contrary, the US pulled significant intelligence resources out of Pakistan and Afghanistan in order to get ready for the rushed invasion of Iraq and that disrupted the search for Osama at a critical time. And the indifference we showed to the rest of the world's opinion in the process undermined the global cooperation we need to win the war against terrorism.
In the same way, the evidence now shows clearly that Saddam did not want to work with Osama Bin Laden at all, much less give him weapons of mass destruction. So our invasion of Iraq had no effect on Al Qaeda, other than to boost their recruiting efforts.
And on the nuclear issue of course, it turned out that those documents were actually forged by somebody -- though we don't know who.
As for the cheering Iraqi crowds we anticipated, unfortunately, that didn't pan out either, so now our troops are in an ugly and dangerous situation.
Moreover, the rest of the world certainly isn't jumping in to help out very much the way we expected, so US taxpayers are now having to spend a billion dollars a week.
In other words, when you put it all together, it was just one mistaken impression after another. Lots of them.
And it's not just in foreign policy. The same thing has been happening in economic policy, where we've also got another huge and threatening mess on our hands. I'm convinced that one reason we've had so many nasty surprises in our economy is that the country somehow got lots of false impressions about what we could expect from the big tax cuts that were enacted, including:
(1) The tax cuts would unleash a lot of new investment that would create lots of new jobs.
(2) We wouldn't have to worry about a return to big budget deficits -- because all the new growth in the economy caused by the tax cuts would lead to a lot of new revenue.
(3) Most of the benefits would go to average middle-income families, not to the wealthy, as some partisans claimed.
Unfortunately, here too, every single one of these impressions turned out to be wrong. Instead of creating jobs, for example, we are losing millions of jobs -- net losses for three years in a row. That hasn't happened since the Great Depression. As I've noted before, I was the first one laid off.
And it turns out that most of the benefits actually are going to the highest income Americans, who unfortunately are the least likely group to spend money in ways that create jobs during times when the economy is weak and unemployment is rising.
And of course the budget deficits are already the biggest ever - with the worst still due to hit us. As a percentage of our economy, we've had bigger ones -- but these are by far the most dangerous we've ever had for two reasons: first, they're not temporary; they're structural and long-term; second, they are going to get even bigger just at the time when the big baby-boomer retirement surge starts.
Moreover, the global capital markets have begun to recognize the unprecedented size of this emerging fiscal catastrophe. In truth, the current Executive Branch of the U.S. Government is radically different from any since the McKinley Administration 100 years ago.
The 2001 winner of the Nobel Prize for Economics, George Akerlof, went even further last week in Germany when he told Der Spiegel, "This is the worst government the US has ever had in its more than 200 years of history...This is not normal government policy." In describing the impact of the Bush policies on America's future, Akerloff added, "What we have here is a form of looting."
Ominously, the capital markets have just pushed U.S. long-term mortgage rates higher soon after the Federal Reserve Board once again reduced discount rates. Monetary policy loses some of its potency when fiscal policy comes unglued. And after three years of rate cuts in a row, Alan Greenspan and his colleagues simply don't have much room left for further reductions.
This situation is particularly dangerous right now for several reasons: first because home-buying fueled by low rates (along with car-buying, also a rate-sensitive industry) have been just about the only reliable engines pulling the economy forward; second, because so many Americans now have Variable Rate Mortgages; and third, because average personal debt is now at an all-time high -- a lot of Americans are living on the edge.
It seems obvious that big and important issues like the Bush economic policy and the first Pre-emptive War in U.S. history should have been debated more thoroughly in the Congress, covered more extensively in the news media, and better presented to the American people before our nation made such fateful choices. But that didn't happen, and in both cases, reality is turning out to be very different from the impression that was given when the votes -- and the die -- were cast.
Since this curious mismatch between myth and reality has suddenly become commonplace and is causing such extreme difficulty for the nation's ability to make good choices about our future, maybe it is time to focus on how in the world we could have gotten so many false impressions in such a short period of time.
At first, I thought maybe the President's advisers were a big part of the problem. Last fall, in a speech on economic policy at the Brookings Institution, I called on the President to get rid of his whole economic team and pick a new group. And a few weeks later, damned if he didn't do just that - and at least one of the new advisers had written eloquently about the very problems in the Bush economic policy that I was calling upon the President to fix.
But now, a year later, we still have the same bad economic policies and the problems have, if anything, gotten worse. So obviously I was wrong: changing all the president's advisers didn't work as a way of changing the policy.
I remembered all that last month when everybody was looking for who ought to be held responsible for the false statements in the President's State of the Union Address. And I've just about concluded that the real problem may be the President himself and that next year we ought to fire him and get a new one.
But whether you agree with that conclusion or not, whether you're a Democrat or a Republican -- or an Independent, a Libertarian, a Green or a Mugwump -- you've got a big stake in making sure that Representative Democracy works the way it is supposed to. And today, it just isn't working very well. We all need to figure out how to fix it because we simply cannot keep on making such bad decisions on the basis of false impressions and mistaken assumptions.
Earlier, I mentioned the feeling many have that something basic has gone wrong. Whatever it is, I think it has a lot to do with the way we seek the truth and try in good faith to use facts as the basis for debates about our future -- allowing for the unavoidable tendency we all have to get swept up in our enthusiasms.
That last point is worth highlighting. Robust debate in a democracy will almost always involve occasional rhetorical excesses and leaps of faith, and we're all used to that. I've even been guilty of it myself on occasion. But there is a big difference between that and a systematic effort to manipulate facts in service to a totalistic ideology that is felt to be more important than the mandates of basic honesty.
Unfortunately, I think it is no longer possible to avoid the conclusion that what the country is dealing with in the Bush Presidency is the latter. That is really the nub of the problem -- the common source for most of the false impressions that have been frustrating the normal and healthy workings of our democracy.
Americans have always believed that we the people have a right to know the truth and that the truth will set us free. The very idea of self-government depends upon honest and open debate as the preferred method for pursuing the truth -- and a shared respect for the Rule of Reason as the best way to establish the truth.
The Bush Administration routinely shows disrespect for that whole basic process, and I think it's partly because they feel as if they already know the truth and aren't very curious to learn about any facts that might contradict it. They and the members of groups that belong to their ideological coalition are true believers in each other's agendas.
There are at least a couple of problems with this approach:
First, powerful and wealthy groups and individuals who work their way into the inner circle -- with political support or large campaign contributions -- are able to add their own narrow special interests to the list of favored goals without having them weighed against the public interest or subjected to the rule of reason. And the greater the conflict between what they want and what's good for the rest of us, the greater incentive they have to bypass the normal procedures and keep it secret.
That's what happened, for example, when Vice President Cheney invited all of those oil and gas industry executives to meet in secret sessions with him and his staff to put their wish lists into the administration's legislative package in early 2001.
That group wanted to get rid of the Kyoto Treaty on Global Warming, of course, and the Administration pulled out of it first thing. The list of people who helped write our nation's new environmental and energy policies is still secret, and the Vice President won't say whether or not his former company, Halliburton, was included. But of course, as practically everybody in the world knows, Halliburton was given a huge open-ended contract to take over and run the Iraqi oil fields-- without having to bid against any other companies.
Secondly, when leaders make up their minds on a policy without ever having to answer hard questions about whether or not it's good or bad for the American people as a whole, they can pretty quickly get into situations where it's really uncomfortable for them to defend what they've done with simple and truthful explanations. That's when they're tempted to fuzz up the facts and create false impressions. And when other facts start to come out that undermine the impression they're trying to maintain, they have a big incentive to try to keep the truth bottled up if -- they can -- or distort it.
For example, a couple of weeks ago, the White House ordered its own EPA to strip important scientific information about the dangers of global warming out of a public report. Instead, the White House substituted information that was partly paid for by the American Petroleum Institute. This week, analysts at the Treasury Department told a reporter that they're now being routinely ordered to change their best analysis of what the consequences of the Bush tax laws are likely to be for the average person.
Here is the pattern that I see: the President's mishandling of and selective use of the best evidence available on the threat posed by Iraq is pretty much the same as the way he intentionally distorted the best available evidence on climate change, and rejected the best available evidence on the threat posed to America's economy by his tax and budget proposals.
In each case, the President seems to have been pursuing policies chosen in advance of the facts -- policies designed to benefit friends and supporters -- and has used tactics that deprived the American people of any opportunity to effectively subject his arguments to the kind of informed scrutiny that is essential in our system of checks and balances.
The administration has developed a highly effective propaganda machine to imbed in the public mind mythologies that grow out of the one central doctrine that all of the special interests agree on, which -- in its purest form -- is that government is very bad and should be done away with as much as possible -- except the parts of it that redirect money through big contracts to industries that have won their way into the inner circle.
For the same reasons they push the impression that government is bad, they also promote the myth that there really is no such thing as the public interest. What's important to them is private interests. And what they really mean is that those who have a lot of wealth should be left alone, rather than be called upon to reinvest in society through taxes.
Perhaps the biggest false impression of all lies in the hidden social objectives of this Administration that are advertised with the phrase "compassionate conservatism" -- which they claim is a new departure with substantive meaning. But in reality, to be compassionate is meaningless, if compassion is limited to the mere awareness of the suffering of others. The test of compassion is action. What the administration offers with one hand is the rhetoric of compassion; what it takes away with the other hand are the financial resources necessary to make compassion something more than an empty and fading impression.
Maybe one reason that false impressions have a played a bigger role than they should is that both Congress and the news media have been less vigilant and exacting than they should have been in the way they have tried to hold the Administration accountable.
Whenever both houses of Congress are controlled by the President's party, there is a danger of passivity and a temptation for the legislative branch to abdicate its constitutional role. If the party in question is unusually fierce in demanding ideological uniformity and obedience, then this problem can become even worse and prevent the Congress from properly exercising oversight. Under these circumstances, the majority party in the Congress has a special obligation to the people to permit full Congressional inquiry and oversight rather than to constantly frustrate and prevent it.
Whatever the reasons for the recent failures to hold the President properly accountable, America has a compelling need to quickly breathe new life into our founders' system of checks and balances -- because some extremely important choices about our future are going to be made shortly, and it is imperative that we avoid basing them on more false impressions.
One thing the President could do to facilitate the restoration of checks and balances is to stop blocking reasonable efforts from the Congress to play its rightful role. For example, he could order his appointees to cooperate fully with the bipartisan National Commission on Terrorist Attacks, headed by former Republican Governor Tom Kean. And he should let them examine how the White House handled the warnings that are said to have been given to the President by the intelligence community.
Two years ago yesterday, for example, according to the Wall Street Journal, the President was apparently advised in specific language that Al Qaeda was going to hijack some airplanes to conduct a terrorist strike inside the U.S.
I understand his concern about people knowing exactly what he read in the privacy of the Oval Office, and there is a legitimate reason for treating such memos to the President with care. But that concern has to be balanced against the national interest in improving the way America deals with such information. And the apparently chaotic procedures that were used to handle the forged nuclear documents from Niger certainly show evidence that there is room for improvement in the way the White House is dealing with intelligence memos. Along with other members of the previous administration, I certainly want the commission to have access to any and all documents sent to the White House while we were there that have any bearing on this issue. And President Bush should let the commission see the ones that he read too.
After all, this President has claimed the right for his executive branch to send his assistants into every public library in America and secretly monitor what the rest of us are reading. That's been the law ever since the Patriot Act was enacted. If we have to put up with such a broad and extreme invasion of our privacy rights in the name of terrorism prevention, surely he can find a way to let this National Commission know how he and his staff handled a highly specific warning of terrorism just 36 days before 9/11.
And speaking of the Patriot Act, the president ought to reign in John Ashcroft and stop the gross abuses of civil rights that twice have been documented by his own Inspector General. And while he's at it, he needs to reign in Donald Rumsfeld and get rid of that DoD "Total Information Awareness" program that's right out of George Orwell's 1984.
The administration hastened from the beginning to persuade us that defending America against terror cannot be done without seriously abridging the protections of the Constitution for American citizens, up to and including an asserted right to place them in a form of limbo totally beyond the authority of our courts. And that view is both wrong and fundamentally un-American.
But the most urgent need for new oversight of the Executive Branch and the restoration of checks and balances is in the realm of our security, where the Administration is asking that we accept a whole cluster of new myths:
For example, the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty was an effort to strike a bargain between states possessing nuclear weapons and all others who had pledged to refrain from developing them. This administration has rejected it and now, incredibly, wants to embark on a new program to build a brand new generation of smaller (and it hopes, more usable) nuclear bombs. In my opinion, this would be true madness -- and the point of no return to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty -- even as we and our allies are trying to prevent a nuclear testing breakout by North Korea and Iran.
Similarly, the Kyoto treaty is an historic effort to strike a grand bargain between free-market capitalism and the protection of the global environment, now gravely threatened by rapidly accelerating warming of the Earth's atmosphere and the consequent disruption of climate patterns that have persisted throughout the entire history of civilization as we know it. This administration has tried to protect the oil and coal industries from any restrictions at all -- though Kyoto may become legally effective for global relations even without U.S. participation.
Ironically, the principal cause of global warming is our civilization's addiction to burning massive quantities carbon-based fuels, including principally oil -- the most important source of which is the Persian Gulf, where our soldiers have been sent for the second war in a dozen years -- at least partly to ensure our continued access to oil.
We need to face the fact that our dangerous and unsustainable consumption of oil from a highly unstable part of the world is similar in its consequences to all other addictions. As it becomes worse, the consequences get more severe and you have to pay the dealer more.
And by now, it is obvious to most Americans that we have had one too many wars in the Persian Gulf and that we need an urgent effort to develop environmentally sustainable substitutes for fossil fuels and a truly international effort to stabilize the Persian Gulf and rebuild Iraq.
The removal of Saddam from power is a positive accomplishment in its own right for which the President deserves credit, just as he deserves credit for removing the Taliban from power in Afghanistan. But in the case of Iraq, we have suffered enormous collateral damage because of the manner in which the Administration went about the invasion. And in both cases, the aftermath has been badly mishandled.
The administration is now trying to give the impression that it is in favor of NATO and UN participation in such an effort. But it is not willing to pay the necessary price, which is support of a new UN Resolution and genuine sharing of control inside Iraq.
If the 21st century is to be well started, we need a national agenda that is worked out in concert with the people, a healing agenda that is built on a true national consensus. Millions of Americans got the impression that George W. Bush wanted to be a "healer, not a divider", a president devoted first and foremost to "honor and integrity." Yet far from uniting the people, the president's ideologically narrow agenda has seriously divided America. His most partisan supporters have launched a kind of 'civil cold war' against those with whom they disagree.
And as for honor and integrity, let me say this: we know what that was all about, but hear me well, not as a candidate for any office, but as an American citizen who loves my country:
For eight years, the Clinton-Gore Administration gave this nation honest budget numbers; an economic plan with integrity that rescued the nation from debt and stagnation; honest advocacy for the environment; real compassion for the poor; a strengthening of our military -- as recently proven -- and a foreign policy whose purposes were elevated, candidly presented and courageously pursued, in the face of scorched-earth tactics by the opposition. That is also a form of honor and integrity, and not every administration in recent memory has displayed it.
So I would say to those who have found the issue of honor and integrity so useful as a political tool, that the people are also looking for these virtues in the execution of public policy on their behalf, and will judge whether they are present or absent.
I am proud that my party has candidates for president committed to those values. I admire the effort and skill they are putting into their campaigns. I am not going to join them, but later in the political cycle I will endorse one of them, because I believe that we must stand for a future in which the United States will again be feared only by its enemies; in which our country will again lead the effort to create an international order based on the rule of law; a nation which upholds fundamental rights even for those it believes to be its captured enemies; a nation whose financial house is in order; a nation where the market place is kept healthy by effective government scrutiny; a country which does what is necessary to provide for the health, education, and welfare of our people; a society in which citizens of all faiths enjoy equal standing; a republic once again comfortable that its chief executive knows the limits as well as the powers of the presidency; a nation that places the highest value on facts, not ideology, as the basis for all its great debates and decisions.
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So is anyone else wondering why 300 people protesting the removal of a judge's unconstitutional monument of the Ten Commandments (which was placed during the dead of night in the courthouse rotunda) is new worthy of continuous updates, but 100,000 peace protesters marching in New Yrok City, San Francisco, or Washington, D.C. was dismissed as a bunch of freaks?
So why hasn't the media in this country made a bigger deal about Ossama's kin being allowed to leave the U.S. by plane when the rest of us could travel?
If nothing else, these people should have been questioned about their knowledge of his activities, particularly givene their reported (earlier, here) residence four doors down from some of the WTC terrorists.
Is this stupidity, collusion, or more Bush family connections to the Saudis?
http://www.edinburghnews.com/index.cfm?id=971322003
Most of the people who read my increasingly infrequent posts probably know about the President's plan to kill overtime pay for people who can be classified as "responsible", "skilled", or "important" in their job function, particularly if they make more than $21,000 per year.
What they likely don't know is that despite the 100,000 faxes and letters sent to the Senate over the past couple of days, the Mr. Bush has threatened to VETO any legislation that attempts to protect overtime pay.
for people who don't see the problem, lets put it in perspective. For me, a couple fo hours of overtime pay is nice (the 20+ hours from the virus outbreak is very nice). For the people this hits most, it will cost them up to 50% of their annual income. That's right. Half. Most of these people are dockworkers, truck drivers, auto workers, and other skilled people who work in moderately lucrative jobs. If they lose their overtime, they could drop from $60,000 per year to $30,000.
So please contact your Senators and reps to keep this frmo happening. CHeck the info below to do so.
September 4, 2003
You are amazing! In the first 48 hours after we sent
our e-mail alert on Tuesday, you and people like you
sent more than 100,000 faxes to U.S. senators and representatives
urging them to block the Bush overtime pay cuts. This
is fantastic--because this fight is an emergency. In
response to this massive response from people like
you, the Bush White House has just threatened to VETO
LEGISLATION TO PROTECT OVERTIME PAY. To save overtime
pay, the 40-hour workweek and the weekend, we need
you to counter veto power with people power.
Each of us has an e-mail circle--friends, family and
co-workers--we send e-mails to. A new poll shows that
three in four Americans oppose the Bush administration's
proposal. So, chances are the vast majority of your
e-mail circle would act to stop these changes.
If you can, please send ALL of them an e-mail urging
them to take action to protect overtime pay. Even people
who wouldn't usually be interested in this sort of
thing are very concerned about the attack on overtime
pay--but only if they hear about it.
There are two ways you can spread the word.
Send a message to your e-mail circle, using our easy
web form, by clicking below.
http://www.unionvoice.org/campaign/septovertime/forward/idedxz95wd6
Or, if it is easier, copy and paste the letter below
into an e-mail message that you send to your e-mail
circle. Either way, the goal is to get this call to
action around to as many people as possible.
\/==\/==\/==\/ COPY AND PASTE BELOW \/==\/==\/==\/
Dear Friends,
The Bush administration's cuts in overtime pay and
changes in the rules that are the foundation of the
40-hour workweek and the weekend will soon become law,
unless the U.S. Senate blocks them. More than 8 million
workers could lose their overtime pay and protections
under these changes.
The AFL-CIO has setup a webpage that allows anyone,
union members and nonmembers, to send faxes to their
U.S. senators about this outrageous change. Overtime
work should be compensated with overtime pay. Working
families depend on it. Please click on the link below
to fax your U.S. senators and urge them not to take
away overtime pay from any worker.
http://www.unionvoice.org/campaign/septovertime/
Thanks!
/\==/\==/\==/\ COPY AND PASTE ABOVE /\==/\==/\==/\
You might also be on some e-mail lists. Send a message
to the people in charge of those lists and ask them
to help.
Together we can win. Thanks for all that you do.
Will the wonders never cease? The hot new political issue among Alabama's evangelical Christian groups is whether Alabama's tax rate should be changed in order to fix the state's budget deficit and raise money to help educate Alabama's poor.
The new movement is largely based on the thesis of a Beeson divity student who wrote a 111 page thesis that discusses tax-rates and their effects on the state's working poor, and then connects reform the tax system with Jesus' sympathy and respect for the poor.
You can read the article on Tapped, or below.
Politics:
Divine Right: From the belly of the southern conservative beast, a small group of Christians set out to change the way the pious think about politics. Francis Wilkinson reports from Alabama.
General Interest: Robert Kuttner on why Wesley Clark could be a welcome addition to the Democratic field.
Labor Lost: Harold Meyerson says that in Wal-Mart's America, worker rights are not a priority.
Ineptitude Redefined: Stereotype holds that the GOP is the party of sober competence. But the opposite is true. Michael Tomasky explains.
The Permanent Election: Robert B. Reich on the disquieting shift of American politics toward continuous battle.
Shifting Sands: Jason Vest on how neocons keep changing their facts to suit their theories.
Party Favor: Mary Lynn F. Jones watches Dean fire up the Democratic faithful in northern Virginia.
Free Speech: Read Al Gore's recent anti-administration indictment in its entirety. Plus, Robert Kuttner on language and leadership.
Electrical Storm: Robert Kuttner says the real culprit behind last week's blackout is the treatment of electric power as an ordinary commodity.
First Offense: Harold Meyerson traces the California recall back to its flawed Progressive beginnings.
Eight Lies: Michael Tomasky counts the president's prevarications on Iraq -- and tallies their consequences.
Send a letter to the editor.
Books & Culture:
Paranormal Progressivism: Ashley Glacel spells out the eerie similarities between Harry Potter's politics and ours.
Oil Painting: Laura Rozen reviews Robert Baer's Sleeping with the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude, which offers an in-depth picture of dirty dealings.
Queer Factor: Noy Thrupkaew asks whether Bravo's latest shows are the new gay minstrelsy.
Cut Below: Noy Thrupkaew says FX's new plastic-surgery drama needs to go deeper.
Usual Suspect: Morgan Meis on why last month's bombings suggest the enduring significance of Casablanca -- and Casablanca.
Graphic Equalizer: Noy Thrupkaew on how a comic-book novelist is capturing the essence of a charged moment in Iran.
Pill Pushovers: Carl Elliott on Katherine Greider's The Big Fix and the pharmaceutical industry's hold on doctors.
The Warrior's Tale: From the upcoming issue of the Prospect: Cass R. Sunstein on Sidney Blumenthal's The Clinton Wars.
Send a letter to the editor.
Divine Right
From the belly of the southern conservative beast, a small group of Christians set out to change the way the pious think about politics.
By Francis Wilkinson
Web Exclusive: 8.28.03
Print Friendly | Email Article
MONTGOMERY, Ala. -- For the first time since black ministers and some of their white brethren marched arm in arm in the civil-rights era, a group of Christians in the South are championing social and economic justice for the dispossessed as a matter of spiritual imperative. Curiously, or perhaps inevitably, the spawning grounds of this progressive movement are Montgomery and Birmingham, Ala., those fiery stations of the civil-rights cross. But as if determined to defy the most cherished stereotypes and bedrock prejudices of enlightened liberals everywhere, the primary actors in this campaign are the kind of white, conservative, Billy Graham evangelicals to whom Martin Luther King, Jr. addressed his Letter from Birmingham Jail -- a missive that, in its day, achieved a resounding absence of effect.
On Sept. 9, Alabama citizens will vote on a proposal to reform the state's regressive tax code. Whether or not the measure passes -- and both opinion polls and Alabama history suggest it will fail -- the story of how a progressive tax initiative became the subject of a statewide referendum, and how it came to be championed by a heretical faction of the religious right, including a conservative Republican governor, has political ramifications that will reverberate long after the vote itself.
Just outside Birmingham, on a proud hill overlooking a wealthy suburb, is Beeson Divinity School, the evangelical seminary of Samford University. It's here that a perennial of liberal ideology was first grafted to the thick root of conservative theology.
Beeson, which teaches the inerrancy of Scripture, has generally been a Christian Coalition sort of place, a marketplace of ideas where southern-fried conservatism was often the only item on the menu. "We're all conservatives here. We don't have any liberals," says Beeson Dean Timothy George. "We're people who say we believe the Bible is the word of God. We generally agree with Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell. We're very conservative Christian evangelicals."
But last fall, Susan Pace Hamill, a Beeson theology student, published a master's thesis arguing that "Alabama's tax structure economically oppresses low-income Alabamians and fails to raise adequate revenues."
Hamill, a tax-law professor at the University of Alabama, spent her sabbatical studying Scripture at Beeson. Her 112-page thesis, published in the fall 2002 issue of the Alabama Law Review, is an attack not only on Alabama's regressive tax code -- which requires poor families to pay up to three times the percentage of income in state tax that wealthy families pay -- but on the Christians who permit such an injustice to persist.
In her thesis, Hamill stakes claims more reminiscent of Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Party than Pat Robertson and the religious right. Citing ancient precedents of land tenure rights and debt forgiveness, she says the Bible mandates a "minimum opportunity" for the poor. Lest anyone miss the point, she goes on to argue that "minimum opportunity" in contemporary America consists of a decent public education. Lest anyone miss that point, Hamill demonstrates that Alabama public schools fall so woefully short of adequacy that only a drastic increase in funds could fulfill the state's moral obligation.
The novel combination of Hamill's left-wing argument and Beeson's right-wing reputation earned front-page coverage in Alabama newspapers. Her ironclad research, including 21 pages of data tables, won praise from editorial boards. And in a state that raises the least tax revenue per capita, Hamill's thesis -- reprinted as a book titled The Least of These: Fair Taxes and the Moral Duty of Christians -- somehow ended up as a rationale for politicians to imagine and initiate the unthinkable.
In late May, Gov. Bob Riley, a conservative evangelical Republican who'd never supported a tax increase in his life, unveiled a plan to enact the largest tax increase in Alabama history. Riley's plan lays claim to enough revenue to pay off the state's $675 million deficit and still raise hundreds of millions more for public schools and social services. In addition, Riley's $1.2 billion plan substantially shifts the tax burden from poor Alabamians to the wealthy.
"Jesus says one of our missions is to take care of the least among us," Riley told The Birmingham News in May, echoing the same Gospel passage that supplied the title of Hamill's book. "We've got to take care of the poor."
In June, after Riley's controversial plan was passed by a state legislature not previously known for political courage, Alabama seemed to enter not a parallel universe but an inverted one: As tax cuts for high-income earners rain down from Washington and social services are slashed by cash-strapped states everywhere, Alabama -- of all places -- was suddenly racing in the opposite direction.
"It's not just historic," says James Williams Jr., executive director of the Public Affairs Research Council of Alabama. "It's a miracle."
Well, not quite. Whether the miracle comes true will depend on the results of the Sept. 9 referendum. As Hamill documents, more than nine in 10 Alabamians claim to be Christian. But as it does elsewhere, culture lords over religion here. Centuries of Sunday hymns haven't softened Alabama's old-time hatred of taxes, its deep suspicion of government or its bloody history of resisting change. But in a place where plenty of people ask, "What would Jesus do?" a surprising number of religious conservatives have concluded that redistributing wealth is high on His list.
Susan Pace Hamill is an unlikely redeemer. Since 1994, Hamill has lived with her husband and two children in Tuscaloosa, where they moved after she left a job at the IRS in Washington. A former corporate lawyer, she was an inveterate careerist who spent years fussing over her tenure file at the University of Alabama.
Hamill entered Beeson as a mainstream Methodist and a social, political and religious moderate. Why she chose to spend her law-school sabbatical at a conservative evangelical seminary is a bit of a mystery to everyone involved. "You're trying to get to the core psychology of why I did this and I don't think I can answer that very well," Hamill says. "I'm probably the strangest student they've ever had."
A thick-set woman with a frosted crown of hair straining in all directions, Hamill, 42, is smart, confident and loud. When she emphasizes a point, as she does with exhausting frequency, her body has a way of pitching forward like a passenger on the deck of a listing ship. Hamill can fill a car ride with enough talk to glut a supertanker. But her unvarnished candor is endearing and, in the face of a challenge, Hamill doesn't flinch.
She was hoping to leverage her scriptural studies into an article for a prestigious law review. Instead, while reading a newspaper, she noticed for the first time that Alabama taxes family income beginning at $4,600. To the self-described "tax jock," it was a shock both to her sense of fairness and to her pride. "How could I have missed this?" she asks.
Hamill began delving into the tax code along with her Bible studies. Under the tutelage of her Beeson professors -- white, middle-aged, conservative, male evangelicals -- she grew more conservative in her theology. And she became increasingly radicalized about the poor.
"I had come in as the greedy commercial pagan. Until this time I had spent all my professional career on the side of money," Hamill says. "There were times when I was doing [research at Beeson] when I had to stop work because it was just too much. There were tears, despair over the injustice and my part in it."
While the Bible is a famously supple text, allowing multiple, even contradictory exegeses on everything from the role of women to the death penalty, its message on the poor has an almost nagging consistency. The Jesus portrayed in the Gospels has enormous respect and compassion for the poor and little regard for wealth.
Hamill is uneasy about her work's immoderate political implications. "I'm not comfortable with liberation theology," she says. But she couldn't deny what she read in the Book. And with Hamill constantly in their faces about it, neither could her teachers at Beeson. "It wasn't just about reformatting me. I came out of there very different, but I think the same thing happened to them," Hamill says.
"Susan is right on this issue," says Frank Thielman, a New Testament scholar whom Hamill calls one of Beeson's "super-size" conservatives. "The Bible's on the side of the poor. Jesus is on the side of the poor. I don't want to be caught on the other side."
The other side, as this particular dispute is now configured, consists of Christians with views similar to those of the Beeson faculty, only perhaps more intense. They tend to be vehemently anti-abortion and anti-gay and wildly enthusiastic about Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore's noisy (and unconstitutional) campaign to keep a 2.5-ton block of granite inscribed with the Ten Commandments in the lobby of the Alabama Judicial Department. They tend to be equally passionate in their opposition to taxes, public school spending and efforts to aid the poor through means other than voluntary religious charity.
In March, the Christian Coalition of Alabama moved to crush Hamill's heresy and discredit her among evangelicals. For its purpose, the organization found the perfect tool: a petition in support of Roe v. Wade signed by numerous law professors. Hamill's name was on the list.
In recent decades, fundamentalists and conservative evangelicals have devoted much of their political energy to a handful of emotionally charged issues. Year after year, the fight against abortion leads the list. Clearly hoping to destroy Hamill in conservative Christian circles, the coalition unleashed a wave of e-mails, phone calls and snail mail attacking Hamill as an abortion activist and hypocrite. "Save the children with taxes -- but abort 'em," is how Christian Coalition member Betty Peters, who has a seat on the state school board, framed the issue.
The attack on Hamill put Beeson on the defensive. "The Christian Coalition is a powerful movement in this state," Dean George says. "And I certainly am strongly pro-life."
George called a faculty meeting to discuss Hamill's status. But instead of truckling to the coalition, most of the faculty lined up squarely behind Hamill. To sway the remaining fence-sitters, Hamill's ethics teacher, Wilton Bunch, produced a graph displaying a high correlation between poverty and abortion rates. Hamill may support Roe v. Wade, Bunch said, but by fighting for poor women, she was fighting to dignify life.
Instead of disowning their iconoclastic student, the faculty issued a unanimous resolution supporting Hamill and her work. "How could we not stand up and support her when she was under attack -- unfair attack -- by some of our friends?" George asks. "I think we were able to distinguish her message from that other issue."
The incident tied Beeson irrevocably to Hamill. "They claimed me," Hamill says. "And I claimed them, too. It's a strange bond that no one could have anticipated."
The Beeson resolution also exposed a growing fissure in the state's religious right. "There's this war simmering between the conservative, reasonable evangelicals and the fundamentalists," Hamill says. "There is rancor."
Beeson, whose faculty includes graduates of Harvard, Cambridge and the University of Chicago, confounds the stereotype of Southern evangelicals as pious dolts; but Christian Coalition of Alabama president John Giles is from a different school. "What's good for business is good for the state, and what's good for the state is good for the people," says Giles, his blue eyes as still as shallow ponds after a storm. Giles has found himself in the difficult role of explaining why a plan that would reduce taxes on the poorer half of Alabama families and raise the quality of the state's sinking public schools -- in turn raising prospects for recruiting business to Alabama -- is a threat to family values.
The answer may be as firmly grounded in finance as the question. Among the coalition's financial benefactors are the powerful timber lobby and ALFA, the Alabama Farmers Federation. ALFA is a multi-tentacled conglomerate with interests ranging from agriculture to insurance. It has long been the most potent political force in Montgomery. Both ALFA and big timber are fighting Riley's tax reform plan, which would cost their members millions in higher taxes, and both no doubt appreciate the "pro-family" cover the Christian Coalition of Alabama affords their cause.
Despite abundant support from local and national Republicans enraged by Riley's apostasy, the coalition has had unusual trouble gaining traction on its home field. Not only did the divinity school of the state's largest Southern Baptist university publicly rebuff it, but a female tax-law professor has effectively stolen the group's biblical fire. It's Hamill, now, who is determining what the Bible says about public policy, not the coalition. In fact, the coalition hasn't managed to poke a single hole in Hamill's scriptural arguments.
More startling, in August, Christian Coalition of America president Roberta Combs endorsed Riley's plan, calling it "visionary and courageous." The treason of the governor's office has been equally shocking. Populated by a religious Republican and a staff of conservative Christians with a penchant for Bible study, it was presumed to be a regime friendly to Giles and his pious corporate backers. Instead, the Riley administration has thoroughly betrayed the creed they hold most sacred: no new taxes.
Alabama state finance director Drayton Nabers, Jr, .the former CEO of a Birmingham insurance company, is one of the chief architects of Riley's tax plan. A slight, sinewy, unassuming figure, Nabers, 62, has steely gray hair and intense blue eyes that twinkle kindly, sometimes playfully, from behind wire-rim spectacles. He joined Hamill, who had just come from delivering a speech with her 9-year-old daughter in tow, and me for lunch at a Chinese restaurant in an expensive mall in suburban Birmingham.
An evangelical intellectual who attended Princeton and Yale Law School and clerked for Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black, Nabers handled his chopsticks as deftly as he steered a discussion of public values and Christian principles. Meeting him for the first time, Hamill exhibited an uncharacteristic deference -- in silent tribute perhaps to Nabers' reputation across the state.
"Before you talk about taxes, you've got to talk about social justice and what the role of government should be with respect to achieving social justice," Nabers said. "My concept of justice relates to the libertarian ideal: freeing all people under God to be all they can possibly be."
Nabers was drawing on the work of Russell Kirk, author of The Conservative Mind and a favorite philosopher of the right. But like a race-car driver on a hairpin turn, he doubled back to Reinhold Niebuhr, the favorite theologian of Martin Luther King Jr. And on the short stretch of road between, Nabers accelerated, making a statement that was nothing short of astonishing for a high-ranking government official in the year 2003.
"The poor in Alabama are generally in a form of bondage to poverty," he said. "In a wealthy society, government has the wherewithal to do a lot to free them from that bondage and raise revenues, and with those revenues engage in programs to try to provide a foundation for people to break the bonds of poverty. The most important question on social issues that a Christian can ask is, 'What is best for the poor?' I'm satisfied that question is at the heart of God."
Clearly something is up with conservative evangelicals down South. Because while the poor may be at the heart of God, they have for some time been beyond the fringe of political discourse. For even longer, for many conservative Christians, particularly in the South, the poor have been a distant priority behind the hot topics of abortion, the "homosexual agenda," prayer in school and religious symbolism in the public square.
Like Hamill and the Beeson faculty, Nabers is attempting to redefine the conservative evangelical agenda, promoting a kind of evolution from clenched fist to open palm.
The will to change is not unconscious. "This probably is the first time since civil rights that the biblical message has been employed for the broader dimensions of social justice," Nabers says.
The civil-rights movement is not the model for these white evangelicals. It is the most proximate sin driving their quest for redemption. Because nothing has so thoroughly mocked Christianity in the Deep South, and undermined its moral authority, like race. And the devil still takes his due.
"There are a lot of unrepentant racists in Baptist and Methodist churches in Alabama," says Wayne Flynt, professor of history at Auburn University. "Their feeling is, 'We were right about civil rights in the 1950s and '60s, and everything that has happened since that time confirms it.'"
The Alabama Constitution still contains language providing for separate schools for blacks and whites. Until the fall of 2000, when it was officially overturned by referendum, the state constitution prohibited miscegenation. The vote to overturn was 59 percent to 41 percent; nearly half of whites voted to keep the ban.
Half the poor in Alabama are black. Many live in a swath of rural counties where the poverty rate is around 40 percent, illiteracy is rampant and life expectancy is on a par with villages in El Salvador. Meanwhile, Birmingham and Montgomery have never recovered from white flight to the suburbs.
"We have to acknowledge the fact that the Gospel has a social implication, a social follow-through," says Beeson's Dean George. "Birmingham has history. Birmingham has scars. Birmingham needs redemption."
For 400 years the white Christians of Alabama possessed singular economic, political and police power. But someone else always seemed to have a richer store of moral authority. Even today, the alabaster Greek revival capitol in Montgomery, the birthplace of the Confederacy, is a remarkable spectacle. But it's the not-quite-shabby Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, from which a boyish Martin Luther King Jr. loaded the Christian Gospel into a slingshot, that induces awe and wonder.
Evangelicals say a man is "broken" when he can admit his fault and accept God's forgiveness. It's something akin to what George Wallace experienced when he renounced his racist past -- and the deep bitterness he'd sowed -- and asked Alabama blacks to forgive his sins.
A number of conservative white evangelicals in Alabama -- it's impossible to tell how many -- seem to be arriving at a similar breaking point. Forty years after King wrote his historic letter from jail asking white pastors to condemn racism and step up to the challenge of their faith, a new perspective is evolving.
The Sept. 9 referendum may be too early a test of the new evangelicals' strength. If it succeeds, the word "miracle" will not be too strong a description. Resistance is powerful in Alabama, and change has always been weak. But the vote's very existence is a clear marker on the road to change. For Hamill, Nabers and their spiritual kin, mindful of the silence that greeted King's Birmingham letter, it will also be an opportunity to post a long-overdue reply.
Francis Wilkinson, former national affairs writer at Rolling Stone, is a partner at the Democratic media firm Doak, Carrier, O'Donnell, Wilkinson & Goldman, consultants to campaigns and corporations.
Francis Wilkinson
Copyright © 2003 by The American Prospect, Inc. Preferred Citation: Francis Wilkinson, "Divine Right From the belly of the southern conservative beast, a small group of Christians set out to change the way the pious think about politics.," The American Prospect Online, August 28, 2003. This article may not be resold, reprinted, or redistributed for compensation of any kind without prior written permission from the author. Direct questions about permissions to permissions@prospect.org.
Copyright © 2003 by The American Prospect, Inc. Preferred Citation: Francis Wilkinson, "Divine Right From the belly of the southern conservative beast, a small group of Christians set out to change the way the pious think about politics.," The American Prospect Online, August 28, 2003. This article may not be resold, reprinted, or redistributed for compensation of any kind without prior written permission from the author. Direct questions about permissions to permissions@prospect.org.