Resumé (rec'd via email)

GEORGE W. BUSH
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue
Washington, DC 20520

I will be available January 2009 and am willing to relocate.

EDUCATION AND EXPERIENCE:

Law Enforcement:
I was arrested in Kennebunkport, Maine, in 1976 for driving under the
influence of alcohol. I pled guilty, paid a fine, and had my driver's
license suspended for 30 days. My Texas driving record has been 'lost' and is not available.

Military:
I joined the Texas Air National Guard and went AWOL. I refused to take a drug test or answer any questions about my drug use. By joining the Texas Air National Guard, I was able to avoid combat duty in Vietnam.

College:
I graduated from Yale University with a low C average. I was a cheerleader.

PAST WORK EXPERIENCE:

I ran for U.S. Congress and lost.

I began my career in the oil business in Midland Texas , in 1975. I bought an oil company, but couldn't find any oil in Texas. The company went bankrupt shortly after I sold all my stock.

I bought the Texas Rangers baseball team in a sweetheart deal that took land using taxpayer money.

With the help of my father and our friends in the oil industry (including Enron CEO Ken Lay), I was elected governor of Texas.

ACCOMPLISHMENTS AS GOVERNOR OF TEXAS:

I changed Texas pollution laws to favor power and oil companies, making Texas the most polluted state in the Union. During my tenure, Houston replaced Los Angeles as the most smog-ridden city in America.

I cut taxes and bankrupted the Texas treasury to the tune of billions in borrowed money.

I set the record for the most executions by any governor in American history.

With the help of my brother, the governor of Florida , and my father's appointments to the Supreme Court, I became President of the Unite States, after losing by over 500,000 votes.

ACCOMPLISHMENTS AS PRESIDENT:

I am the first President in U.S. history to enter office with a criminal record.

I invaded and occupied two countries at a continuing cost of over one billion dollars per week.

I spent the U.S. surplus and effectively bankrupted the U.S. Treasury.

I shattered the record for the largest annual deficit in U.S. history.

I set an economic record for most private bankruptcies filed in any 12-month period.

I set the all-time record for most foreclosures in a 12-month period.

I set the all-time record for the biggest drop in the history of the U.S. stock market. In my first year in office, over 2 million Americans lost their jobs and that trend continues.

I'm proud that the members of my cabinet are the richest of any administration in U.S. history. My 'poorest millionaire, ' Condoleezza Rice, has a Chevron oil tanker named after her.

I set the record for most campaign fund-raising trips by a U.S. President.

I am the all-time U.S. and world record -holder for receiving the most corporate campaign donations.

My largest lifetime campaign contributor, and one of my best friends, Kenneth Lay, presided over the largest corporate bankruptcy fraud in U.S. history, Enron.

My political party used Enron private jets and corporate attorneys to assure my success with the U.S. Supreme Court during my election decision.

I have protected my friends at Enron and Halliburton against investigation or prosecution. More time and money was spent investigating the Monica Lewinsky affair than has been spent investigating one of the biggest corporate rip-offs in history. I presided over the biggest energy crisis in U.S. history and refused to intervene when corruption involving the oil industry was revealed.

I presided over the highest gasoline20prices in U.S. history.

I changed the U.S. policy to allow convicted criminals to be awarded government contracts.

I appointed more convicted criminals to my administration than any President in U.S. history.

I created the Ministry of Homeland Security, the largest bureaucracy in the history of the United States Government.

I've broken more international treaties than any President in U.S. history.

I am the first President in U.S. history to have the United Nations remove the U.S. from the Human Rights Commission.

I withdrew the U.S. from the World Court of Law.

I refused to allow inspectors access to U.S. 'prisoners of war' detainees and thereby have refused to abide by the Geneva Convention.

I am the first President in history to refuse United Nations election inspectors (during the 2002 US election)

I set the record for fewest numbers of press conferences of any President since the advent of television.

I set the all-time record for most days on vacation in any one-year period. After taking off the entire month of August, I presided over the worst security20failure in U.S. history

I garnered the most sympathy ever for the U.S. after the World Trade Center attacks and less than a year later made the U.S. the most hated country in the world, the largest failure of diplomacy in world history.

I have set the all-time record for most people worldwide to simultaneously protest me in public venues (15 million people), shattering the record for protests against any person in the history
of mankind

I am the first President in U.S. history to order an unprovoked, preemptive attack and the military occupation of a sovereign nation. I did so against the will of the United Nations, the majority of U.S.
Citizens and the world community.

I have cut health care benefits for war veterans and support a cut in duty benefits for active duty troops and their families in wartime.

In my State of the Union Address, I lied about our reasons for attacking Iraq and then blamed the lies on our British friends.

I am the first President in history to have a majority of Europeans (71%) view my presidency as the biggest threat to world peace and security.

I am supporting development of a nuclear 'Tactical Bunker Buster,' a WMD.

I have so far failed to fulfill my pledge to bring Osama Bin Laden to justice.

RECORDS AND REFERENCES:

All records of my tenure as governor of Texas are now in my father's
0Alibrary, sealed and unavailable for public view.

All records of SEC investigations into my insider trading and my
bankrupt companies are sealed in secrecy and unavailable for public view.
All records or minutes from meetings that I, or my Vice-President,
attended regarding public energy policy are sealed in secrecy and
unavailable for public review. I specified that my sealed documents
will not be available for 50 years

Bush quietly seeks to make war powers permanent

By declaring indefinite state of war

By John Byrne

31/08/08 "Raw Story' -- As the nation focuses on Sen. John McCain's choice of running mate, President Bush has quietly moved to expand the reach of presidential power by ensuring that America remains in a state of permanent war.

Buried in a recent proposal by the Administration is a sentence that has received scant attention -- and was buried itself in the very newspaper that exposed it Saturday. It is an affirmation that the United States remains at war with al Qaeda, the Taliban and "associated organizations."

Part of a proposal for Guantanamo Bay legal detainees, the provision before Congress seeks to “acknowledge again and explicitly that this nation remains engaged in an armed conflict with Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and associated organizations, who have already proclaimed themselves at war with us and who are dedicated to the slaughter of Americans.”

The New York Times' page 8 placement of the article in its Saturday edition seems to downplay its importance. Such a re-affirmation of war carries broad legal implications that could imperil Americans' civil liberties and the rights of foreign nationals for decades to come.

It was under the guise of war that President Bush claimed a legal mandate for his warrantless wiretapping program, giving the National Security Agency power to intercept calls Americans made abroad. More of this program has emerged in recent years, and it includes the surveillance of Americans' information and exchanges online.

"War powers" have also given President Bush cover to hold Americans without habeas corpus -- detainment without explanation or charge. Jose Padilla, a Chicago resident arrested in 2002, was held without trial for five years before being convicted of conspiring to kill individuals abroad and provide support for terrorism.

But his arrest was made with proclamations that Padilla had plans to build a "dirty bomb." He was never convicted of this charge. Padilla's legal team also claimed that during his time in military custody -- the four years he was held without charge -- he was tortured with sensory deprivation, sleep deprivation, forced stress positions and injected with drugs.

Times reporter Eric Lichtblau notes that the measure is the latest step that the Administration has taken to "make permanent" key aspects of its "long war" against terrorism. Congress recently passed a much-maligned bill giving telecommunications companies retroactive immunity for their participation in what constitutional experts see as an illegal or borderline-illegal surveillance program, and is considering efforts to give the FBI more power in their investigative techniques.

"It is uncertain whether Congress will take the administration up on its request," Lichtblau writes. "Some Republicans have already embraced the idea, with Representative Lamar Smith of Texas, the ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee, introducing a measure almost identical to the administration’s proposal. 'Since 9/11,' Mr. Smith said, 'we have been at war with an unconventional enemy whose primary goal is to kill innocent Americans.'"

If enough Republicans come aboard, Democrats may struggle to defeat the provision. Despite holding majorities in the House and Senate, they have failed to beat back some of President Bush's purported "security" measures, such as the telecom immunity bill.

Bush's open-ended permanent war language worries his critics. They say it could provide indefinite, if hazy, legal justification for any number of activities -- including detention of terrorists suspects at bases like Guantanamo Bay (where for years the Administration would not even release the names of those being held), and the NSA's warantless wiretapping program.

Lichtblau co-wrote the Times article revealing the Administration's eavesdropping program along with fellow reporter James Risen.

He notes that Bush's language "recalls a resolution, known as the Authorization for Use of Military Force, passed by Congress on Sept. 14, 2001... [which] authorized the president to 'use all necessary and appropriate force' against those responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks to prevent future strikes. That authorization, still in effect, was initially viewed by many members of Congress who voted for it as the go-ahead for the administration to invade Afghanistan and overthrow the Taliban, which had given sanctuary to Mr. bin Laden."

"But the military authorization became the secret legal basis for some of the administration’s most controversial legal tactics, including the wiretapping program, and that still gnaws at some members of Congress," he adds.

Sen. McCain is blissfully out of touch

By Joshua A. Swanson,
Published Sunday, August 31, 2008

John McCain showed how out of touch he is with the economic crisis facing millions of Americans – particularly those of us without bank accounts topping $5 million. During a forum at Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, Calif., McCain was asked by Pastor Rick Warren, “At what point, give me a number, give me a specific number. Where do you move from middle class to rich?”

McCain’s response is telling as to how blissfully far-removed and out of touch he is with the seriousness of the economic problems facing our country. “How about $5 million,” McCain answered.

It takes $5 million to be considered rich? This answer is a telling indicator in providing a forecast for the economic priorities of McCain, particularly for North Dakotans, where the average per capita income is $32,763.

Tax break?

While McCain may be living comfortably, millions of Americans, including many North Dakotans, are feeling the pinch – a pinch the presumptive GOP nominee cannot begin to fathom when he claims the dividing line between the rich and middle class is $5 million. When he talks about middle-class Americans, and tax breaks for the middle class, McCain is not talking about you and your family. No, he’s talking about those he considers rich, those with helipads in their backyards and whose yearly bonuses exceed your yearly salary several times over.

According to James P. Smith, a senior economist at the Rand Corp., this $5 million threshold encompasses “almost nobody.” Of all American households, less than one-tenth of 1 percent has a yearly income of $5 million. But guess where the majority of the McCain tax breaks go?

This $5 million threshold and McCain’s inability to comprehend the economic realities facing our country are reflected in his tax and energy plans. The most comprehensive nonpartisan analysis of the candidates’ respective tax proposals, conducted by the Tax Policy Center, supports Barack Obama’s claim that his plan will not increase your taxes – that is, unless you earn $169,480-$237,040. If you’re in this bracket, then you’d pay roughly $486 more in taxes. For all of us under $169,480 of taxable income, we’d benefit from a tax cut under Obama’s plan.

Under McCain’s tax plan, you would not see a tax cut in this bracket. Additionally, families earning $37,595-$66,354, which includes the vast majority of North Dakotans, would get an average tax cut of $1,042 per family under Obama’s plan. Under McCain’s plan, this bracket would only see $319, according to the report. Just like President Bush’s tax cuts, the bulk of McCain’s tax breaks go to the wealthiest percentile of Americans in the top marginal rate, which would cost our treasury nearly $1.6 trillion over the next 10 years. Not exactly the prescription to balance the budget – or provide tax relief to the middle class.

Flawed energy policy

The economics of this intersect with McCain’s energy policy. Today, with the prices at the pump still hovering around $3.55, McCain has opposed both taking oil out of the strategic petroleum reserve and a $1,000 energy rebate to taxpayers, funded by a windfall profits tax on the record profits of oil companies.

Don’t be fooled by those wind turbines in his commercials, McCain has opposed legislation that would provide tax incentives for the clean, renewable energy sources of wind and solar power, and has done so as recently as Aug. 1. McCain is also an active opponent of incentives for ethanol production. Why? Follow the money – since publicly announcing his support for offshore drilling this June, campaign contributions from the oil and gas industry to McCain have exploded. In Texas alone, June donations to McCain’s “Victory ’08 Fund” reached $1.214 million. This does not include the 33 McCain staffers and fundraisers who have received $19.3 million in lobbying fees from the oil and gas industry.

After eight years of regressive tax and energy priorities, it is time for a change. Moreover, with North Dakota’s potential as both a wind energy and ethanol leader, McCain’s economic and energy priorities are cause for concern. Maybe as soon as the rest of us start pocketing that $5 million it takes to be rich, we’ll start seeing the advantages of electing McCain our president. Until then, North Dakotans should think long and hard before deciding that McCain is in the best interests of our state.

Swanson, a native of Maddock, N.D., is lead articles editor, Creighton Law Review, Creighton University School of Law, Omaha.

Theocratic Sect Prays for Real Armageddon

By Casey Sanchez, Southern Poverty Law Center
Posted on August 30, 2008, Printed on August 31, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/96945/

LAKELAND, Fla. -- Todd Bentley has a long night ahead of him, resurrecting the dead, healing the blind, and exploding cancerous tumors. Since April 3, the 32-year-old, heavily tattooed, body-pierced, shaved-head Canadian preacher has been leading a continuous "supernatural healing revival" in central Florida. To contain the 10,000-plus crowds flocking from around the globe, Bentley has rented baseball stadiums, arenas and airport hangars at a cost of up to $15,000 a day. Many in attendance are church pastors themselves who believe Bentley to be a prophet and don't bat an eye when he tells them he's seen King David and spoken with the Apostle Paul in heaven. "He was looking very Jewish," Bentley notes.

Tattooed across his sternum are military dog tags that read "Joel's Army." They're evidence of Bentley's generalship in a rapidly growing apocalyptic movement that's gone largely unnoticed by watchdogs of the theocratic right. According to Bentley and a handful of other "hyper-charismatic" preachers advancing the same agenda, Joel's Army is prophesied to become an Armageddon-ready military force of young people with a divine mandate to physically impose Christian "dominion" on non-believers.

"An end-time army has one common purpose -- to aggressively take ground for the kingdom of God under the authority of Jesus Christ, the Dread Champion," Bentley declares on the website for his ministry school in British Columbia, Canada. "The trumpet is sounding, calling on-fire, revolutionary believers to enlist in Joel's Army. ... Many are now ready to be mobilized to establish and advance God's kingdom on earth."

Joel's Army followers, many of them teenagers and young adults who believe they're members of the final generation to come of age before the end of the world, are breaking away in droves from mainline Pentecostal churches. Numbering in the tens of thousands, they base their beliefs on an esoteric reading of the second chapter of the Old Testament Book of Joel, in which an avenging swarm of locusts attacks Israel. In their view, the locusts are a metaphor for Joel's Army.

Despite their overt militancy, there's no evidence Joel's Army followers have committed any acts of violence. But critics warn that actual bloodletting may only be a matter of time for a movement that casts itself as God's avenging army.

Those sounding the alarm about Joel's Army are not secular foes of the Christian Right, few of whom are even aware of the movement or how widespread it's become in the past decade. Instead, Joel's Army critics are mostly conservative Christians, either neo-Pentecostals who left the movement in disgust or evangelical Christians who fear that Joel's Army preachers are stealing their flocks, even sending spies to infiltrate their own congregations and sway their young people to heresy. And they say the movement is becoming frightening.

"The pitch and intensity of the military rhetoric of this branch of the global Dominionist movement has substantially increased since the beginning of 2008," writes The Discernment Research Group, a Christian watchdog group that tracks what they call heresies or cults within Christianity. "One can only wonder how long before this transforms into real warfare with actual warriors."

'Snorting Religion'

Joel's Army believers are hard-core Christian dominionists, meaning they believe that America, along with the rest of the world, should be governed by conservative Christians and a conservative Christian interpretation of biblical law. There is no room in their doctrine for democracy or pluralism.

Dominionism's original branch is Christian Reconstructionism, a grim, Calvinist call to theocracy that, as Reconstructionist writer Gary North describes, wants to "get busy in constructing a Bible-based social, political and religious order which finally denies the religious liberty of the enemies of God."

Notorious for endorsing the public execution by stoning of homosexuals and adulterers, the Christian Reconstructionist movement is far better known in secular America than Joel's Army. That's largely because Reconstructionists have made several serious forays into mainstream politics and received a fair amount of negative publicity as a result. Joel's Army followers eschew the political system, believing the path to world domination lies in taking over churches, not election to public office.

Another key difference between the two branches of dominionism, which maintain a testy, arms-length relationship with one another, is Christian Reconstructionism's buttoned-down image and heavy emphasis on Bible study, which contrasts sharply with Joel's Army anti-intellectual distrust of biblical scholars and its unruly style.

"Some people snort cocaine, others snort religions," Joel's Army Pastor Roy said while ministering a morning program at Todd Bentley's Lakeland, Fla., revival in late May.

As this article went to press, Bentley's "Florida Outpouring" had been running for more than 100 days straight. Many attendees came in search of spontaneous physical healing and a desire to be part of a mystical community marked by dancing, shouting, gyrating, speaking in tongues and other forms of ecstatic release.

Snide jabs at traditional church services are fairly common at Bentley's revivals. In fact, what takes place onstage at the Florida Outpouring looks more like a pro wrestling extravaganza than church. On stage, Bentley and his team of pastors, yell, chant, and scream "Fire!" and "Bam!" while anointing followers.

The audience members behave as if they are at a psychedelic counterculture festival. One couple jumps up and down twirling red and silver metallic flags. Dyed-haired teenagers pulled in by the revival's presence on Facebook and MySpace wander around looking dazed. Women lay facedown on the floor, convulsing and howling. Fathers wail in tongues as their confused children look on. Strangers lay hands on those who fail to produce tongues or gyrate wildly enough, pressuring them to "let it out."

Bentley is considered a prophet both by his followers and by other leaders of the Joel's Army movement, whose adherents claim to be reviving a "five-fold ministry" of prophets, apostles, elders, pastors and teachers, as outlined in the Book of Ephesians. Not every five-fold ministry is connected to the Joel's Army movement, but the movement has spurred an interest in modern-day apostles and prophets that's troubling to the Assemblies of God, the world's largest Pentecostal church, which has officially disavowed the Joel's Army movement.

In a 2001 position paper, Assemblies of God leaders wrote that they do not recognize modern-day apostles or prophets and worried that "such leaders prefer more authoritarian structures where their own word or decrees are unchallenged." They are right to worry. Joel's Army followers believe that once democratic institutions are overthrown, their hierarchy of apostles and prophets will rule over the earth, with one church per city.

Warrior Nation

According to Joel's Army doctrine, the enforcers of the five-fold ministry will be members of the final generation, for whom the landmark Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade constituted a new Passover.

"Everyone born after abortion's legalization can consider their birth a personal invitation to take part in this great army," writes John Crowder, another prominent Joel's Army pastor, who bills his 2006 book, The New Mystics: How to Become Part of the Supernatural Generation, as a literal how-to guide for joining Joel's Army.

Both Bentley and Crowder are enormously popular on Elijah's List, an online watering hole for a broad spectrum of Joel's Army enlistees, from lightweight believers who merely share an affection for military rhetoric and pastors who dress in army camouflage (several Joel's Army pastors are addressed by their congregants as "commandant" or "commander") to hardliners who believe the church is called to have an active military role in end-times that have already begun. Elijah's List currently has more than 125,000 subscribers on its electronic mailing list.

Rick Joyner, a pastor whose books, The Harvest and The Call, helped popularize Joel's Army theology by selling more than a million copies each, goes the furthest on Elijah's List in pushing the hardliner approach. In 2006, he posted a sermon called "The Warrior Nation -- The New Sound of the Church," in which he claimed that a last-day army is now gathering and called believers "freedom fighters."

"As the church begins to take on this resolve, they [Joel's Army churches] will start to be thought of more as military bases, and they will begin to take on the characteristics of military bases for training, equipping, and deploying effective spiritual forces," Joyner wrote. "In time, the church will actually be organized more as a military force with an army, navy, air force, etc."

In a sort of disclaimer, Joyner writes at one point that God's army "will bring love, peace and stability wherever they go." But several of his books narrate with glee what he describes as "a coming civil war within the church." In his 1997 book The Harvest he writes: "Some pastors and leaders who continue to resist this tide of unity will be removed from their place. Some will become so hardened they will become opposers and resist God to the end."

Two years later, in his book The Final Quest, Joyner described a vision (taken as prophecy in the Joel's Army world, where Joyner is considered an "apostle") of the coming Christian Civil War in which demon-possessed Christian soldiers enslave other, weaker Christians who resist them. He also describes how the hero of the novel -- himself -- ascends a "Holy Mountain" in order to learn new truths and to acquire new, magic weapons.

Kids on Fire

Bentley, who claims to be a supernatural healer, is no less over the top, playing his biker-punk appearance and heavy metal theatrics to the hilt. On YouTube, where clips of his most dramatic healings have been condensed into a three-minute highlight reel, Bentley describes God ordering him to kick an elderly lady in the face: "I am thinking, 'God, why is the power of God not moving?' And He said, 'It is because you haven't kicked that women in the face.' And there was, like, this older lady worshipping right in front of the platform and the Holy Spirit spoke to me and the gift of faith came on me. He said, 'Kick her in the face ... with your biker boot.' I inched closer and I went like this [makes kicking motion]: Bam! And just as my boot made contact with her nose, she fell under the power of God."

The atmosphere is less charged with violence at "The Call," a 12-hour revival of up to 20,000 youths led by Joel's Army pastor Lou Engle and held every summer in a major American city (this year's event was scheduled for Washington, D.C. in August).

Attendees are called upon to fast and pray for 40 days and take up culture-war pledges to lead abstinent lives, reject pornography and fight abortion. They're further asked to perform "identificational repentance," lugging along family trees and genealogies to see where one of their ancestors may have enslaved or oppressed another so that they can make amends. (Many in the Joel's Army movement believe in generational curses that must be broken by the current generation).

As even his critics note, Engle is a sweet, humble and gentle man whose persona is difficult to reconcile with his belief in an end-time army of invincible young Christian warriors. Yet while Engle is careful to avoid deploying explicit Joel's Army rhetoric at high-profile events like The Call, when he's speaking in smaller hyper-charismatic circles to avowed Joel's Army followers, he can venture into bloodlust.

This March, at a "Passion for Jesus" conference in Kansas City sponsored by the International House of Prayer, or IHOP, a ministry for teenagers from the heavy metal, punk and goth scenes, Engle called on his audience for vengeance.

"I believe we're headed to an Elijah/Jezebel showdown on the Earth, not just in America but all over the globe, and the main warriors will be the prophets of Baal versus the prophets of God, and there will be no middle ground," said Engle. He was referring to the Baal of the Old Testament, a pagan idol whose followers were slaughtered under orders from the prophet Elijah.

"There's an Elijah generation that's going to be the forerunners for the coming of Jesus, a generation marked not by their niceness but by the intensity of their passion," Engle continued. "The kingdom of heaven suffers violence and the violent take it by force. Such force demands an equal response, and Jesus is going to make war on everything that hinders love, with his eyes blazing fire."

Although Joel's Army theology is mainly directed at people in their teens and early 20s via events like The Call and ministries like IHOP, sometimes the target audience is even younger. In some of the most arresting images in Jesus Camp, a 2006 documentary about the Kids on Fire bible camp in North Dakota, grade school-aged kids dressed in army fatigues wield swords and conduct military field maneuvers. "A lot of people die for God and they're not afraid," one camper told ABC News reporters in a follow-up segment.

"We're kinda being trained to be warriors," added another, "only in a funner way."

Cain and the Intellectuals

Both Christian and secular critics assailed the makers of Jesus Camp for referring to the camp's extremist, militant Christianity as "evangelical." There is a name, however, that describes Kids on Fire's agenda, if you're familiar with their theology: Joel's Army. Pastor Becky Fischer, who runs the camp, said that a third of the kids at her camp were under 6 years old because they are "more in touch in the supernatural" and proclaimed them to be "soldiers for God's Army." Her camp's blend of end-times militancy and supernaturalism is perfectly emblematic of the Joel's Army movement, whose adherents believe their cause is prophesied in the Old Testament chapter titled "An Army of Locusts."

The stark, evocative passages of that chapter describe a locust swarm that lays waste to Israel (to this day, the region suffers periodic locust invasions): "Like dawn spreading across the mountains a large and mighty army comes, such as never was of old nor ever will be in ages to come." As remarkable as the language is, most biblical scholars agree that it is a literal description of a locust invasion and resulting famine that occurred sometime between the 9th and 5th centuries B.C.E.

In the Book of Joel, the locust invasion is described as an omen that an Assyrian army to the north may attack Israel if it fails to repent as a nation. But nowhere is the invasion described as an army of God. According to an Assemblies of God position paper: "It is a complete misinterpretation of Scripture to find in Joel's army of locusts a militant, victorious force attacking society and a non-cooperating Church to prepare the earth for Christ's millennial reign."

The story of how an ancient insect invasion came to be a rallying flag for 21st-century dominonists begins just after World War II in Canada. Out of a small town in Saskatchewan, a Pentecostal preacher named William Branham spearheaded a 1948 revival in which he claimed that his followers lived in a new biblical time of "Latter Rain."

The most sinless and ardent of his flock would be called "Manifest Sons of God." By the next year, the movement was so strong -- and seemed so subversive to some -- that the Assemblies of God banned it as a heretic cult. But Branham remained a controversial figure with a loyal following; many of his followers believed him to be the end-times prophet Elijah.

Michael Barkun, a leading scholar of radical religion, notes that in 1958, Branham began teaching "Serpent Seed" doctrine, the belief that Satan had sex with Eve, resulting in Cain and his descendants. "Through Cain came all the smart, educated people down to the antediluvian flood -- the intellectuals, bible colleges," Branham wrote in the kind of anti-mainstream religion, anti-intellectual spirit that pervades the Joel's Army movement to this day. "They know all their creeds but know nothing about God."

The Gates of Hell

Branham was killed in a car accident in 1965, but his Manifest Sons of God movement, the direct predecessor of Joel's Army, lived on within a cluster of hyper-charismatic churches. In the 1980s, Branham's teachings took on new life at the Kansas City Fellowship (KCF), a group of popular self-styled apostles and prophets who used the Missouri church as a launching pad for national careers promoting outright Joel's Army theology.

Ernie Gruen, a local pastor who initially promoted and gave citywide credibility to KCF pastors in the early 1980s, cut his connections in 1990. Concerned about KCF's plans to push its teachings worldwide, Gruen published a 132-page insider's account, based on taped sermons and conversations and interviews with parents who had enrolled their kids in KCF's Dominion school.

According to Gruen's report, students at the school were taught that they were a "super-race" of the "elected seed" of all the best bloodlines of all generations -- foreknown, predestined, and hand-selected from billions of others to be part of the "end-time Omega generation."

Though he'd once promoted these doctrines himself, Gruen became convinced that the movement was turning into an end-times cult, marked by what he summarized as "spiritual threats, fears, and warnings of death," "warning followers to beware of other Christians" and exhibiting "a 'super-race' mentality toward the training of their children."

When contacted by the Intelligence Report, Gruen's spokesman said that Gruen stands by everything he published in the report but no longer grants media interviews.

The Kansas City Fellowship remains in operation and has served as a farm team for many of the all-stars of the Joel's Army movement. Those larger-than-life figures include John Wimber, the founder of a California megachurch, The Vineyard, who, before his death in 1997, proclaimed that Joel's Army would not only conquer the earth but defeat death itself. Lou Engle founded The Call based on the Joel's Army visions that KCF "prophet" Bob Jones (not to be confused with Bob Jones III of Bob Jones University) received while at KCF. Mike Bickle, another KCF member, stayed in Kansas City to form the International House of Prayer.

IHOP members and other Joel's Army adherents are well aware of how their movement is perceived by other conservative Christians.

"Today, you can type 'Joel's Army' into a search engine and a thousand heresy hunter websites pop up, decrying the very mention of it," writes John Crowder in The New Mystics. Crowder doesn't exactly allay critic's fears. "This is truly warfare," he writes. "This battle is not a game. They [Joel's Army warriors] will not be on the defense; they will be on the offense -- and the gates of hell will not be able to hold up against them."

So far, few members of the secular media have taken notice of Joel's Army, even as they report on Protestant dominionists like Pat Robertson or the more outrageous calls for the stoning of gays and lesbians emanating from Reconstructionist circles. There are exceptions, however. On the DailyKos, a well-read, politically liberal blog, a diarist has been blogging for two years about her experiences as a walkaway from a Joel's Army church. She writes under a pseudonym out of fear of physical reprisals.

She may have real cause for concern. As Wimber, the late founder of The Vineyard, put it in one of his most famous and fiery sermons, one that is still frequently cited by Joel's Army followers: "Those in this army will have His kind of power. ... Anyone who wants to harm them must die."

© 2008 Southern Poverty Law Center All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/96945/

Bush Seeks to Affirm a Continuing War on Terror

by Eric Lichtblau

WASHINGTON - Tucked deep into a recent proposal from the Bush administration is a provision that has received almost no public attention, yet in many ways captures one of President Bush's defining legacies: an affirmation that the United States is still at war with Al Qaeda.

Seven years after the Sept. 11 attacks, Mr. Bush's advisers assert that many Americans may have forgotten that. So they want Congress to say so and "acknowledge again and explicitly that this nation remains engaged in an armed conflict with Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and associated organizations, who have already proclaimed themselves at war with us and who are dedicated to the slaughter of Americans."

The language, part of a proposal for hearing legal appeals from detainees at the United States naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, goes beyond political symbolism. Echoing a measure that Congress passed just days after the Sept. 11 attacks, it carries significant legal and public policy implications for Mr. Bush, and potentially his successor, to claim the imprimatur of Congress to use the tools of war, including detention, interrogation and surveillance, against the enemy, legal and political analysts say.

Some lawmakers are concerned that the administration's effort to declare anew a war footing is an 11th-hour maneuver to re-establish its broad interpretation of the president's wartime powers, even in the face of challenges from the Supreme Court and Congress.

The proposal is also the latest step that the administration, in its waning months, has taken to make permanent important aspects of its "long war" against terrorism. From a new wiretapping law approved by Congress to a rewriting of intelligence procedures and F.B.I. investigative techniques, the administration is moving to institutionalize by law, regulation or order a wide variety of antiterrorism tactics.

"This seems like a final push by the administration before they go out the door," said Suzanne Spaulding, a former lawyer for the Central Intelligence Agency and an expert on national security law. The cumulative effect of the actions, Ms. Spaulding said, is to "put the onus on the next administration" - particularly a Barack Obama administration - to justify undoing what Mr. Bush has done.

It is uncertain whether Congress will take the administration up on its request. Some Republicans have already embraced the idea, with Representative Lamar Smith of Texas, the ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee, introducing a measure almost identical to the administration's proposal. "Since 9/11," Mr. Smith said, "we have been at war with an unconventional enemy whose primary goal is to kill innocent Americans."

In the midst of an election season, the language represents a political challenge of sorts to the administration's critics. While many Democrats say they are wary of Mr. Bush's claims to presidential power, they may be even more nervous about casting a vote against a measure that affirms the country's war against terrorism. They see the administration's effort to force the issue as little more than a political ploy.

Mr. Bush "is trying to stir up again the politics of fear by reminding people of something they haven't really forgotten: that we are engaged in serious armed conflict with Al Qaeda," said Laurence H. Tribe, a constitutional scholar at Harvard and legal adviser to Mr. Obama. "But the question is, Where is that conflict to be waged, and by what means."

With violence rising in Afghanistan and Osama bin Laden still at large, there are ample signs of the United States' continued battles with terrorism. But Mr. Bush and his advisers say that seven years without an attack has lulled many Americans.

"As Sept. 11, 2001, recedes into the past, there are some people who have come to think of it as kind of a singular event and of there being nothing else out there," Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey told House lawmakers in July. "In a way, we are the victims of our own success, our own success being that another attack has been prevented."

Mr. Mukasey laid out the administration's thinking in a July 21 speech to a conservative Washington policy institute in response to yet another rebuke on presidential powers by the Supreme Court: its ruling that prisoners at Guantánamo Bay , were entitled to habeas corpus rights to contest their detentions in court.

The administration wants Congress to set out a narrow framework for those prisoner appeals. But the administration's six-point proposal goes further. It includes not only the broad proclamation of a continued "armed conflict with Al Qaeda," but also the desire for Congress to "reaffirm that for the duration of the conflict the United States may detain as enemy combatants those who have engaged in hostilities or purposefully supported Al Qaeda, the Taliban and associated organizations."

That broad language hints at why Democrats, and some Republicans, worry about the consequences. It could, they say, provide the legal framework for Mr. Bush and his successor to assert once again the president's broad interpretation of the commander in chief's wartime powers, powers that Justice Department lawyers secretly used to justify the indefinite detention of terrorist suspects and the National Security Agency's wiretapping of Americans without court orders.

The language recalls a resolution, known as the Authorization for Use of Military Force, passed by Congress on Sept. 14, 2001. It authorized the president to "use all necessary and appropriate force" against those responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks to prevent future strikes. That authorization, still in effect, was initially viewed by many members of Congress who voted for it as the go-ahead for the administration to invade Afghanistan and overthrow the Taliban, which had given sanctuary to Mr. bin Laden.

But the military authorization became the secret legal basis for some of the administration's most controversial legal tactics, including the wiretapping program, and that still gnaws at some members of Congress.

Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, the ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee, said he wanted to make sure the Bush administration - or a future president - did not use that declaration as "another far-fetched interpretation" to evade the law, the way he believes Mr. Bush and aides like Alberto R. Gonzales, the former attorney general, did in using the wiretapping program to avoid the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

"I don't want to face another situation where we had the Sept. 14 resolution and then Attorney General Gonzales claimed that that was authorization to violate FISA," Mr. Specter said.

For Bush critics like Bruce Fein, a Justice Department official in the Reagan administration, the answer is simple: do not give the administration the wartime language it seeks.

"I do not believe that we are in a state of war whatsoever," Mr. Fein said. "We have an odious opponent that the criminal justice system is able to identify and indict and convict. They're not a goliath. Don't treat them that way."

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

What's a Godfearing Country to Do?

By RON JACOBS

It's a classic antiauthoritarian trope that enemies don't really exist, therefore governments need to create them. The primary reason they must be created is so that governments can justify their existence. Whether or not governments would exist without the threat of a perceived enemy is up to challenge, but an argument that national militaries exist precisely because of perceived threats requires very little imagination. After all, what sane people would bankrupt their national treasury to maintain the world's largest warmaking capability unless they felt they were threatened? Of course, that perceived threat may or may not be real so, just in case, the role of the rest of the political wing and its media is to provide the perception that the threat is genuine. Which means it is worth bankrupting our treasury and our future. In fact, it is even worth sending our children off to kill and die.

Russia As Enemy

All that being said, the question arises: is Russia really an enemy? Or are the recent machinations by the US military and diplomatic corps merely the result of a desire by Washington's to have a really big enemy to justify its bloated military budget? After all, it seems that the occupation of Iraq has failed to maintain the support of the people in the the US and that the battle for Afghanistan will never be on a grand enough scale to continue justifying the massive expenditures the war industry demands. Russia, however, is not only a very big country that likes to use its military, it also has the historical role as an enemy of Washington. It doesn't matter that the previous Russian enemy was a vastly different government that not only opposed Washington's moves around the world but also claimed to be Washington's ideological opposite. No, the fact that the Russian government that sent its military into Georgia and warned Poland not to allow US missiles on its soil is not about ideology, it's about territory. Territory that Washington has been trying to make part of its sphere of influence since at least the end of World War Two. Stalin and his successors repelled Washington's designs for almost fifty years.

However, as soon as the government they built disintegrated after decades of cold war pressures, the politicians and generals inside the Beltway saw their moment and attacked. Global capitalist institutions demanded payments and starvation while their diplomatic and military protectors demanded territory and allegiance from Moscow's former states. NATO became a weapon in this crusade to remove Moscow's former allies from its enforced protection. Yugoslavia was plucked and deboned under NATO's warplanes. The US dollar and the Euro were waved in front of the new governments that accepted the demands of Wall Street and the European bourses. The former Stalinist leaders of the Soviet provinces were now venture capitalists beholden to the West and the occasional international gangster. Russia did its best to hold on to those regions it considered necessary for trade, launching a bloody war in Chechnya and creating havoc inside Georgia and other former republics whose ports and resources Russia wanted to keep out of the West's hands. Then energy costs went through the roof. Moscow began to see riches it could only have hoped for back in those dreadful days after Gorbachev. Europe needed oil and natural gas and Moscow was able to provide it. Washington was none too happy because this created a wild card that got in the way of its plans for a US/ Europe alliance under the NATO banner against Moscow and any hopes it might have for a new empire. Simultaneously, Moscow began to flex its new economic power, challenging the encroachment of NATO, opposing Washington's desire to isolate Iran, and ultimately responding militarily to the attack on South Ossetia and Abkhazia. If Washington was surprised by this move, they should not have been. It was as predictable as the gratuitous violence in a Dirty Harry movie.

Terrorism-The Other Enemy

The rising possibility of a Russian enemy does not preclude the fact of the existing enemy we are told Washington's military is fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. Of course, as long as the United States keeps up its killing and occupation of those countries, the elusive enemy known as "the terrorists" will exist. Despite the obvious semantic complications arising from doing battle with a strategy (terrorism), Washington has done an exceedingly good job convincing the world that the best way to deal with religiously inspired groups hoping to install a system of governance they consider to be more just than the planet's current regimes is to kill as many members of those groups and the people they live amongst. Naturally, this strategy convinced many of those who have lost loved ones to join the groups whose name their loved ones died in (even if their loved ones had nothing to do with said group). Furthermore, the ideology of such groups is now seen by many as an ideology of national liberation and anti-imperialism.

The convenience of a battle against "terrorism" is that one can make any group or nation part of the enemy. This is what George Bush knew when he told the world in 2001 that "you are either with us or you are against us." There is no room for neutrality in the eyes of this empire. Consequently, one is an enemy even if one has no opinion for or against. Indeed, sometimes one is an enemy even if one opposes the "terrorists." A recent example of this latter reality can be found in an August 28, 2008 news report from the Los Angeles Times about Venezuela and Hezbollah. Although Hezbollah is seen as a legitimate entity and not considered a "terrorist" group by many around the world, Washington and Tel Aviv (who seem to be the final arbiters of such things) differ with that opinion. Consequently, it is one as far as Washington and some other capitals are concerned.

Anyhow, back to the article. Its essence is that because of Venezuela's relations with Tehran, US and Israeli intelligence "worry that Venezuela is emerging as a base for anti-US militant groups and spy services." In what can only be described as a very poor attempt to link together a number of suppositions, rumors and statements by Tel Aviv, the article draws the conclusion that some Hezbollah supporters may be living in Venezuela. Since they may be living there, they may also be conducting fundraising and other operations from their residences there. Furthermore, the article continues, even though the Venezuelan government has tightened up its oversight of any possible fundraising activities by Hezbollah, the fact that there are various Iranian-Venezuelan joint business enterprises opens the possibility that Venezuela is still being used as a fundraising base.

Given that the United States is also the site of fundraising by various groups Washington considers enemies, this article can serve only one purpose--to create a link between "terrorists" and Hugo Chavez. It is a link that of course does not exist but, like the nonexistent link between Saddam Hussein and Al-Queda, if it is repeated enough there will be many people who accept it as fact. In addition, it may even be used as a basis for policy, much like nonexistent Hussein-Al-Queda link was. Despite the fact that Chavez's Bolivarian revolution has been proven to have no connection to terrorism of any kind, the intention of stories like this is to insinuate that it does.

Furthermore, the intention of those insinuations is to isolate governments like Venezuela's that oppose the imperial designs of Washington by linking them to groups that no government would publicly claim as allies. By creating this imaginary link, an enemy of Washington is enhanced. By enhancing that enemy, the war industry enhances the perception that it is needed to protect us from those enemies our government has created. In turn, the war industry's profits are enhanced at our expense.

Ron Jacobs is author of The Way the Wind Blew: a history of the Weather Underground, which is just republished by Verso. Jacobs' essay on Big Bill Broonzy is featured in CounterPunch's collection on music, art and sex, Serpents in the Garden. His first novel, Short Order Frame Up, is published by Mainstay Press. He can be reached at: rjacobs3625@charter.net

Is Iraq a Sovereign and Independent Colony?

By Jacob G. Hornberger

28/08/08 "fff" -- - - One cannot help but be amused over the negotiations taking place between President Bush and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki over how long U.S. troops will be permitted to stay in Iraq and whether occupation troops will be subject to Iraqi law in the interim.

My question is: Why is this something that even needs to be negotiated? I thought that Iraq was now a sovereign and independent country. Isn’t that what President Bush and U.S. officials have been telling us ever since U.S. troops invaded and occupied Iraq some six years ago?

Well, if Iraq really is a sovereign and independent country, then why does it have to negotiate anything with the United States, including an exit date for U.S. troops and how criminal offenses committed by U.S. troops in Iraq are going to be handled? Why can’t Iraq simply tell the U.S. government when it is going to leave Iraq and how the actions of its troops are going to be handled as long as they are in Iraq? As a sovereign and independent country, why does Iraq need consent or approval from the U.S. government for how things operate within Iraq? Does the U.S. government need the consent and approval of foreign regimes before taking actions here within the United States?

The negotiations between President Bush and Iraq belie the truth: President Bush and U.S. officials consider Iraq to be a conquered nation and a colony now with the U.S. Empire. That’s why the new U.S. Embassy is slated to be the largest of its kind in the world—the size of Vatican City. It’s also why Bush’s forces have been building permanent military bases during their occupation of the country.

Bush’s problem, however, is that Iraqi officials don’t consider themselves to be a vassal nation within the U.S. Empire. In fact, as we here at FFF have been pointing out for years, the Bush invasion, with the aid of clever political maneuvering by Islamic radical Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, succeeded in installing a radical Islamic regime into power in Iraq. Such a regime, which has even aligned itself with Bush’s arch-enemy Iran, isn’t likely to accede to Bush’s wish for a permanent U.S. occupation of Iraq, especially given that Iraqi officials know that Bush will soon find himself without political power clearing brush at his ranch in Crawford, Texas.

Mr. Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation.

How the Democrats Helped Bush Hijack the Country

By CYNTHIA McKINNEY

Our country has been hijacked and the Democrats have proven themselves to have been in on the plan. When it came to the Constitution, the Democratic leadership showed us that aiding and abetting illegal spying on us was more important to them than protecting our civil liberties.

When it came to war and occupation, the Democratic leadership showed us that financing an illegal and immoral war, based on lies, was more important to them than the people's desire for peace.

And when the people, hurting from the financial mismanagement of this country, called for accountability for the crimes that have been committed against the people here, against the global community, against nature, itself, the Democratic leadership took impeachment off the table!

Grassroots Democratic Party activists want a livable wage! A "Medicare-for-all" type of health care system, repeal of the Bush tax cuts that have ushered in the greatest income inequality in this country since the Great Depression. But the Democratic Party has shown itself to be incapable of providing even a semblance of the values even of its own activists.

The Democratic Party's national leadership didn't even mention Hurricanes Katrina and Rita survivors in their Congressional agenda for the first 100 days.

The Democratic Party's national leadership gave us the Iran Naval Blockade bill, the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act, and telecom immunity. They continue to fund war and occupation to the tune of $720 million a day while our children graduate from college tens--or even hundreds--of thousands of dollars in debt. Entire cities are going into receivership while the Democratic leadership in Congress gives the Pentagon one half trillion dollars annually with no accountability, no strings attached. That's over and above spending for war.

Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo are the hallmarks of the new U.S. gulag Democrats are helping to create.

They want us to believe that China and Russia are our enemies, in addition to the 60 countries on Dick Cheney's list. They want us to believe that workers, who come to this country to support thier families after Democratic leadership in the country saddl3ed workers with NAFTA, are our enemies. But we are here today to declare that we know who the real enemies are: those false patriots that George Washington warned us of, who wrap themselves in the flag while betraying our values.

We are the true patriots!

We know that the strength of this country lies in the way it countenances dissent. And we are here to dissent. We are not deterred by reports of sleek, new detention facilities or recently-acquired taser guns that kill. For we come to dissent in peace. Indeed, we dissent for peace.

Today, we declare our independence from conformity and "go-along-to-get-along" politics. We declare our willingness to be radical in pursuit of peace and in our hunger for justice. We can see clearly now who the real stickup artists are and that's why we're in Denver!

Our actions here this week begin the disarming of the hijackers. We no longer are afraid. And we won't be deceived. We know that a vote for the Democrats is a vote for more war in Afghanistan and other parts of the world.

But today, we are now free.

Free to stand on the four pillars guiding our political engagement: environmental wisdom, peace, grassroots democratcy, and social justice. And finally, we know our power. We know the power of the people. We know that true power rests in the hands of the people. People who are willing to take a stand.

We need look no further than Haiti, Code,I'voire, Spain, and India to see the power of the people at the ballot box. No further than Brazil, Venezuela, Chile, Argentina, Ecuador, Bolivia, Nicaragua, and Paraguay to know that if they can do it, so can we.

Provided our elections are fair!

And if the Democrats cave in, in the face of fraud, disfranchisement, and theft, then we will be there to demand election integrity!

All over this country, the signs are there. People from New York to Florida, Washington State to California, Colorado to Texas are liberating themselves. We must not stop! Our country is worth it! Let's take our country back! Power to the People!

Cynthia McKinney is the Green Party's nominee for president.

The Politics of Avoidance

By RALPH NADER

The “politics of avoidance” is receiving a great deal of media attention during this period of national political conventions. Unfortunately, the newspapers and television programs do not use the phrase: “the politics of avoidance.” Together with John McCain and Barack Obama, members of the press have become used to living the “politics of avoidance” every day by not asking, talking or reporting about the essential core of what politics should be about—power!

Power! Who has it? Who doesn’t have it? Who should have less of it and who should have more of it? What does concentrated power do to the everyday life of the people as workers, patients, consumers, taxpayers, voters, shareholders and citizens?

Just use these and other power yardsticks and watch how thin and how superficial daily political reporting, even by the best of the press, can become.

In the August 25th edition of The New York Times, a long analysis by Michael Powell is titled “Tracing the Disparate Threads in Obama’s Political Philosophy.” There was no mention of corporate misbehavior—as in corporate crime, corporate corruption, corporate governance, corporate accountability, or cracking down on corporate abuses from the contractors in Iraq to the speculators on Wall Street.

Bear in mind, The New York Times and other newspapers often report about corporate crime and misdeeds. Sometimes reporters do such a good job that they win the Pulitzer and other prizes. Yet, strangely, these reporters do not carry over the reporting of their own paper to their questioning of the Presidential candidates.

Since there is no challenging of the candidates by the reporters about what the candidates would do about this continual corporate crime wave and the miniscule prosecution budgets, or the limited enforcement and regulatory efforts, the candidates can remain mum, very mum.

In Powell’s article, Obama’s economics are described as “a redistributionist liberalism but [he] is skeptical of too much government tinkering. His most influential advisors hail from the University of Chicago, a bastion of free-marketers.” This is Obama’s way of saying to corporations that he is a safe bet not to trouble them with his earlier experience as a community organizer in neighborhoods that were up against a variety of corporate predators, including redlining banks and insurance companies, supermarkets that dumped contaminated food products, landlords who rented apartments with asbestos and lead contaminations and established pay-day lending sharks.

The same day—August 25, 2008, the Wall Street Journal had an entire special section devoted to “Debating the Issues” described as ‘Health Care,’ ‘Energy & the Environment,’ ‘The Economy’ and ‘Trade.’ The Health Care headline is sub-titled: “How Involved Should the Government Be?

Once again the same paradox. The Journal prints some of the best exposes of corporate greed and power in all of mainstream journalism. Yet one strains to detect any of this power analysis when it comes to the paper’s political coverage or campaign features.

Conventional political journalism is all about palliative descriptions, the question of governmental involvement primarily as an issuer of dollars to the recipients in presumed need. It is about symptoms, rarely about causes, and even less often about the need to curb or displace corporate control.

About 75 percent of the American people believe corporations have too much control over their lives. Yet reducing such control or holding it accountable is not part of electoral or political discourse.

A majority of the American people, and fifty-nine percent of physicians in an April poll, favor single payer or full government health insurance (as in full Medicare for all) with free choice of hospital and doctor, private delivery of care, and far less administrative costs and billing fraud. The health insurance companies would be displaced.

John McCain and Barack Obama have never had to debate this majoritarian preference along with their piecemeal, concessionary heathcare plans that please these same insurance companies.

The pollsters also reflect, embody and are saturated with this politics of avoidance. They do not poll the various impacts of concentrated corporate power on the various roles people play in the workplace, marketplace, and their communities.

The New York Times/CBS News Poll of delegates to the Democratic Convention asked about the condition of the economy, health care, going into Iraq, energy, abortion and gay marriage.

Not one question was asked about the most dominant power over government, elections, politics, the federal operating budget, and our political economy.

Whoever asks the questions, whoever controls the yardsticks controls the agenda of public dialogue. The politics of avoidance is designed to avoid the politics of corporate power.

Presidents Jefferson, Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt and leading Supreme Court Justices, Louis Brandeis and William Douglas understood and warned about the menace of unbridled corporate domination.

Today multinational corporations are more powerful then ever, especially over workers and the government. And politics is more about avoiding this central topic than ever before. Discussions about corporate power are off the table.

So much for the Preamble to our Constitution which reads, “We the People…”

Ralph Nader is running for president as an independent.

Militarism and a Uni-polar World

By Lenora Foerstel

27/08/08 "Global Research" -- -- The Trilateral Commission was founded in 1973 by David Rockefeller as an off-shoot of the Council of Foreign Relations (CFR). David Rockefeller was chairman of the CFR in 1970 and subsequently became the founding chairman of the Trilateral Commission. Soon the membership of the Commission had grown to 300 members, including prominent political figures like Zbigniew Brzezinski. Most members of the Trilateral Commission are bankers, media moguls, or corporate CEOs, primarily from North America, Europe and Japan, while all members of the CFR are U.S. Citizens.

The Commission seeks to extend its influence abroad and is careful to avoid the scrutiny of congressional investigations. The CFR on the other hand, focuses on the control of American media.

When American media discuss globalism, they rarely mention that the Trilateral Commission sets most global economic goals, primary among them being the creation of a one-world system of trade. It is basically a form of fascism in which global corporations and their elite CEOs determine the policies and direction of world governments. The creation of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank after World War II was intended to encourage Third World countries to borrow money from wealthy nations, so long as they agreed to the imposition of a wide range of “structural adjustment policies.” Any nation borrowing money from either organization would not be allowed to nationalize its natural resources and would be unable to prevent foreign corporations from buying or controlling those resources.

Shortly before World War II, Hjalmer Schacht, a German banker, toured the United States soliciting American corporate support for Hitler’s new fascist state. U.S. corporations not only agreed to support Germany against the socialist economic system of the Soviet Union, but also declared their opposition to the strong labor movement arising in the United States and Europe.

General Motors was prominent among the corporations that supported the Nazi government, investing $20 million in industries owned or controlled by Herman Goering and other Nazi officials. Other US multinational corporations that profited from and supported Hitler’s industrial war machine included General Electric, Standard Oil, Texaco, International Harvester, ITT and IBM. Today, Standard Oil of New York is unabashed in honoring its chemical cartel that manufactured Zyklon-B, the poison gas used by the Nazi gas chambers. (1)

Among the eminent business leaders backing these multinational corporations were the Rockefellers and Prescott Bush, father of George Bush and grandfather of George W. Bush. Prescott Bush worked with his father-in-law, George Herbert Walker, in the family firm Union Banking Corporation to raise $50 million for the Nazi government by selling German bonds to American investors from 1924 to 1930.

Even though the United States helped to defeat Nazi Germany in World War II, many of the powerful elite families continued to support Hitler’s fascist ideology after the war. John Rockefeller III was an uncritical believer in the doctrine of Thomas Robert Malthus, who claimed that population always increased at a geometric rate while food supply increased at the slower arithmetic rate. Malthus therefore concluded that population growth had to be rigidly controlled. Today, his theory is widely criticized for failing to take into account the vast technological advances in agriculture and food production.

Rockefeller also accepted Hitler’s concept of an Aryan race, leading him to propose population control on the poor and people of color, whom he believed were producing children of inferior intelligence. In an effort to support such views, the Rockefeller family became involved with Eugenics, a fascist doctrine that advocated breeding a superior race by eliminating the mentally ill, physically handicapped, and racially inferior.

During the 1920’s, anthropologist Franz Boaz helped to combat racial prejudice more than any of his contemporaries. Following in his steps was his young protégé, Margaret Mead, who went on to establish that nurture, not nature, was the primary determinant of human health and mental development. Their work showed that Eugenics was based on ideology, not science. The legitimate science of genetics emerged from the ashes of Eugenics, but even today, many geneticists are members of Eugenics societies.

Despite the demise of Eugenics, the theory of over-population remains a common political argument. It has been suggested by Henry Kissinger, a stout member of the Trilateral Commission, that countries that do not control their population should suffer sanctions and the human misery that accompanies them.

The US Congress has supported these early population concepts introduced by Rockefeller’s Foundation. In March 1970, Congress set up a “Commission on Population Growth and the American Future.” The commission included representatives from USAID, the State Department, and the Department of Agriculture, but CIA and Pentagon officials drew up the agenda. “Their objectives were not to assist developing countries, but as promoted by the Trilateral Commission, to curb world population with a view to serving US strategic and national security interests,” notes author Michel Chossudovsky.(2)

In 2007, more than 100 million tons of grain were used to make ethanol, which contributed to high global food prices and subsequent hunger and starvation. During this same year, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization stated that there had been a record grain harvest, suggesting that there is enough food in the world to feed everyone. Indeed, over the last twenty years, food production has risen steadily at over two percent a year, while the rate of population growth has dropped to 1.4 percent a year. Access to food should be viewed as a fundamental human right, but corporations regard it only as a commodity to be sold for profit. No amount of technological progress or increase in food production can overcome corporate greed. The corporations ignore basic human needs, seeking to control world resources by encouraging the US government to build more and more military bases around the world. Presently, the US has 1000 such bases.

Under the Clinton administration, Yugoslavia was dismembered in order to advance American interests. In particular, the former Serbian province of Kosovo was occupied by U.S. troops in order to build Camp Bondsteel, among the largest military bases ever created by the United States. It will double as Kosovo’s largest prison, where prisoners can be held indefinitely without charges and without defense attorneys.(3)

Another major reason for building Camp Bondsteel was to provide protection for an oil pipeline to be built to the Caspian Sea. The Caspian holds some 50 billion gallons of oil, tempting foreign intervention in the Balkans. In an attempt to control Caspian oil, NATO and US troops have been sent to the Georgia.

As Latin America asserts its independence from the odious Monroe Doctrine, its progressive leaders face increasing American pressure and overt threats. These new leaders no longer rely on the International Monetary Fund or the World Bank. Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua, and the Dominican Republic have become members of the Bolivian Alternative for Latin America. This organization emphasizes local energy development and has become the bank of the South. This bank will not operate as a profit driven institution, but as a financial organization that will consider the economic needs of each borrower country.

In an effort to break up this new political organization in Latin America, the US has provided six billion dollars to Alvaro Uribe, President of Columbia, with the understanding that a US military base would follow. The base would be placed in La Guay, a region spanning Northeast Columbia and Northwest Venezuela, a clear threat to the Chavez government in Venezuela.

As in the Caucasus and Latin America, Africa is faced with American military expansion through AFRICOM. AFRICOM is the acronym for the US military command post planned for Sub-Sahara Africa. As pointed out by the members of the National Conference of Black Lawyers (NCBL), AFRICOM will infringe on the rights of African states and will violate international law that protects the sovereignty of nations. African leaders are well aware that AFRICOM is intended to exploit Africa’s national resources.

It has become increasingly clear that the US military has been stretched thin, with insufficient forces to fight simultaneous wars and maintain the vast military bases it is establishing around the world. Responding to this problem, Donald Rumsfeld, former Secretary of Defense, and Vice President Dick Cheney have turned to private military forces. Blackwater, a well-paid mercenary army, has become the world’s most powerful private military corporation. Troops for Blackwater are recruited from countries like the Philippines, Nepal, Columbia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Honduras, Panama, Peru, and Chili. Some 60 former commandos have been recruited from the remnants of the army of former Chilean dictator Augusta Pinochet. They now serve as part of Blackwater’s fighting forces. Other mercenary armies available to the highest bidder include Amo Group, Eunyo, Hart Security, and the Military Professional Resources Incorporated (MPRI). (4)

In early August 1995, under former President Clinton, the MPRI mercenaries were sent to Croatia to train and assist the Croatian military in expelling ethnic Serbs from their villages in the Krajina, an area in Croatia.

American military bases are proliferating around the world like mushrooms. Among the more recent are the bases in Romania, Poland, Bulgaria, Pakistan, India, Australia, Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, Morocco, Tunis, Algeria, Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman and the United Arab Emirates.(5) New bases are presently under construction in Eurasia along the borders of Russia and in areas close to China. The earlier Clinton Doctrine proclaimed that the United States has the unilateral right to use military force to protect markets and resources. Author Michael Swank says the Clinton Doctrine is taken for granted today. He explains, “With markets and resources we have a right to make sure that we control them, which is logical on the principle that we own the world anyway so of course we have that right.” (6)

Dr. Sheldon Wolin, emeritus professor of politics at Princeton University, states that under George Bush the United States has finally achieved an official ideology of imperial expansion comparable to that of Nazi Germany.(7)

The US policy of dividing up countries like Yugoslavia has caused concern in the Middle East, Russia and China. Today, Russia is well aware that the US and NATO hope to divide Russia into three regions, as described in Zbigniew Bryzinski’s book, The Grand Chessboard: Western Russia would be integrated into Europe; Siberia would be separated from Russia; and the Asian republics would be given independence. Both Russia and China are concerned about the relentless expansion of NATO toward their borders.

The military bases spread out over the world have done very little to aid the growth of markets for the US. Taxpayer money funds not only America’s military bases, but the corporations that run them. The current economic depression and the steadily growing public debt, now exceeding nine trillion dollars, has harmed the US social infrastructure in areas like public education and health care. It has also caused the US to lose its competitiveness in manufacturing products to meet civilian needs. Simultaneously, the US has lost international markets to China, India, Russia, and some EU countries.

On June 15, 2001, China, Russia and four of their central Asian neighbors, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, established the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), a new regional group pursuing security and cooperation. The SCO is gaining influence internationally as more and more nations seek to join the group. Mongolia, Pakistan, Iran and India hold observer status, and nations as diverse as Bangladesh, Belarus, Nepal and the Philippines have expressed interest in affiliating with the SCO. (8)

Yevgeny Primakov, head of Russian trade and industry, has declared that the global economy no longer has a single undisputed leader. Russia and China, under the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, have worked to create a multi-polar world.

In May, 2008, Russia hosted the first meeting of BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China), bringing together four nations that are home to forty percent of humanity and representing the fastest growing emerging economies in the world. BRIC is being built on the foundation of a successful trilateral collaboration known as RIC (Russia, India and China).

Anthony Ling, managing director of Goldman Sachs International, noting the rising power of the four BRIC countries, characterizes them as “the new economic tigers.” The US is now lagging behind them in terms of the percentage of energy companys world wide. (9)

The new economic power exercised by BRIC and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization has created a new balance in world politics. The SCO has fostered economic and investment cooperation, including joint projects in the fuel and energy sectors, agriculture, and other spheres. The nations within the SCO have established relations with international bodies, including the United Nations, the European Union, the Association of Southeast Asia Nations (ASEAN), and the Islamic Conference.

In October, 2007, the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), consisting of the presidents of Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhatan, Ky7rgistan, Russia, and Tajikistan signed an agreement with the SCO to broaden cooperation on issues of security, crime, and drug trafficking. The major purpose of this agreement was to reaffirm that all participating states will be protected from the foreign threats. “Signatories would not be able to join other military alliances or other groups of states, while aggression against one signatory would be perceived as an aggression against all.”(10) The CSTO, an observer organization of the United Nations, offered aid and assistance in the reconstruction of Afghanistan, but NATO refused, indicating that they would rely instead on an expanded military presence. (11)

Russia and China feel that their union with SCO, CSTO and BRIC proves that a uni-polar world is out of date, and that a multi-polar world, based on cooperation and mutual support rather than competition and intimidation, will become the world’s standard.

Notes

Michael Zezima, Saving Private Power, The Hidden History of the "Good" War. New York: Soft Skill Press, 2000.

Michel Chossudovsky, “The Global Crisis: Food, Water, Fuel. Three Fundamental Necessities of Life in Jeopardy,” June 5, 2008. www.globalresearch.com

Chalmers Johnson, “The Empire of Bases: The Spoils of War,” excerpted from the book, The Sorrow of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy and the End of Republic. New York: Henry Holt, 2004.

Jeremy Scahill, Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army. New York: Nation Books, 2007.

Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrow of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy and the End of Republic. New York: Henry Holt, 2004.

Michael Shank, “Chomsky: Poorer Countries Find a Way to Escape U.S. Dominance,” Foreign Policy Focus, February 12, 2008. www.alternet/org/story/76657

Chalmers Johnson, “Inverted Totalitarianism: A New Way of Understanding How the U.S. Is Controlled,” May 19, 2008. www.alternet.org

“Shanghai Cooperation Organization Becoming Major World Force,” China Internet Information Center, June 18, 2008. www.chinaembassy.org

“New Economic Tigers: Brazil, Russia, India and China Overtake the U.S. in Dominating Global Energy and Industry New Study Shows,” Associated Press, June 25, 2007.
www.IHT.com/articles/Ap/2007/06/26/business/UN-F-45K

“Collective Security Treaty Organization,” Wikipedia Free Encyclopedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_Security_Treaty_Organization
“Afghanistan: NATO Rejects CSTO Offer, Persists in World Drive,” Voice of Russia, June 26, 2008. www.expat.ru


© Copyright Lenora Foerstel, Global Research, 2008

U.S. Soldiers Executed Iraqis, Statements Say

By PAUL VON ZIELBAUER

In March or April 2007, three noncommissioned United States Army officers, including a first sergeant, a platoon sergeant and a senior medic, killed four Iraqi prisoners with pistol shots to the head as the men stood handcuffed and blindfolded beside a Baghdad canal, two of the soldiers said in sworn statements.

After the killings, the first sergeant — the senior noncommissioned officer of his Army company — told the other two to remove the men’s bloody blindfolds and plastic handcuffs, according to the statements made to Army investigators, which were obtained by The New York Times.

The statements and other court documents were provided by a person close to one of the soldiers in the unit who insisted on anonymity and who has an interest in the outcome of the legal proceedings.

After removing the blindfolds and handcuffs, the three soldiers shoved the four bodies into the canal, rejoined other members of their unit waiting in nearby vehicles and drove back to their combat outpost in southwest Baghdad, the statements said.

The soldiers, all from Company D, First Battalion, Second Infantry, 172nd Infantry Brigade, have not been charged with a crime. However, lawyers representing other members of the platoon who said they witnessed or heard the shootings, which were said to have occurred on a combat patrol west of Baghdad, said all three would probably be charged with murder.

The accounts of and confessions to the killings, by Sgt. First Class Joseph P. Mayo, the platoon sergeant, and Sgt. Michael P. Leahy Jr., Company D’s senior medic and an acting squad leader, were made in January in signed statements to Army investigators in Schweinfurt, Germany.

In their statements, Sergeants Mayo and Leahy each described killing at least one of the Iraqi detainees on instructions from First Sgt. John E. Hatley, who the soldiers said killed two of the detainees with pistol shots to the back of their heads. Sergeant Hatley’s civilian lawyer in Germany, David Court, did not respond to phone calls and e-mail messages Tuesday.

Last month, four other soldiers from Sergeant Hatley’s unit were charged with murder conspiracy for agreeing to go along with the plan to kill the four prisoners, in violation of military laws that forbid harming enemy combatants once they are disarmed and in custody.

In an Army evidentiary hearing on Tuesday in Vilseck, Germany, two of those soldiers — Specialists Steven A. Ribordy and Belmor G. Ramos — invoked their right against self-incrimination. Reached by telephone, James D. Culp, a civilian lawyer for one of the other two soldiers charged, Staff Sgt. Jess C. Cunningham, declined to comment. A lawyer for the fourth soldier, Sgt. Charles P. Quigley, could not be reached.

In their sworn statements, Sergeants Mayo and Leahy described the events that preceded the shooting of the Iraqi men, who apparently were Shiite fighters linked to the Mahdi Army militia, which controlled the West Rashid area of southwest Baghdad.

After taking small-arms fire, the patrol chased some men into a building, arresting them and finding several automatic weapons, grenades and a sniper rifle, they said. On the way to their combat outpost, Sergeant Hatley’s convoy was informed by Army superiors that the evidence to detain the Iraqis was insufficient, Sergeant Leahy said in his statement. The unit was told to release the men, according to the statement.

“First Sergeant Hatley then made the call to take the detainees to a canal and kill them,” Sergeant Leahy said, as retribution for the deaths of two soldiers from the unit: Staff Sgt. Karl O. Soto-Pinedo, who died from a sniper’s bullet, and Specialist Marieo Guerrero, killed by a roadside bomb.

“So the patrol went to the canal, and First Sergeant, Sgt. First Class Mayo and I took the detainees out of the back of the Bradley, lined them up and shot them,” Sergeant Leahy said, referring to a Bradley fighting vehicle. “We then pushed the bodies into the canal and left.”

Sergeant Mayo, in his statement, attributed his decision to kill the men to “anger,” apparently at the recent deaths of his two comrades.

Sergeant Leahy, in his statement, said, “I’m ashamed of what I’ve done,” later adding: “When I did it, I thought I was doing it for my family. Now I realize that I’m hurting my family more now than if I wouldn’t have done it.”

Is War With Russia on the Agenda?

By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

Thinking about the massive failure of the US media to report truthfully is sobering. The United States, bristling with nuclear weapons and pursuing a policy of world hegemony, has a population that is kept in the dark--indeed brainwashed--about the most important and most dangerous events of our time.

The power of the Israel Lobby is an important component of keeping Americans in the dark. Recently I watched a documentary that demonstrates the control that the Israel Lobby exercises over Americans’ view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The documentary is available here.

As a result of the US media’s one-sided coverage, few Americans are aware that for decades Israel has been ethnically cleansing Palestinians from their homes and lands under protection of America’s veto in the United Nations. Instead, the dispossessed Palestinians are portrayed as mindless terrorists who attack innocent Israel.

If one reads Israeli newspapers, such as Haaretz, or publications from Israeli organizations, such as the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, one gets a radically different view of the situation than the propagandistic version delivered by US media and evangelical pulpits.

Most Americans know of the 2000 attack by Muslim terrorists on the USS Cole in Aden harbor that resulted in 17 dead and 39 wounded American sailors. But few have heard of Israel’s 1967 attack on the USS Liberty that left 34 American sailors dead and 174 wounded. Pressured by the Israel Lobby, President Johnson ordered Admiral McCain, father of the Republican presidential nominee, to cover up the attack. To this day there never has been a congressional investigation.

The failure of the American media is again evident in the coverage of the Georgian-Russian conflict. The US media presented the conflict as a Russian invasion of Georgia, whereas in actual fact the American and Israeli trained and equipped Georgian military launched a sneak attack to kill and to drive the Russian population out of South Ossetia, a separatist province.

Russian peacekeepers, together with Georgian ones, had been stationed in South Ossetia since the early 1990s. On orders from Mikheil Saakashvili, the American puppet “president” of Georgia, the Georgian peacekeepers turned their weapons on the unsuspecting Russian peacekeepers and murdered them.

This action by Saakashvili, elected with money from the neoconservative National Endowment for Democracy, an election-rigging tool of US hegemony, was a war crime. In truth, the Russians should have hung Saakashvili, as he is far more guilty than was Saddam Hussein. But it is Russia, not Saakashvili, that the US media has demonized.

Americans have become perfect subjects for George Orwell’s Big Brother. They sit stupidly in front of the TV news or the New York Times or Washington Post and absorb the lies fed to them. What is wrong with Americans? Why do they put up with it? Are Americans the nation of sheep that Judge Andrew P. Napolitano says they are? Americans flaunt “freedom and democracy” and live under a Ministry of Propaganda.

Two decades ago, President Reagan reached agreement with Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev to end the dangerous cold war. But every one of Reagan’s successors has sought to pick a new fight with Russia. In violation of the agreement, NATO has been taken to Russia’s borders, and the US is determined to put former constituent parts of Russia herself into NATO. In an effort to neutralize Russia’s nuclear deterrent and compromise her independence, the US is putting anti-ballistic missile bases on Russia’s borders.

The gratuitously aggressive US military policy toward Russia will lead to nuclear war. I am confident that if Americans elect John McCain, or the Republicans steal another presidential election, there will be nuclear war in the second decade of the 21st century. The neocon lies, propaganda, macho flag-waving, and use of US foreign policy in the interests of a few military-security firms, oil companies, and Israel are all leading in that direction.

The November election is perhaps the last chance to avoid nuclear war. But the opportunity might already have been missed. The Republicans have chosen as their candidate one of the most ignorant warmongers alive. The Democrats’ choice was between one of the most divisive women in America and a man of mixed race with a funny name. Considering American’s taste for war, the Democratic candidate could fail to defeat the GOP war candidate.

Many Americans will vote against Obama because he is black. Why does mixed ancestry confer the black label? If America’s population was predominantly black, would Obama be considered white?

Race and propaganda are more likely to determine the outcome of the November election than any awareness or consideration of real issues by voters.

The real issues are suffocated by the media. The American middle class is being destroyed by jobs offshoring and work visas for foreigners, while the incomes of the super rich are soaring. The US dollar’s reserve currency status is eroded. The US is massively in debt at home and abroad. Health insurance is unaffordable for the vast majority of the population. Injured veterans are being nickeled and dimed, while Halliburton’s profits escalate. Americans are losing their homes, while the US government bails out banks. Wars with Iran, Russia, and China are being planned in order to secure US hegemony.

Americans no longer have a government that is for the people and by the people. They have a government for and by special interests and an insane ideology.

But Americans have war, which lets them take out all their frustrations, resentments, and disappointments on “Muslim terrorists” and “Russian aggressors.” Few Americans are disturbed that 1.25 million Iraqis and an unknown number of Afghans have died as a result of American invasions based on Bush regime lies and deceptions. Even Americans, like Senator Biden, Obama’s selection for vice president, who understand that the wars are based on lies, still want the US to win. So, it was all a mistake and a deception, but let’s win anyway and keep on killing.

I know people who still complain that the US did not nuke North Vietnam. When I ask why Vietnam should have been nuked, they reply, “if we had nuked them we would have won.”

What would America have won? The answer is world loathing and the loss of the cold war.

For many Americans, war is like a sports contest in which they take vicarious pleasure and cheer on their side to victory. Millions of Americans are still bitter that “the liberal media” and war protesters caused America to lose the Vietnam war, and they are determined that this won’t happen again. These Americans have no realization that there was no more reason for the US to be fighting in Vietnam 40 years ago than to be fighting today in Iraq and Afghanistan or tomorrow in Iran.

Obama, if elected, is no guarantee against nuclear war. Obama has shown that he is as much under the Israel Lobby’s thumb as McCain. Obama’s foreign affairs advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, is not a neocon, but he was born in Warsaw, Poland, and has the Pole’s animosity toward Russia. The Bush administration has already changed US war doctrine to permit preemptive nuclear attack. With the US government determined to ring Russia with puppet states and military bases, war is inevitable.

Presidential appointees face confirmation in the Senate. Any of Obama’s appointees who might be out of step with plans for US and Israeli hegemony could expect opposition from large corporations and the Israel Lobby. There is no assurance that an Obama administration would not be positioned on “the issues” by the same special interests that have positioned the Bush administration.

Americans are filled with hubris, not with knowledge. They have no awareness of the calamity that their government’s pursuit of hegemony is bringing to themselves and to life on earth.

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions. He can be reached at: PaulCraigRoberts@yahoo.com

Can we really be so stupid?

by Ross Nelson,
Published Sunday, August 24, 2008

Ross Nelson sorts mail at the post office. To delay total brain atrophy he writes an occasional column for the Forum. He also reads on his breaks when he's not arguing politics or epistemological first principles with his co-workers.

After examining our reaction to the brief fight between Georgia and Russia, we must calmly, rationally ask, have we lost our bleeding minds?

John McCain earlier this year promised us that we would fight many wars in the future. Judging from his take on the Georgia-Russia fracas, he wasn’t kidding. Especially if he’s elected president. His bellicose statements and calls for convening NATO to discuss actions show that his first instinct will be to fight, not defuse.

The wars won’t have to involve a vital American interest, be constitutional or in self-defense. (Quickly: when the Constitution’s preamble speaks of the “common defence” (sic), do you think it refers to Americans or to the entire world?) Like the war in Iraq, these future wars will be gratuitous exercises in slaughter and aggression at the behest of madmen in Washington who claim to fight for the world’s sake.

In a battle without angels, Georgia set out in early August to retake its breakaway province South Ossetia, which holds fewer people than Fargo. South Ossetia had declared itself free in 1991 from Georgia during the general melee of the Soviet Union’s collapse. Georgia then invaded and brutalized the province just as it did this month, but this time Russia, spoiling for a fight, quickly reversed the Georgian invasion and turned occupier.

Having learned nothing from the Iraq war, the usual quarter-wit warmongers on the right and the GOP are at it again. Rush Limbaugh scorns those who have kept Georgia from joining NATO. Understand that if one member of that military alliance is attacked, the rest have to respond to the aggressor. NATO is a tripwire. How many thousands of Americans are we willing to sacrifice in yet another forsaken backwater that has little bearing on us? Let’s not even speak of a nuclear war.

Another crank commentator suggests we send a few fighter jets over Georgia, just to let the Russians know we mean business. Great idea. A mistake on either side and the warmongers might just have enough bloodshed to slake even their infinite appetites. But at least we’ll have made a blow for “democracy,” even if we sink ourselves doing so.

American exceptionalism has been made exceptionally clear. How’s this for Himalayan hubris and hypocrisy? President Bush: “Georgia is a sovereign nation, and its territorial integrity must be respected.” Or better yet, McCain’s “In the 21st century, nations don’t invade other nations.”

What exactly do we call our invasion of Iraq under cover of lies? Or, to placate the warmongers, Bush’s admission of being misled by mistaken intelligence? We are so far above the rest of the planet that we don’t even notice the sheer farce of our self-exemption from the standard we hold others to.

Somehow we can bomb Serbia when it tries to keep its own Kosovar territory and yet side with Georgia when it does the same thing. We can invade Panama to arrest its president, overthrow elected governments in Guatemala and Iran, and make unnecessary wars across the globe. And still we can keep a straight face when lecturing Russia about belligerent behavior.

We can surround Russia with countries that have joined NATO, an antagonistic military alliance, and think nothing of basing missile batteries on their territories. But imagine our reaction should Russia enlist Canada, Mexico and others around us into a Warsaw Pact replete with long-range missiles – even if they were only defensive missiles.

If you think that on the issue of aggressive war I argue moral equivalence, you are absolutely right. Moreover, Georgia is not worth the bones of a single American soldier.

Nelson, Casselton, N.D., is a Fargo postal worker and regular contributor to The Forum’s commentary page. He can be reached at r.cnelson@702com.net