James Atkinson @ 38 re wage vs wealth debate sparking economic depression or social revolution: the French and American revolutions in the last quarter of the 18th century were both sparked by perceived grievances of the governed by the ruling elites’ unjust economic policies. France recently showed that a large underclass of the dispossessed is not conducive to social harmony. Keynes’ “General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money” was penned because he feared that large scale pauperisation and hardship caused by the 1930s depression needs to be an urgent policy issue for governments to avert violent social upheavel as Germany saw in the rise of Nazism. I also referred to the Naxalite rebellion in the early 1970s in the Indian state of West Bengal in a comment @ 120 under Ian Welsh’s “The Long Suck”.

nancy jane @ 88 re the nuclear issue – I want no part in the nuclear brigade. I said as much in a comment @ 123 under Ian Wesh’s post “The Long Suck” and in “The Nuclear Debate” at http://dreamtime.bravehost.com/nucleardebate.html.

A lot of times I feel like I am whistling in the wind but then again who doesn’t?

(1) To complete the oil pipeline

(2) To thwart Taliban suppression of poppy farming, so that Bush family drug running could resume.

Maybe Mr. “Moron” should write his next column about all of those “principled” Republicans who are connected to Abramoff or maybe he could write about all of those “principled” Republicans who look the other way while the President walks all over the Constitution. GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!

http://911readingroom.org/bib/…..cle_id=423

Sergeant Ali Mohamed and U.S. Intelligence Links to the Al Qaeda Leadership

The Report describes Ali Mohamed as “a former Egyptian army officer who had moved to the United States in the mid-1980s, enlisted in the U.S. Army, and become an instructor at Fort Bragg,” as well as helping to plan the bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Kenya (68). In fact Ali Mohamed was an important al Qaeda agent who, as the 9/11 Commission was told, “trained most of al Qaeda’s top leadership,” including “persons who would later carry out the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.”[25] But the person telling the 9/11 Commission this, U.S. Attorney Patrick J. Fitzgerald, misrepresented Ali Mohamed’s FBI relationship. He told the Commission that, “From 1994 until his arrest in 1998, [Mohamed] lived as an American citizen in California, applying for jobs as an FBI translator and working as a security guard for a defense contractor.”[26]

Ali Mohamed was not just an FBI job applicant. Unquestionably he was an FBI informant, from at least 1993 and maybe 1989.[27] And almost certainly he was something more. A veteran of the CIA-trained bodyguards of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, he was able, despite being on a State Department Watch List, to come to America around 1984, on what an FBI consultant has called “a visa program controlled by the CIA”, and obtain a job, first as a security officer, then with U.S. Special Forces.[28] In 1988 he took a lengthy leave of absence from the U.S. Army and went to fight in Afghanistan, where he met with Ayman al-Zawahiri (later bin Laden’s chief deputy in al Qaeda) and the “Arab Afghan” leadership.[29] Despite this, he was able to receive an Honorable Discharge one year later, at which point he established close contact with bin Laden in Afghanistan.

Thanks!!

However, watching WW gets me thinking, and one topic I keep coming back to is which areas are the most basic– which reforms/changes need to be made in order to more effectively influence/change other areas. I keep coming back to two: campaign finance reform and verified voting/honest elections. I worry a lot about the two because with Diebold, et al, it seems like the fix is in. Polling, Republican sound bites, etc show there’s hand-wringing, worrying, etc., but part of me wonders if that’s because there truly is time/opportunity left before the inexorable move towards electronic voting/manipulation becomes irreversible, or if it’s all a dog-and-pony show, and the fix is permanently in? Maybe I’m being too pessimistic…

As for campaign finance reform, I keep coming back to the (obvious) conclusion (my own opinion, naturally) that to provide the best possible array of candidates and attract more people to the idea of running for office, there needs to be total reform of the system as it is. It’s not good for our system to have an extremely small pool of potential candidates, predetermined by their independent financial backing (read: rich) or by the dependent financial backing of others (read: sellout to moneyed interests). Then once in office, the vicious cycle perpetuates itself: the perpetual campaign, whereas our officeholders sell themselves to the highest bidder, thus insuring that the rest of us are never really heard, because we don’t come for an office visit with our checkbooks.

I keep thinking all of the other issues we want to change/fight on would be easier to negotiate/win/discuss if these two issues were fixed. Maybe I’m oversimplifying things here, or being too pessimistic (and I’m definitely re-stating the obvious– these problems have been around for a while now!), but does anyone have concrete suggestions for how to turn the tide? I guess where I’m coming from is that it’s great to fight battles (win some, lose some) on issues as diverse as Iraq, the environment, economics, health care, etc., but feeling that maybe there’s a need to first tackle some of the root causes of governmental corrutpion/dysfunction, so that we have gummint officials *willing* and able to listen, instead of hijacked by people who don’t give a damn. This way maybe we’ll win the war, because in the long run, that’s what counts– and it IS a war– a war for the heart and soul of this nation and its people.

Anyway, off of the soapbox– enjoy the weekend, all!

Funny, weren’t they pillorying the Democrats for this a few days ago?