Re: OT: No child left behind?



Term limits aren't the answer. You could tie the hands of someone who
might actually be doing the job. What you need is a mechanism for the
voters to launch a recall initiative when the dufus/dufette isn't
carrying out the people's will and it has to be one that can be
effectively used in a timely and straightforward way. On the other
hand, a good old revolution is a good way to remind them who the ***
they're supposed to be working for.

Sidebar: Make treason a capital offense and easier to prove,
hehehe...

Ken Wilson

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/042306X.shtml
Bill Moyers | A Time for Heresy
.. This is a time for heresy. American democracy is threatened by
perversions of money, power, and religion. Money has bought our
elections right out from under us. Power has turned government "of, by,
and for the people" into the patron of privilege. And Christianity and
Islam have been hijacked by fundamentalists who have made religion the
language of power, the excuse for violence, and the alibi for empire.
We must answer the principalities and powers that would force on
America a stifling conformity. Either we make the heretical choices
that will inspire us to renew our commitment to America's deepest
values and ideals, or the day will come when we will no longer
recognize the country we love.

Here's what I mean.

Two years ago, the American Political Science Association produced
a study entitled Democracy in an Age of Rising Inequality . The report
said people with wealth - privileged Americans - are "roaring with a
clarity and consistency that public officials readily hear and
routinely follow" while citizens "with lower or moderate incomes are
speaking with a whisper." The study concluded that "progress toward
realizing American ideals of democracy may have stalled, and even, in
some places, reversed."

The following year - 2005 - the editors of The Economist, one of
the world's most pro-capitalist publications, produced their own
sobering analysis of what is happening in America. They found great and
growing income disparities. Thirty years ago the average annual
compensation of the top 100 chief executives was 30 times the pay of
the average worker; today it is 1000 times the pay of the average
worker.

They found an education system "increasingly stratified by social
class" in which poor children "attend schools with fewer resources than
those of their richer contemporaries." They found our celebrated
universities increasingly "reinforcing rather that reducing" these
educational inequalities.

They found American corporations no longer successful agents of
upward mobility. It is now harder for people to start at the bottom and
rise up the company hierarchy by dint of hard work and
self-improvement.

The editors of The Economist studied all this evidence and
concluded - and I am quoting a pro-business magazine, remember - that
the United States "risks calcifying into a European-style, class-based
society."

Let that sink in: The United States "risks calcifying into a
European-style, class-based society."

In 1960 I heard John F. Kennedy promise that "a rising tide lifts
all boats." He was right then. He would be wrong today. Just this past
weekend The Washington Post, in a lead editorial, called for a second
look at the old belief "that anyone who works hard and plays by the
rules can attain the American dream by sharing in the fruits of
economic progress." As great wealth accumulated at the top, the rest of
the country is not benefiting proportionally. Across the country
working men and women are strained to cope with the rising cost of
health care, pharmaceutical drugs, housing, higher education, and
public transportation - all of which have risen faster than typical
family income. The economist Robert J. Gordon, quoted in The Financial
Times (another pro-business publication), says there has been "little
long-term change in workers share of U.S. income over the past half
century." The top ten percent of earners have captured almost half the
total income gains and the top one percent has gained the most of all -
more in fact, than all the bottom 50 percent.

We are witnessing a marked turn of events for a nation whose DNA
contains the inherent promise of an equal opportunity at "Life,
Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness." We were not supposed to be a
country where the winners take all. The great progressive struggles in
our history were waged to make sure ordinary citizens, and not just the
rich, share in the benefits of a free society. Today, however, the
majority of Americans may support such broad social goals as affordable
medical coverage for all, decent wages for working people, safe working
conditions, a good education for every child, and clean air and water,
but there's no government "of, by, and for the people" to deliver on
those aspirations. America is no longer working for all Americans.

How did this happen? By design. For a quarter of a century now a
ferocious campaign has been conducted to dismantle the political
institutions, the legal and statutory canons, and the intellectual,
cultural, and religious frameworks that sustained America's social
contract. The corporate, political, and religious right converged in a
movement that for a long time only they understood because they are its
advocates, its architects, and its beneficiaries.

Their economic strategy was to cut workforces and wages, scour the
globe for even cheaper labor, and relieve investors of any
responsibility for the cost of society. On the weekend before President
Bush's second inauguration, The New York Times described how his first
round of tax cuts had already brought our tax code closer to a system
under which income on wealth would not be taxed at all and public
expenditures would be raised exclusively from salaries and wages.

Their political strategy was to neutralize the independent media,
create their own propaganda machine with a partisan press, and flood
their coffers with rivers of money from those who stand to benefit from
the transfer of public resources to elite control. Along the way they
would burden the nation with structural deficits that will last until
our children's children are ready to retire, systematically stripping
government of its capacity, over time, to do little more than wage war
and reward privilege.

Their religious strategy was to fuse ideology and theology into a
worldview freed of the impurities of compromise, claim for America the
status of God's favored among nations (and therefore beyond political
critique or challenge), and demonize their opponents as ungodly and
immoral.

At the intersection of these three strategies was money: Big Money.


They found a deep flaw in our political system and zeroed in on it.


Our elected officials need huge sums of money to finance their
campaigns, especially to buy television. The average cost of running
and winning a seat in the House of Representatives - the so-called
"People's House" - now tops one million dollars. The chairman of the
Federal Election Commission said just this weekend that anyone who
expects to run for the nomination for president - the nomination - in
2008 will need to have raised one hundred million dollars by the end of
2007. That money isn't going to come from regular folks - less than one
half of one percent of all Americans made a contribution of $200 or
more to a federal candidate in 2004. No, the men and women who have
mastered the money game have taken advantage of this fundamental
weakness in our system - the high cost of campaigns - to sell democracy
to the highest bidder.

Some simple facts:

The number of lobbyists registered to do business in Washington has
more than doubled in the last five years. That's 16,342 lobbyists in
2000 to 34,785 last year. Sixty-five lobbyists for every member of
Congress.

The total spent per month by special interests wining, dining, and
seducing federal officials is now nearly $200 million. Per month.

But it's a small investment on the return. Just look at the most
important legislation passed by Congress in the last decade.

There was the energy bill that gave oil companies huge tax breaks
at the same time that Exxon Mobil just posted $36 billion in profits in
2005, while our gasoline and home heating bills are at an all-time
high.

There was the bankruptcy "reform" bill written by credit card
companies to make it harder for poor debtors to escape the burdens of
divorce or medical catastrophe.

There was the deregulation of the banking, securities, and
insurance sectors, which led to rampant corporate malfeasance and greed
and the destruction of the retirement plans of millions of small
investors.

There was the deregulation of the telecommunications sector which
led to cable industry price-gouging and the abandonment of news
coverage by the big media companies.

There was the blocking of even the mildest attempt to prevent
American corporations from dodging an estimated $50 billion in annual
taxes by opening a P.O. box in an off-shore tax haven like Bermuda or
the Cayman Islands.

In every case these results were driven by the demands of Big Money
in the form of campaign contributions and the cost of lobbying.

And in every case, the religious right was cheering for the
winners.

You've heard about Tom DeLay and Jack Abramoff, I'm sure. Let me
tell you a little more than what you might have heard.

Tom DeLay was a small businessman from Sugar Land, Texas, who ran a
pest extermination business before he entered politics. He hated the
government regulators who dared to tell him that some of the pesticides
he used were dangerous - as, unfortunately, they were. DeLay got
himself elected to the Texas legislature at a time the Republicans were
becoming the majority in the once-solid Democratic south, and his
reputation for joining in the wild parties around the state capital
earned him the nickname "Hot Tub Tom." But early in his political
career, with exquisite timing (and the help of some videos from the
right-wing political evangelist, James Dobson) Tom DeLay found Jesus
and became a full-fledged born-again Christian. He would, in time,
humbly acknowledge that God had chosen him to restore America to its
biblical worldview. "God," said Tom DeLay, "has been walking me through
an incredible journey ? God is using me, all the time, everywhere ?
God is training me. God is working with me ?."

Yes, indeed: God does work in mysterious ways.

In addition to finding Jesus, Tom DeLay also discovered the power
of money to power his career. By raising more than two million dollars
from lobbyists and business groups and distributing the money to dozens
of Republican candidates in 1994, the year of the Republican
breakthrough in the House, DeLay bought the loyalty of many freshmen
legislators and got himself elected majority whip, the number three man
in Newt Gingrich's "Gang of Seven," who ran the House.

Here's how they ran it: On the day before the Republicans formally
took control of Congress on January 3, 1995, DeLay met in his office
with a coterie of lobbyists from some of the biggest companies in
America. He virtually invited them to write their own wish list. What
they wanted first was "Project Relief" - a wide-ranging moratorium on
regulations that had originally been put into place for the health and
safety of the public. Soon scores of companies were gorging on his
generosity, adding one juicy and expensive tidbit after another to the
bill. On the eve of the debate 20 major corporate groups advised
lawmakers that "this was a key vote, one that would be considered in
future campaign contributions." On the day of the vote lobbyists on
Capitol Hill were still writing amendments on their laptops and
forwarding them to House leaders.

Watching Tom DeLay become the virtual dictator of the House, with
the approval of party leaders and the blessing of the Christian right,
I was reminded of the card shark in Texas who said to his prey, "Now
play the cards fair, Reuben; I know what I dealt you." They were
stacking the deck against the people.

Consider what they did to the bill for Medicare prescription drug
coverage. As the measure was coming to a vote, a majority of the full
House was sympathetic to allowing cheaper imports from Canada and to
giving the government the power to negotiate wholesale drug prices for
Medicare beneficiaries. But DeLay and his cronies were working in
behalf of the big pharmaceutical companies and would have none of it.
So they made sure there would be no amendments on the floor and they
held off the final roll call a full three hours - well after midnight -
in order to strong-arm members who wanted to vote against the bill.

There are no victimless crimes in politics. The price of corruption
is passed on to you. What came of all these shenanigans was a bill that
gave industry what it wanted and gave taxpayers the shaft. But when the
deeply flawed bill passed in the wee hours of the morning, the
champagne corks popped in the offices crowded with lobbyists for the
big drug and insurance companies. They were about to be richer on the
backs of America's senior citizens.

When Tom DeLay worked the system to reward the rich and powerful,
he had come a long way from Sugar Land, Texas. The people who had voted
for him had the right to expect him to represent them, not the big
lobbyists in Washington. This expectation is the very soul of
democracy. We can't all govern - not even tiny, homogenous Switzerland
practices pure democracy. So we Americans came to believe our best
chance of responsible government lies in obtaining the considered
judgments of those we elect to represent us. Having cast our ballots in
the sanctity of the voting booth with its assurance of political
equality, we go about our daily lives expecting the people we put in
office to weigh the competing interests and decide to the best of their
ability what is right. What do they do instead?

Well, as Tom DeLay became the king of campaign fundraising, The
Associated Press writes "He began to live a lifestyle his constituents
back in Sugar Land would have a hard time ever imagining." Big
corporations provided private jets to take him to places of luxury most
Americans have never seen - places with "dazzling views, warm golden
sunsets, golf, goose-down comforters, marble bathrooms, and balconies
overlooking the ocean." The AP reports that various organizations -
campaign committees, political action committees, even a children's
charity established by DeLay - paid over $1 million for hotels,
restaurants, golf resorts and corporate jets used by DeLay. There were
at least 48 visits to golf clubs and resorts; 100 flights aboard
corporate jets arranged by lobbyists; and 500 meals at fancy
restaurants, some averaging $200 for a dinner for two.

Spreading a biblical worldview kept DeLay on the move and on the
take. But he needed help to sustain the cash flow. He found it in a
lobbyist and fellow ideologue named Jack Abramoff, who personifies the
money machine of which DeLay, with the blessing of the political and
religious right, was the mastermind. It was Abramoff who helped DeLay
raise those millions of dollars from campaign donors that bought the
support of other politicians and became the base for an empire of
corruption.

Just last month Jack Abramoff pleaded guilty to fraud, tax evasion,
and conspiracy to bribe public officials. It's a spectacular fall for a
man whose rise to power began 25 years ago with his election as
chairman of the College Republicans. Despite its innocuous name, the
organization became a political attack machine for the far right and a
launching pad for younger conservatives on the make. Karl Rove had once
held the same job as chairman. So did Grover Norquist, who ran
Abramoff's campaign and would become the most powerful operative in
Washington for advancing the movement's strategies. At their side was a
youthful $200-a-month intern named Ralph Reed. Over the next several
years they would yoke politics and religion to turn the conservative
revolution into a rapacious racket.

Ralph Reed found Jesus and wound up running Pat Robertson's
Christian Coalition. Time magazine put him on their cover as "the Right
Hand of God." Reportedly after seeing "Fiddler on the Roof" Abramoff
became an Orthodox religious Jew who finagled fake awards to provide
himself with credentials in the new piety-soaked world of conservative
Washington politics. One of those bogus awards named him "a
distinguished Bible scholar." He received the "Biblical Mercantile
Award" from an organization which laundered money for Tom DeLay's
junkets to plush golf clubs.

It's impossible to treat all the schemes and scams this crowd
concocted to subvert democracy in the name of God and greed. But here
are two examples.

Abramoff made his name, so to speak, representing Indian tribes
with gambling interests. As his partner he hired a DeLay crony named
Michael Scanlon. What they had to offer, of course, were their
well-known connections to the political and religious power structure,
including friends at the White House (Abramoff's personal assistant
usefully became Karl Rove's personal assistant), members of Congress,
Christian right activists like Reed, and right-wing ideologues like
Norquist (according to one report, two lobbying clients of Abramoff
paid $25,000 to Norquist's organization - Americans for Tax Reform -
for a lunch date and meeting with President Bush in May 2001.)

Before it was over the Indian tribes had paid them $82 million
dollars, much of it going directly into Abramoff's and Scanlon's
pockets. But some of the money found its way to the righteous. Ralph
Reed, for one, had his hand out. Reed was the religious right's poster
boy against gambling. "We believe gambling is a cancer on the American
body politic," Reed had said. "It is stealing food from the mouths of
children? [and] turning wives into widows." Reed was right about that,
of course, but his distaste for gambling was no match for his desire to
make himself some moolah by helping to protect Abramoff's gambling
interests. When Reed resigned from the Christian Coalition - just as it
was coming under federal investigation and slipping into financial
arrears - he sent Abramoff an email: "Now that I am leaving electoral
politics, I need to start humping in corporate accounts? I'm counting
on you to help me with some contacts."

Abramoff came through. According to published reports, he and his
partner Michael Scanlon paid Reed some $4 million to whip up Christian
opposition to gambling initiatives that could cut into the profits of
Abramoff's clients. Reed called in some of the brightest stars in the
Christian firmament - Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, James Dobson,
Phyllis Schlafly - to participate in what became a ruse in Abramoff's
behalf. They would oppose gambling on religious and moral grounds in
strategic places (Texas, Louisiana, Alabama) at decisive moments when
competitive challenges threatened Abramoff's clients. Bogus Christian
fronts were part of the strategy. Preachers in Texas rallied to Reed's
appeals. Unsuspecting folks in Louisiana turned on their radios one day
to hear the voice of God - with Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson doing
the honors - thundering against a riverboat gambling scheme which
Abramoff wanted defeated because it threatened one of his own gambling
clients. Reed even got James Dobson, whose nationwide radio "ministry"
reaches millions of people, to deluge phone lines at the Interior
Department and White House with calls from indignant Christians. In
1999 Abramoff arranged for the Mississippi Choctaws, who were trying to
stave off competition from other tribes, to contribute over $1 million
to Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform, which then passed the money
along to the Alabama Christian Coalition and to another anti-gambling
group Reed had duped into aiding the cause. It is unclear how much
these Christian soldiers, "marching as to war," knew about the true
purpose of their crusade, but Ralph Reed knew all along that his money
was coming from Abramoff. When he fiddled, his brethren on the
Christian right danced.

It gets worse.

And here we get to the heart of darkness.

One of Abramoff's first big lobbying clients was the Northern
Marianas Islands in the Pacific. After World War II the Marianas became
a trusteeship of the United Nations, administered by the U.S.
government under the stewardship of the Interior Department. During
World War II thousands of Marines died on the Marianas, fighting for
our way of life and our freedoms. Today, these islands are a haven for
tourists - first-class hotels, beautiful beaches, championship golf
courses. But that's not the whole story. The islands were exempted from
U.S. labor and immigration laws, and over the years tens of thousands
of people, primarily Chinese, mostly women, were brought there as
garment workers to live in crowded barracks in miserable conditions.
The main island, Saipan, became known as America's biggest sweatshop.

In 1998 a government report found workers there suffering severe
malnutrition and health problems and subjected to unprovoked acts of
violence. Many had signed "shadow contracts" which required them to pay
up to $7000 just to get the job. They also had to renounce their claim
to basic human rights. They were forbidden to engage in political and
religious activities, to socialize or to marry. Some of the biggest
names in the retail clothing industry were enabled to slap "made in the
USA" labels on the clothes and import them to America while paying the
workers practically nothing.

When these scandalous conditions began to attract attention, the
sweatshop moguls fought all efforts at reform. Knowing that Jack
Abramoff was close to Tom DeLay, they hired him to lobby for the
islands. Conservative members of Congress lined up as Abramoff's team
arranged for them to visit the islands on carefully guided junkets.
Conservative intellectuals and journalists, for hire at rates
considerably above what the women on the islands were making, also
signed on for expense-free trips to the Marianas. They flew
first-class, dined at posh restaurants, slept in comfort at the
beachfront hotel, and returned to write and speak of the islands as "a
true free market success story" and "a laboratory of liberty."

Abramoff took Tom DeLay and his wife there, too. DeLay practically
swooned. He said the Marianas "represented what is best about America."
He called them "my Galapagos" - "a perfect petri dish of capitalism."

These fellow travelers - rightwing members of Congress, their
staffs and their lapdogs in the rightwing press and think tanks -
became a solid phalanx aimed at any and all attempts to provide workers
on the islands with a living wage and decent living conditions. When a
liberal California Democrat, George Miller, and a conservative Alaskan
senator, Frank Murkowski, both indignant at the "appalling conditions,"
tried to raise minimum wages on the islands and at least prevent
arbitrary deportation of the workers, they were stopped cold.

After the 2000 election, when the spoils of victory were being
divided up, Abramoff got himself named to the Bush transition team for
the Interior Department. He wanted to make sure the right people wound
up overseeing his clients in the Marianas. He enlisted Ralph Reed, who
said he would raise the matter with Rove, to stop at least one
appointment to Interior that might prove troublesome. It was about this
time that Reed wrote an email to Enron's top lobbyist touting his pal
Abramoff as "arguably the most influential and effective GOP lobbyist
in Congress. I share several clients with him and have yet to see him
lose a battle. He also is very close to DeLay and could help enormously
on that front. raised $ for bush?[sic]"

For his services to the Marianas Jack Abramoff was paid nearly $10
million dollars, including the fees he charged for booking his guests
on the golf courses and providing them copies of Newt Gingrich's book

To this day, workers on the Marianas are still denied the federal
minimum wage while working long hours for subsistence income in their
little "petri dish of capitalism" - "America at its best."

There are no victimless crimes in politics. The cost of corruption
is passed on to the people. When the government of the United States
falls under the thumb of the powerful and privileged, regular folks get
squashed.

We are dealing here with a vision sharply at odds with the majority
of Americans. These are people who want to arrange the world for the
convenience of themselves and the multinational corporations that pay
for their elections. With their fundamentalist medicine men twirling
the bullroarers in the woods, they would turn America into their petri
dish - a replica of the Marianas, many times magnified: A society "run
by the powerful, oblivious to the weak, free of accountability,
enjoying a cozy relationship with government, thriving on crony
capitalism," in the words of Al Meyeroff, who led a class-action suit
in behalf of the worker on the Marianas and learned what they were up
against. Let this, too, sink in: If the corporate, political, and
religious right have their way, we will go back to the first Gilded
Age, when privilege controlled politics, votes were purchased,
legislatures were bribed, bills were bought, and laws flagrantly
disregarded - all as God's will.

So, my friends at Wake Forest, there is work to do. These
charlatans and demagogues know that by controlling a society's most
emotionally-laden symbols, they can control America, too. They must be
challenged. Davidson Loehr reminds us that holding preachers and
politicians to a higher standard than they want to serve has marked the
entire history of both religion and politics. It is the conflict
between the religion of the priests - ancient and modern - and the
religion of the prophets.

It is the vast difference between the religion about Jesus and the
religion of Jesus.

Yes, the religion of Jesus. It was in the name of Jesus that a
Methodist ship caulker named Edward Rogers crusaded across New England
for an eight-hour work day. It was in the name of Jesus that Francis
William rose up against the sweatshop. It was in the name of Jesus that
Dorothy Day marched alongside auto workers in Michigan, brewery workers
in New York, and marble cutters in Vermont. It was in the name of Jesus
that E.B. McKinney and Owen Whitfield stood against a Mississippi
oligarchy that held sharecroppers in servitude. It was in the name of
Jesus that the young priest John Ryan - ten years before the New Deal -
crusaded for child labor laws, unemployment insurance, a minimum wage,
and decent housing for the poor. And it was in the name of Jesus that
Martin Luther King Jr. went to Memphis to march with sanitation workers
who were asking only for a living wage.

This is the heresy of our time - to wrestle with the gods who guard
the boundaries of this great nation's promise, and to confront the
medicine men in the woods, twirling their bullroarers to keep us in
fear and trembling. For the greatest heretic of all is Jesus of
Nazareth, who drove the money changers from the temple in Jerusalem as
we must now drive the money changers from the temples of democracy.

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