Titanic Post

Published on Wednesday, October 24, 2007 by the Chicago Sun-Timesby Andrew Greeley

I am ashamed for America. Note carefully that I do not say I am ashamed of America. Despite all its inherent flaws and all its tragic mistakes, the United States stands, however incompletely and with whatever imperfections, for the highest standards of freedom and democracy that the world has yet known.

I am ashamed for America because all the evil done in the nation’s name in recent years is turning off the light on the mountaintop. (more…)

A review of The Intellectuals and the Flag, by Todd Gitlin

This article appeared in the Summer 2007 issue of the Claremont Review of Books.

This short, loosely organized collection of occasional essays makes for a surprisingly interesting and valuable book, well worth reading and pondering. Sociologist and radical activist Todd Gitlin, who has been a figure in the American Left since his Vietnam-era days in Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), has made a serious effort to reflect on the failures of the American Left since the 1960s. The criticisms he puts forward here, which are inevitably self-criticisms in part, are unsparing and penetrating, made all the more memorable by his unacademic, direct, and often epigrammatic style.

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How Bush Allowed an Army of For-Profit Contractors to Invade the U.S. Treasury

Rolling Stone Issue 1034

Operation Iraqi Freedom, it turns out, was never a war against Saddam ­Hussein’s Iraq. It was an invasion of the federal budget, and no occupying force in history has ever been this efficient. George W. Bush’s war in the Mesopotamian desert was an experiment of sorts, a crude first take at his vision of a fully privatized American government. In Iraq the lines between essential government services and for-profit enterprises have been blurred to the point of absurdity — to the point where wounded soldiers have to pay retail prices for fresh underwear, where modern-day chattel are imported from the Third World at slave wages to peel the potatoes we once assigned to grunts in KP, where private companies are guaranteed huge profits no matter how badly they fuck things up.

And just maybe, reviewing this appalling history of invoicing orgies and million-dollar boondoggles, it’s not so far-fetched to think that this is the way someone up there would like things run all over — not just in Iraq but in Iowa, too, with the state police working for Corrections Corporation of America, and DHL with the contract to deliver every Christmas card. And why not? What the Bush administration has created in Iraq is a sort of paradise of perverted capitalism, where revenues are forcibly extracted from the customer by the state, and obscene profits are handed out not by the market but by an unaccountable government bureauc­racy. This is the triumphant culmination of two centuries of flawed white-people thinking, a preposterous mix of authoritarian socialism and laissez-faire profit­eering, with all the worst aspects of both ideologies rolled up into one pointless, supremely idiotic military adventure — American men and women dying by the thousands, so that Karl Marx and Adam Smith can blow each other in a Middle Eastern glory hole.

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Published on Tuesday, August 14, 2007 by The San Francisco Chronicleby Bruce Fein

President Woodrow Wilson recanted his no-war pledge, President Franklin D. Roosevelt disowned his balanced budget promise and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., should learn from those examples. She should reconsider her “impeachment [of President Bush] is off the table” pledge. As Ralph Waldo Emerson advised, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.”

The speaker’s reluctance is understandable. The president’s tenure expires on Jan. 20, 2009. An impeachment inquiry could embolden al Qaeda, the Taliban, Iraq’s insurgents and Iran’s nuclear-minded mullahs. President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and a majority of Republicans in Congress would attempt to portray the exercise as naked partisanship. Their enthusiasm for impeaching President Bill Clinton over lying under oath about Monica Lewinsky would be no deterrent.

But countervailing constitutional concerns are more compelling. Bush has crippled checks and balances and protections against government abuses. If these claims and practices are not repudiated, the precedents will lie around like loaded weapons, ready for use by any White House incumbent to intimidate rivals or to destroy the rule of law. (more…)