Power is Corrupting

Mark Twain, who also did not use his real name in public, wrote that an honest man is one whose price is higher than the market rate.  Like most things Mark Twain wrote, this is right, mostly.

In the current political climate, many people prefer to support a candidate who is perfect.

Diogenes thinks this is a poor idea.  The original fellow who adopted the name Diogenes went looking for an honest man, bringing a lit lantern to the marketplace, at noon.  It seems to have not worked, because he never found what he was looking for.

We like to associate “price” as something financial, and for that reason, we like to look for financial peccadilloes when we look for fault in a public figure.  And a good deal of the time, that is exactly correct. 

Diogenes was thinking of the case of Alan Hevesi, who was the New York State Comptroller, and before that, the NYC Comptroller.  Unfortunately, he thought he was entitled to use his office as a fiefdom, and when he got caught, it was the end of his public career, although he was believed to have been a very good public servant and steward of the public’s money in general.  And he was clearly better qualified than either the fellow who ran against him last year, or the current Comptroller, appointed by the State Legislature. 

Last year we learned that Randy Cunningham had a written scale for the amount of payoff he required to generate profits at any given level.  Evidently, he thought of his position as a sales executive, and he thought of his “take” as a commission on each sale.

Bob Ney had a similar outlook.  John Murtha never was charged criminally for earmarking legislation, but he was thwarted in his ambition for a House leadership post by the members of the Democratic caucus, because of the earmarks publicity. 

Tom DeLay was a fellow with a wonderful sense of scale.  Like the accountant Bloom in “The Producers,” DeLay figured out that if a Congressman could steal some small amount in the normal course of business, a smart guy with no inhibitions could create a real industry, tying together the Republicans in the House and the Senate, the Bush Administration, the radical right, people who said that they were Evangelical Christians, and quite a few who were in it only for the money, including Jack Abramoff.  What a brilliant plan! 

For other people, money is not the price.  Many politicians go into that line of work because they like the adulation.  Like rock stars, successful politicians attract groupies who provide unconditional approval, love, sex, and who are willing to let the elected one feel even more powerful personally than he is in politics.  Significantly, we now know that in the 1990’s both Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich had, uh, relationships, that involved fellatio, a form of sexual relationship that is generally not equal.  Both of them used the rationalization that they could say they never had sexual relations with the woman in question.  Some other well known people who seem to crave the attention include Rudy Giuliani, who had two well known affairs while Mayor of New York, and who married the second one.  Diogenes thinks that some of the people who look for political power, really want the opportunity to reject anyone they want, at any time they want.  As example, Mr. Gingrich, who told his first wife he wanted a divorce as she was recovering from cancer surgery, and Mr. Giuliani, whose second wife found out about the divorce on television.  Historically, spies like to use sex as a means to get people to work with them.  Willy Brandt became a tool of the East German spy agency in this way.  John Profumo lost his job in the British cabinet this way as well. 

There are some people who go into politics as a way to exercise power in a way that money does not.  Mark Hanna led the US Senate when he was one of the Robber Barons.

Clearly, he was not doing it only for the money, although he probably did not lose.

And maybe he really thought he was doing good for the country.  Current examples of people who brought their own personal fortunes to work for their entry into politics are Frank Lautenberg, Jon Corzine, and Michael Bloomberg.  Some time ago, the Rockefeller brothers, Nelson and Winthrop, and their nephew, John D IV, have used their personal money to get into politics, as well as John Heintz.  Diogenes accepts that just because individuals really, really want political power, that does not mean that they are bad people, whether Republicans or Democrats. 

Many people believe that it is a good idea to vote for a person of enormous personal wealth, because those people have no reason to steal.  Diogenes thinks that is a foolish idea, because if a truly rich man is going to steal, it is not going to be a few dollars, like Dan Rostenkowski, it will involve billions.  And also because the need for power can be as corrupting as the need for money, there are things a person in power can do that are much worse than stealing a few dollars. 

During the 2004 Republican convention, thousands of people were rounded up on the streets of New York, for the crime of protesting the current administration.  They were held in facilities that are not jails, they were not taken to courts for arraignment.  When the time came for the City to prosecute, the number of people who actually went to trial was zero.  Videotapes the police made at the time showed them just picking people up in nets, including some people who were not actually protesting but happened to be in a place at the right time.  Recently, we learned that eight US Attorneys were fired by the Bush Administration for failing to prosecute political enemies.  And that the US Attorneys who were not fired, did in fact show a policy of prosecuting political enemies. 

Diogenes thinks that stealing a small amount of money is not the greatest crime in politics, compared to destroying the people’s trust in government.  There are some in politics, like Grover Norquist, who want to reduce the size of the government so that it can be drowned in the bath.  Whoever wants to do that has gotten a beautiful start on the  project.  It is up to the rest of us to prevent them from finishing the job.

 

What does Libby know?

What are we going to do about this Libby verdict? 

Lewis Libby was found guilty of obstructing justice and lying.  Of course his attorneys will demand a new trial, and will appeal.  He will lose those appeals, because he is really and truly guilty, and the jury did a real workmanlike job of it.  But Lewis Libby is unlikely to see the inside of a Federal prison unless George W Bush leaves office without warning. 

Libby was the lawyer for Marc Rich, who was pardoned by Mr. Clinton in the last weeks of his administration, and Libby clearly knows the right things he must do to do to get a pardon.  Mr. Bush 43 knows about pardons also.  Mr. Bush famously values loyalty more than anything else, and was the chief loyalty officer for his father, Mr. Bush 41, who pardoned Caspar Weinberger.  Weinberger was convicted in the Iran-Contra scandal, and was pardoned by Mr. Bush 41, a reward for never telling anything he knew, even after he was convicted.  The loyalty was a good thing for Mr. Bush 41, who would have been exposed as a co-conspirator in that sordid affair, and it was a good thing for Mr. Weinberger, who did not really want to begin his retirement as a felon and a jailbird. 

The conspiracy that Mr. Libby was engaged in, clearly involved other people in the Bush 43 administration.   Karl Rove gave quite a lot of testimony about the way Valerie Plame became famous in Robert Novak’s column.  Each time he testified, he had no memory of giving any information about Plame to anyone, until one day, a (former) journalist told Rove about information the Special Prosecutor had, about Rove telling other people about Valerie Plame.  Rove went before the grand jury one more time, and his memory was back – he testified that he did mention Plame to several people.  In this way, Rove escaped indictment.  The Libby jury never got to read that story, so they were mystified about why Karl Rove was not on trial with Libby. 

Libby was the chief of staff to Dick Cheney, the most powerful Vice President in US history.  Clearly, Libby knows the locations of many of the Bush 43 administration’s skeletons.  Here are some of the skeletons we need to look for in the Bush closet: 

First, in order to do the work the Bush people had in mind, they had to control both houses of Congress, otherwise there would be a lot of Senate or Congressional hearings. The fact is that the Iraq invasion was invented as a solution to the threat of terrorism, in time to alter the outcome of the 2002 elections.  And it worked!  The Republicans got control of both houses of the Congress, and did not look into anything that would have been embarrassing to Mr. Bush 43. 

There are several reasons why torture is not used to get information from suspects.

First, many do not actually know anything, and second, whether they know something or not, they will say anything the torturer wants to hear, in order to stop the pain.

If the object is to get truthful, useful information, torture is not a good tool.

On the other hand, torture is the exact best way to get the story that you want, if you do not ever need to use it in a court.  The secret and totally unlawful rendition of people to countries where our people could get them tortured was not some random occurrence.  The CIA did this very dirty work in support of the Bush 43 conspiracy, and to the detriment of the United States and Mr. Libby knows all about it.  The object was to get someone, under duress, to say that Saddam Hussein was building nuclear weapons and chemical weapons and biological weapons.  And it worked!  Oyur people got a lot of information.  The CIA complained that they got much too much information, and could not process it to verify which items were true, and which were not. 

On behalf of the United States of America, people were swept up in Iraq, and sent to Abu Graib.  Some of these people, no doubt, were bad people.  Some of these people were just ordinary people who were accused by one side or another in the Iraqi toxic politics.  Few of these people, bad or good, had anything to give us whether tortured or not.  So far, the investigations run by the Defense Department have called for prosecution of quite a lot of individuals, none with higher rank than a Sergeant.  And one officer was cashiered – Brigadier General Janice Karpinski, who had nothing at all to do with the atrocities at Abu Ghraib, although there were several Generals and several Colonels who did have authority over the interrogations.  And of course, there were CIA agents and CIA contractors, whose responsibility is known only my Donald Rumsfeld, by Cick Dheney, and by Lewis Libby.

Mr. Libby knows that the Bush 43 people cherry-picked information from the CIA.  Mr. Cheney went over there every day to lean on the actual working people at CIA headquarters.  Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney leaned on George Tenet to verify that everything they said was perfectly true.  It was trash, of course, and now everybody knows it.  Nobody knows why Mr. Tenet supported the lies.  Maybe he really liked being the Director of Central Intelligence, and he was angling to get the Medal of Freedom.  In any case, Mr. Tenet was the fig-leaf that allowed Secretary of State Powell to make his powerful, persuasive address to the United Nations, on live TV.  Now, of course, we know that it was all lies.  Mr. Powell says that he did not know at the time that it was lies.

Mr. Tenet knew, and Mr. Cheney knew, and Mr. Libby knew.

It seems like such a long time ago that Dick Cheney invited some of his friends in to hammer out an energy policy.  We have never heard who was there, and we have never heard anything about the way that policy was derived.  We never will know unless we hear about it from Lewis Libby, who certainly knows.

 

We know now that many of the contracts that became necessary because of the sudden and  un-predicted Iraq war, went to the Halliburton Company.  No-bid, open ended contracts that would have provided untold profits to Halliburton, even if they had performed exactly as specified.  Government auditors have identified some billions of dollars in money that Halliburton collected, and that we probably will never see again.  Mr. Cheney knows how those contracts were awarded.  Mr. Cheney still makes more money from Halliburton than he does from his Government salary.  And Mr. Libby knows all about that too.

 

There is such a trove of information that the United States needs to know, that is known to Lewis Libby.  Regrettably, the White House says that there are no plans for a pardon for pardon for Libby.  This is the clearest indication that a pardon is imminent.  Just recently, Mr. Bush said “I am the Decider and Don Rumsfeld is my man,” when Bush was already talking to Rumsfeld’s replacement.  And before that, “You’re doing a helluva job, Brownie” was the first step for Michael Brown to leave FEMA.

 

It is going to be very important for the Congress to get some answers, and this would be a particularly good time to ask those questions.  A Congressional hearing every week on a different aspect of the crimes committed by George W Bush, would provide the same uplift for Democrats in 2008, that the Republicans got from Monica Lewinski being on the tube every day for two years.  It is time to start those hearings – and most of them should star the well-versed Mr. Libby.  We should get them under way this week.

Libby Verdict – What’s it all about?

Today the jury announced their decision :  Lewis Libby is guilty of four criminal counts, and was found not guilty on one count. The prosecution said that Libby lied in order to cover up his part – and the Vice President’s part – in publicizing the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame.  Libby was only a small part of the real crime story.

  In the 1970’s, some Nixon appointees were found guilty of perjury in the Watergate cases.  In those cases, the perjury was bout more than covering up the actual crime, what John Mitchell called a third-rate burglary.  In that time, the real crimes of Richard Nixon involved cheating in order to win re-election in 1972.  He subverted the electoral process, and chose his Democratic opponent, the one least-likely to win, Senator McGovern.

 Likewise, the actual crime in this case, outing Valerie Plame, is only a small part of the web of criminal activity.  The crime is about subverting American Democracy in 2002 and in 2004.  The engagement in Iraq, part of President Bush’s War on Terror ™ was never about US interests.  If the object had been to protect America, we would not have pulled our troops out of Afghanistan at exactly the time we could have destroyed the Al Quaeda leadership and brought Osama Bin Laden to justice. 

 

If the object were protecting America,  the airlines would have installed bulkheads to protect he pilot cabin, and the FAA would have had a protocol telling the pilots NOT to permit hijackers into that cabin, even if the hijackers started to kill passengers and cabin crew. 

 Some of the cover up still exists:  We have a no-fly list that cannot be made more accurate.  We inspect every person before they get on an aircraft.  We do not permit a four ounce toothpaste tube in carry-on bags.  We inspect all checked luggage, after the flight lands, with agents rummaging through the contents (not before takeoff, which would actually protect the flight).  Nobody can lock a bag any more, and if we have to accept a high level of theft from baggage by the team hired to make us safe, it is just the price we pay for Freedom.  It is all part of a program to make us feel less safe.

 The cover up is not only about National Security.  Senator Arlen Spector, who claims to oppose the Bush Administration, slipped a wonderfully wicked detail into the Patriot Act.  Now, if a US Attorney is fired for any reason, the President can name a new US Attorney who does not require Senate confirmation.  Nobody seems to have notice this until recently, when a few US Attorneys had the integrity to go after Republican Members of Congress for criminal violations, and they declined to go after cases that were clearly political hack-jobs.  These US Attorneys, who were good enough Republicans for George W Bush to appoint, all became failures, and had to be replaced, last week.  It is very important at this point in Mr. Bush’s  career that all of his US Attorneys be personally loyal more than dedicated to their job and to the United States.

 In an ordinary mob prosecution, this would be the time that the defendant would start to feel pressure to turn on his bosses, in order to get a reduced sentence.  Normally this would be very important to Lewis Libby, as his sentence could be more than twenty years in a federal prison.  But this is not a normal case. 

 About twenty years ago, Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger was found guilty of a similar violation of the law, covering up the Iran-Contra scandal.  If Weinberger had turned, any number of Ronald Reagan’s people would have been in serious jeopardy.  The Defense Secretary never did feel the pressure, however, as he was pardoned by President George H W Bush.

 It is going to be very difficult to expose the extent of the current scandal, which might be described accurately as a great right wing conspiracy, if Lewis Libby is pardoned by President George W Bush.

Round up all the likely Taliban

Vice President Cheney spent a little time in Pakistan, and was able to show them how to grow a spine – and it’s about time, too. It’s a good thing Cheney made that trip to Afghanistan and Pakistan – obviously he showed General Musharraf how to get tough, and got the arrest of a high value Taliban official.  Now we don’t have to worry about the Taliban any more.

It must be only a coincidence that is is the exact time that a jury is thinking about that innocent sacrificial lamb, Scooter Libby, outing a CIA agent.  Diogenes thinks the President should send Mr. Cheney to New Orleans, where they can arrest a Tropical Low pressure system, and we will not have to worry about hurricanes any more.  And maybe he can go to Los Angeles, so the police there can find the person who really killed OJ Simpson’s wife and her friend.

Speaker Pelosi’s sure hand

During the 2006 election campaign, the Republican noise machine made a good many charges about Nancy Pelosi.  Diogenes thinks that they were merely wishing.  Maybe they know Speaker Pelosi better than Diogenes does, and were genuinely frightened about their prospects if she took the gavel.

Today, the Speaker said that the House is getting ready to support an bill that would prevent the President from deploying troops that are not properly trained, properly equipped, and appropriately rested.  Since the Pentagon has already admitted that they are assigning troops who are not trained, and that nearly all of the ground equipment owned by the Department of Defense will have to be replaced because it is all beat up and used up, the number of troops in Iraq would have to come down.

Republicans in both the House and the Senate have been saying that the non-binding resolutions in both houses were of no use.  Yesterday on the Letterman show, John McCain mocked the debate in the Senate as being a waste of the taxpayers’ money.  That is a very funny remark.  Senator McCain is a big supporter of the war in Iraq.  He has not identified any parts of the war effort that might have wasted money.  The actual budget for the war is unknown, so there is no way to accurately gauge how much time it takes to waste as much money as the US Senate wasted in those two weeks of discussing the war.  Diogenes guesses, about two and a half minutes.  Granted, the House actually got to discuss the war, and the Senate did not, because the Republican members of the Senate threatened to filibuster, and they were able to muster the 41 votes necessary to prevent cloture.  Congratulations, Trent Lott:  nobody in America knows there’s a war in Iraq, because you were able to keep your people inside the GOP electrified fence.

Speaker Pelosi had the advantage of House rules, which do not permit a filibuster.  When the House of Representatives debated the war, every member got five minutes, and over 400 members actually spoke.  The more the war is discussed, the more detail is exposed to the public, to the voters, the less we will hear from Republicans about the waste of money involved in discussing the subject.

When the House Democrats organized, Speaker Pelosi supported Congressman John Murtha for the number two leadership post.  Before the elections last November, nobody would have supposed that Mr. Murtha had any chance at all for that post.  He was instrumental in the Democratic success in the House.  Murtha’s long service as an officer in the Marine Corps gave him political cover in attacking the conduct of the war, and for suggesting that our troops be withdrawn.  This also gave cover to other Democratic members, and for Democratic challengers, and it worked in creating the Democratic majority.  Clearly, it was going to be a good idea to reward Murtha in some way, and that’s what he wanted.  So Speaker Pelosi supported Mr. Murtha.  The new Democratic majority came into office with another mandate in mind from the voters:  Keeping the Congress clean of scandal, including earmarked projects for companies that have a special Congressional patron.  Unfortunately for Mr. Murtha, he was becoming well known for the same kind of scandal that caused some Republicans to lose their seats, and by the time the Members voted for their Majority Leader, all of them knew about it.  So Steny Hoyer did not have a difficult time winning the post.  At the time, the MainStream Media described it as a huge loss for Speaker Pelosi, but Diogenes thinks otherwise.  Pelosi may not know everything, but she has the ability Lyndon Johnson had in the 1950’s, she knows how to count votes.

 Every time an issue comes up, and Speaker Pelosi side-tracks it or tables it, it is an issue that was not going to be a success no matter what anyone did.  Politics is sometimes described as the art of the possible, and Nancy Pelosi is a gifted artist.

John McCain on Letterman

Last night Senator John McCain was David Letterman’s guest, and announced that he will be running for President.  No news there.  He also announced his strategy, which might be newsworthy.  McCain shows himself as a regular person, not necessarily a soldier in the right-wing corps, a vigorous man in late middle age with, with a sense of humor.  None of it is true, of course.

Diogenes remembers that in 1961, his sixth grade class was taken by school bus to a campaign rally for Richard Nixon, because President Eisenhower was appearing there.

The President looked like a very old man:  He was the oldest US President at that time.

Later, of course, Ronald Reagan was elected at that same age, looking physically more powerful than Eisenhower.  We now know that Mr. Reagan already had Alzheimer’s disease when he was elected, though it did not become obvious for a few more years.

John McCain is older than Dwight Eisenhower at the end of his term, older than Ronald Reagan when he took office.  And the 2008 election is still a year and a half away.

John McCain likes to portray that he has personal integrity, another lie.  He never had anything to say about the war in Iraq, contrary to President Bush, until the 2006 election.

Now, McCain says that Mr. Rumsfeld was the worst Secretary of Defense in US History, and that Vice President Cheney ahs ill-served the President.  Diogenes has never seen any daylight between Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney, and Diogenes remembers the wonderful things that Mr. Bush had to say about Mr. Rumsfeld at his retirement ceremony.  For that matter, Mr. McCain had nice things to say about the Secretary while he was in office, and still has not said anything critical of President Bush, about the conduct of the war, or any other subject.

Ross Perot, who got a lot of votes in 1992, was famous as a business leader for many years.  In an interview long before his run for office, Perot said that one of the questions he always asked of people looking for a job, was, “Have you always been faithful to your wife?”  Perot said that if a man cannot keep his promise to the most important person in his life, how can anyone believe he will keep promises in a business relationship.  A little extreme, but maybe instructive.  John McCain has been married to his current wife for quite a while, but it is not his first marriage.  When McCain was flying missions over Vietnam, he had a wife waiting for him.  When he was imprisoned by the Vietnamese, he had a wife waiting for him.  When he came home, badly injured, his wife took care of him.  After he recovered (he still has some physical problems from being shot down and from torture), local Republicans thought he would be a very good candidate for office, much like John Kennedy.  One of his biggest backers had an attractive daughter, Mr. McCain’s current wife.

Diogenes thinks that Mr. McCain cannot be elected President.  He would be a better President than Mr. Bush has been, but that is not a high level of qualification.  Mr. McCain has a problem with age, with his health, with his political and personal integrity.  And apparently, Republican voters don’t like him very much.  

The cross-dressing former Mayor of New York has twice the popularity of Mr. McCain, even though Mr. Giuliani is now  working on his third marriage and who lived with a gay couple when he was carrying on with his current wife.

Presidential Inside Baseball

Diogenes is a compulsive news watcher. For better or for worse, it has always been so.

Watching the news this year is getting to be painful.  Most of the Mainstream Media, who certainly know better, are covering the 2008 Presidential Race as if there were something to cover. 

There is something like this phenomenon that happens every year at this time, the sports writers and the TV sportscasters talk about the upcoming baseball season. Statistics, stories about the health of key players, hints of injury.  Honestly, they have been talking and writing for more than a week about Derek Jeter not being as close to Alex Rodriguez as he used to be.  I think very highly of Derek Jeter.  Except in the playoffs, I think highly of Alex Rodriguez.  If they can be civil to each other when they are on the field, and if they can play well together, Diogenes will be just as happy if they never have dinner together again. 

Baseball is the area of journalism that invented “inside baseball,” a discussion of the fine points of the game that can maybe decide which team is going to win, in a very close match.  At least in baseball, the sports writers seldom get into this aspect a whole year before the season begins.  In politics, there is no such thing as too early for “inside baseball.”

There are people who think that Barack Obama is the Great Hope of Democrats who do not want Hillary to run for the Presidency.  There are people who think that Hillary Clinton is the absolute best candidate to unite the party and run a national campaign for the White House and to increase the Democrats’ presence in each house of The Congress. The people who support John Edwards, and the people who support the other candidates all have some feelings abut this.  This early, a year before the first primary vote is cast, it is not useful for anyone to talk about the fine points. 

Now, it is time for people to think about whether they have the fire in the belly.  Al Gore, showing that he has quite a good sense of humor, seems to not be running.  Evan Bayh decided months ago that he could not make a serious attempt.  It was different in the old days – in 1976 Diogenes supported Birch Bayh in the New York primary, until he dropped out.  Diogenes was very impressed with the Senator from Indiana, and even more impressed with Evan Bayh’s mother, Marvella Bayh.

Tom Vilsack, who might have been a perfectly good dark-horse candidate in those days, figured out that he did not have the financial power to be in a race for a year with no votes counted. 

It is entirely too early to spend a lot of time figuring out what each candidate might be thinking and might be doing.  Last week there was a high level of media attention, and electrical storms throughout the blogosphere, about a fight between Hillary and Obama,
That fight, such as it was, would not have attracted attention in a Junior High School cafeteria.  (Nya, Nya, Nya — No, You are). 

There really are a lot of issues before us at this time.  The Democrats hold enough seats in the House and in the Senate to create a good, old-fashioned argument about a lot of things we want to do.  Like, ending the war.  Certainly enough seats to pick a fight with the President when that is required.

Diogenes was talking with his father tonight – a recovering Republican who voted for John Kerry in 2004.  Dad said, “I don’t see anything going in the right direction.  I don’t see any improvement, just a lot of noise.”  Diogenes pointed out that sometimes lack of progress is quite an improvement.  When you are in a car driving towards a cliff, and the driver disregards reality and wants to stay the course, just getting the car stopped for a while and having an argument about it, is a big improvement.  Dad, who is maybe even more cynical than Diogenes, had to agree to that.

There’s a lot going on.  This is not a good time for the Media and the Blogosphere to ignore all of the useful things we can do, and focus only on the might-be’s that can happen in the next two years. The Presidential race will sort itself out without any help, in the course of the next six or twelve months.  Condensing the primary season will leave us with one candidate way before the nominating convention, which will be about as exciting as watching clothes dry in a laundromat.

We really ought to think about what we can do in the next two years, things that can have an actual effect, to bring back the Democrat’s agenda:  Peace and Prosperity, in 2008.

Cheney in Wonderland

Vice President Dick Cheney was not injured in the attack near Baghram Air Base, for which Diogenes thinks we might be pleased.  The Taliban, who sent the suicide bomber,  stated that they did so exactly because Dick Cheney was there.  The attack did no damage to the base, and Cheney was never in any danger.  However a US soldier died, along with an American contractor and more then 20 Afghans.

 Mr. Cheney is in Afghanistan – and all over Asia – exactly because it would be very embarrassing for him to be in his usual place.  Washington is where the jury is out in the case of I Lewis Libby, former Chief of Staff to the VP.

Mr. Libby and Mr. Cheney were among those responsible for taking US forces out of Afghanistan at a time when we could have won the Afghan war.  As General Grant observed, winning is not about taking territory, it is about destroying the enemy’s army.

We failed to do that in Afghanistan.  We took the troops to Iraq, but also failed to destroy the enemy’s army there, and created a civil war as well. 

Another demonstration of people dying in order to float the rationale of the Right Wing Republicans.

The Paris Hilton Relief Act

Today Diogenes got an e-mail-chain-mail from his friend Andy.

Andy get these things from a Republican friend. Today’s was a poem about a farmer who is taxed to death, and then has to pay an inheritance tax… maybe you have seen it.

Tax his land, tax his bed, tax the table at which he’s fed…

The whole thing is a lie, of course. A farmer who is in poor financial health does not leave an estate large enough to pay an inheritance tax.

Diogenes does not know how you feel about inheritance taxes. Along with Bill Gates Sr and Bill Gates Jr, and Warren Buffet, Diogenes is in favor of inheritance taxes.

Let’s talk about Diogenes’ mother for a minute. Mom has quite a lot of money, by Diogenes standards, and Diogenes might inherit some of it. Diogenes is in favor of the inheritance tax. Mother, who has not a thing to lose, is very opposed to the Death Tax. She says that she has struggled (her word) for everything she has. She made most of her money from investing in Manhattan Real Estate. Make no mistake, Mom has done a great job with a building that she got a a very good price because it was losing money. She hired a PI to find the tenants who were not really living there (and were making more money per month sub-leasing than they paid in rent), and got the leases back. Then Mom did some construction so the apartments were no longer the same, and got them out of rent-stabilization. Anyway, she was very good at it and made a lot of money. The appreciation on the value of Mom’s investments has never been taxed. Not taxed to death, never taxed. She is taxed on income, but not on appreciation. Yes, Diogenes knows about the hideous New York City Real Estate Tax. The tenants pay for that, as they pay for the high cost of heating fuel.

Mother is not in the class of very wealthy, but they have this in common:

They money earned is taxed, the appreciation of wealth is not taxed.
If the Republicans succeed in abolishing the inheritance tax (now in a five year hiatus), they should name it the Paris Hilton tax relief act.

–

Let’s think about this: No American farmer ever went out of business due to high taxes.
They go out of business because they cannot make a profit… the tax money is marginal to them. There are cycles of profitability in farming… sometimes they make a lot of money, sometimes they lose money. For a very long time, the big farm owners would buy up the small farms when the small farmers went bust.
In the 1930’s the Democrats put in a system of price supports that limited the profits in good years and prevented catastrophic losses. When the Republicans took control of the Congress and the White House in the 1950’s, they did not touch the farm programs. When Ronald Reagan was able to bully the Congress in the 1980’s, he did not touch those programs

When Newt Gingrich took control of the House in 1994, and Bob Dole ran the Senate, they passed the Freedom to Farm Act, supported by the biggest farm owners, who made it look like it would be a god-send to all farmers. Diogenes notes that it did not work out that way. Now the average size of US farms is much bigger than it was in 1994.  The number of farmers in the United States is much smaller than it was in 1994. The biggest 5% of farm owners control over 40% of the acres in cultivation.

They would like to make some people believe that we need to support family farmers by reducing the tax burden.  As we say here in Brooklyn, Fuggeddaboudidt!  Here in Brooklyn, we used to have a lot of farms.  There were farms in Canarsie even in the 1970’s.  It was not taxes that put them out of business, it was prosperity… the land became worth much more than the value of the farm, so the farmers took the money – quite a lot of it – and went away.

The Republicans want us to think all those tax-eating programs, the ENTITLEMENTS, those Liberal programs, that’s what’s killing the farmers. Certainly not the five trillion dollars we have spent so far on the Iraq war.

And especially the War in Iraq, which has killed a good many sons of farmers, who went into the service because they could not make a living in agriculture.

Diogenes thinks that the Republicans have been very clever with their under-the-radar campaigns by e-mail and by use of (ugh!) right-wing radio that normal people cannot listen to without a big bottle of Ibuprofen.  They have Frank Luntz and his clones, framing the debate so it’s about Mom and apple-pie and the American Way.

Diogenes hopes that a many people will adopt a skeptical approach to a lot of the stuff that shows up.

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Diogenes does not insist that the cost of the war in Iraq is five trillion dollars.  Diogenes thinks that since we are going to have to replace 100% of all the land-based equipment owned by all of the armed services as the result of the war, this figure is closer than that of Mr Rumsfeld and Mr Gates.  You know, a trillion here, and a trillion there, pretty soon you are talking about a lot of money.

 

Strom Thurmond’s Political DNA

This week, the NY Daily News trumpeted that the fourth generation ancestor of Al Sharpton was a slave owned by a relative of the late Senator Strom Thurmond.

Diogenes believes that the very worst aspect of America is our heritage of slavery.

Enslavement of conquered people was not invented here.  Indeed, Native Americans were enslaved in the New World a hundred years before the English founded the Jamestown colony, and when the Indians were worked to death, they were replaced by others brought from Africa, where there had been a long history of enslavement.

Enslavement is such a vile crime that Diogenes, who is generally opposed to capital punishment, thinks it might be a good idea for people who hold slaves and those who trade in slaves.  Most Amrericans think that The Emancipation Proclamation ended most of the slavery in the United States.  That is not true:  It did not have any effect in slaveholding states that were not in rebellion against The United States.  The Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution ended lawful slavery in this country, and mostly, it is observed.  Please stay tuned for some examples of enslavement in the USA at the current time.

One aspect of the “peculiar institution” that was ignored for many years was the use of female slaves for sexual pleasure.  Diogenes visited Thomas Jefferson’s home, Monticello, in 1976.  It was already commonly known, at least by History geeks, that Jefferson was thought to have fathered slave children by one of his slaves, Sally Hemings.  At that time, there was no mention of Sally Hemings in the tour.  When asked, the tour guides stated that there were scurrilous rumors to that effect, but there was no evidence that it actually was the case.  A few years ago, it was demonstrated very clearly that the descendants of Sally Hemings were related to Thomas Jefferson, and many believe that they are direct descendants of the President.  The Civil War era diarist Mary Chestnut noted that every plantation had slave children that resembled the male (white) members of the household, a fact that was observed by everyone except on their own plantations.

 

Now, a genealogy service reports that Al Sharpton is the fourth generation descendant of an enslaved man who was owned by Julia Thurmond Sharpton, who was related to the one time candidate for President and full time lying hypocrite, Strom Thurmond.

Diogenes was a little boy in the 1950’s, do he does not have a memory of Thurmond’s race in 1948.  Thurmond is dead now, at long last, but for most of his very long career, he was the champion of those who intended to oppress Black people.  He was the incarnation of an evil that should never have existed, and must be erased from this country before we can actualize our country’s civic beliefs.

Thurmond was opposed to racial mixing, which was anathema to the Southern political elites.  As late as 1969, former Secretary of State Dean Rusk had to resign a professorship at the University of Georgia when his son married a black woman in Virgina.  Strom Thurmond was recorded on many occasions saying he was oppose to miscegenation ( he called it Miss- sejj –i- NAYSHUN).  Thurmond railed against the “mongrelization of the white race” until black people got the vote, and started to vote in large numbers.

Strom Thurmond was lying the whole time.  Before he ran for the Presidency in 1948, James Strom Thurmond was the father of a girl, the daughter of a black servant in the Thurmond household.  After the Senator’s death in 2005, the daughter, Essie May Washington-Williams revealed the secret of who her father was.  During his lifetime, Thurmond acknowledged his daughter, and paid for her education.  After his death, Thurmond’s immediate (white) family tried to say that it was not so, until Washington-Williams’ photograph appeared in newspapers.  The fact is, she looks astonishingly like her father, much closer in resemblance than Strom Thurmond’s legitimate son. 

Brooklyn has an interesting history with respect to slavery.  The oldest existing structure in Brooklyn, built by Colonial-era settlers, is the Lott House.  In the last few years, remedial work on the Lott house uncovered slave quarters.  There are people named Lott living in Brooklyn now, at least one living a few blocks from the Lott house.  Historians of Brooklyn have told Diogenes that the family mostly moved from Brooklyn around 1828, when the institution of slavery was made unlawful in New York State.  Before that, there were many slaves in Brooklyn:  The first Census of the United States, in 1790, showed that Brooklyn was the city with the second-largest number of slaves in the United States (after Charleston SC).

Diogenes believes that the Minority Leader in the US Senate, Trent Lott, is the descendant of the slaveholders in Brooklyn.  There is no evidence of this, except for the coincidence of his name, but proof is not really required for this kind of publication.

Trent Lott is now in his second term as leader of the Republicans in the Senate.  A few years ago, he was supplanted as Majority Leader by Bill Frist, after some of Lott’s public statements on the subject of Strom Thurmond, actually became public.  Here’s what Senator Lott had to say about Thurmond in 2002: 

I want to say this about my state. When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We’re proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn’t have had all these problems over all these years either. 

What in the world was Lott talking about?  The problems of Black people having the right to vote?  Being able to earn a good living without fear of being lynched?  When he was caught – and because the speech was broadcast on C-SPAN, it is not surprising that he was caught – Lott made another statement:

My comments were not an endorsement of his positions of over 50 years ago, but of the man and his life.

Lott endorsed the man and the life of his hero, Thurmond.  One wonders if Lott still endorses the life of his hero, who stood for hypocrisy more than anything else.  In the course of looking up Trent Lott, Diogenes found an interesting fact about Lott’s youth.

In 1962, a fraternity at University of Mississippi was raided by federal marshals, who found 24 weapons.  Trent Lott was the president of that fraternity, Sigma Nu. 

Hypocrisy is a result of our history of slavery.  Not all American hypocrisy can be traced back to the institution of slavery.  But a good deal of it can be.  The efforts of Mr. Thurmond and Mr. Lott and others to keep whites in power in the South have been very successful.  There is no more institution of slavery in the United States, but so many people are attached to the ideals of the slaveholders that the USA was virtually captured by the old Confederacy between 2001 and 2007.  And on the other side, there are people who explain every vile act as the result of years of slavery and racisim.

Al Sharpton, the New York politician who never was elected to any office, and who has not lived in New York State in the last 15 years, claimed in 1987 that Tawana Brawley was abducted and repeatedly raped by Steven Pagones, an Upstate NY Assistant District Attorney.  When the governor, Mario Cuomo, asked the Attorney General, Robert Abrams to investigate the allegations, Al Sharpton also said that Abrams had masturbated over the photographs of the naked 15 year old Brawley.  As late as 2003, Sharpton insisted that he did nothing wrong in making those unsupported allegations.  He says all he did was to believe Tawana Brawley’s story. 

Diogenes thinks that both Trent Lott and Al Sharpton are the spiritual descendants of Strom Thurmond.  Both of them have the main characteristics of Thurmond:

Being absolutely wrong about serious subject,
Lying about the nature of their statements and beliefs,
Being intransigent about their lies.

 

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Slavery is not dead in the USA.  Indeed, there still are several kinds of slaves in New York.  Diogenes sees that he has been wordier than usual, and will address this issue in the future.