We could try term limits, a single term. In and out. Make room for the next bright face. What do politicians do during the summer? They give college commencement speeches til hoarse, all the same speech… “You are our country’s future leaders”. Meanwhile 50 years pass, the college kid is gray and that politician still has his ass on his seat. A single term would not fundamentally change the patronage system, but it would devalue it. You’re not worth as much.

Also sensible would be a switch to runoff elections, or at least instant runoff elections. But as the snide commandant in Stalag 17 told the feisty boys in Barracks 4, “Curtains vud do vunders for this barracks. You veel not get them!” Democrats and Republicans staunchly unite in opposition to such extreme measures. Why take poison unless you are trying to commit suicide?

There were no intelligence failures concerning Iraq. The invasion was not a mistake. Neither was the torture. Instead, bright, rational people acted in the best tradition of U.S. foreign policy since the birth of our great nation, the redskins being the first foreigners. Try telling Americans that their country uses violent force without moral compunction in wresting from weaker countries just what it wants from them and the air will suddenly get chillier around you. However, there is a record. Like Casey Stengel used to say, “You could look it up.”

It would take more than a cell block of arrests from the president on down to make America the Beautiful’s dress pretty enough to party again, but who will arrest the arrestors? For the future we could require political office holders to speak their own words, that is, write their own speeches. That shouldn’t be too much to ask of a leader.

Americans are well trained in how to think. It occurs so naturally from birth that we are unaware of the training. The basic idea is that your country knows better than you do. The most thoroughly educated Americans treat it as undying dogma that our country is always and everywhere a force for good in the world. Those who have been deprived of formal education rely more on their nose, an organ of exceptional trustworthiness.

The primary writer of the Constitution, James Madison, stressed that the government must be set up in such a way so as “to protect the minority of the opulent from the majority”, such protection of the rich becoming axiomatic. Good Americans seem very comfortable with the great wealth and income divide in their country. Another founding father, first Chief Justice John Jay, felt that those who owned the country should run it. Good Americans are comfortable with that also.

In election year 2000, Al Gore claimed that the greatest beneficiaries of Bush’s proposed tax cuts would be the richest 1% of Americans, but sufficient voters, ever mindful of longstanding tradition, protected that minority.

We are not a nation of laws, despite the priestly incantations. There are plenty of people who are above and beyond the law. We say we are a nation of laws but for that statement to have the intended, hallowed effect it has to mean more than hauling some vagrant off the street. It has to mean that the punishments meted out to the weak and poor will in identical measure be meted out to the rich and powerful. We could try, Stengel-like, to look it up, but for that the record is meager.

Declaring war is a popular tactic. Thanks to modern technology we have a handy measure of its permeability throughout our culture. Googling the term “war on hunger” yields some 21,900 references. The “war on poverty” yields 646,000 references, and the “war on drugs” yields 4,310,000. Then there is the “war on terror” with 25,100,000.

We are supposed to accept the sincerity of these wars with all the seriousness that the naming is intended to imply. Looking to actual practice the war on hunger more closely resembles a war on the hungry, the war on poverty a war on poor people, and the war on drugs a war on the people who use them. Now comes the punch line, only it isn’t funny. The war on terror more closely resembles a war to terrorize (intimidate) we the people.

First, if we wanted to reduce terror, we could stop harboring terrorists, stop supporting them, stop paying them, and stop doing it ourselves. There are a couple of reasons why Americans are slow in coming to this conclusion. One is that we only acknowledge the terrorism of others, never our own. Ours is always precautionary action or legitimate self-defense. The second reason is ironclad; the State Department confines its definition of terrorism to that which is carried out by “subnational groups or clandestine agents”, so acts carried out by the United States of America are conveniently exempt.

Countries, even countries with armies so mighty they encircle the globe, cannot commit terrorism, by official decree. They do it unofficially. But they can do a lot more. They can plan and initiate a war of aggression, the “supreme international crime” as adjudged at Nuremberg, “differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole”. One of those other war crimes is Art. 6 (c) Crimes against Humanity, meaning civilians, meaning terrorism.

Americans learn early on about the unmatched freedoms we enjoy. What is all the fanfare about if these freedoms are only granted on a tentative basis? What does it mean to be free from surveillance when the government finds no pressing reason to surveil, but subject to surveillance when the government claims the need? Or to have the right to dissent when it does not greatly worry the government, only to have dissent stifled when it poses serious problems? These freedoms that our leaders boast about to succeeding generations are surely more than fair-weather freedoms. That would be bad enough but it goes one step deeper. Freedom is expressly for the bad weather, or it never really was.

The “war on terror” is our national slogan. It went into the shop for a nomenclature change last year, but emerged intact. For awhile we didn’t want to seem too warlike. Better to stress promotion of freedom and democracy, freshen up the old image. But the war on terror says it all, and it is oh so useful. The other day the man with the worst job in America, Scott McClellan, landed a blow for freedom with his retort to a questioner, “Are we a nation at war?” Of course there is an answer besides the dutiful yes but to voice it may affect your ability to continue roaming without a straitjacket.

The President must have the war because the war makes it possible to do all the things he could never do if there wasn’t a war. Ask his cover, Attorney General Gonzales, who informs the Judiciary Committee that there is no such thing as a bad inherent power. One of the senators asked Gonzales a very improper question. “How will we know when the war is over?” Gonzales could only smile at the suggestion that between these two learned men there could be any general disagreement about the usefulness of war to a country intent on dominating the world with military force.

War is not inevitable but there is something innate in our species that prepares us to march to the beat of the drum. Our primitive herd instinct makes us vulnerable to exploitation. When everybody is taught precisely the same thing, it no longer matters what is taught. The result is always orthodoxy. The military teaches a valuable strategy. After being captured, the best time to escape is as soon as you can. Of course you have to realize you are a captive.

A million men frozen at attention waiting for the signal of another to act as one. Is this not true ugliness? Ugliness is not deformity but its opposite; it is any multitude of people in constant agreement.

War as a tool of control relies on the glorification of battle and death. Humans are the only of earth’s creatures that cherish life. This is because they know it will end. This is why they invented god. But what is the historical record of the god concept? Is it used more effectively to save or take life? We could look it up.

James Rothenberg, dissident writer/activist - jrothenberg@taconic.net

The measures appear to have had drastic effects. The chief military spokesman at Guantánamo, Lt. Col. Jeremy M. Martin, said yesterday that the number of detainees on hunger strike had dropped to 4 from 84 at the end of December.

Some officials said the new actions reflected concern at Guantánamo and the Pentagon that the protests were becoming difficult to control and that the death of one or more prisoners could intensify international criticism of the detention center.

Colonel Martin said force-feeding was carried out "in a humane and compassionate manner" and only when necessary to keep the prisoners alive. H e said in a statement that "a restraint system to aid detainee feeding" was being used but refused to answer questions about the restraint chairs.

Lawyers who have visited clients in recent weeks criticized the latest measures, particularly the use of the restraint chair, as abusive.

"It is clear that the government has ended the hunger strike through the use of force and through the most brutal and inhumane types of treatment," said Thomas B. Wilner, a lawyer at Shearman & Sterling in Washington, who last week visited the six Kuwaiti detainees he represents. "It is a disgrace."

The lawyers said other measures used to dissuade the hunger strikers included placing them in uncomfortably cold air-conditioned isolation cells, depriving them of "comfort items" like blankets and books and sometimes using riot-control soldiers to compel the prisoners to sit still while long plastic tubes were threaded down their nasal passages and into their stomachs.

Officials of the military and the Defense Department strongly disputed that they were taking punitive measures to break the strike. They said that they were sensitive to the ethical issues raised by feeding the detainees involuntarily and that their procedures were consistent with those of federal prisons in the United States. Those prisons authorize the involuntary treatment of hunger strikers when there is a threat to an inmate's life or health.

"There is a moral question," the assistant secretary of defense for health affairs, Dr. William Winkenwerder Jr., said in an interview. "Do you allow a person to commit suicide? Or do you take steps to protect their health and preserve their life?"

Dr. Winkenwerder said that after a review of the policy on involuntary feeding last summer Pentagon officials came to the basic conclusion that it was ethical to stop the inmates from killing themselves.

"The objective in any circumstance is to protect and sustain a person's life," he said.

Some international medical associations and human rights groups, including the World Medical Association, oppose the involuntary feeding of hunger strikers as coercive.

Lawyers for the detainees, although troubled by what they said were earlier reports of harsh treatment of the hunger strikers, have generally not objected to such actions when necessary to save their clients.

The Guantánamo prison, which is holding some 500 detainees, has been beset by periodic hunger strikes almost since it was established in January 2002 to hold foreign terror suspects. At least one detainee who went on a prolonged hunger strike was involuntarily fed through a nasal tube in 2002, military officials said.

Since last year, the protests have intensified, a sign of what defense lawyers say is the growing desperation of the detainees. In a study released yesterday, two of those lawyers said Pentagon documents indicated that the military had determined that only 45 percent of the detainees had committed some hostile act against the United States or its allies and that only 8 percent were fighters for Al Qaeda.

After dozens of detainees began joining a hunger strike last June, military doctors at Guantánamo asked Pentagon officials to review their policy for such feeding. Around that time, officials said, the Defense Department also began working out procedures to deal with the eventual suicide of one or more detainees, including how and where to bury them if their native countries refused to accept their remains.

"This is just a reality of long-term detention," a Pentagon official said. "It doesn't matter whether you're at Leavenworth or some other military prison. You are going to have to deal with this kind of thing."

Military officials and detainees' lawyers said the primary rationale for the hunger strikes had evolved since last summer. In June and July, they said, the detainees were mostly complaining about their conditions at Guantánamo.

Several lawyers said that military officers there had negotiated with an English-speaking Saudi detainee, Shaker Aamer, who is thought to be a leader of the inmates, and that the detainees had agreed to stop their hunger strike in return for various concessions.

Military officials denied that such negotiations had occurred. But military officials and the lawyers agreed that when another wave of hunger strikes began in early August they were more generally focused on the indefinite nature of the detentions and that it was harder for the authorities there to address.

Colonel Martin said the number of hunger strikers peaked around Sept. 11 at 131, but added that he could not speculate about why other than to note that "hunger striking is an Al Qaeda tactic used to elicit media attention and also to bring pressure on the U.S. government."

Until yesterday, Guantánamo officials had acknowledged only having forcibly restrained detainees to feed them a handful of times. In those cases, the officials said, doctors had restrained detainees on hospital beds using Velcro straps.

Two military officials, who insisted on anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the question, said that the use of restraint chairs started after it was found that some hunger strikers were deliberately vomiting in their cells after having been tube-fed and that their health was growing precarious.

In a telephone interview yesterday, the manufacturer of the so-called Emergency Restraint Chair, Tom Hogan, said his small Iowa company shipped five $1,150 chairs to Guantánamo on Dec. 5 and 20 additional chairs on Jan. 10, using a military postal address in Virginia. Hogan said the chairs were typically used in jails, prisons and psychiatric hospitals to deal with violent inmates or patients.

Hogan said that he did not know how they were used at Guantánamo and that had not been asked how to use them by military representatives. Detainees' lawyers said they believed that the tougher approach to the hunger strikes was related to the passage in Congress of measure intended to curtail the detainees' access to United States courts.

Federal district courts have put aside most lawyers' motions on the detainees' treatment until questions about applying the measure have been litigated.

"Because of the actions in Congress, the military feels emboldened to take more extreme measures vis-à-vis the hunger strikers," said one lawyer, Sarah Havens of Allen & Overy. "The courts are going to stay out of it now."

Wilner, who was among the first lawyers to accept clients at Guantánamo and represented them in a case in 2004 before the Supreme Court, said a Kuwaiti detainee, Fawzi al-Odah, told him last week that around Dec. 20, guards began taking away items like shoes, towels and blankets from the hunger strikers.

Odah also said that lozenges that had been distributed to soothe the hunger strikers' throats had disappeared and that the liquid formula they were given was mixed with other ingredients to cause diarrhea, Wilner said. On Jan. 9, Odah told his lawyers, an officer read him what he described as an order from the Guantánamo commander, Brig. Gen. Jay W. Hood of the Army, saying hunger strikers who refused to drink their liquid formula voluntarily would be strapped into metal chairs and tube-fed.

Odah said he heard "screams of pain" from a hunger striker in the next cell as a thick tube was inserted into his nose. At the other detainee's urging, Odah told his lawyers that he planned to end his hunger strike the next day. Another lawyer, Joshua Colangelo-Bryan, said one of his three Bahraini clients, Jum'ah al-Dossari, told him about 10 days ago that more than half of a group of 34 long-term hunger strikers had abandoned their protest after being strapped in restraint chairs and having their feeding tubes inserted and removed so violently that some bled or fainted.

"He said that during these force feedings too much food was given deliberately, which caused diarrhea and in some cases caused detainees to defecate on themselves," Colangelo-Bryan added. "Jum'ah understands that officers told the hunger strikers that if they challenged the United States, the United States would challenge them back using these tactics."

United States military authorities have taken tougher measures to force-feed detainees engaged in hunger strikes at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, after concluding that some were determined to commit suicide to protest their indefinite confinement, military officials have said.

In recent weeks, the officials said, guards have begun strapping recalcitrant detainees into "restraint chairs," sometimes for hours a day, to feed them through tubes and prevent them from deliberately vomiting afterward. Detainees who refuse to eat have also been placed in isolation for extended periods in what the officials said was an effort to keep them from being encouraged by other hunger strikers.

The measures appear to have had drastic effects. The chief military spokesman at Guantánamo, Lt. Col. Jeremy M. Martin, said yesterday that the number of detainees on hunger strike had dropped to 4 from 84 at the end of December.

Some officials said the new actions reflected concern at Guantánamo and the Pentagon that the protests were becoming difficult to control and that the death of one or more prisoners could intensify international criticism of the detention center.

Colonel Martin said force-feeding was carried out "in a humane and compassionate manner" and only when necessary to keep the prisoners alive. H e said in a statement that "a restraint system to aid detainee feeding" was being used but refused to answer questions about the restraint chairs.

Lawyers who have visited clients in recent weeks criticized the latest measures, particularly the use of the restraint chair, as abusive.

"It is clear that the government has ended the hunger strike through the use of force and through the most brutal and inhumane types of treatment," said Thomas B. Wilner, a lawyer at Shearman & Sterling in Washington, who last week visited the six Kuwaiti detainees he represents. "It is a disgrace."

The lawyers said other measures used to dissuade the hunger strikers included placing them in uncomfortably cold air-conditioned isolation cells, depriving them of "comfort items" like blankets and books and sometimes using riot-control soldiers to compel the prisoners to sit still while long plastic tubes were threaded down their nasal passages and into their stomachs.

Officials of the military and the Defense Department strongly disputed that they were taking punitive measures to break the strike. They said that they were sensitive to the ethical issues raised by feeding the detainees involuntarily and that their procedures were consistent with those of federal prisons in the United States. Those prisons authorize the involuntary treatment of hunger strikers when there is a threat to an inmate's life or health.

"There is a moral question," the assistant secretary of defense for health affairs, Dr. William Winkenwerder Jr., said in an interview. "Do you allow a person to commit suicide? Or do you take steps to protect their health and preserve their life?"

Dr. Winkenwerder said that after a review of the policy on involuntary feeding last summer Pentagon officials came to the basic conclusion that it was ethical to stop the inmates from killing themselves.

"The objective in any circumstance is to protect and sustain a person's life," he said.

Some international medical associations and human rights groups, including the World Medical Association, oppose the involuntary feeding of hunger strikers as coercive.

Lawyers for the detainees, although troubled by what they said were earlier reports of harsh treatment of the hunger strikers, have generally not objected to such actions when necessary to save their clients.

The Guantánamo prison, which is holding some 500 detainees, has been beset by periodic hunger strikes almost since it was established in January 2002 to hold foreign terror suspects. At least one detainee who went on a prolonged hunger strike was involuntarily fed through a nasal tube in 2002, military officials said.

Since last year, the protests have intensified, a sign of what defense lawyers say is the growing desperation of the detainees. In a study released yesterday, two of those lawyers said Pentagon documents indicated that the military had determined that only 45 percent of the detainees had committed some hostile act against the United States or its allies and that only 8 percent were fighters for Al Qaeda.

After dozens of detainees began joining a hunger strike last June, military doctors at Guantánamo asked Pentagon officials to review their policy for such feeding. Around that time, officials said, the Defense Department also began working out procedures to deal with the eventual suicide of one or more detainees, including how and where to bury them if their native countries refused to accept their remains.

"This is just a reality of long-term detention," a Pentagon official said. "It doesn't matter whether you're at Leavenworth or some other military prison. You are going to have to deal with this kind of thing."

Military officials and detainees' lawyers said the primary rationale for the hunger strikes had evolved since last summer. In June and July, they said, the detainees were mostly complaining about their conditions at Guantánamo.

Several lawyers said that military officers there had negotiated with an English-speaking Saudi detainee, Shaker Aamer, who is thought to be a leader of the inmates, and that the detainees had agreed to stop their hunger strike in return for various concessions.

Military officials denied that such negotiations had occurred. But military officials and the lawyers agreed that when another wave of hunger strikes began in early August they were more generally focused on the indefinite nature of the detentions and that it was harder for the authorities there to address.

Colonel Martin said the number of hunger strikers peaked around Sept. 11 at 131, but added that he could not speculate about why other than to note that "hunger striking is an Al Qaeda tactic used to elicit media attention and also to bring pressure on the U.S. government."

Until yesterday, Guantánamo officials had acknowledged only having forcibly restrained detainees to feed them a handful of times. In those cases, the officials said, doctors had restrained detainees on hospital beds using Velcro straps.

Two military officials, who insisted on anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the question, said that the use of restraint chairs started after it was found that some hunger strikers were deliberately vomiting in their cells after having been tube-fed and that their health was growing precarious.

In a telephone interview yesterday, the manufacturer of the so-called Emergency Restraint Chair, Tom Hogan, said his small Iowa company shipped five $1,150 chairs to Guantánamo on Dec. 5 and 20 additional chairs on Jan. 10, using a military postal address in Virginia. Hogan said the chairs were typically used in jails, prisons and psychiatric hospitals to deal with violent inmates or patients.

Hogan said that he did not know how they were used at Guantánamo and that had not been asked how to use them by military representatives. Detainees' lawyers said they believed that the tougher approach to the hunger strikes was related to the passage in Congress of measure intended to curtail the detainees' access to United States courts.

Federal district courts have put aside most lawyers' motions on the detainees' treatment until questions about applying the measure have been litigated.

"Because of the actions in Congress, the military feels emboldened to take more extreme measures vis-à-vis the hunger strikers," said one lawyer, Sarah Havens of Allen & Overy. "The courts are going to stay out of it now."

Wilner, who was among the first lawyers to accept clients at Guantánamo and represented them in a case in 2004 before the Supreme Court, said a Kuwaiti detainee, Fawzi al-Odah, told him last week that around Dec. 20, guards began taking away items like shoes, towels and blankets from the hunger strikers.

Odah also said that lozenges that had been distributed to soothe the hunger strikers' throats had disappeared and that the liquid formula they were given was mixed with other ingredients to cause diarrhea, Wilner said. On Jan. 9, Odah told his lawyers, an officer read him what he described as an order from the Guantánamo commander, Brig. Gen. Jay W. Hood of the Army, saying hunger strikers who refused to drink their liquid formula voluntarily would be strapped into metal chairs and tube-fed.

Odah said he heard "screams of pain" from a hunger striker in the next cell as a thick tube was inserted into his nose. At the other detainee's urging, Odah told his lawyers that he planned to end his hunger strike the next day. Another lawyer, Joshua Colangelo-Bryan, said one of his three Bahraini clients, Jum'ah al-Dossari, told him about 10 days ago that more than half of a group of 34 long-term hunger strikers had abandoned their protest after being strapped in restraint chairs and having their feeding tubes inserted and removed so violently that some bled or fainted.

"He said that during these force feedings too much food was given deliberately, which caused diarrhea and in some cases caused detainees to defecate on themselves," Colangelo-Bryan added. "Jum'ah understands that officers told the hunger strikers that if they challenged the United States, the United States would challenge them back using these tactics."


Copyright 2006The New York Times Company

Upwards of eighty percent of the people recognize that they have essentially no representation in government. They appreciate the political process for the sham it is and many of them refuse to participate in it. In the process they allow a small minority to elect people to office, some of them as servants to the people, others not.

Let us proceed upon the assumption that all persons are created equal. Therefore, all people should be treated accordingly, regardless of their income, property holdings, race, sex or creed. Assuming that a great majority accept this credo, we must then recognize that the current system does not operate upon this principle. It favors those with wealth over people without wealth. It offers privileges and advantages to a small percentage of the citizenry that it does not accord to the great majority. Thus it is a paradigm that is inherently unjust and unequal. At this point we must ask ourselves: Do we believe in such a system? If we do not, then we must ask: Does an unjust system deserve and warrant our support?

Let it be understood that any system based upon a paradigm of inequity, and therefore injustice, cannot be reformed. Capitalism is an economic and social system based upon private wealth, not the commonwealth. It is inherently unstable and unsustainable because it is based upon the idea of private greed and waste. The result is that power and wealth is concentrated into the hands of the few by exploiting the many, and by destroying the earth. It is the philosophical basis for trickle down economics that gives plenty to those at the top, much less to those immediately below the top, and virtually nothing to those at the bottom. Those at the top stand upon the shoulders of everyone below the top, which is an enormous burden for them to bear. This is also the psychological underpinning of plutocratic rule.

No matter how good the intentions of the thousands or millions of first-rate people operating in good faith within that system, it is inherently unfair and unjust. It cannot produce equity or justice because it was not designed to operate in this way. Expecting a different result than the kind we always get is like asking an oak tree to produce oranges. However we might wish it possible, it is not going to happen. Oaks can only produce acorns—the seeds of their own kind.

Tremendous amounts of energy and capital are spent waiting for our oaks to produce oranges, as the inequity gap continues to widen and the system spins wildly out of control. Meanwhile, the infection deepens and spreads violence and imperialism throughout the world, setting a chain of events in motion that has the potential to destroy us all. Under capitalism the rich are parasites that prey upon the labor of the poor; they continually bleed them dry and treat them as mere servants. War rages wherever there is social and economic injustice with its staggering cost in capital, misery, environmental degradation and appalling loss of life. In very simplistic terms, this is nothing more than the output of the input. Injustice can never create justice; inequity will never produce equity. If we believe in getting a better result, we must find a better paradigm such as Democratic Socialism.

So we come to the realization that the political process does not, and cannot work for us—the great majority of the citizens. It plays us against one another and distracts us from recognizing the root causes of injustice that is the source of our misery. Thus we come to realize that we do not live in a democracy, as we are so recklessly told; we live in a Plutocracy—a system in which those with wealth rule those without wealth. That is the kind of government we have. Let us have it no more. If the form of government we have offers little benefit to us, or does us great and irreparable harm, why should we support it? Plutocratic government does not and cannot liberate us—it enslaves us.

Nearly ninety percent of us have no more freedom from endless toil and sacrifice than the slave on the plantation. Under the enormous and oppressive weight of capitalism, we are nothing more than the property of our employers, who can and do terminate us at will without just cause or provocation. The system that created slavery is incapable of emancipating its slaves. The genius of the wage slave system is that the great majority of its subjects do not realize that they are in fact slaves to fraudulent corporate and plutocratic power.

We must also recognize that no political party, regardless how well intentioned it is, represents us by operating within the existing framework of capitalism, or wage slavery. The only representation we have is ourselves. Our power cannot come from the system that produces our misery and suffering; it can only come from without. We the people are our own power; but only if we act. It was this realization that gave organized labor and the civil rights movements their impetus for social justice. True grass roots movements understand that their power lies in direct action, not in waiting for corrupt leaders to give us what is already ours under the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. We must assert our rights, here and now, and without compromise. Nothing is given without a demand. We cannot cure one part of a diseased body—we must cure the whole organism in order to give it health.

The neocon cabal that is in power will not voluntarily step down. They must be forcefully removed from power by demonstrations and acts of civil disobedience on a massive scale. Let me stress that these demonstrations and marches are to be non-violet. Violence begets violence. These must not be sporadic events—they must be frequent, widespread and economically disruptive. As workers, our greatest weapon has always been to withhold our labor through the general strike, as well as our refusal to consume beyond the most basic necessities.

We have but a brief window of opportunity to organize and to mobilize against our oppressors, before dissent is criminalized and punishable by imprisonment. Beyond the Rubicon dissenters will be imprisoned and every channel of free and open communication will be commandeered and subverted to the service of empire. This is already happening on a large scale. Unless we appreciate the approaching danger and act to defend our human rights and our dignity, we will quickly reach the point of no return. We stand now at the brink of the Rubicon wondering how to proceed.

As we put our bodies on the line we will suffer many defeats and indignities. These events must be so widespread that even the commercial media cannot afford to ignore them. There will be beatings and attacks upon us. Our oppressors must be exposed and revealed for who and what they are. The world will be our witness. So great will be the force of worldwide opposition to this brutal conduct, that its perpetrators will be forced to relinquish their hold on power. This is the only way to bring the system down and give power to the people.

At this point a brief clarification is in order: Giving power is a misnomer. Power is never given; it is taken, or asserted. Let us take that which is rightfully ours and use it for the public good. We cannot afford to wait for our acorns to evolve into oranges. The window of opportunity is rapidly closing. It may not be available to us tomorrow.

Regimes such as the Bush cabal have always plagued America They are a recurring cancer that pervades every cell of society. They recur because we are treating symptoms, not underlying causes. A few decades ago it was Nixon and his henchmen. The cancer replicates itself through the capitalistic system of inherent inequity. The time has come to treat the disease, to rid ourselves of its scourge for all eternity, rather than treating the symptoms manifested in the present moment of crises. Otherwise, history is doomed to repeat itself in endless replicating cycles of want and waste and human misery. A long road to industrial and personal emancipation awaits our eager footsteps. Let the journey begin.

Charles Sullivan is a photographer and free lance writer living in the Eastern Panhandle of West Virginia. He welcomes your comments at earthdog@highstream.net.

In an interview, Frist, a doctor and Tennessee Republican, denied that the wording was added that way.

Trial lawyers and other groups condemn the law, saying it could make it nearly impossible for people harmed by a vaccine to force the drug maker to pay for their injuries.

Many in health care counter that the protection is needed to help build up the vaccine industry in the United States, especially in light of a possible avian flu pandemic.

The legislation, called the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act, allows the secretary of Health and Human Services to declare a public health emergency, which then provides immunity for companies that develop vaccines and other "countermeasures."

Beyond the issue of vaccine liability protection, some say going around the longstanding practice of bipartisan House-Senate conference committees' working out compromises on legislation is a dangerous power grab by Republican congressional leaders that subverts democracy.

"It is a travesty of the legislative process," said Thomas Mann, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank.

"It vests enormous power in the hands of congressional leaders and private interests, minimizes transparency and denies legitimate opportunities for all interested parties, in Congress and outside, to weigh in on important policy questions."

At issue is what happened Dec. 18 as Congress scrambled to finish its business and head home for the Christmas holiday.

That day, a conference committee made up of 38 senators and House members met several times to work out differences on the 2006 Defense Department appropriations bill.

Rep. David Obey, D-Wis., the ranking minority House member on the conference committee, said he asked Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, the conference chairman, whether the vaccine liability language was in the massive bill or would be placed in it.

Obey and four others at the meeting said Stevens told him no. Committee members signed off on the bill and the conference broke up.

A spokeswoman for Stevens, Courtney Boone, said last week that the vaccine liability language was in the bill when conferees approved it. Stevens was not made available for comment.

During a January interview, Frist agreed. Asked about the claim that the vaccine language was inserted after the conference members signed off on the bill, he replied: "To my knowledge, that is incorrect. It was my understanding, you'd have to sort of confirm, that the vaccine liability which had been signed off by leaders of the conference, signed off by the leadership in the United States Senate, signed off by the leadership of the House, it was my understanding throughout that that was part of that conference report."

But Keith Kennedy, who works for Sen. Thad Cochran, R-Miss., as staff director for the Senate Appropriations Committee, said at a seminar for reporters last month that the language was inserted by Frist and Hastert, R-Ill., after the conference committee ended its work.

"There should be no dispute. That was an absolute travesty," Kennedy said at a videotaped Washington, D.C., forum sponsored by the Center on Congress at Indiana University.

"It was added after the conference had concluded. It was added at the specific direction of the speaker of the House and the majority leader of the Senate. The conferees did not vote on it. It's a true travesty of the process."

After the conference committee broke up, a meeting was called in Hastert's office, Kennedy said. Also at the meeting, according to a congressional staffer, were Frist, Stevens and House Majority Whip Roy Blunt, R-Mo.

"They (committee staff members) were given the language and then it was put in the document," Kennedy said.

About 10 or 10:30 p.m., Democratic staff members were handed the language and told it was now in the bill, Obey said.

He took to the House floor in a rage. He called Frist and Hastert "a couple of musclemen in Congress who think they have a right to tell everybody else that they have to do their bidding."

Rep. Dan Burton, R-Ind., also was critical of inserting the vaccine language after the conference committee had adjourned.

"It sucks," he told Congress Daily that night.

Rep. Jim Moran, D-Va., another member of the conference committee, was upset, too, a staff member said, because he didn't have enough time to read the language. The final bill was filed in the House at 11:54 p.m. and passed 308-102 at 5:02 the next morning.

The Senate unanimously approved the legislation Dec. 21, but not before Senate Democrats, including several members of the conference committee, bashed the way the vaccine language was inserted.

"What an insult to the legislative process," said Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., a member of the conference committee. Byrd is considered the authority on legislative rules and tradition.

President Bush signed the legislation into law Dec. 30.

When asked about Frist's earlier denial, spokeswoman Amy Call said: "Bill Frist has fought hard to protect the people of Tennessee and the people of the United States from a bioterror emergency and that's what he did throughout this process."

Hastert's office did not provide a response.

Not against the rules

The practice of adding to a compromise bill worked out by bipartisan House-Senate conference committees, while highly unusual, is not thought to violate congressional rules.

Some Senate and House Democrats have proposed banning the practice as part of broader attempts at ethics reform in Congress.

They, consumer groups and others with concerns about possible harm caused by vaccines charge that the move was a gift by Frist to the pharmaceutical industry, which they point out has given a lot of campaign cash to the Nashville doctor through the years.

"The senator should be working to ensure there are safe vaccines to protect American families rather than protecting the drug industry's pocketbooks," Pamela Gilbert, president of Protect American Families, said in a statement. The group is an alliance of consumer, labor and advocacy organizations.

Frist has received $271,523 in campaign donations from the pharmaceutical and health products industry since 1989, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a watchdog group.

He is also a possible candidate for president in 2008.

In the interview, Frist reiterated how important he thinks the vaccine protections are.

"The United States of America, if a pandemic occurs, is totally unprepared," he said. "And the only way we are going to be prepared is rebuilding our manufacturing base to build a vaccine infrastructure that can be timely and responsive. We don't have it today."

Frist has long advocated liability protection for vaccine makers, and it was widely reported that he would attempt to attach the legislation to the Defense Appropriations bill because it is considered must-pass legislation.

Ken Johnson, senior vice president of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, said that, while the group favors liability protection, it did not take a position nor did it lobby on behalf of the law that passed. •

Copyright © 2006, tennessean.com. All rights reserved.

If one contractor does not do it, his or her prices will be higher than those of another who does. With hundreds of millions of people desperate for any kind of job the global economy may offer, there will always be willing competitors.

Faced with its own imperatives, the core corporations can do little more than close their eyes to the infractions and insist that they have no responsibility for the conditions of their contractors.

Modern Slavery

Descriptions of the working conditions of millions of workers, even in the 'modern and affluent" North, sound like a throwback to the days of the early industrial revolution. Consider this description of conditions at contract clothing shops in modern affluent San Francisco:

Many of them are dark, cramped and windowless.... Twelve-hour days with no days off and a break only for lunch are not uncommon. And in this wealthy, cosmopolitan city, many shops enforce draconian rules reminiscent of the nineteenth century. "The workers were not allowed to talk to each other and they didn't allow us to go to the bathroom," says one Asian garment worker . . .

Aware of manufacturers' zeal for bargain-basement prices, the nearly 600 sewing contractors in the Bay Area engage in cutthroat competition-often a kind of Darwinian drive to the bottom.... Manufacturers have another powerful chip to keep bids down Katie Quan, a manager of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union in San Francisco, explains, "They say, 'If you don't take it, we'll just ship it overseas, and you won't get work and your workers will go hungry.'"

In 1992 a [Department of Labor] investigation of garment shops on the U.S. protectorate of Saipan found conditions akin to indentured servitude: Chinese workers whose passports had been confiscated, putting in eighty-four-hour weeks at sub-minimum wages.

The line between conditions in the South and the North as defined by geography becomes ever more blurred. Dorka Diaz, a twenty-year old textile worker who formerly produced clothing in Honduras for Leslie Fay, a U.S.-based transnational, testified before the Subcommittee on Labor-Management Relations of the U.S. House of Representatives that she worked for Leslie Fay in Honduras alongside twelve- and thirteen-year-old girls locked inside a factory where the temperature often hit 100 degrees and there was no clean drinking water. For a fifty-four-hour week, she was paid a little over $20. She and her three-year old son lived at the edge of starvation. In April 1994, she was fired for trying to organize a union.

When the black women who toiled over knitting machines in a Taiwanese-owned sweater factory in South Africa for fifty cents an hour made it known that with the election of Nelson Mandela they expected "a union shop, better wages and a little respect," the Taiwanese owners responded by abruptly closing their seven South African factories and eliminating 1,000 jobs. Low as the wages were, the cost of labor in South Africa is twice that of labor in Brazil or Mexico and several times that in Thailand or China. Noting that prospective foreign investors have turned wary of South Africa, the New York Times suggests, "There are doubts about the Government's long-term commitment to capitalism, about whether Mr. Mandela can contain the expectations of the impoverished majority." In the world of big money and multimillion-dollar compensation packages, greed is a worker who wants a living wage.

In many Southern countries, to say that conditions verge on slavery is scarcely an exaggeration. China has become a favorite of foreign investors and corporations seeking cheap labor and outsourcing for offshore procurement at rock-bottom prices. Business Week described the prevailing conditions of Chinese factory workers:

In foreign-funded factories, which employ about 6 million Chinese in the coastal provinces, accidents abound. In some factories, workers are chastised, beaten, strip-searched, and even forbidden to use the bathroom during work hours.

At a foreign-owned company in the Fujian province city of Ziamen, 40 workers-or one-tenth of the work force-have had their fingers crushed by obsolete machines. According to official reports, there were 45,000 industrial accidents in Guangdong last year, claiming more than 8,700 lives.... Last month ... 76 workers died in a Guangdong factory accident.

Although the Chinese government reportedly is trying to tighten up on standards, it has faced enormous problems of unemployment since its decision to free up market forces. Tens of millions of rural workers are streaming to the cities. Urban unemployment stood at 5 million in mid-1994, a 25 percent increase in a year. Two million workers lost their jobs in Heilongjiang province in 1993 alone. Millions more urban workers face pay cuts, and half of the government-owned enterprises that employ approximately half of the urban workforce are losing money, creating prospects of massive layoffs and plant closings.

Government efforts to tighten up on standards in this "free-market miracle" are also hampered by skyrocketing rates of crime and corruption.

In Bangladesh, an estimated 80,000 children under age fourteen, most of them female, work at least sixty hours a week m garment factories. For miscounting or other errors, male supervisors strike them or force them to kneel on the floor or stand on their heads for ten to thirty minutes.
It isn't only in the garment industry.

In India, an estimated 55 million children work in various conditions of servitude, many as bonded laborers-virtual slaves-under the most appalling conditions. Each child has his or her own story. A few months after his rescue from forced labor, Devanandan told a reporter that he had been coaxed to leave home by a promise of wages up to $100 a month for working at a loom two hours a day while going to school. When he agreed, he found himself locked up in a room where he ate, slept, and was forced to work knotting carpets from four in the morning till late evening for pennies in pay.

Former Indian Chief Justice P. M. Bhagwati has publicly testified to observing examples of boys working fourteen to twenty hours a day: "They are beaten up, branded [with red-hot iron rods] and even hung from trees upside down."

The carpet industry in India exports $300 million worth of carpets a year, mainly to the United States and Germany. The carpets are produced by more than 300,000 child laborers working fourteen to sixteen hours a day, seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year. Many are bonded laborers, paying off the debts of their parents; they have been sold into bondage or kidnapped from low-caste parents. The fortunate ones earn a pittance wage. The unfortunate ones are paid nothing at all. The carpet manufacturers argue that the industry must have child laborers to be able to survive in competition with the carpet industries of Pakistan, Nepal, Morocco, and elsewhere that also use child laborers.

As we rush to enter the race to the bottom in a globally competitive world, it is sobering to keep in mind just how deep the bottom is toward which we are racing.

The Limits of Social Responsibility

Within the apparel industry, a few socially concerned firms such as Levi Strauss, Esprit, and The Gap are attempting to live by their values. They are proving that a responsible, well-managed company need not tolerate the worst of the conditions described above, but they face the same competitive pressures as others in their industry. Almost inevitably, such firms find themselves developing split personalities. In the end, they finance their public good works and the good pay and conditions of their headquarters staffs by procuring most of the goods they sell through contractors that offer low wages and substandard working conditions.

Consider specifically the case of Levi Strauss, a company widely acclaimed as a leader in the realm of corporate responsibility. In April 1994, the Council on Economic Priorities gave Levi Strauss an award for its "unprecedented commitment to non-exploitative work practices in developing countries." In 1984, the company was named one of the hundred best companies to work for in America. In June 1992, Money magazine ranked it first among all U.S. companies for employee benefits. Bob Haas, chief executive officer (CEO) of Levi Strauss, was featured in the August 1, 1994, cover story of Business Week titled "Managing by Values," which emphasized his belief that social responsibility and ethical practice are good business.

In 1985, Bob Haas, as CEO and a member of the Levi Strauss family, led a $1.6 billion leveraged buyout of the company, taking it private specifically to prevent a takeover by outside speculators. The fact that 94 percent of the stock is in Haas family hands has given the company more flexibility in maintaining its social commitment than a publicly held company might have in an era of hostile takeovers.

Under Haas's leadership, Levi Strauss has set strict standards with regard to the work environment. As evidence that they mean it, the Levi Strauss board of directors voted unanimously to close out $40 million a year in production contracts in China in protest of human rights violations. When the company found that its contractor in Dhaka, Bangladesh, was hiring girls as young as eleven as full-time seamstresses, it worked out an agreement by which Levi Strauss would continue to pay the wages of these girls while sending them to school and paying for their uniforms, books, and tuition. When they reach age fourteen, the minimum employment age set by International Labor Organization standards, they will return to work. By the standards of the industry, Levi Strauss is a candidate for sainthood. But it is sobering to see how constrained even a Levi Strauss can be.

Although Haas asserts that Levi Strauss has made every effort to keep as many of its production jobs in the United States as possible, during the 1980s, it closed fifty-eight U.S. plants and laid off 10,400 workers. According to Haas, if the company had made its decisions on purely economic grounds, its remaining thirty-four production and finishing plants would all have been closed in favor of overseas production.

Even at its plants in the United States, the core-periphery phenomenon is evident. When the authors of The 100 Best Companies to Work for in America visited the Levi Strauss plant in El Paso, Texas, they found that Money magazine had ranked the company number one on the basis of the benefits enjoyed by its headquarters staff, not by staff at its plants. The benefits received by the El Paso production workers were little different from the marginal conditions at other local textile factories. The authors decided not to include the company among the 100 best in the book's revised edition.

Spreading Cancer

We have focused here on U.S.-based multinationals, because their dysfunctions seem to be spreading through the world like a cancer. By way of 1994, a binge of corporate restructuring in Europe, similar to that in the United States, had pushed Europe's unemployment rate to 10.9 percent. Even these rates, high as they are, may mask a much deeper dysfunction. In Belgium, unemployment was 8.5 percent in 1992, but 25 percent of the workforce was living on public assistance.

Persistent joblessness is resulting in growing social unrest, exacerbating racial tensions, and sparking a vicious backlash against immigrants. Joblessness is especially acute among youth, whose unemployment rate is twice that of the general population and still rising. On March 25, L994, 50,000 students marched down a Paris boulevard, "taunting police and chanting slogans demanding jobs." A survey of 3,000 European teenagers found them "confused, vulnerable, obsessed with their economic futures.

Pointing out that the unemployment rate in Europe has averaged about 3 percentage points higher than in the United States, The Economist cautioned "no trade barrier will keep out the technological changes hat are revolutionizing work in the rich world; and a trade war is sure o destroy more jobs than it saves. It counseled Europe to respond by emulating the United States to reduce the social safety net benefits that give the unemployed little incentive to seek work," minimum wages that cost young workers their jobs," employer social security contributions hat reduce demand for labor, and "strict employment-protection rules" hat discourage firms from hiring by making "it hard, if not impossible, ~ lay off workers once they are on the payroll." To those who point out hat the quality of jobs in America has deteriorated as a consequence f such policies, The Economist has a ready answer:

Too many [of the jobs being created in America], say the merchants of gloom, are part-time, temporary and badly paid. The real wages of low-skilled workers have fallen over the past decade. Yet in comparison with Europe, this should be seen as a sign of success, an example-of a well-functioning labor market-not a failure. As manufacturing has declined, America and Europe have both faced shrinking demand for low-skilled labor. In America, the relative pay of these workers was allowed to fall, so fewer jobs were lost. European workers, by contrast, have resisted the inevitable and so priced themselves out of work."

In short, Europe's unemployment problem is a result of overpaying the poor, taxing the rich, and imposing regulations on European firms that limit their ability to get on with serious downsizing. The Economist editorial pointed to moves by various European countries to reduce minimum wages, cut payroll taxes, and loosen employment-protection laws as signs of hope for Europe. Business Week offered similar counsel:

To ensure it remains competitive once the down-cycle wanes, Europe must be willing to see more of its low-value-added manufacturing jobs move to Eastern Europe and elsewhere.... And it must reduce farm subsidies while continuing to hammer away at high wages and corporate taxes, short working hours, labor immobility, and luxurious social programs. If Europeans don't follow these prescriptions, this recession may be doomed to be more than just a cyclical one.... Putting up trade barriers will only insulate Europeans from the discipline they need to maintain.
Although they are running a bit behind the United States, the evidence suggests that European companies and governments are increasingly heeding this advice, which means that the unemployment, racial tension, and social unrest currently plaguing Europe are almost certain to spiral upward. We may presume that The Economist will then praise Europe for its success.

Although Japan, with unemployment below 3 percent, continues to be the full-employment champion of the industrial world, there is evidence that the commitment there to lifetime employment has begun to break down and that a growing number of Japanese are experiencing the pinch of joblessness. A series of economic shocks has leaf Japanese managers to look to the United States for lessons on increasing efficiency. According to Michael Armacost, former U.S. ambassador to Japan:

Japanese business leaders-who just a few years ago thought they had nothing further to learn from us-are examining American business practices with renewed interest and emulating some with interesting results.... Daiei, one of the country's largest chain stores, says it will seek to reduce retail prices by 50 percent over three years.... Wal-Mart Stores recently established links with two of Japan's supermarket chains.... Japanese executives are now studying America's experience with corporate downsizing, merit-pay packages and investment practices.
Armacost goes on to urge American trade negotiators to focus on pushing for regulatory reforms to accelerate these processes.

With or without U.S. tutelage, it is already happening. Domy Co., a discounter, is importing Safeway cola for sale in Japan at forty-seven cents a can, undercutting the price of local beverages by 55 percent. It sees great potential for imports of Safeway lemon-lime soda, cookies, and bottled water. The Japanese government has relaxed size limits on new retail outlets as well as limits on store hours and business days- with the consequence that retailers are seeking the wide-open spaces of the suburbs, and strip malls are springing up throughout the countryside. Retailers are turning to cheap imports, with China as a preferred source. The burgeoning discount retailers have become the darlings of the Japanese stock market. Faced with price cutting based on low-cost imports, Japanese companies have been restructuring to increase their efficiency.

In January 1995, an accord was announced between the United States and Japan under which U.S. investment houses would have the right to participate in the management of Japanese pension funds. Wall Street investment managers may soon be positioned to give the Japanese lessons in their home territory on the money game, predatory finance, corporate cannibalism, and managed competition.

The trend toward concentration in the retail sector is spreading rapidly to other countries, partly as a consequence of changes in trade rules that open domestic markets to the large retail chains. On January 14, 1994, only two weeks after the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) went into effect, Wal-Mart announced its move into Canada, which began with the purchase of 120 Woolco discount department stores from Woolworth Canada. Business Week called it "a full-scale invasion of the Canadian market." Investors rushed to sell holdings of Canada's major retail chains, which were believed to be ill-equipped to meet Wal-Mart's price competition. Canadian retailing consultant John Winter predicted that by the late 1990s, "half of the Canadian retailers you see up here now may not be in business.

With the signing of NAFTA, U.S. retailing giants were poised to quickly "conquer retailing" in Mexico as well, but according to Business Week, "Mexico's army of bureaucrats, steeped in protectionist habits, is plaguing them with mountains of paperwork, ever changing regulations, customs delays, and tariffs of up to 300 percent on low-priced Chinese imports favored by the discounters. Mexico thought that it had a free-trade agreement with the United States to become the major low-wage supplier of the U.S. market. It seems to have balked when confronted with the reality that U.S. retailers intended to use NAFTA to open Mexico to goods produced by even lower paid Chinese workers.
The complaints of the U.S. retailing giants aside, we might conclude that the Mexican government showed better sense in putting up a few roadblocks to slow the assault of the mega-retailers than it did in spending millions to promote NAFTA in the first place.

The dream of the corporate empire builders is being realized. The global system is harmonizing standards across country after country- down toward the lowest common denominator. Although a few socially responsible businesses are standing against the tide with some limited success, theirs is not an easy struggle. We must not kid ourselves. Social responsibility is inefficient in a global free market, and the market will not long abide those who do not avail of the opportunities to shed the inefficient. And we must be clear as to the meaning of efficiency. To the global economy, people are not only increasingly unnecessary, but they and their demands for a living wage are a major source of economic inefficiency. Global corporations are acting to purge themselves of this unwanted burden. We are creating a system that has fewer places for people.

Jim Bob came out of the feed store, threw his purchases into the back of the wagon and climbed up beside his wife. He picked up the reins, shook them and called out to the donkey -- "Giddy-up Joe! Come on, Joe, let's go!"

But Joe just stood there, oblivious to Jim Bob's pleading, his tongue-clickings, even to the lash of the reins on his rump. Jim Bob sighed, picked up the baseball bat, climbed down, walked around in front of Joe and, with a mighty swing, smashed him right between his long ears with the bat. Jim Bob hopped back into the wagon, grabbed the reins and, with a single, "Go, Joe!" the donkey headed off at a brisk trot.

Jim Bob's wife was horrified. "Why did you hit Joe in the head with that bat?" she asked.

Jim Bob grinned, "Sometimes ol' Joe forgets who's the boss here," he said. "When that happens, you just gotta get his attention..."

That was back in the day -- but little has changed since then. Donkeys are still stubborn. Especially on the political scene, where most are completely oblivious to what's going on around them. It's easy for some to forget who's the boss when they're free to gallop through the halls of power -- trot around with the big boys...

Unless you happen to be a Connecticut donkey.

Democrats in that very blue, anti-war state are unhappy with their three-term senator, Joe Lieberman, for his stubborn, rabid support of President Bush and his bloody, illegal war. They pleaded with Joe to recognize that the war on Iraq was planned long before 9-11, that there were no weapons of mass destruction in that pitiful, unarmed country, and that thousands of US citizens and tens of thousands of Iraqi men, women and children are being blown to pieces, maimed, and poisoned with depleted uranium -- all because of a lie.

But Joe refused to move. He responded by penning an op-ed in the Nov. 29, 2005 Wall Street Journal entitled "Our Troops Must Stay." In that piece, Lieberman "catapaulted the propaganda" that Iraq was experiencing a great deal of progress, underscored by "continuing security and growing prosperity." The Shiite south, he said, "remains largely free of terrorism, receives much more electric power and other public services than it did under Saddam, and is experiencing greater economic activity." And Lieberman said even the Sunni triangle -- Baghdad on the East, Tikrit to the North, and Ramadi to the West, where most American troops are slaughtered, is showing progress...

Warming to his subject, Lieberman wrote, "None of these remarkable changes in Iraq would have happened if Coalition Forces, lead (sic) by the U.S., had not overthrown Saddam Hussein ...The question is whether the American people and enough of their representatives in Congress from both parties understand this."

Lieberman then chided war naysayers on both sides of the aisle with, "I am disappointed by Democrats who are more focused on how President Bush took America into the war in Iraq almost three years ago, and Republicans who are more worried about whether the war will bring them down in next November’s elections, than they are concerned about how we continue the progress in Iraq in the months and years ahead."

Lieberman underscored his stance in December by hitting the talk-show circuit to wrap himself in the flag and scold his anti-war constituents -- "It is time for Democrats who distrust President Bush to acknowledge that in matters of war we undermine presidential credibility at our nation's peril."

But Connecticut yankees are hard to fool. They know civil war is raging throughout Iraq. They know we are there under false pretenses. They know in November, while Lieberman was polishing his commentary, 88 American servicemen were killed. In December - 67, January - 65, and 15 in the first seven days of February - for a total of 235. They know there was never any reason for even one of the nearly 2,300 U.S. servicemen and women to die. They know a lie is not good enough reason to destroy an entire generation of Americans -- nor to remain silent to keep from embarrassing the man who sent them to their deaths.

In January, Democrats in Manchester attempted to get Lieberman's attention by overwhelmingly passing a resolution opposing his "unconditional support of President Bush." The measure stated that Lieberman was not acting in the best interest of the American public or the Democratic Party by supporting Bush in the handling of the Iraqi conflict. Dorothy Brindamour, one of the many Democrats to speak out, said, "I think it is one thing to be an independent thinker. It's another thing to be a Democratic senator who is acting as a lobbyist for King George and his chancellor, Cheney."

Lieberman responded by trotting to the annual State of the Union speech on Jan. 31 and, when Bush defiantly claimed that the only exit plan from Iraq was "victory" in his noble war on terror, Lieberman was the lone Democrat to rise with the Republicans and give Bush a cheering, standing ovation.

Four days later, Windsor Democrats joined their Manchester counterparts and, with a mighty swing, bashed Lieberman right between the ears with a Vote of No Confidence "for embracing Bush's position on the war, including denying that the United States wrongly entered the war and that it was not accomplishing the objectives set out by the president."

Windsor Democratic town Chairman Tim Fitzgerald admitted the resolution was a "practical way" to get Lieberman's attention, but added he was "not delusional that this is going to change his fundamental way of thinking."

According to the Los Angeles Times, Lieberman's approval ratings in Connecticut are at a weak 52%, which puts him in a shaky political position, and sharks are beginning to circle for the upcoming August primary -- something the Democrats don't need right now. To make matters worse, Keith Crane, from Branford, not only created a "Dump Joe" Internet site, but shows up at meetings with fists full of anti-Lieberman buttons and bumper stickers.

What Lieberman's constituents don't understand is that his stubborn defense of the Iraq war in all probability goes much deeper than mere support of Bush's war on terror. Rising numbers of innocents sent to early graves in an unending war is the price that Lieberman and others within the U.S government -- willingly or unwillingly -- are committed to pay in order to keep Israel safe from madmen such as Iranian President Mahmooud Ahmadinejad who has openly called for Israel to be "wiped off the map."

Lieberman, like so many of his congressional peers, has sworn to do whatever it takes to protect Israel, and all appear to be blinded by ideology. Therefore, they are condemned to show up for work morning after morning in a chamber that reeks of blood.

U.S. politicians have removed their fingers from the pulse of the nation. They have forgotten who's the boss. Face it -- if you're an elected political animal who refuses to move, refuses to pay attention; refuses to pull the state wagon -- you could likely find yourself "put out to pasture" in the next election.

Especially if you're a Connecticut donkey.

Sheila Samples is an Oklahoma writer and a former civilian US Army Public Information Officer. She is a regular contributor for a variety of Internet sites. Contact her at: rsamples@sirinet.net

Some of this gigantic financial flow, of course, is because of intelligent investment, efficiency and hard work. A very large part, however, occurred simply because ExxonMobil happened to be standing in the right place at the right time holding a bushel basket (or a huge oil drum) collecting surplus profits resulting from chance and other people's misfortune.

First, the Iraq war helped add billions to ExxonMobil's windfall gains by raising the price of crude oil, gasoline and natural gas. Then Hurricanes Katrina and Rita disrupted domestic production and refining, pushing prices even higher.

All of us pay for the huge profits, but poor Americans living in colder regions and working people who must commute long distances are the ones whose contribution to ExxonMobil's profits are the most painful.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration estimates that home heating oil prices this year will be 23 percent higher than last year; throughout the Northern states, this means not only discomfort but real hardship, even death for some of the elderly.

As to people who must drive to work: A 2005 CNN poll found 58 percent of drivers experiencing severe or moderate hardship when gasoline was at $2.22 a gallon. Now the government is predicting $2.41 a gallon for this year.

Some experts believe the gigantic profits result not from chance but from limited refining capacity - possibly deliberate - reducing supply and boosting prices. Although demand has grown dramatically in recent decades, Jamie McCourt, president of the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights, observes: "We haven't had a refinery built since 1976."

In the best of all possible worlds, ExxonMobil might recognize the sources of its good fortune and give something of reasonable scale back to the American people (beyond the relatively modest amount it donates to the arts, education and other causes).

It might, for instance, help make heating oil available to low-income citizens, as Venezuela is doing in Massachusetts, New York and Maine.

Or it could simply contribute money to help offset the pain: Appropriations for the Low Income Housing Energy Assistance Program for this fiscal year are only $2.1 billion, nearly $3 billion short of what Congress authorized.

Beyond this, ExxonMobil could make a major contribution to helping rebuild New Orleans, where it has an important refinery. Private citizens have donated about $3.2 billion so far to the rebuilding effort. The $13 million contribution ExxonMobil touts on its Web site is a mere one-eighth of 1 percent of the increase in its 2005 profits.

Actually, given its New Orleans refinery, ExxonMobil might do very well by doing good: It could protect its investment by getting serious about helping the city build strong Category 5 levees and restoring hurricane-slowing wetlands. The estimated total cost is $31 billion - $5 billion less than ExxonMobil's 2005 huge profit flows.

Unfortunately, we do not live in a world where significant, voluntary "give-backs" to American society are common.

The obvious alternative is some form of taxation, something we have done many times in the past when chance and misfortune have combined to produce unwarranted gains.

Last fall, the Republican-controlled Senate approved a one-year tax increase of $5 billion for the nation's largest oil companies.

Another Senate-approved measure would effectively remove the foreign tax credit that the nation's three largest oil companies receive for taxes paid in other countries. At the moment, however, even these tiny steps are unlikely to pass the House of Representatives.

It will take an aroused citizenry to demand what should be given freely. Sen. Byron L. Dorgan, a North Dakota Democrat, and six other senators have introduced windfall profits tax legislation. This direction would inevitably have to be at the center of a serious agenda for change as the pain continues to increase.

Gar Alperovitz, the Lionel R. Bauman professor of political economy at the University of Maryland, College Park, is author of "America Beyond Capitalism: Reclaiming Our Wealth, Our Liberty, and Our Democracy." His e-mail is garalper@ncesa.org.

Today, after spending more than $50,000 in legal fees in a lawsuit against the Monroe County Community School Corporation, Mayer awaits a decision from a Reagan-appointed federal judge as to whether or not she will be granted a jury trial.

“If Judge [Sarah E.] Barker doesn’t grant us a jury trial, it would really be criminal,” Mayer said from her son’s home in Wisconsin, where she was forced to live after finding herself unable to support herself. “It means I would have spent all this money for nothing.”

Mayer is one of at least three teachers in the country who have filed lawsuits against their employers since the beginning of the war, claiming their First Amendment rights were violated after they were fired for what they said was an opposition to the war.

So far, one case has been settled out of court in favor of the teacher. In 2004, former New Mexico high school teacher Bill Nevins received a $205,000 settlement from the Rio Rancho School District. A year earlier, one of his students recited a poem over the school’s intercom system that questioned the war in Iraq. Nevins, a 10th-grade Humanities teacher, was also the coach of the Rio Rancho High School poetry team. His contract was terminated within months of the incident.

Professor says he was denied tenure for body count

In November 2005, Alan Temes, an assistant professor at Indiana University of Pennsylvania filed a lawsuit against the college after he failed to get tenure. Temes said he would post the body count of US soldiers and Iraqi civilians next to a bulletin board filled with pro-military imagery, which included the words “Operation Iraqi Freedom” next to a picture of the burning twin towers.

In the lawsuit, Temes claims he was warned by the department chair that he would not get tenure if he continued posting the body count next to the pro-war bulletin board. His last day at the college is in May and he’s been looking for work for several months with no luck. He has no regrets about what he did.

“If you’re going to push the war, at least be aware that the count of Iraqi civilians is growing at a phenomenal rate,” Temes said. “I figured the American people need to know the facts. I didn’t think the mainstream press was doing enough of a job.”

In Mayer’s case, she says it was an article in Time Magazine for Kids that lead to her termination. In January 2003, she was teaching a Current Events class to fourth, fifth and sixth graders at Clear Creek Elementary School. They had been discussing the articles in the magazine, which dedicated an issue to the situation in Iraq. One student asked Mayer if she had ever participated in a peace march.

“I said that peace marches are going on all over the country and that whenever I pass the courthouse square where the demonstrators were, I honk for peace because they hold up signs that say honk for peace.”

That night, a sixth-grade student girl told her parents that Mayer was encouraging them to protest against the war, igniting a furor that Mayer said she'd never before experienced in her 20-year teaching career.

Three days later, the girl’s father showed up to the school for a meeting with Mayer and principal Victoria Rogers. Mayer explained that she had simply explained to the children that there are two sides to the story. When the father asked if she had any children in the military, she told him her son had recently enlisted. But that only seemed to antagonize him even further.

“He kept getting angrier and angrier,” she said. “He stood up and started pointing his finger in my face. I felt very threatened.”

The father turned to Rogers with a request.

“I want her to promise never the mention the word peace in her class again,” Mayer remembered him saying.

Rogers assured him that could be done, and Mayer reluctantly agreed never to mention the word “peace” in her class again.

“I wanted to calm the parent down,” she said. “I didn’t want to be insubordinate.”

Later that afternoon in a faculty meeting, Rogers circulated a memo announcing the cancellation of “Peace Month,” a traditional month-long series of activities beginning on Martin Luther King Jr. Day that taught children how to settle differences through mediation.

“She said that we can talk about war, but not about peace,” Mayer said. “That for now on, nobody is allowed to have a stance on the war.”

Rogers, who declined to go into specifics about Mayer’s case, said that Peace Month was never cancelled but that it “died a natural death.”

“We felt we were working on it all year round,” said Rogers, who has since retired as principal of the school. “We were already working on life skills throughout the year so it became incorporated into what we were doing every day.”

But Peace Month was scheduled to begin less than two weeks before she sent out the original memo on Jan. 13, 2003 announcing the cancellation of the five-year tradition. Over the next few months, as President Bush declared Mission Accomplished and the country became increasingly divided, the angry father rallied other parents against the teacher.

Complaint filed on sexual harrassment form

At least two parent complaints against Mayer were typed up on Title IX Sexual Discrimination and Harassment grievance documents and placed in her personnel file.

“There was no substance to it,” Mayer said. “This complaint was very mysterious. I never saw it until I was disposed (in September 2005).”

That likely explains why she had been unable to find work since losing her teaching job on the Gulf Coast of Florida in 2005, where she had been hired as a teacher in Boca Grande, an upscale community and long-time retreat for the Bush family.

Mayer, who is certified to be an administrator, applied to be a principal when a position came open within the Boca Grande school district. But when they checked on her references, the sexual harassment complaint came to light.

“I did not get the principal’s job. I got fired again,” she said.

Even though it was typed on an official sexual harassment document, the actual complaint against Mayer accused her of “harassing” children because she would put up her hand to silence a child if the child had interrupted a conversation between herself and another student.

“The parent had signed it, but nobody on the school administration has signed it,” she said. “When we tried to find out who did it, nobody admitted to it.”

She then found another complaint against her on the same sexual harassment form, this one accusing her of announcing to the class about a student’s medication. Mayer denies the allegation.

When Mayer’s attorney looked into why the complaints were typed up on Title IX forms, they told him they had been writing all complaints against teachers on the federal forms for a decade.

Mayer contacted the ACLU about her case three years ago, but was told to hire an attorney if she could afford it.

“At the time I could afford it, but now I’m out of money,” she said. And when Indiana author Kurt Vonnegut heard of her case, he contacted the Indiana chapter of the ACLU on her behalf, but they refused to intervene. If anything, history is on her side. Not only did the teacher in New Mexico receive a $205,000 settlement in 2004, but a Wisconsin teacher had a similar victory in 1991.

During the first war in Iraq, high school teacher and wrestling coach Jim Low, opposed plans for a ceremony supporting the war in Iraq to be held before a wrestling match. When the ceremony continued as planned, Low walked out of the building, delegating his coaching duties to an assistant. When his contract was terminated two months later, Low sued the Lakeland Union High School District in Minocqua, claiming his First Amendment free speech rights had been violated. He subsequently received a settlement of $140,000 from the northern Wisconsin school district.

If Judge Barker grants Mayer a trial by jury, it would begin on Mar. 6. “Usually they give you at least a month’s notice as a courtesy, but February 6th already passed and I haven’t heard anything,” she said. “So I’m still waiting to hear from her.”

Mayer said her case is such a clear cut example of a First Amendment violation that she can not comprehend why it has not already been settled. “At first, the contention of the school was that my speech wasn’t protected because the war in Iraq wasn’t a matter of public concern,” she said. “Then they changed their contention and said that my speech wasn’t protected because the classroom wasn’t a public forum.”

She believes small-town politics may play a role. The teacher’s union refused to help her; Mayer notes that the principal comes from an “old family” and that she was married to the former president of the union.

But others have kept her spirits up. Mayer says Howard Dean, whom she had volunteered for in 2004, has taken an interest in her case and checks up on it periodically. And the local Air America affiliate in Wisconsin has set up a legal fund to help Mayer raise money for her court battle.

“If the judge rules against me, she will be saying that a teacher doesn’t have a right to free speech at school,” Mayer said. “If the classroom is not a public forum, then a teacher has no right to free speech.”

First, I'm not rabid, in personal or political style. I'm a sedate, nondescript middle-aged academic who tries to approach political and moral questions rationally. I articulate principles, provide evidence about how those principles are often undermined by powerful institutions, and offer logical conclusions about how citizens should respond. I encourage people to disagree with my principles, contest my evidence and question my logic -- all appropriate activities in a university where students are being trained to think for themselves and in a nominally democratic society where citizens should to do the same.

Second, I offer such critiques without hate. Sometimes my assessments are harsh, such as in evaluating George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq and concluding the attack was unlawful and, therefore, our president is guilty of crimes against peace and should be prosecuted. Similarly harsh was the judgment that Bill Clinton's insistence on maintaining the harsh economic embargo on Iraq in the 1990s resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocents and, therefore, Clinton was a moral monster who was unfit to govern. None of this has to do with hating either man, but instead with assessments and judgments we should be making.

Third, these critiques are not of the United States, but of specific policies and policymakers. No nation is a monolith with a single set of interests or political positions, and it's nonsensical to claim that harsh critique constitutes rejection of an entire nation.

Why would anyone suggest that I rabidly hate the United States? It's easier to defame opponents using emotionally charged language than engage on real issues. Accuse them of being irrational and hateful. Ignore the substance of the claims and just sling mud. By even minimal standards of intellectual or political discourse, it's not terribly honorable, but it often works.

Beyond these junkyard dog tactics, Horowitz's email also makes one crucial factual error. I did write that the United States losing the Iraq war was a good thing -- not in celebration of death and destruction, of course, but because the defeat temporarily restrains policymakers in their dangerous attempts to extend the U.S. empire. But that was the first sentence of an opinion piece I published in various newspapers in 2004, not a statement to students. The distinction is important.

Horowitz and similar critics argue that professors like me inappropriately politicize the classroom, forcing captive student audiences to listen to radical rants. No doubt there are professors who rant -- from the left, right and center; there's a lot of bad teaching in universities.

But I'm constantly attacked by people who have no knowledge of -- and as far as I can tell, no interest in learning about -- how I teach. Because they hear me express strong opinions at political rallies or read my newspaper opinion pieces, they assume I treat my classroom like a pulpit and students as targets for conversion.

I teach journalism, and in the course of that teaching, I regularly discuss how journalists cover controversial topics; it's hard to imagine teaching responsibly without doing that. When appropriate, I have talked in class about how journalists cover war -- explaining that many people around the world believe the U.S. invasion of Iraq violated international law, observing that U.S. journalists in the corporate commercial media rarely write about that and suggesting reasons for the omission.

There's always a politics to teaching; the choices professors make about what readings to assign and how to approach a subject are influenced by their politics -- left, right, or center. But that does not meaning teaching is nothing but politics.

No one knows that better than professors who hold views challenging the conventional wisdom, those of us who don't rabidly hate the United States but do passionately love learning and the promise of an open, independent university.

Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin, and the author of, most recently, "The Heart of Whiteness: Confronting Race, Racism and White Privilege" (City Lights Books).

It's quite a statement by Clooney (who directed the movie) and his casting directors not to have got an actor to play McCarthy. But they made the right decision. No actor could quite convey the aura of menace that emanates from this Republican Torquemada. This was what confronted hundreds of government officials, State department civil servants, army officers, librarians, journalists and broadcasters in the early Fifties. McCarthy brought them all under his pitiless gaze and told the nation they were dangerous subversives, bent on enslaving America beneath a Communist yoke. He scared the life out of Americans, and convinced them that the land of freedom was pullulating with Soviet spies and Commie sympathisers.

The drama of Good Night lies in watching Murrow and his team on the TV show See It Now take on McCarthy and suffer the consequences. The film opens in 1953,when the country was already in the grip of red-baiting fever. But how did it get that way? How did this junior senator from Nowheresville rise to such a position of power that, in the words of his biographer, "no man was closer than he to the centre of American consciousness, or more central to the world's consciousness of America".

Modern US perspectives on McCarthy are so extreme - to the Left he is Satan incarnate, to the Right he's an admirably direct militant patriot - that the basic facts of his life are often in dispute. He was born in November 1908 in either Appleton or Grand Chute, Wisconsin. Some commentators stress his seditious Irish Catholic roots, some his Hunnish German grandmother. He dropped out of school to help on the family farm, work as a chicken farmer and run a grocery store. At 20, he returned to high school, crammed four years' study into a single year and went on to take a law degree at Marquette university, Milwaukee. He worked for a Wisconsin law firm, supplementing his income by playing poker.

At 28 he campaigned to be district attorney as a Democrat. When that didn't work, he became Republican candidate in an election to be a circuit judge. An early marker of his bruising style was to send out flyers claiming his 66-year-old opponent, Edgar Werner, was 73, senile and mired in financial corruption. He won, and became the youngest judge in Wisconsin's history.

When America went to war, McCarthy enlisted in the Marines, became an intelligence briefing officer in the Solomon Islands, flew 11 (or possibly 30) missions as an aerial photographer and tail gunner, was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross, and commended for bravery by Admiral Nimitz. Or did he? Many historians claim he embellished his war record - that he had a desk job, flew only in training exercises and got the Nimitz commendation by deception.

It didn't stop him using photos of himself in full fighting gear when campaigning for the Senate against Robert La Follette, a four-term senator and Republican star. He attacked La Follette for not serving his country (at 46, he'd been too old to join up) and for war profiteering. La Follette lost by 5,000 votes, retired from politics and committed suicide.

And so McCarthy launched himself into politics. In the general election he beat his Democratic opponent and entered the Senate. In a typically restrained maiden speech he addressed the problem of a coal strike. He suggested the striking miners should be drafted into the Army. Then if they refused to go back to work, they could be tried for insubordination and shot. Simple.

McCarthy's first three years in power were quiet; he was considered friendly but unimpressive and without influence. What made him start demonising Communists? The move was prompted by fear of losing his seat. In 1949 he was under investigation for taking bribes and dodging tax. His war record was also under scrutiny. What should he do? His advisers suggested he attack the Democrats and accuse them of harbouring Red subversives.

Two key figures helped McCarthy build a case. One was Jack Anderson, a journalist who would listen in as McCarthy grilled fellow senators on the phone about recent meetings and political loyalties. McCarthy got his senate peers to spill the beans. Anderson got stories, and supplied McCarthy with information. The second aide was J Edgar Hoover, the FBI boss who fed McCarthy all manner of ammunition.

The explosion came in 1950. On 9 February McCarthy made a speech to the Republican Women's Club of Wheeling, West Virginia. He held up a piece of paper and said, "I have here in my hand a list of 57 people that were known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist party and who, nevertheless, are still working and shaping the policy of the State department." Some, he said, were passing secrets to the Soviet Union. Eleven days later, in a six-hour speech on the Senate floor, he repeated his claims and named four of the alleged subversives. When Democrat senators accused him of lying and smear tactics, he accused them of being Communist sympathisers.

There was nationwide consternation. Despite McCarthy's refusal to publish his list and his chronic inability to stick to one figure (were there 57, 81 or 205 card-carrying Reds?) people were ready to believe in Commie infiltration. A month earlier, Alger Hiss had been jailed for perjury after being accused of being an accomplice to a former member of an underground Communist network. The war was going badly in Korea. In China, the Kuomintang regime had been replaced by a Communist government. The shadow of Soviet Russia was lengthening across Europe, and there was much talk of an atomic arsenal, of spying, brainwashing and what McCarthy called "the traitorous actions of those who have had all the benefits that the wealthiest nation on earth has had to offer". The following year, when Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were convicted of passing atomic secrets to the Russians, McCarthy seemed to be vindicated.

Was there any truth in his claim? Surprisingly, there was a list - of sorts. It was sent in 1946 by the Secretary of State James Byrnes to a Congressman, and contained the names of 284 people declared unfit to hold jobs in the Department because of Communist connections or other reasons. The "other reasons" included incompetence, homosexuality and alcoholism. (As some have pointed out, if McCarthy had been screened, he'd have gone on the list himself.) Of card-carrying Communists, there was little evidence. McCarthy's claims were investigated by the Tydings Committee, to whom he was obliged to give the list (by now 110 names). The Committee concluded, after 31 days of hearings, that the senator's charges were a "fraud" and a "hoax." Three days later, the FBI arrested Julius Rosenberg for spying.

It's hard for us to imagine the scale of hysteria in the next three years, as McCarthy spread his net of accusations, taking in top politicians, leading academics, and the owner of Encyclopaedia Britannica. As chairman of the Government Committee on Operations of the Senate, McCarthy was inviolable. Anyone who criticised his claims was branded a traitor. Hostile journalists were attacked, sometimes physically. Drew Pearson, for months a thorn in McCarthy's side, was branded "a Moscow-directed character assassin" and kicked in the groin by McCarthy in the cloakroom of a Washington club.

McCarthy began to add books to his witch-hunt. His underlings checked out the library system, and the Overseas Library Program looking for anti-American propaganda, and found 30,000 titles by "communists, pro-communists, former communists and anti-anti-communists". They were removed from US libraries.

The interrogations continued. In 1953, McCarthy's committee examined 653 individuals - first in private closed session (rumours spread about "abuse" and "browbeating" on some occasions); then, if a witness invoked the Fifth Amendment, they'd be examined in public court and their names publicised. If, the logic ran, you had ever publicly held left-wing views, you were probably a Communist; the only way to prove you'd changed was to shop other left-wingers. Such was the climate of fear, hundreds of people lost their jobs. By 1954, 81 of the 110 names put before Tydings subcommittee had resigned or been dismissed.

McCarthy even attacked the president, accusing Harry S Truman of being a woolly liberal, "soft" on Communists and keen to protect Soviet agents. Truman lost the 1952 election, and the Republican Eisenhower moved into the White House. He disapproved of McCarthy's tactics but was pressured by his party not to denounce the popular demagogue.

Then McCarthy over-reached himself. He took on the Army, investigating a New York dentist called Peress, drafted as a captain in 1952 and supposedly a Party member. The Army retaliated by feeding journalists with stories that would embarrass the senator - such as, that he and his Committee sidekick Roy Cohn had conspired to prevent their friend David Schine from being drafted, and that Cohn had put pressure on Army personnel to give Schine special privileges.

The Army-McCarthy Hearings lasted 36 days and were watched on new-fangled televisions by 20 million Americans. They were especially struck by one interchange, when the Army's attorney-general Joseph Welch listened to McCarthy bad-mouth yet another junior lawyer and exploded: "Let us not assassinate this lad further, senator. You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir?"

By now the American media had stopped being too frightened of McCarthy to speak. Columnists went on the offensive. Ed Murrow openly criticised McCarthy's methods on See It Now on 9 March 1954. Three weeks later, McCarthy responded by attacking Murrow on the programme. The public, seeing their anti-Red champion as a sneering roughneck, withdrew their support. In July, a senator accused McCarthy of 46 counts of "conduct unbecoming a member of the US Senate", a rap-sheet later reduced to two. It was enough. On 2 December 1954, the Senate voted to "condemn" McCarthy by 67 votes to 22. He lost the chairmanship of the Government Committee that had been his throne since 1950. His power base had vanished. His public support dwindled away. The press wouldn't touch a McCarthy story. He was finished. A chronic heavy drinker, he suffered from cirrhosis and died of hepatitis in May 1957 at 48.

What had it all been for? To modern-day supporters, like the right-wing pundit Anne Coulter, he represented an expression of popular dissatisfaction. To Anatole Lieven, the historian of modern US nationalism, he nursed an Irish-Catholic hatred of the intellectual élites of the Wasp establishment. But the best summation is from his biographer, Richard H Rovere: "He was not totalitarian in any significant sense, or even reactionary. The social and economic order didn't interest him. If he was anything at all in the realm of ideas, principles, doctrines, he was a species of nihilist; he was an essentially destructive force, a revolutionist without any revolutionary vision, a rebel without a cause."

Brown is widely considered the public face of the government's sluggish response to Katrina. But he signaled earlier this week that he was prepared to discuss his storm communications with President Bush and other top White House officials _ a possible signal that his testimony would assign blame elsewhere.

The White House has barred some top advisers and staffers from answering Senate investigators' questions about the administration's response, saying that certain discussions and documents must remain confidential. But Brown, who quit FEMA shortly after the storm and left the federal payroll Nov. 2, is no longer covered by that confidentiality protection.

White House spokesman Trent Duffy said the president and his top aides were fully aware of the massive flooding _ and less concerned whether it was caused by levee breaches, overtoppings or failed pumps, all three of which were being reported at the time.

"We knew there was flooding and that's why the No. 1 effort in those early hours was on search and rescue, and saving life and limb," Duffy said.

Shortly after the disaster, Bush said, "I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees." He later said his comment was meant to suggest that there had been a false sense of relief that the levees had held when the storm passed, only to break a few hours later.

The Bush administration has said it knew definitively early Tuesday, Aug. 30, the day after the storm, that the levees had been breached, based on an Army Corps of Engineers assessment.

Democrats said the documents showed there was little excuse for the tardy federal response.

"The first communication came at 8:30 a.m.," said Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., top Democrat on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. "So it is inexplicable to me how those responsible for the federal response could have woken up Tuesday morning unaware of this obviously catastrophic situation."

The first internal White House communication about levee failures came at 11:13 a.m. on Aug. 29 in a "Katrina Spot Report" by the White House Homeland Security Council.

"Flooding is significant throughout the region and a levee in New Orleans has reportedly been breached sending 6-8 feet of water throughout the 9th ward area of the city," the internal report said.

Last week's furor over the eviction of two women from the State of the Union address is reminiscent of a long-forgotten controversy when women's suffrage took center stage during Woodrow Wilson's 1916 speech.

Wilson had no intention of addressing women's suffrage. But militant suffragists from the National Woman's Party, led by Swarthmore graduate Alice Paul, had other plans. The NWP had campaigned vigorously against Wilson and the Democrats in 1916 because they failed to support a suffrage constitutional amendment.

Not only did Wilson narrowly win reelection, but the NWP suffered the untimely death of one of its best-known young speakers, the flamboyant activist Inez Milholland, who had collapsed at a campaign rally after shouting out a soon-to-be famous battle cry against Wilson. Paul's strong instinct for political theater led her to capitalize on the publicity surrounding Milholland.

On Dec. 5, six NWP members sat in the front row of the House gallery, waiting for Wilson's expected appeal for greater voting rights for men in Puerto Rico. Suddenly, they leapt to their feet and unfurled a large banner that had been hidden under their clothes. It echoed Milholland's final battle cry: "Mr. President: What will you do for woman suffrage?"

The Capitol Police hurried to the gallery to arrest the demonstrators, but they were blocked by a crowd of NWP supporters and eventually abandoned the effort. Wilson, smiling slightly, caught only a glimpse of the offending banner before it was torn down. The New York Times later scoffed that "no aggregation of male minds... would ever think of anything so supremely small and cheap."

Despite mockery and opposition, Paul believed it was essential to pressure Wilson on suffrage. In early January 1917, she sent her first wave of suffrage pickets to stand silently before the White House, where they would remain for most of the year. Wilson could not leave the Oval Office for his daily automobile ride without facing the demand: "Mr. President: What will you do for woman suffrage?"

Grudging toleration of these "Silent Sentinels" evaporated in the hysteria that enveloped the nation after Wilson took the nation to war in April. Dissent became suspect, and protesters became enemies of the state. Suffrage pickets who refused to cease their demonstrations were soon imprisoned.

Castigated by the press, beaten and chased by mobs as pro-German traitors, and abandoned by their sisters in the mainstream suffrage organization, the militants struggled to keep suffrage in the public eye. By November 1917, Paul was in solitary confinement in a psychiatric prison ward, suffering the horrors of forcible feeding as she led a hunger strike. After federal court intervention, all the prisoners were released, and their convictions later overturned. Three years later, Paul and millions of other American women would finally have the right to vote.

Muzzling dissent has a surprisingly long history in a nation that presses commitment to freedom of expression. But that history also teaches us that the government cannot keep silent forever a message whose time has come. The real lesson may be that of another nonviolent protester, Mohandas Gandhi, when he described the course of movements for social justice: "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."

Catherine Lanctot is a professor at of law at Villanova University. Email to: lanctot@law.villanova.edu