Corporate Tyranny versus Democracy

The Republicans don't just use dog whistles when talking to us "hoi poi', you know, "those people" [us people]. They also code their arguments when talking to each other. This is understandable, because they really don't want ordinary people (like us) looking too carefully at the elitist arguments they are making or the private, separate advantage [Locke's definition of Tyranny] they are seeking. This is especially the case with George Will's collumn in the post today. You have to have an advanced degree in History or in Republican Dogmatics to understand what he's saying. I'm not kidding. He's actually attacking Teddy Roosevelt and praising Robert Taft here!. It's like he's turned on a God of his party, unless you can crack the code.

But here's the first paragraph:

"Ted Cruz’s victory in Tuesday’s Texas Republican runoff for the U.S. Senate nomination is the most impressive triumph yet for the still-strengthening tea party impulse. And Cruz’s victory coincides with something conservatives should celebrate: the centennial of the 20th century’s most important intraparty struggle. By preventing former president Theodore Roosevelt from capturing the 1912 Republican presidential nomination from President William Howard Taft, the GOP deliberately doomed its chances for holding the presidency but kept its commitment to the Constitution."

The 9th amendment says; "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people." and Amendment 10 - "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

Okay, great. Will doesn't bother to explain. He expects the people he's talking to already be familiar with the conservative spin on the subject. Will Says:

"Before Cruz, 41, earned a Harvard law degree magna cum laude, he wrote his Princeton senior thesis on the Constitution’s Ninth and 10th Amendments, which, if taken seriously, would revitalize two bulwarks of liberty: the ideas that the federal government’s powers are limited because they are enumerated and that the enumeration of certain rights does not “deny or disparage others retained by the people.”"

I can understand why George likes the guy. He, like our President, was an editor of the Harvard Law Review, and is a member of our countries 1% elite. He's a masterful debater. But what is Will talking about with respect to the 9th amendment and the 10th Amendment? So here let me share it briefly from an article by Ted Cruz:

"The 10th Amendment embodied a revolutionary concept. Written just a few years after we had won our independence from Britain, the Constitution fundamentally changed the relationship between people and government.

So far so good, almost any Democratic Republican would agree with their Republican colleagues on this. The 10th Amendment reserves powers not granted to the Federal Government to the States "or to the people."

And we all agree with his next comment too:

"For millennia, the source of power and authority had always been kings and government, and rights were seen as gifts by grace from the monarch. The Constitution inverted that understanding, with sovereignty beginning in the American people — beginning with We the People — and power given to government only to a limited degree."

Again no complaints:

"Indeed, that was the genius of the Constitution — limiting government to protect the liberty of the people. Because the Framers recognized that unchecked government can strip the people of their freedoms, they designed a constitution to prevent that from happening."

And indeed "As James Madison, the Constitution’s primary author, explained:"

"“If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.”"

Now Madison when he wrote this was expressing a conservative opinion fearing both the common people, and the machinations of factions. And the goal was moderation:

"Because men are not angels, the Constitution was designed to create an effective national government while preventing the government from overreaching."

Hamilton and Jefferson saw the constitution as a bullwork against the designs of Banking and factional interests whose main interest was their own self aggrandizement. They saw the constitution as a protection for all and a means of trying to mitigate and control factionalism. They would use the issue of whether laws were constitutional or not to oppose banking, corporate and corrupt interests who they saw as enriching themselves at the expense of the general welfare.

And Cruz concludes:

"Thus, the Constitution “split the atom of sovereignty,” as the Supreme Court has put it, separating governmental power between the legislature, the executive and the judiciary, and between the federal government and the 50 states.

So this is what Will is getting at when he praises the "Madisonian" beliefs of Cruz. For Will and Cruz government should be limited. "The People" are to be restricted from working their will on the country, and if they are unrestrained, conservatives believe they inevitably will over-reach.

"History had taught the Framers that those in government almost always try to get more power, and the magic of dividing governmental power into many separate parts is that each part fights hard against the others to prevent them from expanding their power. As a result, government power overall is limited and our freedom is protected."

So what Will is getting at is the notion that the 10th Amendment prohibits the government from exercising any power that is not enumerated. What Ted and Will also do is to interpret what the constitution says as limiting the Government even when the constitution implicitly (implies) that a thing is constitutional interpreting that powers not prohibited are also unconstitutional. Thus he interprets it to mean (as he states before the quotes above):

"Thus, any power that the Constitution does not affirmatively give the federal government, it does not have."

Here we disagree, because Will and other conservatives interpret this in a parsed and convenient manner. We believe that the constitution does give the Federal Government power to regulate National Systems under it's interstate commerce clause. Conservatives want to read into the constitution the notion that if it doesn't say it nobody has that right, except maybe private local tyrants and monopolies. They certainly don't believe "the people" have that right unless it's "The right people."

So Will, the Federalist Society, the "Whigs" and other elitists aren't really talking about the 9th and 10th amendment but about literal and implied versus explicit powers. And this came up recently in the context of the healthcare debate, because most conservatives believe that we should not have the Government regulating any of our national systems; healthcare, being the first target. Hence the reference to Teddy Roosevelt who was one of the last progressives in the Republican party with any real popularity or power.

"Both ideas are repudiated by today’s progressives, as they were by TR, whose Bull Moose Party, the result of his bolt from the GOP, convened in Chicago 100 years ago Sunday, Aug. 5, 1912."

Will is claiming that we progressives "repudiate" the 9th and 10th amendment. This of course is a straw argument because we believe that the purpose of the 9th and 10th amendment is to empower "the people" and that if the States are good with Federal involvement in a national system, then the government certainly has the right under it's power to regulate commerce to regulate commerce that involves the entire country. And indeed, that is why the ACA won in the Supreme Court.

Why the Attack on TR?

Cruz is the latest of young lawyers whose dancing on the basis of rhetoric, sophistry and parsing the constitution so enthralls conservatives, but what piqued my interest was the attack on TR. Will writes:

"After leaving the presidency in 1909, TR went haywire. He had always chafed under constitutional restraints, but he had remained a Hamiltonian, construing the Constitution expansively but respectfully. By 1912, however, he had become what the Democratic nominee, Woodrow Wilson, was — an anti-Madisonian. Both thought the Constitution, the enumeration and separation of powers, intolerably crippled government."

Now, this is an interesting thing to say. There was nothing unconstitutional about Hamilton's opinions, and indeed both FDR and TR based their arguments on an intellectual who had made the case that in this age of powerful monopoly of the governance of commerce, banking and industry, only the Federal Government could protect the "rights of the people." So TR saw himself as "using Hamiltonian means" to advance "Madisonian Ends." That is to fight the banks, the special interests, and the powerful factions of the country. TR saw that he had to use the power of the Federal State.

This is not disdain of either Madison or Jefferson, and this defamation of TR is absurd. And the defamation of Wilson as "disdaining Madison is absurd:

"Espousing unconstrained majoritarianism, TR disdained James Madison’s belief that the ultimate danger is wherever ultimate power resides, which in a democracy is with the majority. He endorsed the recall of state judicial decisions and by September 1912 favored the power to recall all public officials, including the president."

No by 1912 TR saw that the fight against the Financial Wealthy and their Trusts and corporations was hopeless if carried out by the States alone and that the USA was a national system. His progressive party wanted to reform the government, add additional amendments to make our democratic republic more democratic and to reduce the tyrannical power of the trusts and monopolies.

"TR’s anti-constitutional excesses moved two political heroes to subordinate personal affection to the public interest. New York Sen. Elihu Root had served TR as secretary of war and secretary of state, and he was Roosevelt’s first choice to succeed him in 1908. Massachusetts Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge had long been one of TR’s closest friends. Both sided with Taft."

Wikipedia notes:

"Roosevelt ran a vigorous campaign, but the campaign was short of money, as the business interests which had supported Roosevelt in 1904 either backed the other candidates or stayed neutral. Roosevelt was also handicapped by the fact that he had already served nearly two full terms as President, and thus was challenging the unwritten "no third term" rule."

So "principled stand?" LOL

"As the Hudson Institute’s William Schambra says (in “The Saviors of the Constitution,” National Affairs, Winter 2012, and elsewhere), by their “lonely, principled” stand, Root and Lodge, along with Taft, “denied TR the powerful electoral machinery of the Republican Party, which would almost surely have elected him, and then been turned to securing sweeping alterations” of the Constitution."

Now, note Will claims that the election saved the Constitution from the 9th and 10th amendment being abused, but TR's proposals all included the use of constitutional amendments to put them into effect. So he's not really complaining about TR abrogating the constitution so much as changing it to bring in real reform. Again from the Wikipedia article:

The platform also urged states to adopt measures for "direct democracy", including:

The recall election (citizens may remove an elected official before the end of his term)

The referendum (citizens may decide on a law by popular vote)

The initiative (citizens may propose a law by petition and enact it by popular vote)

Judicial recall (when a court declares a law unconstitutional, the citizens may override that ruling by popular vote)

"However, the main theme of the platform was an attack on the domination of politics by business interests, which allege allegedly controlled both established parties. The platform asserted that

To destroy this invisible Government, to dissolve the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of the day.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_Party_(United_States,_1912)

So if TR had been elected, far from eliminating democracy, he'd have strengthened it and included features of direct democracy and controls over the massive corrupt power of the business interests that then and now ran the whole country for their own "private, separate advantage" [John Locke] which is the definition of tyranny according to John Lock. To our Whiggish Conservatives, his defeat was a victory for "the conservative cause." In other words a victory for business elites and the tyranny of business.

"Wilson won with 41.8 percent of the vote (to TR’s 27.4 percent). Taft won 23.2 percent, carrying only Vermont and Utah, but achieved something far grander than a second term: the preservation of the GOP as an intellectual counterbalance to the Democrats’ thorough embrace of progressivism and the “living” — actually, disappearing — Constitution."

Wilson was more Madisonian and Jeffersonian than either TR or Taft. And he was a reluctant convert to progressivism, coming from the populist movement as he did, and being a Jefferson scholar who considered himself in the line of Jefferson. So the result was only a victory for the continued dominance of business interests over the country, something that continues to this day:

"Today, many of the tea party’s academic despisers portray it as anti-democratic and anti-intellectual. Actually, it stands, as did the forgotten heroes of 1912, with Madison, the most intellectually formidable Founder. He created, and the tea party defends, a constitutional architecture that does not thwart democracy but refines it, on the fact that in a republic, which is defined by the principle of representation, the people do not directly decide issues, they decide who will decide. And the things representatives are permitted to decide are strictly circumscribed by constitutional limits on federal power."

If democracy means affirming the local tyranny of dictatorial monopolies then we are living in 1984.

"TR sought to make these limits few and as flimsy as cobwebs when the people chose to amend them by plebiscitary methods. The New Republic, then a voice of progressivism, ridiculed Root for being “committed to the theory of government, based upon natural rights” — the Declaration of Independence’s theory of pre-political rights. Schambra, however, argues that for Root and Lodge, as for today’s tea party, the rights proclaimed in the Declaration and the restrictions that the Constitution imposes on government are inseparably linked, as Root said, to “the end that individual liberty might be preserved."

Somehow I don't find this argument compelling at all. Eventually a two term amendment would have been passed, and the ability to override arbitrary and corrupt court decisions would improve our processes and democracy, not degrade them. And it certainly would give us some democratic controls over our politicians. I guess registering Lobbyists (which was also on the plank, would interfere with the elitist notion that money = speech and speech is only privileged if it is backed by money.

"The GOP’s defeat in 1912 — like that in 1964 under Barry Goldwater, whose spirit infuses the tea party — was profoundly constructive. By rejecting TR, it preserved the Constitution from capricious majorities."

Everyone is entitled to an opinion. But at least we now see the context, and this reveals his real fear. That someone might be able to put a check on the rent seeking and corporate welfare of our corrupt governing elites from business. Limiting the formal Federal Government while ceding rights nad powers to private corporations is unconstitutional by the 10th Amendment. When did the monopolies get the power to take away our rights or oppress people at the will of a tyrant!

"Assuming Cruz wins the general election in his crimson state, he and like-minded Republicans in the Senate — Utah’s Mike Lee, Kentucky’s Rand Paul, South Carolina’s Jim DeMint, Wisconsin’s Ronald H. Johnson, Pennsylvania’s Patrick J. Toomey, Florida’s Marco Rubio and, if they win, Indiana’s Richard Mourdock, Arizona’s Jeff Flake and perhaps others — can honor two exemplary senatorial predecessors by forming the small but distinguished Root-Lodge Caucus."

Somehow I don't see any of these people as heroes. But once you understand the context the elitism and disdain for "majoritarian" politics and the will of the people becomes obvious.

I could spend more time on this. I can't find my essay on John C. Calhoun where I noted that his arguments for Nullification were refuted by his arguments as a young nationalist for "compelling national interest." They seem to have disappeared from the internet and my source book is packed in a box. So I'm confining myself to providing context so I can get some sleep.

Sources:

"Texas’s Ted Cruz gives tea party a Madisonian flair" URL: [http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/george-will-texass-ted-cruz-gives-tea-party-a-madisonian-flair/2012/08/01/gJQApiwePX_story.html]

Ted Cruz on the 10th Amendment: [http://www.thepoliticalguide.com/Profiles/Senate/Texas/Ted_Cruz/Views/The_Tenth_Amendment/]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_Party_(United_States,_1912)

Karski and the Difficulty of Saving Anyone

Karski: How One Man Tried to Stop the Holocaust

I've been slowly reading the book "Karski, How one man tried to stop the Holocaust", by E. Thomas Wood, and the man Karski really impresses me. He did champion the cause of Jews, as well as his own Polish people, and in public and with evidence, from 1942 on. And he did his level best to get the West to do something to stop or slow the exterminations. He carried the message of Jewish leaders back to the West with suggestions such as bombing switching tracks, dropping leaflets, and similar; and the West ignored him.

No evidence is incontrovertible evidence in the hands of skeptics, and bad or doubtful friends, and his observations weren't accepted until 2 years later when Troops started knocking at the doors of the death camps with cameras and newsfilm crews and showing the world what was there. By then it was too late.

People can't say that saving Poland would have required the West to go to war again. But all it would have required would have been for the West to have spine enough to be willing to go to bat for an ally. The Allies didn't want to keep fighting after Hitler was gone beyond what would be necessary to destroy the Japanese Empire. Roosevelt wanted Russia to help him fight the Japanese. Churchill wanted to buy peace by appeasing Stalin and giving him half of Poland. Roosevelt wanted Russias entry into the war with Japan in in return for carving up part of Poland. And so Poland was considered strategically expendible. Karski tried to fight this but his bad luck was to have bad friends for allies and to be facing an almost impossible strategic situation. Poland was on the Russia physical side of Germany, and Poland was lucky that Russia didn't want to directly rule the entire country.

The Enemy of my Enemy is not really my Friend

A former enemy who is the enemy of one's enemy is maybe a temporary friend, but not likely a long term one. Such "friends" are liable to be doubtful and traitorous ones and both the Polish Communists and Russia fell in that category. Karski had an impossible task. While in Poland he gathered messages from all the factions of the Polish underground Government and carried them back to equally fractuous factions in Paris on his first trip and London on his second. Those reports told how the Communist cadres of Poles were perfectly willing to attack the Germans and blame the poles, or turn over Poles to the Germans who weren't among their ranks. The Communist rebels in Poland were more on the side of Russia than Poland. And of course Stalin wanted to regain and make permanent his land grab from when the betrayed Poland in the first place in his Ribbentrop treaty. The Poles were up against a major enemy.

Chess versus Poker

And the difficulty of dealing with this was incredible. Stalin was playing chess, and when his troops murdered Polish officers in Katyn and their other prison camps, they set it up so that they could try to blame the Germans for the Massacres. The true perpetrators of the Katyn Massacres wouldn't be revealed until the 1960's, though the Germans uncovered the bodies in 1942, and in an example of their own stone faced hypocrisy brought in an international team of forensic experts to examine the graves. The Germans claimed a diplomatic coup in accusing the Russians of mass murder (which was true). And as the author notes in the book and Wikipedia confirms:

"In April 1943 the Polish government-in-exile insisted on bringing the matter to the negotiation table with the Soviets and on opening an investigation by the International Red Cross.[48] Stalin, in response, accused the Polish government of collaborating with Nazi Germany, broke off diplomatic relations with it,[49][50] and started a campaign to get the Western Allies to recognize the alternative Polish pro-Soviet government in Moscow led by Wanda Wasilewska."

So Karski's efforts to get the West to champion Poland, only provided Stalin with an excuse to make official his existing war aims (seizing Polish Territory) and also gave an excuse for the West to decapitate the Polish Government in exile (some believe that the death of the Polish leader in exile, Sikorsky, wasn't a complete accident).

Doubtful Allies

And it got worse for Karski. Karski had to work with the American Right to try to convince Roosevelt to back his countries issues. He had to work with Poles who were at each other's throats. And the Polish underground had to work with Polish Communists who took every opportunity to undermine and setup their compatriots rather than working with them. He was trying to convince the USA government to support the Polish cause, and he made friends with Roosevelts advisors on the right such as Elbridge Durbrow and William C. Bullitt. Bullitt was willing to champion his causes, but Bullitt had launched a very personal and public attack on one of Roosevelt's closest advisors, Sumner Welles, for being a Homosexual, and managed to discredit himself around the same time he started to champion Karski's cause. Eventually Bullitt would be a hero among right wing circles, but Bullitt lost all influence on FDR because of this. And Jan Karski met personally with FDR, who was impressed by him, and unfortunately it didn't do much for the Poles. The USA was not going to go to war for Poland against Russia. And nobody was going to save the Jews. One has to be careful with ones friends as much as with ones enemies.

Eventually the Russians came in. Told Warsaw to revolt. Delayed their capture of Warsaw long enough to make sure the Germans crushed them. Killed or imprisoned most of the pro-West Polish Government. Installed a Communist Government. Took the eastern part of the country. Kicked the Germans out of what had been the Eastern Part of Germany, and moved the borders around to what they are now. Karsky had an after the war career as an anti-communist, pro-Jewish, historian and professor at Georgetown. My copy of his biography is autographed, not by the author but him. He died in 2000. I think I stood in line with my wife for that signing, he was a real hero.

Best thing to do is to read the two books; one by him, and the other by E. Thomas Wood.

Sources:

Wikipedia Article

http://www.amazon.com/Karski-How-Tried-Stop-Holocaust/dp/0471145734/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1343765410&sr=1-2&keywords=Karski

http://www.amazon.com/Karski-How-Tried-Stop-Holocaust/dp/0471145734/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1343765410&sr=1-2&keywords=Karski

http://www.amazon.com/Story-Secret-State-Jan-Karski/dp/1931541396/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1343765410&sr=1-1&keywords=Karski

Related

Katyn Massacrehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katyn_massacre

Bullitt:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_C._Bullitt

Welles:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumner_Welles

http://www.amazon.com/From-Colony-Superpower-Foreign-Relations/dp/0195078225

Crusading to protect the bottom line

Anyone who's been following the money with regard to the Tea Party movement and the Koch brothers, and knows a bit of history, knows that the level of violence and hatred is not particularly unique to them. They aren't that much different from other movements that wanted to "Take Back America" except that they get a lot more attention from our corporate media than they deserve. But that's not new either. During the Great Depression (and before) most people didn't trust the corporate newspapers, they got their news from community Newspapers.

Frank Rich, blogging in the New York times back in 2010 noted that all the sturm and drang of the Tea Party was coming from:

...."the sugar daddies who are bankrolling it, and have been doing so since well before the “death panel” warm-up acts of last summer. Three heavy hitters rule. You’ve heard of one of them, Rupert Murdoch. The other two, the brothers David and Charles Koch, are even richer, with a combined wealth exceeded only by that of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett among Americans. But even those carrying the Kochs’ banner may not know who these brothers are." http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/opinion/29rich.html

All in all Bernie Sanders notes that there are some 22 individuals bankrolling the Tea Party. That doesn't include all the moguls who run corporations and don't want their names in Kleig lights and so give to ostensible "Charitable Organizations" that run ads that start out "Tell Obama" so that they can keep their deductibility with the IRS. These donations are secret because they don't want stockholder or customer revolts and they give to 501(c)3 organizations. And I note that there are 100's of articles on this subject but when I google it, only one comes up. So we are getting what our governors are willing to pay for.

Anyway the columnist notes:

"All three tycoons are the latest incarnation of what the historian Kim Phillips-Fein labeled “Invisible Hands” in her prescient 2009 book of that title: those corporate players who have financed the far right ever since the du Pont brothers spawned the American Liberty League in 1934 to bring down F.D.R. You can draw a straight line from the Liberty League’s crusade against the New Deal “socialism” of Social Security, the Securities and Exchange Commission and child labor laws to the John Birch Society-Barry Goldwater assault on J.F.K. and Medicare to the Koch-Murdoch-backed juggernaut against our “socialist” president."

Even the language is almost the same.

And my latest poem is also from 2010:

Unto Ceasar - http://fraughtwithperil.com/cholte/2012/07/26/unto-caesar/

Fukushima meltdown is a misnomer

This article:

TEPCO’s do or die mission to save nuclear reactor may have caused largest radiation leaks during Fukushima disaster

The article explains that during the meltdown of Reactor #2:

"attempts to prevent explosions at the Unit 2 reactor may have in fact caused a substantially large radiation leak. They proved that hypothesis by pairing data of the recorded radiation levels which rose sharply 3 times at Fukushima Daini monitoring posts over a period of 5 hours during the night of March 14th."

Anyone who cares to remember will remember they were dumping sea water on the reactors (3 melted down and one fuel pond seems to have melted too) during the disaster. This was advertised as being done to prevent meltdown, but in fact were intended to prevent explosions, but the reactors had already melted. The report notes that:

by that time, the amount of nuclear fuel which had already melted down in the core was already leaking into the containment vessel, filling it with radioactive materials, prior to the start of seawater injection operations.

So the seawater, instead of cooling reactor rods to prevent meltdown, was actually hitting extremely hot, and in some case burning materials:

"The researchers report shows that workers were unable to get coolant water into the Unit 2 reactor"

... and that this was because the core was so hot and so in meltdown that water coming in contact with the core turned to steam. They had to vent the steam to keep the containment vessel from exploding. Even with that each injection "the pressure in the containment rose as well until it reached over two times the designed limits", which "combined with the extreme heat would threaten to crack or damage the concrete containment vessel." And the researchers theorize that "radioactive materials escaped from cracks in the concrete containment vessel, and were carried south towards the Fukushima Daini nuclear power plant." The report notes that:

"TEPCO would later hypothesize due to elevated temperatures, among other factors, that a breach roughly 10 cm wide was created in the reactor’s containment vessel 21 hours after the quake. Tepco also said it believes that parts used to ensure air tightness may have broken from overheating."

Under these conditions the cladding for the fuel rods, which is made of Zirconium alloy would have catalyzed hydrogen gas production and explosions. Also Zirconium is not particularly flammable when it is intact but as it degrades it becomes very flammable and burns like a sparkler.

For these reasons there is every reason to suspect that a good portion of the content of these reactors burned away or corroded away during the meltdown event, and that this event, if it is over, is over because the fuel is mostly gone into the atmosphere, down stream, and out to sea, by sea or in the air.

There is abundant evidence, mostly hidden in articles or the web, that the Fukushima meltdown is even much larger than TEPCO admits.

Sources and further information:

http://enformable.com/2012/07/tepcos-do-or-die-mission-to-save-a-nuclear-reactor-may-have-caused-largest-radiation-leaks-during-fukushima-disaster/

youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KWQfQ4d4N5o&feature=plcp

The One thing all these fools seem to agree on

You'd have thought that after Chernobyl the world would have figured out that Einstein was right when he warned that nuclear power was a hell of a way to boil coffee. Well they didn't. You'd think they'd learn from Fukushima, but the only thing they seem to have learned is that it is a lot more profitable to lie and cover up a disaster than to tackle it head on. Chernobyl killed tens of thousands of people, but heroic people prevented an even worse disaster, many at the expense of their lives. The disaster, nevertheless, brought down the Soviet Union and poisoned vast swaths of the Ukraine and Belarus. Japan seems to have only learned from Chernobyl some pointers on cover ups. Countries like China, Iran, and others have learned nothing from Fukushima or Chernbyl and seem hell bent on killing more people. Even the USA seems hell bent on resurrecting the nuclear nightmare. But the consequences as bad as they are are under-reported, not exaggerated.

Anybody who thinks that atom bombs, or nuclear reactors, are a smart investment is insane.

Scientists in Chernobyl have been studying children of that disaster. Years later they are still sick, and governments, instead of dealing with the effects of these disasters are punishing those who speak out on them.

(see: http://www.llrc.org/rat/subrat/rat429.htm)

Israel evacuated Jewish children who lived near the Chernobyl disaster, and is able to study what happened to them. But Doctors living near the area still face censorship and repression. The above article writes:

"The study showed that children aged less than 1 year when the accident happened (April 1986) were the worst affected, but children born after the disaster have suffered more than those who were aged over 1 year at the time. Children born in the year before the disaster had about a 2.2 times higher risk of thyroid disease than older children. But the high risk (about 1.4 times higher) persisted for the children born after 1986. For lymphadenopathy the increased risk was about 1.5 times higher for children born after the disaster than for those aged 1 year or more at the time. The study shows that the longer the children had remained in the contaminated areas, the sicker they became, and the higher was their risk of developing goitre, thyroid cancer, gastrointestinal and lymph disorders, and autoimmune diseases. Over 13% of the children had signs and symptoms of liver and gallbladder disease, and 11% suffered from glandular and lymph disease; chronic tonsillitis was diagnosed in almost 19%. Goitre (commonly a precursor of thyroid cancer and autoimmune thyroid diseases) was diagnosed in 17.6% of the children, with the highest rate (29.4%) in children from the highly contaminated Gomel region. The finding of a strong association between morbidity and not only the levels of contamination in the areas where children lived but also how long they had lived there supports results published by the Gomel State Medical Institute in Belarus."

To make it simple, radioisotopes such as cesium, strontium, iodine, and the others have biological effects from ingestion and a combination of radioactive poisoning and chemical poisoning as they damage the bones, nervous system, musculature, and endocrine children of people poisoned by these substances.

And The government retaliates against researchers:

Last year Bandazhevsky lost his job at the Medical Institute, was imprisoned, and had his computers and research papers confiscated. His offence was to condemn state- funded research into the health effects of Chernobyl. In a report which LLRC has seen he wrote that the Institute of Radiation Medicine (part of the Belarus Ministry of Health) had wasted billions of roubles on projects which are finding nothing new and which will contribute nothing to the overall aim of reducing radiation exposures and their impact on health.

Following his adoption by Amnesty International as a prisoner of conscience he was released in December, but he is under surveillance and still faces trial.

This sort of thing is not confined to Belarus, all over the world there is evidence of illness and disease (especially cancers) associated with radiation exposure and fallout. These are crimes, but it seems that the one thing our plutocratic governments can agree on world wide -- is that they'd rather be able to kill each other at a touch of a button than provide public goods for their people or protect them from harm. We all face the same enemy, the notion that we are subjects to be ruled instead of people whose governments need our consent to govern well.

Further reading:http://www.llrc.org/rat/subrat/rat429.htm

The Bain of Romney

Romney recently denied he was working for Bain during the times when the Washington Post claims that Bain was going to town on outsourcing and off-shoring. They've tried to maintain he left Bain in 1999. I had researched this before and the article I'd read back then at the time claimed he left for his run for Governor. It was vague about what year that was.  When Romney accused the Washington Post, Obama and the Boston Globe of lying I went back to the Wikipedia article, but it's been edited again, so the stuff that was there last time is gone. The revised article on his bio now refers to an announcement that Romney made in 2001 that he'd not be going back to active service with Bain after he finished with the Olympics;
http://www.deseretnews.com/article/859621/Public-service-for-Romney.html

Public service for Romney | Deseret News

www.deseretnews.com

"Mitt Romney won't return to the business world after the 2002 Winter Games but instead will pursue public service, possibly elected office."

Trouble is, this announcement is from 2001, not 1999. That article also included the following comment:

"No one would run a 3 1/2-year campaign for any office in Utah. I'm surely not, and I imagine Mitt is not either"

Okay, he announces in 2001 that he's not going back to private work at Bain Capital. I suppose we are supposed to take him at his word, though he's still CEO of Bain Capital for at least another 4 years.


Trouble is, even if he was on leave of absence, his SEC filings show him as sole owner and CEO the whole time. From 1999-2001 he's clearly CEO in those filings.


The Boston Globe cites the 2000 SEC filing which shows;

"Bain Capital, Inc., a Delaware corporation ("Bain Capital"), is the sole                       
managing partner of the BCIP entities.  Mr. W. Mitt Romney is the sole
shareholder, sole director, Chief Executive Officer and President of Bain
Capital and thus is the controlling person of Bain Capital.  The executive
officers of Bain Capital are set forth on Schedule B hereto."

And:

http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/892058/000092701600002483/0000927016-00-002483-0001.txt

And (2001): 
http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1054290/000092701601001009/0000927016-01-001009-0001.txt, there were some minor changes:

Mr. W. Mitt Romney, in his capacity as sole shareholder, sole director, Chief Executive Officer and President of Bain Investors VI, Bain Capital, Brookside Investors Inc. and Sankaty Investors II and in his capacity share voting and dispositive power with respect to the shares held by CLEC members. The filing of this statement by Mr. W. Mitt Romney shall not be construed as an admission that he is, for the purpose of Section 13(d) of the Exchange Act, the beneficial owner of such shares based on their pro-rata share of membership interests in CLEC."

So it's obvious that in 2000/2001 he was still running the company, even if he was also involved with the Olympics, and after the olympics were over, in his Massachusetts financial disclosure, the Boston Globe reports further:

"Also, a Massachusetts financial disclosure form Romney filed in 2003 states that he still owned 100 percent of Bain Capital in 2002. And Romney’s state financial disclosure forms indicate he earned at least $100,000 as a Bain “executive” in 2001 and 2002, separate from investment earnings."

From 2002-2004 his record gets murky.
The Wiki article says "He transferred his ownership to other partners and negotiated an agreement that allowed him to receive a passive profit share as a retired partner in some Bain Capital entities, including buyout and investment funds." Supposedly that is similar to a blind trust, except there is nothing blind about it and the Wiki article doesn't say when the transfer occured. Normally a "passive profit share" would indicate no active involvement in business decisions. The article admits that his money wasn't in a blind trust until 2003, so it is that period between 2001 and 2003 where the arguments run right now. Politico claims that:

"Romney did not finalize a severance agreement with Bain until 2002, a 10-year deal with undisclosed terms that was retroactive to 1999. It expired in 2009."[http://www.politico.com/blogs/burns-haberman/2012/07/when-did-romney-leave-bain-128735.html] 

Trouble is that if Romney stated that he was leaving Bain for private work in 2001, but didn't actually do so until 2002, and shows on the records the whole time as CEO of the company, that really doesn't pass a smell test.

http://bostonglobe.com/news/politics/2012/07/11/government-documents-indicate-mitt-romney-continued-bain-after-date-when-says-left/IpfKYWjnrsel4pvCFbsUTI/story.html

Government documents indicate Mitt Romney continued at Bain after date when he says he left - The Bo

www.bostonglobe.com

Mitt Romney has repeatedly sought to distance himself from some business dealing...

"Bain Capital and the campaign for the presumptive GOP nominee have suggested the SEC filings that show Romney as the man in charge during those additional three years have little meaning, and are the result of legal technicalities. The campaign declined to comment on the record. It pointed to a footnote in Romney’s most recent financial disclosure form, filed June 1 as a presidential candidate."

Naturally. Fact Checker maintains;

If the Obama campaign were correct, Romney would be guilty of a federal felony by certifying on federal financial disclosure forms that he left active management of Bain Capital in February 1999….

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/post/mitt-romney-and-his-departure-from-bain/2012/07/12/gJQAASzUfW_blog.html
So, it's going to take a little fact checking by real fact checkers to get to the heart of this subject.  Fact is Romney was technically in charge (CEO), owner of Bain Capital, was apprised of many of its decisions, and doesn't announce that he's not going to continue with business until his work at the Olympics is over.  Was he involved in day to day operations? What CEO is? Was he involved in high level decisions? Maybe he can avoid prosecution but he can't pass the smell test.
My own feeling is that even if Romney wasn't involved in day to day operations, he's still responsible for what his company decided to do while he was still technically at the helm, and he's responsible for what Bain does as the owner of that company as well.
The examiner writes:

"Whether Romney lied on the SEC filings and other documents, or whether he is lying now, he lied nevertheless. Either he resigned in 1999 and lied to the SEC, or he didn’t resign then and therefore he is lying about the outsourcing now. Both statements can not be true. Obama and the Washington Post trust the official filings Romney signed at the time, not the statements the campaign is making now."

Also whether Romney left in 1999 or not, his big investment in outsourcing was in 1998.

Examiner -- New Evidence shows outsourcing despite Romney denials

Boston Globe Article

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/07/bain-capital-mitt-romney-outsourcing-china-global-tech

Attacking Democracy itself

I posted a blog post on July 8 2012 about how Frederick Hayek actually despised Democracy, praised Pinochet's dictatorship (and the bloodshed with it) and how libertarians seem to be morphing into Fascists (Neo-Liberalism already is pretty identical to Fascism outside the USA) and today I get this wonderful gift of a horrible dishonest -- but intensely revealing article that confirms my observations; and I guess my fears about where at least some on the far right are trending.  The friend who sent this to me, based on past history with his governance style has no problems with this thesis. A mutual friend shared this article from the Capitalism Magazine. He seems to agree with it entirely, including its thesis that democracy is evil.
http://capitalismmagazine.com/2012/07/the-founding-fathers-and-democracy/ Brian Phillips writes:

"Democracy means unlimited majority rule. The majority may do as it pleases simply because it is the majority. Under democracy the individual is subservient to the majority, that is, the collective. Democracy is a form of collectivism."

This article is dishonest, misleading, misdirects people about what democracy is about, and thus shows how Libertarians, probably out of frustration with the fact that most people have trouble seeing the fine quality of the invisible cloth that they spin their ideology from are gradually morphing back to their roots as fascists that we discussed in my last blogpost. For one thing it distorts the subject from the first line to the last.

First, Democracy does not mean "unlimited majority rule."  The word means simply "democracia" -- rule by the "demos" or the people. It has never meant simple majority rule except in the hands of polemicists and demagogues. The ancient Athenians believed that democracy required the people to "step up" (Hoi boulomenos) and volunteer in democratic institutions. Indeed in modern times word democratica in Greece is synonymous with Republic. Democracy: δημοκρατία Republic: δημοκρατία. So when Jefferson is talking about 51% votes and such he is referring to "direct democracy" versus the Republican notion of a Federation or a commonwealth. Even so Jefferson and Madison believed in indirect "Republican Democracy. They saw the danger that democracy can descend into mob rule, where "the individual is subservient to the majority" -- but that is not what democracy is about. They are making a false equivalence between democracy and collectivism. And this is a disturbing development because up until now the majority of libertarians have at least paid lip service to majority rule.

I guess this is illustrative of where the far right is trending.  I guess just because the far right can't seem to convince people that they should vote libertarian, (or neo-liberal as their philosophy is known outside the USA), even though it means poverty and desperation for the many and liberty only for the masters they seem to be giving up on the subject and like always with neo-fascists they cannot  simply make their case without first hijacking, rustling the word "democracy" and then trying to rebrand it as something ugly. I guess that is why they make the false association between the word "democracy" with "collectivism:" Brian Phillips continues:

"Collectivism holds that individuals exist only as a member of a group—whether a race, an economic class, or the State. Individuals per se  do not possess rights, but only in their capacity as a member of a group. Under democracy an individual possesses rights only when he is a member of the majority. Even then those rights are limited and continually threatened, because if the individual finds himself in the minority on any issue, he is required to follow the dictates of the majority. He may be on the winning side on a vote regarding light rail, but be on the losing side on a vote regarding school bonds."

 There are two interesting points about this assertion. The first one is that the only place you see the Supreme Court, or anybody, asserting that a group has rights "only as a member of a group" is in the case of corporate law, where the Citizens United Case built this whole megillah about Corporate Personhood, having the privileges of special speech and that money is privileged speech.  In their Arizona decision the Court claimed that giving public money to competing groups and individuals "burdened" the speech of the privileged and wealthy.  Obviously, for the current court, free speech is a collective right only granted to the privileged and wealthy. The rest of us believe that groups exist to defend our individual rights from other groups or the government itself. We understand that the problem is "faction" versus commonwealth.  In a functioning commonwealth if the majority wants school bonds and one is on the winning side one accepts that the majority with which one disagrees is legitimate to want to invest in "light rail." One can't have commonwealth if one's faction dominates whether it is majority or minority.  If one's faction wins whatever the issue, that is not a functional republic.  Eyler Robert Coates, Sr. quotes Jefferson endorsing the concept of democratic republicanism:

""We may say with truth and meaning that governments are more or less republican as they have more or less of the element of popular election and control in their composition." --Thomas Jefferson to John Taylor, 1816. ME 15:23"

http://eyler.freeservers.com/JeffPers/jefpco55.htm

The above article examples Federalist 10 in context with Madison's and Jefferson's other writings. And they don't support this next quote from the Demagogue Brian Phillips either. Phillips writes;

"For the most part, the Founders were opposed to democracy. James Madison, for example, wrote “There is no maxim, in my opinion, which is more liable to be misapplied, and which, therefore, more needs elucidation, than the current one, that the interest of the majority is the political standard of right and wrong.”

This is not true. Maybe some of the founders, but not James Madison or Jefferson, were opposed to democracy, but Jefferson and Madison were opposed to mob rule, not democracy! What the honest writer  Eyler Robert Coates, Sr.  notes that:

Apparently, Jefferson believed that the enlightened citizenry of a pure republic would not be so inevitably subject to the destructive factions that Madison described in Federalist No. 10 (see above). In fact, Jefferson suggested that a republican form of government without a due degree of popular control was no panacea, and lumped such governments along with monarchies(!) as channels of oppression.
http://eyler.freeservers.com/JeffPers/jefpco55.htm

And  Eyler Robert Coates, Sr. quotes Jefferson:

"Societies exist under three forms, sufficiently distinguishable. 1. Without government, as among our Indians. 2. Under governments, wherein the will of everyone has a just influence; as is the case in England, in a slight degree, and in our States, in a great one. 3. Under governments of force; as is the case in all other monarchies, and in most of the other republics. To have an idea of the curse of existence under these last, they must be seen. It is a government of wolves over sheep." --Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 1787.

Phillips continues quoting Jefferson out of context:

Thomas Jefferson stated that “a democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine.” And perhaps my favorite is a quote often attributed to Benjamin Franklin: “Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote!”"

But the fact is that Jefferson was referring to direct democracy not to democratic republicanism.  It looks like libertarians are abandoning the principles of republicanism along with their despite for democracy.  Jefferson wanted to avoid mob rule, and had definite ideas how to do so, including privileging free education. Jefferson's republican principles dictated:

"Action by the citizens in person, in affairs within their reach and competence, and in all others by representatives, chosen immediately, and removable by themselves, constitutes the essence of a republic... All governments are more or less republican in proportion as this principle enters more or less into their composition." --Thomas Jefferson to Pierre Samuel Dupont de Nemours, 1816.

Thus a lot of the misquotes in this article are taken out of the context of the destinction between direct democracy and democracy as government getting it's authority from the people. Read Federalist 10 for more. Coats goes into more detail and explains the subject pretty darn well:

http://eyler.freeservers.com/JeffPers/jefpco55.htm

Phillips concludes:

"Democracy forces you to act in accordance with the demands of the “will of the people,” regardless of your own judgment. Democracy compels you to surrender your liberty and your property for the “general welfare.” Democracy forces you to sacrifice your rights."

This is a call to authoritarianism and a pack of lies. Since I know better, I think Jefferson has the right term for it; "dupery.":

"Believing as I do that the mass of the citizens is the safest depository of their own rights, and especially that the evils flowing from the duperies of the people are less injurious than those from the egoism of their agents, I am a friend to that composition of government which has in it the most of this ingredient." --Thomas Jefferson to John Taylor, 1816.

I could go into more detail, but that is enough for this post.  I agree with this final quote from Jefferson, which is also my operating principle.

"Lay down true principles and adhere to them inflexibly. Do not be frightened into their surrender by the alarms of the timid, or the croakings of wealth against the ascendency of the people." --Thomas Jefferson to Samuel Kercheval, 1816.

And this quote comes from Jefferson's Inaugural address, and also contradicts Phillips lies and spin:

"During the contest of opinion through which we have passed the animation of discussions and of exertions has sometimes worn an aspect which might impose on strangers unused to think freely and to speak and to write what they think; but this being now decided by the voice of the nation, announced according to the rules of the Constitution, all will, of course, arrange themselves under the will of the law, and unite in common efforts for the common good. All, too, will bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression. Let us, then, fellow-citizens, unite with one heart and one mind. Let us restore to social intercourse that harmony and affection without which liberty and even life itself are but dreary things. And let us reflect that, having banished from our land that religious intolerance under which mankind so long bled and suffered, we have yet gained little if we countenance a political intolerance as despotic, as wicked, and capable of as bitter and bloody persecutions."

http://www.bartleby.com/124/pres16.html

Phillips might have the words, but he has none of the spirit of Jefferson in his writings. He's like an assassin who attacks the very spirit of his target. He's like a kidnapper who cuts the words out of a book and rearranges them into an extortion note. This attitude of hate towards democracy, the 99%, and the people has to be stopped. It has to be defeated. Then maybe we can restore the "harmony and affection" that mark a real commonwealth and a democratic republic, and that were the vision and goal of the real founding fathers rather than the twisted and dark shadows that are invented by these neo-liberals who try to rebrand Jefferson's ideas and the concepts of Democratic Republicanism into something dark and authoritarian.