http://informationclearinghouse.info/article15207.htm
'Once upon a time the House of Representatives was known as "the people's house." No more. It belongs to K Street now. That's the address of the lobbyists who swarm all over Capitol Hill. There are 65 lobbyists for every member of Congress. They spend $200 million per month wining, dining and seducing federal officials. Per month!' Lincoln Weeps By Bill Moyers 10/03/06 "Tom Paine" -- -- Bill Moyers is a veteran television journalist for PBS and the president of the Schumann Center for Media and Democracy. "Capitol Crimes," the first episode of Bill Moyers' latest series of documentary specials, airs Wednesday, TONIGHT on PBS. (Check local listings.) Back in 1954, when I was a summer employee on Capitol Hill, I made my first visit to the Lincoln Memorial. I have returned many times since, most recently while I was in Washington filming for a documentary about how Tom DeLay, Jack Abramoff, Ralph Reed and Grover Norquist, among others, turned the conservative revolution into a racket-the biggest political scandal since Watergate. If democracy can be said to have temples, the Lincoln Memorial is our most sacred. You stand there silently contemplating the words that gave voice to Lincoln's fierce determination to save the union-his resolve that "government of, by, and for the people shall not perish from the earth." On this latest visit, I was overcome by a sense of melancholy. Lincoln looks out now on a city where those words are daily mocked. This is no longer his city. And those people from all walks of life making their way up the steps to pay their respect to the martyred president-it's not their city, either. Or their government. This is an occupied city, a company town, and government is a subservient subsidiary of richly endowed patrons. Once upon a time the House of Representatives was known as "the people's house." No more. It belongs to K Street now. That's the address of the lobbyists who swarm all over Capitol Hill. There are 65 lobbyists for every member of Congress. They spend $200 million per month wining, dining and seducing federal officials. Per month! Of course they're just doing their job. It's impossible to commit bribery, legal or otherwise, unless someone's on the take, and with campaign costs soaring, our politicians always have their hands out. One representative confessed that members of Congress are the only people in the world expected to take large amounts of money from strangers and then act as if it has no effect on their behavior. This explains why Democrats are having a hard time exploiting the culture of corruption embodied in the scandalous behavior of DeLay and Abramoff. Democrats are themselves up to their necks in the sludge. Just the other day one of the most powerful Democrats in the House bragged to reporters about tapping "uncharted donor fields in the financial industry"-reminding them, not so subtlely, of the possibility that after November the majority leader just might be a Democrat. When it comes to selling influence, both parties have defined deviancy up, and Tony Soprano himself couldn't get away with some of the things that pass for business as usual in Washington. We have now learned that Jack Abramoff had almost 500 contacts with the Bush White House over the three years before his fall, and that Karl Rove and other presidential staff were treated to his favors and often intervened on his behalf. So brazen a pirate would have been forced to walk the plank long ago if Washington had not thrown its moral compass overboard. Alas, despite all these disclosures, nothing is happening to clean up the place. Just as the Republicans in charge of the House kept secret those dirty emails sent to young pages by Rep. Mark Foley-a cover-up aimed at getting them past the election and holding his seat for the party-they are now trying to sweep the DeLay-Abramoff-Reed-and-Norquist scandals under the rug until after Nov. 7, hoping the public at large doesn't notice that the House is being run by Tom DeLay's team, minus DeLay. All the talk about reform is placebo. The only way to counter the power of organized money is with organized and outraged people. Believe me, what members of Congress fear most is a grassroots movement that demands clean elections and an end to the buying and selling of influence-or else! If we leave it to the powers that be to clean up the mess that greed and chicanery have given us, we will wake up one day with a real Frankenstein of a system-a monster worse than the one created by Abramoff, DeLay and their cronies. By then it will be too late to save Lincoln's hope for "government of, by, and for the people." *** From: The Progressive Review <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> SAD STORIES FROM AMERICA'S PAST MARJORIE COHN, PORTSIDE - In 1798, the Federalist-led Congress, capitalizing on the fear of war, passed the four Alien and Sedition Acts to stifle dissent against the Federalist Party's political agenda. The Naturalization Act extended the time necessary for immigrants to reside in the U.S. because most immigrants sympathized with the Republicans. The Alien Enemies Act provided for the arrest, detention and deportation of male citizens of any foreign nation at war with the United States. Many of the 25,000 French citizens living in the U.S. could have been expelled had France and America gone to war, but this law was never used. The Alien Friends Act authorized the deportation of any non-citizen suspected of endangering the security of the U.S. government; the law lasted only two years and no one was deported under it. The Sedition Act provided criminal penalties for any person who wrote, printed, published, or spoke anything "false, scandalous and malicious" with the intent to hold the government in "contempt or disrepute." The Federalists argued it was necessary to suppress criticism of the government in time of war. The Republicans objected that the Sedition Act violated the First Amendment, which had become part of the Constitution seven years earlier. Employed exclusively against Republicans, the Sedition Act was used to target congressmen and newspaper editors who criticized President John Adams. Subsequent examples of laws passed and actions taken as a result of fear-mongering during periods of xenophobia are the Espionage Act of 1917, the Sedition Act of 1918, the Red Scare following WW I, the forcible internment of people of Japanese descent during WW II, and the Alien Registration Act of 1940 (the Smith Act). During the McCarthy period of the 1950s, in an effort to eradicate the perceived threat of communism, the government engaged in widespread illegal surveillance to threaten and silence anyone who had an unorthodox political viewpoint. Many people were jailed, blacklisted and lost their jobs. Thousands of lives were shattered as the FBI engaged in "red-baiting." One month after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, US Attorney Gen. John Ashcroft rushed the U.S.A. Patriot Act through a timid Congress. The Patriot Act created a crime of domestic terrorism aimed at political activists who protest government policies, and set forth an ideological test for entry into the United States. In 1944, the Supreme Court upheld the legality of the internment of Japanese and Japanese-American citizens in Korematsu v. United States. Justice Robert Jackson warned in his dissent that the ruling would "lie about like a loaded weapon ready for the hand of any authority that can bring forward a plausible claim of an urgent need." That day has come with the Military Commissions Act of 2006. It provides the basis for the President to round- up both aliens and U.S. citizens he determines have given material support to terrorists. Kellogg Brown & Root, a subsidiary of Cheney's Halliburton, is constructing a huge facility at an undisclosed location to hold tens of thousands of undesirables. In his 1928 dissent in Olmstead v. United States, Justice Louis Brandeis cautioned, "The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding." Seventy- three years later, former White House spokesman Ari Fleischer, speaking for a zealous President, warned Americans "they need to watch what they say, watch what they do." *** http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/04/opinion/04wed1.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin Woulda. Coulda. Shoulda? NY Times Lead Editorial: October 4, 2006 The more the House Republican leaders try to defend themselves on the Congressional page scandal, the worse it looks. They still do not seem to appreciate how serious this is, especially for a party that poses as the arbiter of morality. And they appear to be trying harder to deflect blame from themselves than to get to the bottom of what actually happened. The F.B.I. has begun investigating, but that will be a prolonged process, and the voters have to render a verdict in five weeks. There is evidence emerging that they should consider. Dennis Hastert, the House speaker, is responsible for the page program, and for seeing that the recent improprieties are properly investigated. His performance has been disturbing. As late as Monday, he was still minimizing the scandal. He said he understood that the improper contacts between pages and Mark Foley, the Florida Republican who resigned last week, occurred after the pages left the program. "This was after the fact," Mr. Hastert said, "and you know - would have, could have, should have." First, it's not at all clear that events transpired after the pages left the program. And, in any case, why is that relevant? Surely preying on ordinary young Americans is just as vile as preying on pages. Mr. Hastert hardly sounds like an effective leader who intends to investigate the allegations thoroughly, particularly now that the focus is shifting from Mr. Foley's conduct to whether House leaders covered it up. His remarks struck the same dismissive tone as the White House spokesman Tony Snow's references to "naughty e-mails." It is disturbingly difficult to straighten out the basics of who said and did what when. John Boehner, the majority leader, was saying late last week that he did not recall informing Mr. Hastert that there was a problem with Mr. Foley. Now he is insisting he did and trying to dump the mess in the speaker's lap. Thomas Reynolds, the New York Republican who heads the National Republican Congressional Committee, insists he told Mr. Hastert this spring of his concerns about Mr. Foley. But Mr. Hastert says he does not recall being told. There are more unanswered questions. When John Shimkus, the Illinois Republican who is chairman of the House Page Board, learned of the Foley problem, he informed the House clerk, but not the Democrat on the committee, or anyone in the Democratic leadership. It is unclear why he withheld the information. The pages' well-being should have been his primary concern, not partisan politics. Mr. Reynolds, who was one of the few members of Congress to know about the Foley problem early on, insists he did all he had to when he "took it to my supervisor," Mr. Hastert. But Mr. Reynolds is a key member of the House leadership, and his constituents need to know whether he knew enough to have done more than he did. We'd also like to know why, in the months when Mr. Reynolds was one of the few people to know of Mr. Foley's misconduct, Mr. Foley contributed $100,000 to Mr. Reynolds's Congressional campaign committee. Every one of these political leaders is up for re-election next month. Voters should go into the booth with full information about how they all handled this challenge to their leadership. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- LAAMN: Los Angeles Alternative Media Network --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Digest: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Help: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Post: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Archive1: <http://www.egroups.com/messages/laamn> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Archive2: <http://www.mail-archive.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/laamn/ <*> Your email settings: Individual Email | Traditional <*> To change settings online go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/laamn/join (Yahoo! ID required) <*> To change settings via email: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
