Surrender, Dorothy "Two capitulations by congressional Democrats today should have progressives marching on the Capitol with pitchforks".
by Rick Perlstein on October 9, 2007 - 10:38am. Campaign for America's Future http://commonsense.ourfuture.org/blog/rick_perlstein Quite a day for Democratic capitulations. Early this August, recall, Democrats were asked by the administration to cooperate in passing a technical fix in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act so the NSA could listen in on foreign-to-foreign calls looped thorough U.S. facilities. Democrats replied, "yes, of course, that's perfectly reasonable" - which it was. Then the Administration promptly sandbagged them by ramming through a radical bill that went far further than what had just been agreed to - "seemingly subtle changes in legislative language," the New York Times reported, that "would sharply alter the legal limits on the government's ability to monitor millions of phone calls and e-mail messages going in and out of the United States." Even the neo-cons now running the Washington Post editorial page judged it an outrage - "strong-armed through both chambers by an administration that seized the opportunity to write its warrantless wiretapping program into law - or, more precisely, to write it out from under any real legal restrictions." Then, two weeks ago, we learned that they greased the skids for this madness by laundering a bogus terror threat against Capitol Hill. Not to fear, Democratic leaders assured us. The blanket eavesdropping was authorized for a mere six months, at which time they promised to fix the outrage. Apparently, they changed their mind. "Democrats Seem Read to Extend Wiretap Power", the Times today informs us - now, not in six months. Why the rush? It turns out to be very simple. The Justice Department said "jump!" So how does a majority party that, had they resisted, would have been both politically and morally in the right respond? By replying, of course, "How high?" Because, the Times quotes some professor, "Many members continue to fear that if they don't support whatever the president asks for, they'll be perceived as soft on terrorism." How I wish these members would read Glenn Greenwald, who demonstrates that those fears are absurd. But then, moving to our second astonishing Democratic capitulation of the day, these are the same people who can't get through, or refuse to get through, a bill to tax the income of private-equity firm execs - billionaires! - at the ordinary rate of 35 percent, instead of the current 15 percent. The Washington Post is reporting that Harry Reid met with private-equity firms and told them not to worry: no bill on carried interest would get through this year. He claims there's simply not enough time. And that it has nothing to do with one of the largest lobbying campaigns on record, encompassing some twenty firms and a single payment by one private-equity firm, the Blackstone Group, of $3.74 million, to its own Gucci Gulf denizens - "one of the largest recorded fees to any lobbying firm during a six month period." Yes, not enough time. For if the measure doesn't pass this session, it won't go anywhere in 2008 - for, as the Post points out, recording the conventional wisdom of a city gone mad, "lawmakers and lobbyists agree that if the tax is not raised this year, its chances are not strong in 2008, either; Congress tends to be leery of tax increases in election years." Even tax increases on billionaires. What a world! [Rick Perlstein is the author of Before The Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, winner of the 2001 Los Angeles Times Book Award for history. From the summer of 2003 until 2005 he covered the presidential campaigns as chief national political correspondent for the Village Voice. He is currently working on a sequel to Before the Storm tentatively titled Nixonland: The Politics and Culture of the American Berserk, 1965-1972. In 2006 and 2007 he wrote a biweekly column for The New Republic Online. Perlstein is now senior fellow at the Campaign for America's Future, for whom he writes the blog The Big Con.] Portside aims to provide material of interest to people on the left that will help them to interpret the world and to change it. Submit via email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe: www.portside.org/subscribe Search the archives: www.portside.org/archive *** http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20071009_the_martyring_of_che_guevara/ The Martyring of Che Guevara By Robert Scheer Truthdig: October 9, 2007 The 40th anniversary of the death of Che Guevara elicited considerable media attention, mostly about his iconic image captured on T-shirts throughout the world. There were the standard snarky asides that many young people wearing those T-shirts have scant notion of who Che was, but the journalists reporting the story seemed equally ignorant. Little was reported about Che’s life and what led him to shun the comforts of a physician’s lifestyle in Argentina to fight as a revolutionary in the rugged terrains of Cuba, the Congo and, finally, Bolivia—or why someone who claimed to be obsessed with helping the world’s poor was executed, gangland style, on the order of a CIA agent. One exception was the BBC, which bothered to send a reporter to Florida to interview Felix Rodriguez, the Cuban-born CIA agent who was part of a team of CIA operatives and Bolivian soldiers who captured Che. “Mr. Rodriguez ordered the soldier who pulled the trigger to aim carefully, to remain consistent with the Bolivian government’s story that Che had been killed in action in a clash with the Bolivian army,” said the BBC report. Che’s hands were then cut off and put in formaldehyde to preserve his fingerprints. In his interview with the BBC, Rodriguez claimed that the order to kill Che came from the Bolivian government, and that he went along: “I could have tried to falsify the command to the troops, and got Che to Panama as the U.S. government said they wanted,” he recalled, but he didn’t. Clearly, the U.S. government was not unhappy with Rodriguez’s role in the bloody affair, for he went on, as he boasts, to train the Nicaraguan Contras and advise the repressive Argentine military government in the 1980s. He showed the BBC reporter his CIA medal for exceptional service along with a picture of him with the first President Bush in the White House. George H.W. Bush, it should be remembered, had been the head of the CIA during some of the years that Rodriguez worked there and was not put off by the man’s past deeds, including his part in Che’s assassination. So, what’s the big deal? Che was a Cuban Communist, and it’s a good thing that folks like Bush and Rodriguez were able to defeat him before he spread his evil message further—right? False, on every count. First off, he was either an Argentine Trotskyite or an anarchist, but Che was not a Communist in what we think of as the heavily entrenched, bureaucratized Cuban mold. Che was restless in post-revolutionary Cuba because his anarchist temperament caused him to bristle at the emerging bureaucracy. He was, like Trotsky in his dispute with Stalin, skeptical that the kind of socialism that truly served the poor could survive in just one country; hence, he died attempting to internationalize the struggle. It also turned out that killing Che was a big mistake, as his message was spread more effectively by his execution than by his guerrilla activities, which were, after he left Cuba, quite pathetic. This is the case in Latin America, where political leaders he helped inspire are faring better than those coddled by the CIA. Daniel Ortega, whom the CIA worked so doggedly to overthrow, is the elected president of Nicaragua. Almost all of Latin America’s leaders are leftists, some more moderate than Che (as in Brazil), and others as fiery as the guerrilla (in Venezuela), but all determinedly independent of yanqui control. Fortunately, they differ from Che in preferring the ballot to the gun. But all recognize that poverty remains the region’s No. 1 problem and that the free-market model imposed by the United States hardly contains all the answers. Recall that the U.S. break with the Cuban revolution came before Castro’s turn toward the Soviets, and that it was over his nationalization of American-owned business assets in Cuba ranging from Mafia-run casinos to the electric power grid. These days, few politicians in the United States even seem to care about the subversive Cuban influences in our own backyard that once haunted them. The embargo on Cuba remains to mollify Florida’s aging Cuban community, but what’s important to Washington today is Mideast oil, not protecting the peasants of Bolivia from the likes of Che Guevara. On Monday, Che’s death was marked, in the Bolivian village where he was killed, by Bolivian President Evo Morales, who proclaimed his movement “100 percent Guevarist and socialist,” which hardly registers as a propaganda success story for those favoring CIA assassinations. They turned a failed—and flawed—guerrilla fighter into an enduring symbol of resistance to oppression. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- 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! 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