This coming Wednesday the House Judiciary Committee plans to hold a hearing on “Drones and the War On Terror: When Can the U.S. Target Alleged American Terrorists Overseas?”

This is odd for a number of reasons.

1. Congressional committees usually don’t do anything at all on such matters.

2. The vast majority of the men, women, and children being killed have not been targeted.

3. The vast majority of the men, women, and children being killed or targeted have not been Americans.

4. The president’s nominee to direct the CIA refuses to deny that the president claims the power to kill Americans when they are not overseas, not to mention non-Americans within the United States and anyone at all overseas.

5. The three Americans we know the president has targeted and killed by drone strike in no way match up with the justifications for theoretical strikes found in the “white paper.”

6. The president is targeting and killing people with a variety of technologies, not just drones.

7. The only remotely legal or moral answer to the question asked by the hearing is “never.”

All such concerns will, of course, be brushed aside.  Congress ought to question the administration on its program of drone killing, regardless of what title the hearing is given, right?  But this is where things get really odd.  The witness list doesn’t include the president or a single person who works for him, no one from the CIA, no one from the White House, no one from the Pentagon, nobody from the Office of Legal Counsel. As far as we know, and it seems extremely likely to be the case, the committee has not subpoenaed any documents.  If it invited any government witnesses, it has not subpoenaed them or made any plans to figuratively or literally hold them in contempt.  Instead, all the witnesses are outside “experts” who won’t know any more about what’s going on than the rest of us.

A defender of this approach explained it to me thus: Senators and Representatives are often remarkably ignorant.  Senator Dianne Feinstein doesn’t even know that all military aged males killed by drone strikes are being declared militants.  Congress Members don’t even read newspapers.  If some smart experts testify at a public hearing, then elected officials can’t deny as many facts.  Plus, inviting government witnesses would just produce stonewalling or lying.

In my view, stonewalling and lying are reasons for subpoenas and contempt, not a complete abdication of the power of oversight.  It’s not that I think glorified public newspaper reading is worse than nothing.  I just think more is called for.

On the other hand, the notion that Congress needs more information before it should act is ludicrous.  What sort of memo could legalize murder?  What sort of due process could be applied to murder to make it not be murder?  As long as Congress is bringing in experts to talk about what’s already public knowledge, I’d like to propose a different type of witness.  If witnesses from Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen are not deemed relevant, newspaper interpreters are not going to make them so.  I’d like to propose, then, as one of many actually useful witnesses a gentleman by the name of Leo Tolstoy, who had this to say well over a century ago:

“People are astonished that every year there are sixty thousand cases of suicide in Europe, and those only the recognized and recorded cases—and excluding Russia and Turkey; but one ought rather to be surprised that there are so few. Every man of the present day, if we go deep enough into the contradiction between his conscience and his life, is in a state of despair.

“Not to speak of all the other contradictions between modern life and the conscience, the permanently armed condition of Europe together with its profession of Christianity is alone enough to drive any man to despair, to doubt of the sanity of mankind, and to terminate an existence in this senseless and brutal world. This contradiction, which is a quintessence of all the other contradictions, is so terrible that to live and to take part in it is only possible if one does not think of it—if one is able to forget it.

“What! all of us, Christians, not only profess to love one another, but do actually live one common life; we whose social existence beats with one common pulse—we aid one another, learn from one another, draw ever closer to one another to our mutual happiness, and find in this closeness the whole meaning of life!—and to-morrow some crazy ruler will say some stupidity, and another will answer in the same spirit, and then I must go expose myself to being murdered, and murder men—who have done me no harm—and more than that, whom I love. And this is not a remote contingency, but the very thing we are all preparing for, which is not only probable, but an inevitable certainty.

“To recognize this clearly is enough to drive a man out of his senses or to make him shoot himself. And this is just what does happen, and especially often among military men. A man need only come to himself for an instant to be impelled inevitably to such an end.

“And this is the only explanation of the dreadful intensity with which men of modern times strive to stupefy themselves, with spirits, tobacco, opium, cards, reading newspapers, traveling, and all kinds of spectacles and amusements. These pursuits are followed up as an important, serious business. And indeed they are a serious business. If there were no external means of dulling their sensibilities, half of mankind would shoot themselves without delay, for to live in opposition to one’s reason is the most intolerable condition. And that is the condition of all men of the present day. All men of the modern world exist in a state of continual and flagrant antagonism between their conscience and their way of life. This antagonism is apparent in economic as well as political life. But most striking of all is the contradiction between the Christian law of the brotherhood of men existing in the conscience and the necessity under which all men are placed by compulsory military service of being prepared for hatred and murder—of being at the same time a Christian and a gladiator.”

It seems to me that the occasion of publicly discussing the U.S. government’s targeting and killing U.S. citizens presents an opportunity for opening up even the narrowest of bigots to the contradiction between killing and protecting (whether or not one puts the latter in the religious terms of Tolstoy’s day — as I do not but most Congress Members sometimes pretend to).  Tolstoy may not be the ideal witness, as he’s dead.  But he does have the advantage of having already posed to himself better questions than anyone would ask him if he were alive. (You know they’d be asking about the latest film adaptation of Anna Karenina.)

“‘How can you kill people, when it is written in God’s commandment: “Thou shalt not kill”?’ I have often inquired of different soldiers. And I always drove them to embarrassment and confusion by reminding them of what they did not want to think about. They knew they were bound by the law of God, ‘Thou shalt not kill,’ and knew too that they were bound by their duty as soldiers, but had never reflected on the contradiction between these duties. The drift of the timid answers I received to this question was always approximately this: that killing in war and executing criminals by command of the government are not included in the general prohibition of murder. But when I said this distinction was not made in the law of God, and reminded them of the Christian duty of fraternity, forgiveness of injuries, and love, which could not be reconciled with murder, the peasants usually agreed, but in their turn began to ask me questions. ‘How does it happen,’ they inquired, ‘that the government [which according to their ideas cannot do wrong] sends the army to war and orders criminals to be executed.’ When I answered that the government does wrong in giving such orders, the peasants fell into still greater confusion, and either broke off the conversation or else got angry with me.

“‘They must have found a law for it. The archbishops know as much about it as we do, I should hope,’ a Russian soldier once observed to me. And in saying this the soldier obviously set his mind at rest, in the full conviction that his spiritual guides had found a law which authorized his ancestors, and the tzars and their descendants, and millions of men, to serve as he was doing himself, and that the question I had put him was a kind of hoax or conundrum on my part.

“Everyone in our Christian society knows, either by tradition or by revelation or by the voice of conscience, that murder is one of the most fearful crimes a man can commit, as the Gospel tells us, and that the sin of murder cannot be limited to certain persons, that is, murder cannot be a sin for some and not a sin for others. Everyone knows that if murder is a sin, it is always a sin, whoever are the victims murdered, just like the sin of adultery, theft, or any other. At the same time from their childhood up men see that murder is not only permitted, but even sanctioned by the blessing of those whom they are accustomed to regard as their divinely appointed spiritual guides, and see their secular leaders with calm assurance organizing murder, proud to wear murderous arms, and demanding of others in the name of the laws of the country, and even of God, that they should take part in murder. Men see that there is some inconsistency here, but not being able to analyze it, involuntarily assume that this apparent inconsistency is only the result of their ignorance. The very grossness and obviousness of the inconsistency confirms them in this conviction.”

Congress would hear something worth hearing from this witness, I believe.  But so might twenty-first century U.S. peasants as well. Read the rest of this entry →

Among those who refused to comply with Congressional subpoenas, never mind requests, while George W. Bush was president were: the Department of Justice, the Secretary of State (“not inclined” was Condi’s explanation), the Vice President (who preemptively announced he would probably not comply with such silliness and didn’t), the White House Counsel, the White House Chief of Staff, the White House Political Director, the White House Deputy Chief of Staff, the White House Deputy Political Director, the White House Office of Management and Budget, and so on.  There’s a collection of these subpoenas (the targets being Republicans) over at http://democrats.com/subpoenas

Congress held lots of the aforementioned bums in contempt, as did most of the rest of us.  But it didn’t actually hold them.  In fact it expected the Justice Department to do the enforcement of the subpoenas — even those addressed to the Justice Department.  In decades gone by, Congress used to make use of a power called inherent contempt, which meant the power to preserve its own existence by compelling witnesses to cooperate and holding them in jail on Capitol Hill until they saw fit.  No more.  Now “inherent contempt” is just the feeling that bubbles up in the stomach of your average American when a member of Congress walks by.  Don’t believe me?  Check the polls. Pink slime in your hamburgers is significantly more popular than Congress.

Now the blue and red slime in Congress have switched sides.  Now Republicans want to hold a Democratic Attorney General in contempt.  Get in line, schmucks!  This is a government with secret trade deals worse than NAFTA, secret meetings to let health insurance executives “reform” healthcare, secret drone wars, not-so-secret wars launched in defiance of Congress, executive orders throwing out half the Bill of Rights, and wild claims of state secrets powers made in courts to protect law-breaking predecessors, corporate partners, and themselves.  This is a White House that won’t tell Congress how its murder by drone program is legal or how it justifies killing unidentified people with “signature strikes.”  This is an administration that tells senators to their faces that they will be informed of any war on Syria or Iran after it’s begun.  These guys used to hide the White House visitor logs and now just hold their meetings away from the White House.  John Dean and Daniel Ellsberg are in agreement that secrecy has reached new heights.  And now, finally, you want to hold them in contempt?  Get in line!

Most contemptible, of course, is that virtually nobody in Washington gives a rat’s derriere about the institution of Congress or the representation of majority will or enforcement of the rule of law against the powerful.  The branches of government are now the Democratic Party and the Republican Party.  The remnants of the previous system are employed for motivations created in the current one.  So, when the President is a Democrat, the Republicans in Congress toil and sweat to give him the power to lock people up without charge, deploy the military within the United States, spy into every corner of the land without probable cause, etc., because they want those powers for Republican presidents and for the military.  But they also go after the Democratic administration viciously on usually less serious but highly inflammatory matters.  Meanwhile, the Democrats, who are outraged by any and all presidential abuses by Republicans, are eager to help Obama dwarf King George III’s list of crimes before the Fourth of July.

The trouble is not that we just happen to be trading back and forth between horribly bad presidents from one party and even worse presidents from the other.  The trouble is that when you give absolute power to an individual, it corrupts him absolutely.  Listen to all the lamentations over Egypt’s weak president.  The founders of the United States allowed this country to last as long as it has by creating a weak president.  Egypt’s problem is an empowered military.  Our problem in the United States is an empowered military, corporatocracy, and president.  What we need is power for the people and their legitimate representatives.  Electing a really great all-powerful dictator from a benevolent and progressive third party is no more of a solution than is lesser-evilism.  A move toward an actual solution would be observable if Congress actually came to care about being more than a crowd of court jesters.  It could start by enforcing all outstanding subpoenas and requests from the past 12 years, regardless of party.

I recently wrote about a conversation I’d had with a fairly typical Democratic candidate for Congress (O.K. perhaps he was below average) — a former military officer who claims to be for peace, but whose every solution involves war.  I asked him to make commitments on what sort of things he would vote for or against, and he evaded every such question, while maintaining that he held a desire for peace somewhere in his heart.

The suspicion might arise in a reasonable reader that candidates simply don’t make commitments and perhaps shouldn’t.  Every situation is unique.  Candidates can’t know the details of a future bill or the context in which it might be brought to a vote.  They can simply tell you what values they hold dear, what accomplishments grace their resumes, and how utterly worthless their opponents are.  More than that one should not ask.

This suspicion can be set aside in one of two ways.  The first would be a commonsense belief in democracy.  How the hell can you elect people to do what you want done if they refuse to tell you what they’ll do?  If they won’t tell you how they would have voted on past bills, or whether they would cosponsor existing bills, and if they consider looming wars that are constantly in the news to be “too hypothetical,” you can bet they’re hiding something, and you can bet that something stinks.

The other way to set aside the suspicion that candidates won’t make anti-war commitments is to find candidates who do.  I’d like to point out one who is probably at the top of the list.  It’s almost unfair to compare him with one of the worst candidates his party is fielding.  Yet he is almost certainly the best example of a new candidate running for an open seat and making a commitment to peace a central part of his platform.

Norman Solomon’s background involves decades in the peace movement.  He’s studied and written books and produced films about peace and war.  He’s traveled to war zones in an effort to prevent wars.  It shouldn’t be surprising that he would favor peace when he decides to run for office.  Yet there is a widespread and growing notion that those who most favor peace and can best work for peace are members of the military, or retired members of the military.  Electing these warriors for peace almost always leads to bitter disappointment, and yet the notion remains in the back of people’s heads that the best peace makers are the experts on war.  The idea that there might be experts on peace, that there might be value in the expertise that caused certain of those experts to draw the right conclusions about our current wars before they started — this is all off the radar screen of our public discussion.

Norman Solomon, Democratic candidate in California’s Second Congressional District (the north coast), is committed to supporting two bills that have been introduced by Congresswoman Barbara Lee of Oakland.  One of them, HR 780, which has 70 cosponsors, would limit Afghan war funding to paying for troop withdrawal.  The other, HR 4173, which has 27 cosponsors, would create diplomatic talks with Iran and forbid (with narrow exceptions) any unconstitutional attack on Iran not authorized by Congress.

Solomon would not only have voted no on this year’s National Defense Authorization Act and its provision of presidential power to indefinitely imprison, but Solomon publicly opposed it when it was up for debate.

Solomon would defund the current wars and has publicly lobbied Congress to use the power of the purse to defund immoral, illegal wars since the days of the war on Vietnam.

Solomon is committed to the struggle to restore to Congress its constitutional authority to declare and authorize war.

More can be found on Solomon’s website at http://solomonforcongress.com including this:

“Ending Perpetual War

“I favor – and have repeatedly called for – the swift and safe withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq and Afghanistan.

“As national co-chair of the Healthcare Not Warfare campaign (along with Congressman John Conyers and Donna Smith of the California Nurses Association), I support significant cuts in unnecessary military spending – with commensurate increases in funding for healthcare, education and other human needs. . . .”

“. . . Real national security involves shifting much of our perpetual military spending to programs that create sustainable jobs, expand education and opportunity, and rebuild our economy and our communities. . . .”

“. . . I am opposed to any more pre-emptive invasions and attacks that cause enormous human suffering while further inflaming anti-U.S. sentiment.  The United States should fully abide by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, moving toward a world free of nuclear weapons. . . .”

“. . . I support robust public investment in economic programs that create living-wage jobs. The government should invest directly in the nation’s infrastructure, and in social services that help stabilize our communities. . . .”

“. . . I strongly support H.R. 870 – the ‘Humphrey-Hawkins 21st Century Full Employment and Training Act‘ — introduced by Congressman John Conyers, which provides for a federal policy of full employment. With a one-quarter of 1 percent transaction tax on Wall Street, the bill would generate roughly $150 billion per year in revenues, creating millions of new jobs. . . .”

“. . . For decades — as an activist, author and nationally syndicated columnist — I have detailed how big money in politics promotes everything from war and environmental degradation to economic injustice and unfair trade treaties to media conglomeration and corporatization of healthcare. In my largely volunteer-driven campaign for Congress, I have implemented a grassroots approach to fundraising: raising hundreds of thousands of dollars from several thousand (mostly small) donors, while refusing to accept a penny of corporate PAC money.  As a member of Congress, one of my top priorities will be to back legislation and a constitutional amendment aimed at removing money from politics.”

My recommendation to people who don’t have decent candidates in their districts is to organize, educate, mobilize, focus on building pressure in between elections, and support Norman Solomon for Congress.

Full disclosure: I ought to oppose just that, because I have lost Norman as a colleague at RootsAction while he campaigns and will lose him permanently if he is elected.  But what’s best for my daily grind is in conflict with what’s best for the country.

David Swanson’s books include “War Is A Lie.” He blogs at http://davidswanson.org and http://warisacrime.org and works for the online activist organization http://rootsaction.org. He hosts Talk Nation Radio

For progressives and populists around the country who take an interest in Congressional races there are always a few good challengers we might hope to send to Washington.  Incumbents, we assume, can take care of themselves.

But in Northern Ohio, redistricting has thrown two incumbents into one district.  It’s a heavily Democratic district created purposely to guarantee a number of other districts to Republicans.  The incumbents are both Democrats, both white, both 65, and many imagine that they do similar work in Washington.  In fact, they could not be more different.  One of them does tremendous good for our national politics, working to move our government in a better direction from inside it, just as the rest of us do from the outside.  We cannot afford to lose him.  We would be obliged to work for his reelection even if his opponent were far above average.  The record suggests something else.

A useful example to highlight the contrast between Congressman Dennis Kucinich and Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur is found in the funding of wars.  Between 2001 and 2009, Congresswoman Kaptur voted for $545 billion in war funding, voting Yes over and over again for Bush’s wars.  Congressman Dennis Kucinich voted for a total of $17 billion. (See the chart below.)

In the lead up to the invasion of Iraq, Kucinich’s was the clearest voice against it.  He circulated evidence of war lies to his colleagues.  He organized many of them to vote No with him.  Kaptur, too, voted No on the authorization.

But once the war had started, many Congress members, including Kaptur, turned around and voted to fund its continuation and escalation, year after year, even as the public turned more and more strongly against the war.  While Kucinich was working to impeach Bush and Cheney, Kaptur was voting to fund their wars.  While Kucinich was advancing resolutions to shift the debate toward ending wars and preventing new ones, Kaptur was claiming wars made us safer and reciting “support the troops” rhetoric, as though what veterans need most is the creation of more injured veterans.

This distinction matters more than ever as the prospect of a war on Iran looms larger.  Kaptur wants NASA and the Pentagon to work together more closely, while Kucinich opposes the militarization of space.  Kaptur seems to believe the military industrial complex is a beneficial jobs program, whereas Kucinich seems to believe it is what Eisenhower said it would be.

Congresswoman Kaptur has been spending a lot of money on television ads in hopes of defeating Kucinich in the upcoming primary.  Where does her money come from?  Well, according to the Center for Responsive Politics (OpenSecrets.org), in the current election cycle, she gets 77% of her money from PACs, and 5% from small individual contributors.  Kucinich, in contrast, gets 5% from PACs, and 68% from small individual contributors.  Kucinich does not get money from war contractors.  Kaptur is a different story.  Thus far, in the current election cycle, her fourth biggest “contributor” is a little operation known as General Dynamics.  Her third biggest is Teledyne Technologies.  Tied for seventh place are American Systems Corp and Northrop Grumman.  Tied at 16^th are Boeing and Lockheed Martin.  Most of these corporations have been among Kaptur’s regular funders in past campaigns as well.  They are also among the leading violators of U.S. laws.

According to the Federal Contractor Misconduct Database (ContractorMisconduct.org), these are the worst four offenders from any industry:

Contractor      Federal Contract $      Instances of Misconduct    Misconduct $
–                               (FY2010)                    (Since 1995)                        (Since 1995)

1. Lockheed Martin        $34367.4m                     57                         $590.1m

2. Boeing Company         $19366.6m                  43                         $1600.5m

3. Northrop Grumman         $15522.7m                35                           $850.7m

4. General Dynamics          $14908.8m                   13                             $78.5m

Among the types of misconduct engaged in by these four leaders, as detailed at the above database, are the following: contract fraud, kickbacks, defective pricing, unlicensed exports, emissions violations, groundwater cleanup violations, inflated costs, providing of bribes and sexual favors, nuclear safety violations, nuclear waste storage violations, federal election law violations, radiation exposure, illegal transfer of information to China, violations of the National Labor Relations Act, embezzlement, racial discrimination and retaliation, age discrimination and retaliation, unauthorized weapons sales to foreign nations, retaliation against whistleblowers.  And that’s just Lockheed.  In fact, that’s just a small sampling of just Lockheed.  Why take money from these companies?

According to the National Priorities Project (CostOfWar.com) Kaptur’s Ninth District of Ohio (prior to redistricting) has shelled out over $3.1 billion for wars since 2001.  That expense has been with Kaptur’s full cooperation.  And that is an expense measured purely in dollars taken from tax payers to pay for wars.  It does not include further costs for veterans’ care, for interest on war debt, for increased fuel prices, or for lost opportunities.  Nor does it include the cost already extracted of several times the $3.1 billion for a base annual military budget that has roughly doubled this decade and done so on the basis of the wars.

According to a report titled “The U.S. Employment Effects of Military And Domestic Spending Priorities: An Updated Analysis,” (PDF) by Robert Pollin and Heidi Garrett-Peltier of the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, (October 2009), spending the same dollars on the military (without specifying war spending which would likely make the contrast even greater) produces many fewer jobs than if spent in other industries.  If Ohio’s Ninth District’s $3.1 billion had been spent on tax cuts for working people, instead of on the military, the people of the Ninth District could have seen a net gain of 9,920 jobs.  That’s considering the full impact of jobs lost, directly created, and indirectly created.  Military spending, purely in terms of job creation, is worse than nothing.  Tax cuts — not for Mitt Romney but for the rest of us — does more good.

But the same study also shows a better path.  If the $3.1 billion had been taken away from the military and spent instead on clean energy, we would have seen a net gain of 17,050 jobs.  If instead the investment had gone to healthcare, the net gain would have been 24,000 jobs.  And if the choice had been to fund education, the gain in jobs would have been 54,250.  Could Ohio’s Ninth District use 54,250 jobs?  Not many people would choose to chase those jobs away in order to support wars based on lies, wars that endanger us, wars that devastate the natural environment, wars that erode our civil liberties, wars that carry a heavy human cost — not just an economic one.  Not many people, but one of them is Marcy Kaptur.

If you visit Kaptur’s campaign website at MarcyKaptur.com, only one specific issue is immediately visible, front and center: celebration of a World War II memorial.  At Kucinich.us there is also only a single issue immediately visible: a petition urging the Congressman’s colleagues to stop funding the war in Afghanistan.  In the “Agenda” section of Kaptur’s site there is no acknowledgement that war or peace is an issue to be considered at all.  In the “Issues” section of Kucinich’s site, there is a section on war and peace that addresses a number of specific wars.

There is also, on the Kucinich site, a lot more detail than on Kaptur’s about numerous other issues.  The example of wars and war funding is fairly typical.  In rough terms, Kucinich tends to back peace, justice, and the will of the public, while Kaptur tends to back the very same things when and if the leadership of the Democratic Party happens to do so.  Back on February 25, 2010, she voted to extend the PATRIOT Act without reforms of its abusive procedures.  Kucinich voted No.  Back on October 23, 2007, Kucinich had also voted No on the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act, while Kaptur voted Yes.  On December 8, 2010, she voted against the DREAM Act, while Kucinich and a majority of the House and of the Democrats voted for it.  Any elected official will let us down sometimes, but Kaptur is just no Kucinich.

Many organizations agree. VoteSmart.org lists the rankings of various groups.  Planned Parenthood gives Kucinich a score of 100%, Kaptur 71%.  The ACLU scores Kucinich 94%, Kaptur 75%.  Also favoring Kucinich in their rankings are the Arab American Institute, the Human Rights Campaign, the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, the League of Conservation Voters, Peace Action, the AFL-CIO, the Sargent Shriver National Center on Poverty Law, etc.  I’m not being selective here.  There don’t seem to be any progressive analysts scoring Kaptur over Kucinich on anything.  Progressives like Alan Grayson and Barney Frank are urging us to support Kucinich over Kaptur.

How independent and principled a member of Congress is has a direct, and sometimes devastating, impact on their district and the nation and the world.  Kaptur believes a nuclear power plant at the edge of Lake Erie with a bad history of safety violations should be allowed to continue to operate, while Kucinich has asked for it to be repaired or decommissioned.  Only one of these two representatives is putting the safety of the public first.

I believe people who care about the future of the United States, from Ohio’s new Ninth District or anywhere else, should be following and supporting Kucinich’s campaign.  If he loses, we lose.  We may not always agree with him.  He may not always be able to win over a majority of his colleagues.  He may sometimes let us down.  But were he not there, votes that helped end the Iraq war would have never been held.  Debates that have helped curtail further war making would simply not have happened.  Articles of impeachment for Bush and Cheney would never have been introduced.  Countless witnesses before House committees would have gotten off without ever facing the important questions.  Many people pushing for single-payer healthcare in their states would have never heard of it.  Our televisions would be better able than they are now to pretend that majority positions on major issues do not exist, because there would not be that one man in the government willing to raise the issue and publicly lobby his colleagues to join him.

We’re such defeatists these days, that we either condemn Kucinich’s compromises, forgetting that Kaptur outdoes him in that regard 100-fold, or we imagine that because he’s so much better he must be doomed to lose.  On the contrary, Kucinich has a long history of winning congressional elections, both primaries and general.  While the redesigned district includes a larger population from Kaptur’s former district than from Kucinich’s, it includes more Democrats from Kucinich’s than from Kaptur’s.  Kucinich inspires his supporters, and in primaries it is the relative turnout of tiny percentages of people that decides.

Who is in Congress or the White House is going to be of far less importance than who is in the streets and what kind of people’s movement is developed to nonviolently resist injustice and war.  But without a single voice inside Congress willing to speak up in the ways Kucinich has, the people’s movement will suffer.  There’s no lesser-evilism required here.  Kucinich is actually a good representative.  There’s no partisanship required here.  Love a party or hate them all; regardless, we should reward those who have listened to our demands.  Or why would anyone listen again?

##

The table below shows enacted appropriations, adapted from “The Cost of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Other Global War on Terror Operations Since 9/11″ by Amy Belasco, Congressional Research Service, March 29, 2011, (PDF).  Votes are on final passage of the conference report unless there was no recorded vote.  In that case, the indicated vote is on initial House passage.

Name of Law	Public Law No.	Date Enacted	DOD Funds ($bln)	Kucinich Voted	Kaptur Voted
FY01 Emerg. Supp. Approp. Act for Recovery from and Response to Terrorist Attacks on the US	P.L. 107-38	9/18/01	13.6	Yes	Yes
FY02 Dept. Of Defense and Emergency Terrorism Response Act	P.L. 107-117	1/10/02	3.4	Yes	Yes
FY02 Emergency Supplemental	P.L. 107-206	8/2/02	13.8	No	Yes
FY03 Consolidated Appropriations	P.L. 108-7	2/20/03	10.0	No	Yes
FY03 Emergency Supplemental	P.L. 108-11	4/16/03	62.6	No	Yes
FY03 DOD Appropriationsa	P.L. 107-248	10/23/02	7.1	No	Yes
FY04 DOD Appropriations Act (rescission of FY03 funds)	P.L. 108-87	9/30/03	-3.5	No	Yes
FY04 Emergency Supplemental	P.L. 108-106	11/6/03	64.9	No	No
FY05 DOD Approps Act, Titles IX & Xb	P.L. 108-287	8/5/04	25.0	No	Yes
FY05 DOD Appropriations Actc	P.L. 108-287	8/5/04	2.1	No	Yes
FY05 Supplemental Appropriations	P.L. 109-13	5/11/05	75.9	No	Yes
FY06 DOD Approps. Act, Title IX	P.L. 109-148	12/30/05	50.0	No	Yes
FY06 DOD Appropriations Actc	P.L. 109-148	12/30/05	0.8	No	Yes
FY06 Emergency Supplemental	P.L. 109-234	6/15/06	66.0	No	Yes
FY07 DOD Appropriations Act	P.L. 109-289	9/29/06	70.5	No	Yes
FY07 Supplemental, Amendment #2 (Did not include Withdrawal Deadlines from Iraq)d	P.L. 110-28	5/25/07	94.5	No	No
FY08 Continuing Resolution	P.L. 110-92	9/29/07	5.2	No	Yes
FY08 DOD Appropriations Act	P.L. 110-116	11/13/07	11.6	No	Yes
FY08 Consolidated Approps. Act	P.L. 110-161	3/11/04	70.0	Not voting	No
FY08 Supplemental, FY09 Bridge Approps. Act (Roll call #431)d, e	P.L. 110-252	6/30/08	157.9	No	No
FY09 Consolidated Security, Disaster Assistance, and Continuing Appropriations Act	P.L. 110-329	9/30/08	2.5	No	Yes
FY09 Supplemental Approps. Act	P.L. 111-32	6/24/09	80.0	No	No
FY10 Consolidated Appropriations Act	P.L. 111-117	12/16/09	1.4	No	Yes
FY10 DOD Approps. Act, Title IX	P.L. 111-118	12/19/09	127.3	No	Yes
FY10 Supplemental	P.L. 111-212	7/27/10	30.8	No	No
FY11 DOD and Year-Long Continuing Resolutionf	P.L. 112-10	4/15/11	159.1	No	No
TOTAL WAR FUNDING VOTED FOR				$17 billion	$545.3 billion

a.      FY03 Appropriations Act included $7.1 billion in regular FY03 defense appropriations for GWOT thatDOD cannot track; the FY04 DOD Appropriations Act rescinded $3.5 billion in FY03 war monies.

b.      Title IX funds in FY05 do not include a $1.8 billion scoring adjustment that reverses the previousrescission of FY04 funds because this did not change wartime monies.

c.      Reflects funds obligated for Operation Noble Eagle from DOD’s regular appropriations as reported by the Defense Finance Accounting Service.

d.     The House took separate votes on different sections of the bill, which were then combined when sent to the Senate.

e.      The FY08 Supplemental included funds for both FY08 and bridge funds for FY09.

f.       This bill was the final DOD Appropriations Act and the final version of the CR.  It was preceded by seven other CRs.

I cannot stress sufficiently that we will best move Congress toward peace and justice by keeping it at arm’s length and pressuring it without self-censorship, compromise, or entanglement with one or the other of its two branches: the Democratic or Republican. We are engaged in a long-term campaign to undo a plutocratic war state. Moving that campaign forward in the general culture is more important than which criminal enterprise has a majority of seats: the Democratic or Republican.

But it will be advantageous to us to have as many individuals with some nerve and a core of human decency occupying seats in Congress — perhaps as many as three or four of them if we are lucky. While only a mass movement will move the mass of corporate shills on Capitol Hill, it cannot hurt to have a few people there who are seriously on our side, people who understand where we are coming from without being taught, people who can communicate in front of a camera, people who are willing to step out alone and lead, and people capable of organizing others to join them.

Most elections pair up lesser and greater evils, and sometimes it’s hard to tell which is which. But some handful of elections, especially primaries, include actually good candidates. I understand the presidential obsession. We’ve given presidents royal powers, so it matters that we show resistance to each would-be king by backing someone who would conceivably give those powers back, such as Rocky Anderson or Jill Stein. And I understand local action. But most localities don’t offer anything, and most general elections have already been decided by the gerrymanderers. If you must focus on elections, why not look to the few places that could make a real difference?

The best voice the peace movement has had in elected Washington in recent years has been Congressman Dennis Kucinich. He’s pushed the rest of the House of Misrepresentatives to places it had no desire to go. If we lose his voice in Washington, we will be taking a serious step backward. The point is not that we need elected officials to tell us what we want. The point is that only the very rarest of elected officials ever listen to what we want. Kucinich is one of them. The Ohio legislature has combined Kucinich’s district with Rep. Marcy Kaptur’s. These two Democratic incumbents will compete in one primary. That Kaptur is not the worst member of Congress we’ve ever seen, that she has in fact been remarkably good on occasion, does not alter the pressing need to keep a voice for peace in official Washington. (Full disclosure: I worked for Kucinich in 2004 and briefly in 2008.) Go here: http://kucinich.us

We have the possibility of putting another extremely powerful voice for peace into our government this year in the form of Norman Solomon. Solomon is the author of a dozen books on media, political discourse, and public policy, including “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death,” which he also made into a film. From 1997 to 2010, Solomon was the founder and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. He was one of the few strong voices on national television against invading Iraq before the start of the Iraq War in early 2003, appearing on CNN and other major TV networks more than a dozen times to argue for diplomacy instead of a U.S. attack. Solomon organized and went on three missions to Baghdad prior to the invasion of Iraq — including one led by Congressman Nick Rahall and former U.S. Senator James Abourezk — seeking alternatives to war. Solomon is one of us and would speak to us from within our government — as an infiltrator, as it were. He needs to win his primary! (Full disclosure: I work for an organization that Solomon was involved in starting at http://rootsaction.org .) Go here: http://solomonforcongress.com

We have the possibility as well of returning to Congress another uncompromising voice against war with the power to shift the corporate-approved public discourse in a wiser direction. Alan Grayson’s was a principled and fearless voice during his brief tenure in Washington, and we ought to bring him back: http://congressmanwithguts.com

Of course, I’m counting on Rep. Barbara Lee to remain in office. And there are young newcomers with the potential to become allies of the people in the halls of power. It would be crazy to predict such a thing, but it is possible. One of these potential leaders is Ilya Sheyman: http://ilyasheyman.com

The clearest congressional voice for peace at the moment, of course, is the voice of someone with a vision of domestic policy that many of us find dangerous if not delusional. Republican Congressman Ron Paul’s voice against wars, empire, militarism, and abuse of power is helpful to those causes. Any success he has in the presidential primaries that is credited to his foreign policy positions will be all to the good. In the absence of progressives with backbones, more Libertarians like Paul would be welcome additions, I think. Go here: http://ronpaul2012.com and here: http://ronpaulforcongress.com

That’s all I have to say about this election. I now return you to whatever dumbest thing Newt Gingrich said today.

Last week, President Obama racked up several more broken campaign promises as he pushed through Congress three new job-killing corporate trade agreements.  The Senate Finance Committee was quite open about the fact that these agreements will kill off more jobs and eager to mitigate the damage with band aids attached to the treaties.  Some of us who were in the hearing room felt an obligation to speak up and ask why in the world the senators — with perfect bipartisan harmony — insisted on causing the damage in the first place.  And for that we were thrown in jail.

Imagine the denunciations of human rights abuses in Colombia if the plan for that country this week were war rather than corporate exploitation to produce impoverishment to produce drug crops to produce war.  Imagine the denunciations of human rights abuses in Iran having continued as usual if U.S. cops weren’t cracking skulls in New York, Boston, Denver, and San Diego.  Maybe we wouldn’t have needed the Tale of the Moronic Mexican Iranian Assassins at all.

Also last week, President Obama pretended to try to pass a weak gesture in the way of lessening the damage of his policies with separate legislation known as a “jobs bill.”  But he made no serious effort to get it passed and according to many observers wanted it to fail.  It was blocked by Democrats as well as Republicans in a Democratic Senate.  Nonetheless, the purpose was apparently to create a campaign ad for what the same president will supposedly try to do in 2013 if reelected, and if tens of millions of us are still obediently filling out job applications.

Dutiful union members and party activists last week rallied for a bill the President did not whip for.  In other words, they took part in a theatrical advertisement for a reelection campaign.

“The president has learned that a loss can be a win,” said an unnamed source whom Politico calls a “senior Democratic strategist who supports Obama.”  And I can confirm that this is not only real but typical.  “We’ve done everything to win legislatively, to scrape through,” this loyal partisan said.  ”Now we’re determined to keep the high ground on a set of issues where we have the overwhelming support of the American people.”  If you doubt the intention to shift all energy into a presidential reelection campaign, watch Tom Hayden’s interview about Occupy Wall Street on Keith Olbermann’s show.

Here are the problems with this picture:

First, the same president is killing off jobs on a large scale with corporate trade pacts and military spending.  Military spending produces fewer jobs than tax cuts for non-billionaires, much less useful spending on infrastructure, green energy, or education.

Second, the same president’s jobs bill, had it passed, would have barely touched the problem of wealth inequality, joblessness, and imbalance of power.

Third, Obama made no serious effort to pass the bill, despite having demonstrated in the past the ability to compel any Democrat to vote for any bill, including war-funding supplementals and godawful corporate health-insurance schemes.

Fourth, the bill was blocked by Democrats who have a majority in the Senate.

Fifth, the Majority Leader Harry Reid recently lowered the bar for moving bills forward from 60 to 51 votes, despite years of feigned helplessness in the face of the unreachability of the 60-vote mark.  Reid is no more serious in his efforts than Obama.

Sixth, campaign promises from people who have broken hundreds of campaign promises would be useless even if the pretenses of attempting decent governance were not so transparent.

If Obama or Reid or the Democratic Party or MoveOn.org or anybody else thinks the people occupying the streets of our cities in protest are going to fall for this, they’ve got a very rude awakening coming.  The Occupation movement is one that brings policy demands to the government, not partisan pretense to a pseudo-combat with the goal of bipartisanship or the election of either flavor of crypto-fascist corporate servants.

The question is not whether we want to risk electing a racist buffoon to the imperial throne.  The question is whether we want to join those who are making major sacrifices to occupy our city squares and move our entire culture and our entire government toward peace and justice instead of plutocracy and planetary collapse.  Do we want to avoid a war on Iran before it happens or turn against it once we have a Republican president?  Do we want to halt global warming or lament its advances later?  Do we want to overthrow our financial oligarchy or hope it changes the appearance of the curtains behind which it works?

The genius of the 99% movement is that it brings people’s demands to the government.  Nobody is asking a political party what to demand, whom to confront, and whose crimes to grant immunity.  We’re uniting as a people to insist on representation in our government.  The notion that we already have it from either half of our government is so ludicrous as to reveal those who make that claim to be engaging in fraud.

We now have a majority supporting the nonviolent occupations.  And we have 99% of that majority sitting on its rear ends.

If you object to being played for a bunch of fools, get in the streets!

If you resent people stripping away jobs while pretending to create them, get in the streets!

If you’d rather have a decent place to live in which your children and grandchildren will be able to live as well, instead of bailouts for bankers and new wars started every few months, get in the streets!

If you’d rather see majority opinion obeyed just once on any issue than have a congressional caucus dutifully represent the interests of unmanned drones, get in the streets!

The conversation is changing.

The mortgage fraud non-settlement is in trouble.

Wall Street is scared.

There are bills in Congress to eliminate the Super Committee and to end the Federal Reserve.

There is music in the cafes at night and revolution in the air.

Don’t just sit there nodding.

If the U.S. Constitution says one thing, a treaty ratified by the United States says another, a law passed by Congress yet another, and another law passed by Congress another thing still, while a signing statement radically changes that last law but itself differs with an executive order, all of which statements of law conflict with a number of memos drafted by the Office of Legal Council (some secret and some leaked), but a President has announced that the law is something completely different from all of this, and in practice the government defies all of the above including the presidential announcement . . . in such a case, the obvious but possibly pointless question arises: what’s legal?

The above theoretical example of legal confusion sounds extreme, but it is not far off the actual situation with regard to some of our most important public policies. Take the example of U.S. warmaking in Libya. Is that legal?

The U.S. Constitution says Congress must decide where and when to make war. Congress has not declared a war since 1941. Since that date Congress has put up a gradually diminishing pretense of involvement. In the case of Libya, Congress played no role whatsoever in launching the war. Is the law what the Constitution says, how the Constitution was interpreted for the first two-thirds of our national history, what presidents have gotten away with in recent decades, or what a president can get away with today? Wait, don’t answer that!

The Constitution also says that ratified treaties are the supreme law of the land. Does that include treaties passed almost a century ago, largely forgotten, and almost never discussed on television? Does it include only treaties that have been duplicated in U.S. statutes? Does it include only treaties the government is inclined to comply with? In this regard, we might wish to recall that theoretically the Kellogg Briand Pact is still one of our many supreme laws of the land. In 1928, the U.S. Senate ratified this treaty, which states:

“The High Contracting Parties solemly declare in the names of their respective peoples that they condemn recourse to war for the solution of international controversies, and renounce it, as an instrument of national policy in their relations with one another.”

The Senate tacked on a couple of modifications to the treaty, a practice of debatable legality itself. One reservation the Senate added was for cases of defense. The other was to clarify that the United States was not obliged to enforce the treaty by going to war against its violators. Since nobody has even claimed that Libya attacked the United States, and since the United States voluntarily went to war, the exceptions do not seem relevant. War is illegal. Period. At least if we go by Kellogg Briand. And why not? Aren’t ancient laws recalled and put to use when we need to expand corporate power or discriminate against gays or advance any other political agenda? So, why not Kellogg Briand? Because it’s been violated? What kind of reason is that?

The United Nations Charter, too, makes war illegal, with very limited exceptions that do not seem to apply. But the United Nations passed a resolution that the U.S. Justice Department, in a leaked/published memo, relies on heavily to justify the war. Does that resolution make the war in some way legal, even if the memo isn’t and the Constitution is still violated? And what if the war, in various ways, violates the resolution? The resolution was for a humanitarian intervention, a no fly zone, a cease fire, an arms embargo, and a ban on foreign ground troops. It was immediately used to bomb civilians, introduce arms, and employ foreign ground troops, not to mention drone bombings and an apparent assassination attempt — both practices of highly dubious legality. Is a war legalized by a resolution even if it violates the resolution, and even if it violates numerous other laws in doing so? Or is it internationally legalized while remaining domestically unconstitutional?

A U.S. law passed in 1973, the War Powers Act, if you read what it actually says, would have applied only if Libya had attacked the United States, which no one has ever claimed. But everyone pretended this law applied anyway. The War Powers Resolution requires that the President report information to Congress within 48 hours of launching a war, which Obama did — except that he didn’t include most of the information he was required to report. The War Powers Resolution also puts a 60-day limit on unconstitutional war, and that clock has expired. So is the war illegal because it violates both the Constitution and this weaker law? Or is it legal because there’s been such a pretense of complying with the law, to the extent of sending Congress a polite note when the 60-day clock ran out? And is this law somewhat less legal than other laws because it was passed over a veto and because some, but not all, presidents since its passage have declared that they object to it and hold it to be unconstitutionally strong — as opposed to being unconstitutionally weak, as the law appears to be?

Last week, the House of Misrepresentatives passed numerous amendments to the “Defense Authorization Act of 2012.” One amendment made clear that passage of the bill did not authorize war in Libya. (Arguably, the failure of Congress to fund any war in Libya also makes the war — you guessed it — illegal.) Another amendment prohibited the use of U.S. ground troops in Libya (unless employed through a department other than “Defense”). But another amendment required that, upon completion of the war, the U.S. military dig up and bring home the bones of U.S. sailors buried in Tripoli during an earlier war in 1804 (which Congress did not declare but authorized). How exactly is that going to happen unless the U.S. military gains control of Tripoli? And what is accomplished by refusing to authorize a war that is already underway, with another 90 days just announced by NATO, and with not a glimmer of a threat of holding anyone accountable for it? Is the idea to make a war “illegal” but watch it roll along?

Another section of the same bill (an amendment to strip it failed to pass) effectively gives presidents the power to make wars. This section (#1034) conflicts with the War Powers Act and the Constitution. It might also conflict with a congressional resolution ending or prohibiting a specific war. The President claims not to want this power, and a generous interpretation of a statement from his administration holds that he has threatened to veto the bill over it. While a veto strikes me as extremely unlikely, a signing statement seems somewhat more likely, if this amendment gets through the Senate. Here’s a situation in which the fundamental question of who has the power of war could have several answers. The Constitution will continue to say Congress, while the War Powers Act says mostly Congress, but this new legislation says presidents, and a signing statement says something different.

Why would President Obama signing-statement away more presidential power? Well, he probably won’t. But think about why he avoided asking Congress to declare or authorize war in the first place, when it probably would have. And why did he avoid asking Congress to declare or authorize war within 60 days? Why does he insist that the war is fought by NATO, rather than the United States, even though NATO and its role in the war would not exist without the United States? The goal seems to be expanding presidential power. NATO answers to the president but its abuses, as in Afghanistan, cannot be investigated by Congress. Asking Congress to play a role, even if it plays the desired one, means having to ask Congress again the next time. And allowing Congress to legislate that Congress has no role would mean that theoretically Congress could unlegislate that again. So, Obama could object to Congress having the gall to believe itself empowered to crown him king.

We could end up with a war illegal under the Constitution, legal and illegal under laws and treaties depending which we choose to consult, and illegal or legal under a signing statement depending how we try to make sense of it, but legal under the Justice Department’s memos. What’s legal?

A resolution to end the U.S. Libya war, HCR 51, will have to be voted on in the House by the week after next at the latest. If the vote is not held, in violation of the law, or if it is held and passes (and then passes the Senate too), will the war be thereby made even more illegal than it was, or illegal for the first time? What if the “Defense Authorization Act” passes the Senate and is signed into law with Section 1034 intact before the House holds its vote on ending the Libya war, or after? Can the crime of having violated the War Powers Act be retroactively treated to immunity? Can the same Congress legislatively and unwittingly deprive itself of the power to end a war it tries to end? What if Congress, frustrated in its effort to vote the war over, votes to ban the use of any dollars to fund the war? Then (and only then?) would continuation of the war be truly illegal? And what if a new memo or presidential decree in the meantime claimed the right to fund the war by other means, Iran-Contra-style or otherwise?

Or what if all measures went against the war’s legality? What if Section 1034 is rejected by the Senate, both houses vote to end the war, both houses vote to defund the war, the United Nations declares the war illegal, and so forth, but the war continues? Can a war be illegal and roll right along, like warrentless spying, procedure-free imprisonment, or assassination squads?

The White House/Pentagon is planning a secret briefing for Congress on the Libya War. Those who attend should be aware that the war in Libya appears to be a crime and that failure to report crimes that one witnesses is a felony. In this situation, can a Congress member be prosecuted both for revealing the contents of the meeting and for not doing so?

The only thing that seems clear here is that Thomas Paine’s notion of the law as king in this country isn’t holding up very well. Obviously the law is only king if we’re clear on what a law is and our government obeys it. If a law is any bill freely passed by Congress and signed or passed over a veto, provided the courts do not reject it as unconstitutional, and if the highest law is the Constitution and our treaties, then clarity might be possible. But then executive decrees and orders and lawless claims of secrecy and immunity would not be laws, signing statements would not be laws, and blatantly unconstitutional laws would not be laws. Persuasive arguments in secret meetings, and the whole regime of threats and bribes that the White House uses to manipulate the Congress would not be part of lawmaking.

Getting from where we are to there could be tricky. The Constitution itself proposes a way to do it that does not seem applicable. The tool that the Constitution provides the Congress is called impeachment, but obviously that cannot be discussed in this situation, since President Obama is not known to have been having sex with anyone.

There’s a simple reason why the Democrats in Washington, D.C., can’t end the wars or shrink the military or close Guantanamo or legalize union organizing or create a real health coverage system or repeal NAFTA or tax carbon or (fill in the blank).

But the simple reason keeps changing.

In 2005 and 2006 it was that they were in a minority in the House and Senate.

In 2007 and 2008 it was that they lacked the White House.

In 2009 and 2010 it was the filibuster.

In 2011 and 2012 it will be that they are a minority in the House.

The 2005-2006 reason was credible, even if Republicans seem to have no trouble passing tax bills in the minority.

The 2007-2010 reasons were not credible. Without passing a single bill, Congress could have stopped funding wars and/or impeached the top war criminals. And the filibuster was kept around by choice. It could have been eliminated in January 2009, or the credible threat to eliminate it in 2011 could have resulted in its elimination or reform at any time during the past two years, as has been done before.

Throwing out the filibuster rule this coming January (next week) wouldn’t eliminate the Republican majority in the House. A credible reason for not passing decent bills will have been restored just in time. But some of our courts might have judges confirmed to sit at them for a change. And horrible House legislation would not have to be made even worse to get it through the Senate — well, not as much worse anyway. And if, at some point in the future, a majority of senators — from whatever party or combination of parties — is willing to work with the House to pass decent laws, it would be able to do so.

The filibuster rule does not protect minority rights. The filibuster rule creates minority rule. In a democratic republic, every individual should have protected rights (remember when Americans had those?), but no minority should have the right to rule, certainly not 41 wealthy old white men elected in states containing 11 percent of the U.S. population.

The filibuster has roots in opposition to U.S. involvement in World War I. There’s no reason a filibuster can’t be used to block an injustice. When the whole Senate is bought and sold through corrupt elections, party control, corporate media, and lobbyist pressure, there is no reason to suppose that a majority of senators represents majority opinion in the country. When Wyoming has as many senators as California, talk of majority representation in the Senate is outlandish to begin with. But the filibuster rule makes these problems worse. We are likely to always be better off on the whole with the rule of 51 senators than with the rule of 41.

Partial reforms, like ending senators’ power to place “secret holds” on bills or removing delays in the process of confirming nominees, are all good. Such reforms limit the power of senators to block the work of the House and the will of the majority of the Senate. But the most needed reform is the elimination of the filibuster rule, a change from requiring three-fifths of senators to move a bill to a vote to requiring a simple majority. Such a change would not prevent Senator Bernie Sanders from making a long speech, as he did recently — an act widely mislabeled a “filibuster” despite the fact that he was not blocking any legislation. Such a change would simply end the power of 41 senators to block bills or nominations. A reform requiring any number between 41 and 51 would be an improvement as well.

Making the filibuster “real,” that is, requiring that senators stand and speak to maintain a filibuster, is much less of a real reform. It might break some filibusters; it might not. It would certainly give a platform to a minority of senators to mouth off while the corporate media compares them to Jimmy Stewart and describes their late-night heroics as they prevent any other senate business from occurring.

There were no filibusters until the late 1830s. The Senate originally functioned under the same rule the House still functions under, requiring a simple majority to move a bill to a vote. Until we can eliminate the Senate, we should eliminate rules that have made it worse. You may have less than a week to call your senators and say: About the filibuster: end it, don’t mend it.

By David Swanson

The House Judiciary Committee has some new members: Conor Boylan, David Swanson, Andrea Miller, and Tim Carpenter of Progressive Democrats of America:

PHOTO

The impeachments start later this afternoon.

Kidding.  Mostly.

The truth is that PDA is using the House Judiciary Committee’s hearing room as headquarters today,  It was packed this morning with congress members, staffers, and activists.  We’re passing out posters for tomorrow’s rally too.

PHOTO

Now everybody is out lobbying on both sides of the hill for an end to wars, investment in jobs, and commitments not to cut, weaken, or privatize Social Security.

Download the lobby packet here and here.

The two co-chairs of Progressive Democrats of America’s Healthcare Not Warfare Caucus, Norman Solomon and Donna Smith, have written to members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus asking them to change their ways.
 
"Many PDA members–and millions of other progressives–were disheartened by the course of events with healthcare legislation," write Smith and Solomon. "We saw that most of the CPC threw down the gauntlets about minimally ‘robust’ reform, but later picked them up, acquiescing to corporate interests and White House pressure. Please, do not do that with Social Security. Please, do not do that with Medicare."
 
PDA’s letter also goes after CPC members for their weakness in opposing war funding and urges them to all cosponsor Congresswoman Barbara Lee’s H.R. 6045 which would restrict military spending on Afghanistan to paying for U.S. withdrawal.
 
A reception is planned with the Co-Chairs of the Congressional Progressive Caucus Raul Grijalva and Lynn Woolsey, Chair of the Congressional Black Caucus Barbara Lee, Rep. Dennis Kucinich, Rep John Conyers, PDA Board Members Bill Fletcher, Jr and Medea Benjamin, and Co-Chair of Strengthen Social Security Nancy Altman.
 
The reception is October 1st, 4-5 p.m., at the Capitol Visitors Center.
 
The march on Washington planned for October 2nd and covered in Tuesday’s New York Times has added a demand for an immediate end to the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, and a transfer of funding from the war/military budget to jobs, housing, and green energy.
 
Visit: http://www.onenationforpeace.org

photos by Mike Hersh

 

Teach In on War on Capitol Hill
Don’t Use Any More of Our Money
Brown Bag Vigil on April 21st
Marcy Winograd in DC on April 27th
Harvey Wasserman on Climate Bill

Teach In on Capitol Hill on War

What Congress Must Do to End U.S. Wars and Help Secure a Peaceful Middle East

DESCRIPTION:  Educational briefing on the U. S. agenda in the Middle East, its consequences and development of a strategy/plan to withdraw.  Emphasis will be on constructive, interactive dialogue among panelists and attendees.

MODERATOR:  Representative Dennis J. Kucinich (D – Ohio)

PANELISTS: Chris Hedges, Jeremy Scahill, David Swanson, Ann Wright — Learn more.

DATE:  Thursday, April 29, 2010

TIME:  1:45 PM – 4:00 PM

PLACE:  Gold Room (2168), Rayburn House Office Building, Independence Ave and C Street SW, Washington, D.C.

REFRESHMENTS:  Beverages

ADMISSION:  Free and open to the public, the media, members of Congress, and staff

Call your Representative at (202) 224-3121 and ask them to attend.

  

Don’t Use Any More of Our Money

In the coming weeks, Congress will vote on spending $33 billion of your money to send another 30,000 troops, plus many more contractors, to Afghanistan. 

We are inflicting horrible suffering on the people of Afghanistan, making our own nation less safe, and spending resources we badly need.

Tell congress members we need them to publicly commit to voting No, and to urge their colleagues to do the same.  Call your Representative at (202) 224-3121.

Here’s a whip list tracking who has already committed to voting No and to publicly lobbying their colleagues to join them:
http://defundwar.org

  

Brown Bag Vigil on April 21st

It’s time to up the level and the reach of public pressure, with Brown Bag Vigils all over the country on April 21st at local congressional offices, where we will demand NO votes on funding an escalation in Afghanistan.

 

Marcy Winograd in Washington, D.C., on April 27th

Please join hosts Andy Shallal, Medea Benjamin, Steve Cobble, Steve Shaff, David Swanson, and Tim Carpenter to….
Meet and Greet PDA Congressional Candidate  Marcy Winograd (CA-36/Harman)
Busboys & Poets (5th and K St.), Washington, D.C.
April 27, 7:00 PM
Click here for more details and to RSVP

 

Video: Harvey Wasserman on Climate Bill, Hemp, Nukes, Teabaggery, and Solartopia

Harvey Wasserman spoke in Charlottesville, Va., on April 19, 2010. He discussed past activist successes and new strategies, and the vision of his book Solartopia, as well as the concerns expressed in his recent popular article "Will the Climate Bill Nuke Earth Day?" Wasserman laid out five key steps to fix the mess we’re in. You’ll want to hear them. Hint: one has to do with corporate power and another with wars.

WATCH THE VIDEO.