Post Trump Letters to My Democratic Senators

As much as know-nothings and racists, corrupt Democrats who don't listen to or fight for their constituents cost their party the presidency.

Here's one of my letters to my three Democratic senators (one is being replaced at the end of this term by another). I live in a Republican House district, so I have no rep to contact there.

Feel free to copy and send it to your own senators, reps, and state and national party officials.


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Sen. Dianne Feinstein

United States Senate

331 Hart Senate Office Building

Washington, D.C. 20510

November 13, 2016

Sen. Feinstein,

As a Democratic voter old enough to remember the George W. Bush years, I urge you to fight against Republicans and fight for progressive values rather than repeat the shameful enabling that Democrats in both chambers did for nearly all of the Bush presidency.

I am under no illusions that Democrats made some faulty tactical political decisions to pursue a greater good. 

The reality is too many elected Democrats take their marching orders from Wall Street banks and other corporations even when what they want conflicts with the best interests and wishes of the overwhelming majority of your constituents.  This has been especially true on issues like Wall Street deregulation and  bailouts, instead of regulation and vigorous prosecution, enabling the privatization of public education and prisons, and not publicly challenging the business and geopolitical goals of our foreign policy and means of implementing them.

A profound example of this was Obamacare that was written largely by insurance companies with seemingly no provision to control their arbitrary price increases instead of something like Medicare for All or at least a public option that would have served as a threat to private insurers that if they didn't act ethically, their customers could leave them for that.

Democrats in Congress have also supported rather than opposed our profoundly dishonest and criminal policies in Middle East.  Our allies in the Gulf, and indirectly (barely) our own government are supporting groups like ISIS to undermine secular regimes like the one in Syria, and the past one in Libya.

Likewise, the recently declassified Saudi pages of the Joint Congressional Inquiry into 9/11 make it clear that Saudi Arabia funded and supported the 9/11 hijackers, which our government did nothing about.  This makes it clear that terrorism is not a problem our government is fighting but a tool and excuse it is using to pursue other goals.  No one in the leadership of Democrats in Congress has ever clearly articulated what those goals are and consistently fought this agenda that I know of.

Worse, once the Cold War ended and Russia became at least as capitalist as us, rather than find a way to cooperate with them, we have violated our word, expanded NATO to their borders, and fomented coups in places like the Ukraine to install regimes hostile to Russian security and economic interests like the transit of oil and gas from Russia to European markets.  A lot of people like myself balked at voting for Hillary Clinton since she had enthusiastically implemented this policy as Secretary of State and during her campaign, announced even more confrontational policies that could have lead to war with nuclear armed Russia.  While we might "win" such a war, millions would lose their lives and trillions dollars would be wasted to benefit very, very few.

While you have been progressive on many domestic issues, your family’s profiting from war contracts makes your support of any policy in that area suspect to say the least.  

Senator Feinstein, I urge you to help make the Democratic Party represent working people instead of just being the corporate party that doesn't pander to bigots.

Urge your colleagues to fight for leaders of the Democratic minority in Congress who will fight for progressive values.  Wall Street tools like Chuck Schumer should not even be considered an option.

Democratic voters will no longer tolerate politicians who give us lip service during election season, their back after, and their loyalty to Wall Street.

Sincerely,

 Professor Smartass

TO OBAMA: in every war speech, add military & economic reality check

I posted the following to the Change.gov's Citizens' Briefing Book of ideas for Obama. If you like what I have to say, go there and vote it up. If you don't, go make a better suggestion.

Congress should be required to detail in any authorization of military action or funding of on-going military action and the president should be required to cite in detail in any speech about military action the following:

• How large the military of that country is compared to ours. If the threat is supposedly about WMD, they must recite the number of nukes we have, and what any country knows we would do if they launched nukes at us or gave terrorists a nuke they detonate here: burn them off the map before the mushroom cloud cleared here.

Once that is discussed, people will wonder why we are even considering attacking that country, which leads to what Napoleon said wars are really all about:

"There is only one thing in this world, and that is to keep acquiring money and more money, power and more power. All the rest is meaningless."

The Bush administration and our Congress, including most Democrats, have been profoundly dishonest about this in the current Iraq War. Therefore, they should be required to enumerate the following about future military conflicts:

• Describe the historic business interests the United States or other foreign powers have had in that country. Obviously, with Iran, Iraq, and Venezuela, that interest is oil. Oil is also less obviously but equally our interest in the Sudan, Nigeria, and a good deal of AFRICOM.

• Describe in detail which business interests have lobbied for the military action, how much they have given to members of Congress who did and didn't vote for the action, how much money they plan to make in the invaded or intimidated country, and what percentage of their profits they pay in taxes to the United States.

In the current Iraq War, we still haven't heard details about what oil companies demanded of Cheney in his energy task force, but we do know they were pouring over maps of Iraq and lists of which countries had oil contracts there. After the invasion, Bush forced them to privatize most of their economy and is pressuring to pass a Hydrocarbon (oil) law that originally gave 88% of the oil income to oil companies, a deal other oil rich Gulf countries would never accept without a gun to their heads (which Iraq has).

While the Iraqi cabinet approved the law,the parliament figured out it was a bad deal, so the oil companies actually tried to BRIBE them with millions of dollars each to pass it--and they STILL wouldn't pass it.

MORE IRAQ OIL THEFT LINKS

• Describe in detail what the average American will get for sacrificing our tax dollars and soldiers lives for these business interests.

In the case of Iraq, our reward from oil companies was continued demands for tax breaks & subsidies, being gouged at the pump, AND demand for more drilling rights in federal lands with no obligation to sell the oil here or even drill it in a timely manner to help prices here.

As we saw with the Wall Street crisis this fall and even more clearly with how they spent our bailout money on mergers, exorbitant executive bonuses, and lavish parties, America's financial elite are not only incompetent and morally bankrupt, but they are a threat to the economic security and safety of average Americans.

The economic pain we are feeling now is just a taste of what they have dealt out to other countries for decades, crushing their dreams of democracy and decent standard of living just to get a few more percentage points of profit.

Unfortunately, George W. Bush was not an aberration, but their greed, callousness, and incompetence lurching into plain view for all to see for the first time.

Just because they have scurried back to the shadows doesn't mean they aren't still calling the shots.

The way to start to pry their sociopathic hands from wheel of state is to demand our elected officials state publicly what the financial elite demand of them in private before another generation of Americans is further impoverished, killed in their wars, and asked to take the lives of those who stand in the way of their profits.

McCain falsely blamed troops for torture during debate

During the first debate with Barack Obama, John McCain said this would solve the torture problem:

So we have a long way to go in our intelligence services. We have to do a better job in human intelligence. And we've got to -- to make sure that we have people who are trained interrogators so that we don't ever torture a prisoner ever again.

CNN TRANSCRIPT

Wow. So the problem is ignorant interrogators, not the people in the White House who gave the orders?

Didn't CIA interrogators refuse to use the methods they were ordered to use until they got the legal cover from the torture memos, written under the guidance of then White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales who went on to become attorney general?

The resulting memo defined torture as only "death, organ failure or the permanent impairment of a significant body function."

The few soldiers prosecuted at Abu Ghraib weren't trained in interrogation techniques, but they were following orders from the interrogators at the prison who told them to "soften the prisoners up" for them, and the methods they used were remarkably similar to a then Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's torture memo said to be posted publicly at Abu Ghraib by prison commander Gen. Jane Karpinski.

Recently, it was discovered that the White House principals actually met to micromanage torture methods like sleep deprivation and waterboarding, and incredibly, Bush said he knew and approved, according to ABC News.

The Principals Committee included Vice President Cheney, former National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell, as well as CIA Director George Tenet and Attorney General John Ashcroft.

Contrary to the Bush administration spin on this, the military is hardly ignorant on torture nor do they approve of it apart from Bush's handpicked generals.

The abuse at Abu Ghraib was first reported by an Army MP, Joseph Darby.

When Navy lawyers at the Pentagon, who work for JAG became aware of the torture policy, they contacted the New York City Bar Association’s Committee on International Human Rights and urged them to publicly and strenuously oppose it.

In November of 2006, then dean of West Point, US Army Brigadier General Patrick Finnegan, flew to Southern California to ask the producers of the TV show 24 to stop glorifying torture since it was influencing the thinking of cadets more than the training they were getting at West Point.

Perhaps most daming evidence against the "blame the troops" position on torture is the Army's own interrogation manual. In addition to describing as torture virtually every technique approved by the Bush administration, it gives this simple test of whether something is torture:

If your contemplated actions were perpetrated by the enemy against US PWs [prisoners of war], you would believe such actions violate international or US law.

FM 34-52

Jesus said it more simply, "Do unto to others as you would have them do unto you" (Matthew 7:12, Luke 6:31).

All the Christians who have supported Bush have forgotten that in their lynch mob blood lust.

To his credit, John McCain bucked the Bush administration on torture for a while and even wrote a moving op-ed on why it was a bad idea.

Our commitment to basic humanitarian values affects--in part--the willingness of other nations to do the same. Mistreatment of enemy prisoners endangers our own troops who might someday be held captive. While some enemies, and Al Qaeda surely, will never be bound by the principle of reciprocity, we should have concern for those Americans captured by more traditional enemies, if not in this war then in the next.

(John McCain, Newsweek Nov. 21, 2005)

Unfortunately, McCain gave up this moral and pragmatic position to gain the support of the Bush administration and voted to give Bush the discretion to use torture.

After being involved in the torture debate since it broke out in 2004, McCain knows this is not an issue of poorly trained soldiers but of elected civilian leaders and their appointees who put their own personal agendas ahead of our military's traditional ethics, our laws, and the Geneva Convention, which we helped write. They put their own agendas and personal gains ahead of the safety of our troops with their torture policy, as McCain's own earlier words testify to.

Instead of defending the troops, McCain is siding with the worst president in our history and blaming them for the conduct of the White House, which has used the troops as human shields to deflect responsibility for their own war crimes.

That is beneath contempt.

At a future debate, I want McCain to be asked who bears primary responsibility for the torture that has occurred: the troops in the field or the civilians who gave the orders.

BUSH TORTURE RESOURCES

Declassified torture memos

NY Times guide to torture memos

Geneva Convention against torture

Overview of Abu Ghraib abuse: 60% or more innocent

The most famous torture victim's story

Detaining, abusing, & raping children

VIDEO: Torture Memo Author Asked if President Can Bury Someone Alive

You can get Sarah Palin's foreign policy experience in just 2 seconds!

All you have to do is look at these photos of Russia's Big Diomede Island, which can be seen from Alaska.

The Russian island has been uninhabited since World War II. The American one has a population of 146.

The island on the left is part of the United States.
The one on the right is Russian.

Here's a better view of just the Russian one:


And our rock island and Russia's from space:

Man, I don't know about you, but after looking at those photos, I feel much more qualified to talk to Vladimir Putin about strategic nuclear weapons, which countries to let into NATO, and whether we are risking a world war by trying to encroach on Caspian Sea oil or by attacking Iran.

Don't you feel it too?

Thank you, Sarah Palin, for helping so many of us to become foreign policy experts by looking at a rock that happens to belong to another country.