He never stands for election on the platform of dictatorship. He always represents himself as the instrument of the “A Free America,” “Service to the Lord,” or some other useful, supercilious buzzwords.

You can depend on the fact that our Dictator is one of the boys, and he stands for everything traditionally American. And although nobody will ever say ‘Heil’ to him, nor call him ‘Fuhrer’ or ‘Duce,’ they will greet him with one great big, universal, democratic, sheeplike bleat of ‘O.K., Chief! Fix it like you wanna, Chief! Oh Kaaaay!’

What’s happening in America is the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government has to act on information which the people cannot understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could understand it, it cannot be released because of national security.

This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, is taking place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real security purposes. And all the crises and safeguards (occasionally real safeguards, too) so preoccupy the people that they cannot not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter.

To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most ever have occasion to develop. Each step is so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, ‘regretted,’ that, unless one is detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understands what the whole thing is in principle, what all these ‘little measures’ (that no ‘reasonable, patriotic American’ could resent) must some day lead to, one no more can see it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head. One day, the government can do anything (and does) that it sees necessary, law or no law.

One doesn’t see exactly where or how to move. Each Neocon outrage, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a *little* worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for the one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in dissenting somehow. You don’t want to act, or even to talk, alone; you don’t want to ‘go out of your way to make trouble.’ Why not? — Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty.

Uncertainty is a very important factor, and, instead of decreasing as time goes on, it grows. Outside, in the streets, in the general community, everyone is happy. One hears no protest, and certainly sees none. You know, in France or Britain there will be slogans against the government painted on walls and fences; in the U.S., even in the largest cities, there is not even this. In the university community, in your own community, you speak privately to your colleagues, some of whom certainly feel as you do; but what do they say? They say, ‘It’s not so bad’ or ‘You’re seeing things’ or ‘You’re an alarmist.’

And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can’t prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don’t know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, the end?

As nightfall does not come all at once, neither does fascism. In both instances, there is a twilight. And it is in such twilight that we all must be aware of change in the air — however slight — or we all become unwitting victims of the darkness.
Anonymous said…

Rachel Rogers, a single mother of four in upstate New York, did not worry about the presence of National Guard recruiters at her son’s high school until she learned that they taught students how to throw hand grenades, using baseballs as stand-ins. For the last month she has been insisting that administrators limit recruiters’ access to children.

Orlando Terrazas, a former truck driver in Southern California, said he was struck when his son told him that recruiters were promising students jobs as musicians. Mr. Terrazas has been trying since September to hang posters at his son’s public school to counter the military’s message.

Meanwhile, Amy Hagopian, co-chairwoman of the Parent-Teacher-Student Association at Garfield High School in Seattle, has been fighting against a four-year-old federal law that requires public schools to give military recruiters the same access to students as college recruiters get, or lose federal funding. She also recently took a few hours off work to stand beside recruiters at Garfield High and display pictures of injured American soldiers from Iraq.

“We want to show the military that they are not welcome by the P.T.S.A. in this building,” she said. “We hope other P.T.S.A.’s will follow.”

Two years into the war in Iraq, as the Army and Marines struggle to refill their ranks, parents have become boulders of opposition that recruiters cannot move.

Mothers and fathers around the country said they were terrified that their children would have to be killed - or kill - in a war that many see as unnecessary and without end.

Around the dinner table, many parents said, they are discouraging their children from serving.

At schools, they are insisting that recruiters be kept away, incensed at the access that they have to adolescents easily dazzled by incentive packages and flashy equipment.

A Department of Defense survey last November, the latest, shows that only 25 percent of parents would recommend military service to their children, down from 42 percent in August 2003.

“Parents,” said one recruiter in Ohio who insisted on anonymity because the Army ordered all recruiters not to talk to reporters, “are the biggest hurdle we face.”

Legally, there is little a parent can do to prevent a child over 18 from enlisting. But in interviews, recruiters said that it was very hard to sign up a young man or woman over the strong objections of a parent.

The Pentagon - faced with using only volunteers during a sustained conflict, an effort rarely tried in American history - is especially vexed by a generation of more activist parents who have no qualms about projecting their own views onto their children.

Lawrence S. Wittner, a military historian at the State University of New York, Albany, said today’s parents also had more power.

“With the draft, there were limited opportunities for avoiding the military, and parents were trapped, reduced to draft counseling or taking their children to Canada,” he said. “But with the volunteer armed force, what one gets is more vigorous recruitment and more opportunities to resist.”

Some of that opportunity was provoked by the very law that was supposed to make it easier for recruiters to reach students more directly. No Child Left Behind, which was passed by Congress in 2001, requires schools to turn over students’ home phone numbers and addresses unless parents opt out. That is often the spark that ignites parental resistance.

Recruiters, in interviews over the past six months, said that opposition can be fierce. Three years ago, perhaps 1 or 2 of 10 parents would hang up immediately on a cold call to a potential recruit’s home, said a recruiter in New York who, like most others interviewed, insisted on anonymity to protect his career. “Now,” he said, “in the past year or two, people hang up all the time. ”

Several recruiters said they had even been threatened with violence.

“I had one father say if he saw me on his doorstep I better have some protection on me,” said a recruiter in Ohio. “We see a lot of hostility.”

Military officials are clearly concerned. In an interview last month, Maj. Gen. Michael D. Rochelle, commander of Army recruiting, said parental resistance could put the all-volunteer force in jeopardy. When parents and other influential adults dissuade young people from enlisting, he said, “it begs the question of what our national staying power might be for what certainly appears to be a long fight.”

In response, the Army has rolled out a campaign aimed at parents, with television ads and a Web site that includes videos of parents talking about why they supported their children’s decision to enlist. General Rochelle said that it was still too early to tell if it is making a difference.

But Col. David Slotwinski, a former chief of staff for Army recruiting, said that the Army faced an uphill battle because many baby boomer parents are inclined to view military service negatively, especially during a controversial war.

“They don’t realize that they have a role in helping make the all-volunteer force successful,” said Colonel Slotwinski, who retired in 2004. “If you don’t, you’re faced with the alternative, and the alternative is what they were opposed to the most, mandatory service.”

Many of the mothers and fathers most adamant about recruitment do have a history of opposition to Vietnam. Amy Hagopian, 49, a professor of public health at the University of Washington, and her husband, Stephen Ludwig, 57, a carpenter, said that they and many parents who contest recruiting at Garfield High in Seattle have a history of antiwar sentiment and see their efforts as an extension of their pacifism.

But, he added, parents are also reacting to what they see as the military’s increased intrusion into the lives of their children.

“The recruiters are in your face, in the library, in the lunchroom,” he said. “They’re contacting the most vulnerable students and recruiting them to go to war.”

The access is legally protected. As recently as 2000, said one former recruiter in California, it was necessary to dig through the trash at high schools and colleges to find students’ names and phone numbers. But No Child Left Behind mandates that school districts can receive federal funds only if they grant military recruiters “the same access to secondary school students” as is provided to colleges and employers.

So although the Garfield P.T.S.A. voted last month to ban military recruiters from the school and its 1,600 students, the Seattle school district could not sign on to the idea without losing at least $15 million in federal education funds.

“The parents have chosen to take a stand, but we still have to comply with No Child Left Behind,” said Peter Daniels, communications director for the district. In Whittier, a city of 85,000 10 miles southeast of East Los Angeles, about a dozen families last September accused the district of failing to properly advise parents that they had the right to deny recruiters access to their children’s personal information.

Mr. Terrazas, 51, the father of a Whittier High School junior, said the notification was buried among other documents in a preregistration packet sent out last summer.

“It didn’t say that the military has access to students’ information,” he said. “It just said to write a letter if you didn’t want your kid listed in a public directory.”

A few years ago, after Sept. 11, the issue might not have gotten Mr. Terrazas’s attention. His father served in World War II, his brother in Vietnam, and he said that he had always supported having a strong military able to defend the country.

But after the war in Iraq yielded no weapons of mass destruction, and as the death toll has mounted, he cannot reconcile the pride he feels at seeing marines deliver aid after the tsunami in Asia with his concern over the effort in Baghdad, he said.

“Because of the situation we’re in now, I would not want my son to serve,” he said. “It’s the policy that I’m against, not the military.”

After Mr. Terrazas and several other parents expressed their concern about the school’s role in recruitment, the district drafted a new policy. On May 23, it introduced a proposed opt-out form for the district’s 14,000 students.

The form, said Ron Carruth, Whittier’s assistant superintendent, includes an explanation of the law, and boxes that parents can check to indicate they do not want information on their child released to either the military, colleges, vocational schools or other sources of recruitment. Mr. Carruth said that next year the district would also prohibit all recruiters from appearing in classrooms, and keep the military ones from bringing equipment like Humvees onto school grounds, a commonly used recruitment tool.

He said that some of the information from the 11-by-17-inch poster that Mr. Terrazas sought to post, including how to verify recruiters’ claims about financial benefits, will be part of a pamphlet created by the school for students.

And at least a dozen other districts in the area, Mr. Carruth added, up from three in November, are considering similar plans.

Unlike Mr. Terrazas, Ms. Rogers, 37, of High Falls in the upper Hudson Valley, had not thought much about the war before she began speaking out in her school district. She had been “politically apathetic,” she said. She did not know about No Child Left Behind’s reporting requirements, nor did she opt out.

When her son, Jonah, said he was thinking of sitting out a gym class that was to be led by National Guard recruiters, Ms. Rogers, who works part time as a clerk at the local motor vehicles office and receives public assistance, said she told him not to be “a rebel without a cause.”

“In this world,” she recalled telling him, “we need a strong military.”

But then she heard from her son that the class was mandatory, and that recruiters were handing out free T-shirts and key chains - “Like, ‘Hey, let’s join the military. It’s fun,’ ” she said.

First she called the Rondout Valley High School to complain about the “false advertising,” she said, then her congressman.

On May 24, at the first school board meeting since the gym class, she read aloud from a recruiting handbook that advised recruiters on ways to gain maximum access to schools, including offering doughnuts. A high school senior, Katie Coalla, 18, stood up at one point and tearfully defended the recruiters, receiving applause from the crowd of about 70, but Ms. Rogers persisted.

“Pulling in this need for heartstrings patriotic support is clouding the issue,” she said. “The point is not whether I support the troops. It’s about whether a well-organized propaganda machine should be targeted at children and enforced by the schools.”

By Damien Cave
Laura Cummins, in Accord, N.Y., contributed reporting for this article.

“Mr. Cunningham accepted a bribe to perform an official act – an egregious action that strikes at the very heart of our democracy and dishonors the people he has been elected to represent; it is only proper that he resign.

“This offense is just the latest example of the culture of corruption that pervades the Republican-controlled Congress, which ignores the needs of the American people to serve wealthy special interests and their cronies. The Republican Congress has the wrong priorities; it is time to restore a high ethical standard to the Congress.”
~ Nancy Pelosi
—————–
They are starting to fall like dominos. GOOD!
~ BackyardPi

The New Recruitment

It is not a surprising confluence of events — opinion polls show support for the Iraq War waning and military recruiters working harder to fill their quotas. In November, 2005, the Government Accountability Office released a study which showed, “the military is falling far behind in its effort to recruit and re-enlist soldiers for some of the most vital combat positions in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

Read full story:

No Child Left Behind

The June 2005 issue of HARPER’S MAGAZINE published some excerpts from a high school recruiting manual. Among the instructions: “Contact the seniors in the early spring. The end of their lives as high school students is approaching fast. This is the time reality sets in. For some it is clear that college is not an option. If you can make the appointment for a sales presentation on the first contact, then do so.” The manual suggests frequent re-contacting of students throughout their high school years.

Read the manual online. pdf
Leave My Child Alone!
Advocacy group opposed to the release of information through the No Child Left Behind Act.
Read full story: http://leavemychildalone.org/

Did you know…

… that the notorious No Child Left Behind Act includes a sneaky section that requires high schools to turn over private information on students to military recruiters?
And that the Pentagon has created an illegal database of 30 million 16-25 year-olds, including names, addresses, email addresses, cell phone numbers, ethnicities, social security numbers, extracurricular activities, and areas of study?
Yikes. What do we do? Any way you look at it, this is a family privacy nightmare, another strong-arming of our local schools, and a creepy warm-up to a possible draft. However, it’s also a great reason to get together and take action.
So, whether you’re a parent, teacher, school administrator, veteran or just another adamant American concerned about privacy rights, look for an action that you like and JOIN US!

Read full story:

~ BackyardPit

One advertising agency did a good job of putting that figure into perspective in one of its releases:

A billion seconds ago it was 1959.

A billion minutes ago Jesus was alive.

A billion hours ago our ancestors were living in the Stone Age.

A billion days ago no creature walked the earth on two feet.

And a billion dollars lasts 8 hours and 20 minutes at the rate our government spends it.

~ Kaye

~ BackyardPit

I took my troubles down to Tom DeLay
He’s that dude with the insect spray
He’s got a pad down on Thirty-Fourth and Vine
Sellin’ little bottles of, Rove Potion Number Nine

I told him that I sucked at pol-i-tics
I’ve been this way since 1996
He looked at my palm and he made a magic sign
He said “What you need is, Rove Potion Number Nine”

He bent down and turned around and gave me a wink
He said “I’m gonna make it up right here in the sink”
It smelled like turpentine, it looked like Indian ink
I held my nose, I closed my eyes, I took a drink

I didn’t know if it was day or night
I started slimin’ everyone in sight
But when I dissed a cop down on Thirty-Fourth and Vine
He broke my little bottle of, Rove Potion Number Nine

Audio “Love Potion Number Nine”

By MadMustard

~ BackyardPit

Burgess, of the Conflict Research Consortium, says he’ll continue working on the political help-wanted ad he constructs in his daydreams. He wants a candidate who will stand up to “political manipulation,” and explain to Americans how opportunistic politicians are distorting real debate for selfish purposes.

“Somebody’s got to get up and explain to people how they’re being manipulated,” he says. “I think there’s an opportunity for someone to run against it.”

Then he considers what he has just said.

“I might be being naive.”

Read full story.

~ BackyardPit

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - White House staffers will be required to attend briefings next week on ethics and the handling of classified information after the indictment last week of a senior administration official in the CIA leak probe, the Washington Post reported on Saturday.

Quoting a memo from President George W. Bush sent to White House aides on Friday, the paper reported that the White House counsel’s office will conduct a series of presentations next week for those aides with security clearances.

The briefings with provide a refresher on general ethics rules, including the treatment of classified material, the paper wrote.
Read full story.

O-boy, some more bullshit coming out of Washington. You’re going to try and tell me Dick Cheney, Lewis Libby, Carl Rove and other White House staffers need a refresher on general ethics rules, including the treatment of classified materials. You’re going to try and tell me you’re going to give a bunch of gangsters a refresher on ethics rules. Bullshit, what they need is to be fired and put in jail and you Bush, you need to resign!
BackyardPit.

For the first time in his presidency a majority of Americans question the integrity of President Bush, and growing doubts about his leadership have left him with record negative ratings on the economy, Iraq and even the war on terrorism, a new Washington Post-ABC News poll shows.

On almost every key measure of presidential character and performance, the survey found that Bush has never been less popular with the American people. Currently 39 percent approve of the job he is doing as president, while 60 percent disapprove of his performance in office — the highest level of disapproval ever recorded for Bush in Post-ABC polls

Read full story at Washington Post

I bet you republicans and Christians who voted for the gangster republicans are kicking yourselves in the ass right about now, it gets better, wait till the end of the gangster republican Bush’s term in office and he pardons his gangster republican buddies. Then you can give yourselves a relay good kick in the ass.
We should be giving people like Ronnie Earle, Valerie Plame, Joe Wilson, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, Bunnatine Greenhouse and Colin Powell and others The Presidential Medal of Freedom. The Presidential Medal of Freedom is the highest civilian award given in the United States. And putting the gangster republican liars in jail and throwing the key away!
BackyardPit