Fournier for Congress

Michael Moore made an idiot out of himself on “Democracy Now!” this morning. He endorsed Obama and then proceeded to differ with the candidate on the critical issues of war, health care, and the economy. Moore says he’s hoping Obama will violate his promise to strengthen the US military presence in Afghanistan, that he’ll withdraw his support for the continuation of private health insurance, and that he’ll repudiate his own vote in favor of the bank bailout. Good luck with that, Mike! Amy Goodman didn’t ask Moore whether this betrayal of his own publicly-expressed principles is permanent or just for the election.  

Seven billion dollars in cash got misplaced in Iraq because of the “fog of war.” Either 30,000 or 650,000 Iraqis died in consequence of the U. S. occupation; the number’s not knowable because of the fog of war. Amid the fog of war, U. S. pilots are caught on tape strafing a squad of British soldiers. The fog of war keeps military authorities from noticing atrocities committed by the growing criminal element in our armed forces.

Where does this metaphor come from, and why are we suddenly hearing it so often? You won’t find it in the works of Stephen Crane or Rudyard Kipling. Eisenhower didn’t use it, and neither does Colin Powell. It came up recently when filmmaker Errol Morris made it the title of his 2003 documentary about failed warmaker Robert MacNamara, but it’s not a new concept.

The idea of a fog of war goes back at least to a Prussian general whose troops got beaten repeatedly by Napoleon’s forces, right up until the French conqueror’s fortunes were reversed at Waterloo. This Prussian,the esteemed Carl von Clausewitz, wrote a book in 1832 on the philosophy of war that is regaining popularity among “scholarly” militarists.

As a chronic loser of military engagements, Clausewitz seems to have anticipated Murphy’s Law, which says that what can go wrong will go wrong. The fog of war is an extension of this doctrine. Amid the smoke, the flying balls of lead, the flashing blades, the blood, the screams, and the dead bodies, there will be confusion, and military tactics will sometimes go awry. Can’t be helped. Oh, well.

I think the reason you haven’t heard much about the fog of war until recently is that is looks a lot like an excuse for malfeasance. Today, with military malfeasance at a level unseen since the 18th Century, excuses are needed, and the fog of war seems to get the point across. Never mind that Clausewitz was referring literally to gunsmoke, of which there was plenty from the firearms of his day and which has been largely removed from the modern field of combat.

So when you hear a general or government official or an agent of the commercial media use the term “fog of war,” don’t lose sight of the true meaning of this picturesque metaphor: incompetence, failure, and defeat.

America is in deep trouble. It’s not just the economy. Our way of life is falling apart in front of us. We used to be a nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Today we’re a homeland, divided, forced to present ID to enter a public building and forced to tolerate outlaws in public office.   Good-bye, Liberty!  Good-bye, Justice! 

Democrats and Republicans in Washington put us in this mess and they have no plans to change course. They’re going to keep on waging war, keep on making secret deals, keep us burning oil, keep on spying on us, keep on making the rich richer while the poor get poorer.

We didn’t vote for this. We didn’t vote for two wars. We didn’t vote for a trillion dollar blank check for bankers. We didn’t vote for a health care casino that leaves millions sick and broke. We didn’t vote to neglect the levees in New Orleans or to assemble mercenary armies for deployment to our streets. Democrats and Republicans in Washington, stuck in the 20th Century, gave us all that.

I’m running with the Green Party, because I’ve left the the 20th Century behind. In the 21st Century, we don’t do war. We do public works instead. We don’t do clandestine deals. We do the public interest instead. We don’t subsidize bankers, and we don’t coddle irresponsible debtors either. We don’t make people shop for health care. We join the rest of the industrialized world and make it a tax-funded entitlement. We work like hell to end fuel-burning and restore the earth, sooner rather than later.

As a lawyer and a professional persuader, I plan to put intense pressure on Democrats and Republicans to clean up their act. Restoring our republic is a dirty job, and I’ll do it if I win this election.

Rick Green: A Lot At Stake In 1st District:

With extinction of the middle class, another Great Depression and the rule of law on the line, you would think we’d be hearing just a little bit more about the race in the First Congressional District.

(Reprised from Current Invective)

In the neo-democratic institutions of the 21st Century, the inalienable right of the people to opt out of debate and decision-making has created a new social order: decidership. Americans live in a decidership, and it has rather suddenly replaced the republic we have been relinquishing over the past 20 years or so.

The ruling class in a decidership names a decider and holds a sham election to confirm him. George W. Bush will be seen as the first in a line of deciders. We entrust our decider to select from the myriad policy options available to comfort the worried masses in a failing nation.

A decidership is entirely multiple-choice. Unlike dictators, who superimpose personal vision on the nations they rule, deciders have no vision but depend on others to supply it. Deciders resemble dictators only in the sense that they wield absolute power.

Decidership requires no public discussion, and it countenances none. Visionaries representing privileged political patrons present their ideas in private to subordinates of the decider, who edit out the chaff and present what’s left to the decider. The decider then presents his selections to the legislative branch for approval; approval is optional, since the decider is empowered by the sleepy populace to execute his selections with or without it.

There are courts in a decidership, but the decider decides when and in what manner court orders will be honored or enforced. Court orders adversely affecting the decider or his subordinates or patrons are routinely ignored. Standards, rules, and laws are altogether arbitrary in a decidership and can never be allowed to impede the decider or his patrons in any way. “The Constitution is a piece of paper,” said the first decider not long ago.

In a decidership, the people must have enemies, and the decider chooses them for us. They are almost always ruled by cronies of the decider or his patrons, people like Saddam Hussein and Manuel Noriega. Deciders are licensed to kill the chosen enemies, but they usually do it through surrogates, typically decent young men who put on a military uniform every day out of a sense of duty and honor. When the decider’s soldiers kill, they get a pat on the back. When they die, they must be buried in secret. The injured ones are discarded like refuse in a decidership, but who cares?

The who-cares ethic is really at the heart of a decidership. All power flows from the vacuum that informs public morality. In a decidership, the bombing of foreign cities and kindness to animals coexist comfortably. There are warriors for Jesus and vegans with pit bulls. Cognitive dissonance is treated with drugs, mostly by prescription, or with massage or meditation.

Nobody knows how long a decidership can endure. We know that it can overcome a hardy old constitution, 50 state governments and international organizations of every kind, including the one known, anachronistically, as the United Nations. We suspect decidership will survive another election and corrupt the winner irredeemably. The people will be asleep again within a month of the inauguration, if history’s any guide. The big question is whether decidership can withstand the strains of an economy in catastrophic failure and an army in revolt, common hazards for nations that reject the duties of citizenship.

I participated in a candidate forum on Sunday at St. Bridget’s Church in Manchester. It’s the only opportunity I’ve had so far in this election to discuss issues in public with the incumbent Democrat John Larson and his Republican challenger Joseph Visconti. With the commercial media focused so completely on the presidential election, there’s precious little to help voters decide which congressional candidate to support, especially those who might be disposed to vote for a non-Democrat/non-Republican.

The Connecticut League of Women Voters is sponsoring a candidate forum in my district, but I’m not invited to participate because, according to the decision-makers at the League, I’m not a serious candidate. The League didn’t tell me exactly what the criteria for seriousness are, but they were clear on this: I haven’t raised enough money. I made a complaint, but I don’t expect to get anywhere with it.

There’s some irony in the League’s decision. The League was kind enough to invite me to submit answers to questions for its on-line voters’ guide. I put some work into the answers, exhausting the word-count limit, and I tried to cram as much information and detail as I could into each response. I visited the site to see what the other two candidates had submitted. John Larson’s responses refer voters to his web site for answers (there are no answers on his web site), and Joe Visconti gives brief, general responses with little detail and no commitments. Anyone consulting the League’s guide would conclude from the three sets of responses that I’m the only serious candidate and would be surprised to hear that I was disqualified from the League’s candidate forum.

Channel 3 also seems determined to keep me out of the public eye. Dennis House interviewed me for eight minutes in June on “Face the State,” but the station didn’t archive the segment for over two months, impeding my petition drive. Interviews with Democrats and Republicans were featured prominently on the show’s web site, but I had to press hard for a couple of months to get my interview posted. This past Sunday “Face the State” featured Larson and Visconti, but Dennis didn’t call me.

The lesson of all this is not that I’m unelectable. If ever there was a year to vote against Democrats and Republicans, this is the year. The lesson is that voters will have to discuss the issues in this congressional election among themselves. The commercial media aren’t going to cover it, and they especially aren’t going to give a dissident candidate a soapbox.  So when you talk to people who vote in the First District, ask which candidate they’re supporting for Congress and why. Send them to my website. Send them to CT-N, which taped the forum on Sunday at St. Bridget’s and will soon have the event available on-demand on the CT-N website. If you don’t discuss this election with people you know, it probably won’t get discussed at all.

Bank robbery, generally understood as a crime committed against the banker, takes on new meaning under the legislation that is expected to pass the House today. The bill allows bankers to rob the national treasury to make up for gambling losses incurred by a few of them over the last couple of years.

The bank thugs didn’t hold a gun to the Congress, but they did the next best thing. They threatened the government of the United States with the immediate termination of further credit if the people failed to fork over a sum equal to the yearly earnings of 30 million workers. Just as a kidnaper cuts off his victim’s finger and sends it to the anxious relatives, the bankers cut off the credit of small business first, to show they’re serious.

Our leaders like to say that they don’t negotiate with terrorists, and they didn’t negotiate in this case. They simply agreed to pay the ransom. As often happens in such cases, capitulation is no guarantee that the bankers will liberate our abducted economy, and my congressman John Larson, who voted to pay the terrorists, shouldn’t be surprised to find the economy decomposing in a shallow grave soon after the election.

My opponent Congressman John Larson and a panel of influential local Democrats gave ten good reasons yesterday not to bail out bankrupt bankers and then pleaded for public support to do just that.

They held the floor for over an hour and left the public a half-hour to ask questions. It was clear from their talk that:

There is no panic except among bankers
The bailout (Larson prefers “rescue) isn’t paid for
The people are against it
It regulates nothing
The political process of enacting it is corrupt
It might not work, and, even if does, we’ll have to cough up more later
It’s still a blank check for Bush
It was arranged in haste and poorly thought-out
Huge amounts of money will flow out of this country
Congress is incompetent to handle economic issues, and this is probably not the best solution

The reasons for enacting the bailout—Larson believes that it didn’t pass because we called it a bailout instead of a rescue—are one: we’re scared. It’s a crisis, and we must act, says John Larson. Do something! Anything! Throw money!

When Larson was challenged to explain why he let this happen, he had, as always, “blame to go around.” His defense is based on his own weakness and the utter corruption of the body—the greatest government on earth, by consensus of opinion—in which he serves.

Larson’s argument is that it’s impossible to act in the public interest because members of the other party oppose it. He’s saying, first, that the positions of his adversaries are fixed and immutable and that he hasn’t the strength of character to persuade any of them of anything. He’s acknowledging that as a leader, with the power to sway public opinion and public policy, he is an utter failure. And as he confesses the weakness of his own advocacy, he maligns the House of Representatives as incapable, without supermajorities, of doing the right thing. Crap!

John Larson fails to carry out the will of the people because it conflicts with the will of his owners, expressed through the leaders of his elite club, Nancy Pelosi, Rahm Emanuel, Barney Frank, and company, along with their cronies in the other party and in the Senate and White House. It’s Larson and Bush against us on this issue.