Is Another Aspect Of The TPP They Hid From Us, Legally Stoning Gays?

Psychotic assholes

"Money and principle," Orlando Congressman Alan Grayson told me this morning, "are battling for U.S. foreign policy supremacy. Money is winning." He was referring particularly to trade policy, especially the TransPacific Partnership on which he is probably the top congressional expert. Congress appears to be slowing the TPP down a little, but, alas, not killing it off. Maybe a Hollywood boycott, though, can help.

Ever hear of Brunei? It's a small (population 408,000, same as Omaha), extremely rich (5th wealthiest nation in the world, entirely based on oil and gas), fascist dictatorship on the island of Borneo that somehow escaped being incorporated into Indonesia or Malaysia. The dictator is an hereditary sultan and this one is a homophobic psychotic who has just mandated the death penalty (by stoning) for gays. He's one our our esteemed partners in the TPP. And here's where the boycott comes in. Even if you had never heard of Brunei, you well may have heard of the Dorchester Collection luxury hotel chain (which includes the Beverly Hills Hotel and Hotel Bel-Air in L.A., the Hotel Eden in Rome, London's Dorchester and 45 Park Lane, Hôtel Plaza Athénée in Paris, Hotel Principe di Savoia, and several others). They are all being boycotted starting this week. Virgin's Richard Branson is one of the organizers of the boycott. So are the Oscars.

Brunei's all-powerful Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah announced last Wednesday that he would push ahead with the syariah law that will eventually include tough penalties such as death by stoning.

Branson said on the weekend that Virgin employees would not stay at the Dorchester Collection luxury hotel chain, which includes The Dorchester in London and the Beverly Hills Hotel in Los Angeles.

"No @Virgin employee, nor our family, will stay at Dorchester Hotels until the Sultan abides by basic human rights," the British billionaire posted on Twitter.

Others who have called for a boycott include comedian Stephen Fry, TV host Sharon Osbourne and comedian Ellen DeGeneres.

The US group Feminist Majority Foundation said it had also pulled its annual Global Women's Rights Awards, co-chaired by Jay and Mavis Leno, from the Beverly Hills Hotel in protest.

Our old friend Curtis Ellis, the Executive Director of the American Jobs Alliance, wants to make sure people upset about the floggings, dismemberments and stoning-to-death are also aware that just as Brunei was phasing in the barbaric practices, "Obama’s chief trade negotiator Michael Froman was on Capitol Hill selling the TransPacific Partnership agreement, which would bind the U.S. to Brunei and give the Islamic Sultanate special economic privileges." It would also allow Brunei to bypass U.S. courts and go before an international tribunal to sue for lost profits from the boycott being pushed by the city of Beverly Hills and human rights advocates.  

“The fact that President Obama seeks the TransPacific Partnership to reward Brunei, which has institutionalized the torture to death and violent punishment of gay men, lesbians and women in general, represents a new low in the administration’s abandonment of America’s traditional role in upholding human rights,” says feminist author and activist Naomi Wolf.

“The TransPacific Partnership is a terrifying development for Americans because it forces us to live under decisions that we have no say about whatsoever, and takes legislation and legal rulings out of the hands of Americans and puts them in the hands of international courts beyond the reach of the will of the people,” says Wolf.

While human rights groups, religious freedom advocates, LGBT and women’s rights groups protest a regime that supports the public flogging of women who have abortions, the jailing of women who become pregnant outside of marriage, the stoning to death of gay men and lesbians and the outlawing of Bibles and Christian missionaries, the Obama administration is seeking deeper ties with the Islamic Sultanate of Brunei.

The TransPacific Partnership (TPP) is a sweeping pact with twelve nations that would tie the U.S. more closely to Brunei and give the Brunei government special investment privileges in the United States.

“The barbarism in Brunei shows us everything that’s wrong with the TransPacific Partnership. We should not give special privileges to countries that spit on basic American values. The Obama administration should be standing up for American values and human rights, not the Sultan of Brunei,” says American Jobs Alliance executive director Curtis Ellis.

Mark Pocan, who has ProgressivePunch's #1 progressive crucial vote score of any Member of Congress, was not happy. "The Trans-Pacific Partnership," he told us, "must not provide special trade privileges to countries that continue to violate human rights and restrict equality. American trade agreements should be the economic reward for developing countries that promote human rights, not reinforcing bad actions by nations like Brunei." Shenna Bellows, the progressive Democrat running for the Maine Senate seat occupied by TPP supporter Susan Collins, felt the same way as Rep. Pocan. "The situation in Brunei demonstrates the need to halt the Trans Pacific Partnership and to take a different approach to ensure the human rights, labor and environmental standards are key parts any international trade agreements."

Ted Lieu is the state senator for Beverly Hills and if he wins the primary next month and the election in November, he'll be the congressman that covers the Beverly Hills Hotel as well. I don't think he had politics in mind this evening when he told us how horrified he was by the whole Brunei mess. "I join with others in calling for a boycott of the Beverly Hills Hotel and the Hotel Bel-Air until a new owner is found. The current owner, the government of Brunei, has passed a series of shockingly repressive and brutal laws against women and homosexuals. For example, stoning homosexuals to death was wrong in the 16th century and is wrong today. It is the equivalent of the government murdering people based on their sexual orientation. There are many other hotels in Beverly Hills for people to stay. I also note that it would be ridiculous for the U.S. to reward Brunei with the TPP."

The Conservatives' War Against Women Really Is A War Against The 99%

When Connie Morella served in Congress, there still really were moderate Republicans-- and she was one them. But Connie is 81 now and those days are far gone. There are no moderate Republicans; there aren't even mainstream conservative Republicans. The party has gone institutionally insane-- and Connie agrees with that assessment. She started life as a Democrat in Massachusetts but switched when she married a moderate Republican who worked for Maryland Senator Charles Mathias. An 8 term congresswoman, she never felt all that comfortable with the radical right take-over of her adopted party. She was outspokenly pro-Choice, pro-pot, pro-immigrant and pro-gun control, favored equality for minorities and gays, was an advocate for a clean environment and was the only Republican in the House to oppose both Bushs plans to invade Iraq (1991 and 2002)-- not popular positions among an increasingly deranged GOP base that ceded any semblance of independent thinking to Rush Limbaugh, Glen Beck, Michael Savage and the Fox News hate and propaganda machine. Democrats in control of the state legislature gerrymandered her district to guarantee a win for then state-Senator Chris Van Hollen, also a moderate whose record is pretty much the same as Morella's. In 2010 President Obama appointed her to the American Battle Monuments Commission.

Friday she gave an exclusive interview to Josh Israel of TPM in which she lambasted her fellow Republicans for their War on Women. She explained that the Republican Party is not just not a big tent party, it's "not even a small tent, It collapsed." When she helped reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act in 2000, it passed in a Republican-controlled House 415 to 3, only certifiably insane GOP wingnuts/human garbage voting against it, Helen Chenoweth (R-ID), John Hostelttler (R-IN) and adulterer Mark Sanford (R-SC).

"I think the [Republican] Party has moved more towards the right and it has become more solidified in terms of not offering opportunities for other voices to be heard. Look at [Indiana Republican Senate Nominee Richard] Mourdock’s statement when he proclaimed victory: I’m not going to give into them, they’re going to come over to me. The word compromise is not even in the lexicon, let alone an understanding of what it means."

...I went to Harvard in 2008. My program’s theme was “An Endangered Species: A Moderate in the House of Representatives.” If I were to go back now, I think I’d have to say “An Extinct Species,” not endangered, extinct.

...I’ve always said that when you look at Congress, you had more bipartisanship with Congressional Caucus for Women’s Issues. The number of issues has gotten smaller… I was the prime sponsor in 2000 of the Violence Against Women Act, when it was reauthorized… On the floor, there was hardly a vote against it. And now, I don’t know why these women have been cornered, so to speak. Maybe they are motivated by the fact that this is an election year-- and in a presidential election particularly, they want to act to counter the concept of the War on Women. That’s why they’re coming up with their own caucus, I suppose. I’ve always felt [the women's caucus] needed to be bipartisan… I think it’s a defensive attempt on the part of this caucus, because they’re concerned... Women are a majority of the voting bloc. If they sense that some of the equities they worked so hard for are being taken away, you’ll see a backlash."

Naomi Wolf agrees-- and she did a feature in The Guardian Thursday that explores why conservatives are waging a war against women and why now. She sees it as part of Empire's relentless struggle to gain social control over all of our lives. And she's well aware that Murdoch's and the Koch brother's ALEC is leading the battle.

[S]tate by state, a well-funded legislative war on women is being unleashed. Many of these new proposed bills, or recently passed state laws, attack in novel ways women's rights to ownership of their bodies and their basic life choices, which second-wave feminists thought long won.

Planned Parenthood appears to be target No 1: Maine, Texas, Arizona, Ohio, Tennessee, Indiana, North Carolina and Kansas have all either had bills to defund Planned Parenthood successfully passed or else bills introduced to begin the process of defunding.
 
Target No 2 is abortion rights. Since 2011, 92 new laws against abortion took effect, in 11 states: some states, such as Tennessee, are passing creative new restrictions on abortion rights. On 12 April, Governor Jan Brewer of Arizona signed a new law banning abortions later than 18 weeks after fertilization, and imposing new regulations making abortion more difficult to obtain.

What is this flurry of legislation about? Is it about the sanctity of life?

I would love to believe that-- and some grassroots opposition to abortion rights does, indeed, I have argued elsewhere, arise from a genuinely feminist perspective on social conditions that treat women as disposable sexual objects, and women's fertility as without value, or as an inconvenience to a consumer sexual culture; and these give desperate pregnant women no options at all except termination. Feminists for Life is an organization that I respect a great deal-- though I don't agree with their policy goals-- for creating a seamless pro-life feminist analysis of this kind.

But the groups and representatives that are wallpapering state legislatures with identikit legislation to penalize women's sexual and reproductive rights are the same bloc that gleefully kill food stamp programs used by the same desperate women if they choose to bear the child. This is the same constituency that happily supports sending moms of small children who are in the military into harm's way in corporate wars of choice. So what is this push deriving from?

I had an "Aha" moment recently in Oxford. I was speaking about the British Contagious Diseases Acts-- legislation passed in the 1860s that caused thousands of women be arrested and locked up for up to eight months at a time for looking as if they might have had sex. A graduate student asked me, perceptively, if I had looked at this issue in relation to issues of empire at that time, and another student noted in response that imperial British forces had, at around the same time, set up a complex and expansive equivalent of "lock hospitals" to incarcerate and manage prostitutes in colonized regions.

It was a moment of realization for me because, indeed, that is what empire does; and that is what empire is doing now: systems of control are practiced and, in a sense, perfected "elsewhere" on "the other"; and then, they are too temptingly effective to gatekeepers not to bring them home to use, at length, on their own populations.

Some have argued that this present "war on women" is a war against progressivism-- or a war against feminism, in particular. I would say, looking at the big picture, that it is more serious than that-- not that those options are not plenty serious enough. I would say that the call for transvaginal probes, for gagging medical providers, for sending the state to shake a finger for an extra 72 hours at a distressed woman and stand between her and the discussion she is having with her inner-most and private conscience, is all part of the larger crackdown we see on privacy, private space, freedom and personal choice.

It is on the same spectrum of control: the will to gag Bradley Manning or Julian Assange also seek to gag a medical provider in South Dakota. The same impulse to peer into personal emails and listen to private phone calls that has led the NSA to pour billions into surveillance stations in Utah, is the same impulse of panopticon state control that wants to get between the sheets of men and women in consensual sexual decision-making, and monitor or restrict their access to condoms and contraception. And it is the same Big Brother impulse for control that maintains that what a woman does with her own care-provider is a function of state management.

In other words, women have always had their sexuality managed, surveilled, and controlled by governments; this has been called "gender." I have said here before that getting granular with people's sexual privacy is one of the standard forms of traumatizing state control which closing societies reach for.
 
But in fact, the bigger crackdown shows us that it is merely the genderized manifestation of state control. This impulse to mediate and regulate personal choices has been inflamed, I would argue, not by women being particularly uppity-- but by people being uppity. The awakening of protesting and demanding behavior of Occupy communities and of Ron Paul supporters, of the unions in Wisconsin, and the students in Montreal, and the rebellious Greeks in Athens, has made the gatekeepers seek every kind of method of control available to them.

So, identical bills have been proposed in Albany, New York to criminalize anonymous postings online-- to "protect business people and government officials" from criticism.  And the 2013 National Defense Authorization Act has language legalizing the directing of propaganda at United States citizens. And so on.

Dusting off the same old panoply of woman- and sex-controlling initiatives-- with updated and technological twists-- is simply a useful extension of the general arsenal of control whose purpose is to manage and subdue what is generally an increasingly insubordinate population. We can see this backlash through a feminist lens. But we miss an important insight if we restrict our vision to the feminist lens alone.

Ohmygosh, Doonesbury's Zonker Harris a Teabagger? Why not? Naomi Wolf's signed on

DOONESBURY: Monday

[Don't forget to click on all the strips to enlarge]

"[A]s I was told by Fritz Stern, a scholar of fascism who has written about the origins of Nazism, 'In Germany there was a yearning for fascism before fascism was invented.' It is the yearning that we now see, and it is dangerous. If we do not immediately reincorporate the unemployed and the poor back into the economy, giving them jobs and relief from crippling debt, then the nascent racism and violence that are leaping up around the edges of American society will become a full-blown conflagration."

-- Chris Hedges, in an almost-important essay,

"Is America 'Yearning for Fascism'?"

by Ken

So President Obama is now a "Drill, baby, drill" guy. And Zonker's a Teabagger.

Chris Hedges posted the above-noted piece on TruthDig Monday, by coincidence the very same day that Zonker Harris made initial contact with the Teabaggers. (For the benefit of non-Doonesbury folk, the two-time Grand National Tanning Champion's website bio begins: "Few young Americans have so thoroughly savored the joys of college -- which he once referred to as 'the best nine years of my life' -- as Californian-American Zonker Harris.") I think Hedges is a serious writer, with a lot of on-the-ground journalistic observation (and he was a good journalist, for the record) to back up his theorizing. This piece begins:

The language of violence always presages violence. I watched it in war after war from Latin America to the Balkans. The impoverishment of a working class and the snuffing out of hope and opportunity always produce angry mobs ready to kill and be killed. A bankrupt, liberal elite, which proves ineffectual against the rich and the criminal, always gets swept aside, in times of economic collapse, before thugs and demagogues emerge to play to the passions of the crowd. I have seen this drama. I know each act. I know how it ends. I have heard it in other tongues in other lands. I recognize the same stock characters, the buffoons, charlatans and fools, the same confused crowds and the same impotent and despised liberal class that deserves the hatred it engenders.

“We are ruled not by two parties but one party,” Cynthia McKinney, who ran for president on the Green Party ticket, told me. “It is the party of money and war. Our country has been hijacked. And we have to take the country away from those who have hijacked it. The only question now is whose revolution gets funded.”

The Democrats and their liberal apologists are so oblivious to the profound personal and economic despair sweeping through this country that they think offering unemployed people the right to keep their unemployed children on their nonexistent health care policies is a step forward. They think that passing a jobs bill that will give tax credits to corporations is a rational response to an unemployment rate that is, in real terms, close to 20 percent. They think that making ordinary Americans, one in eight of whom depends on food stamps to eat, fork over trillions in taxpayer dollars to pay for the crimes of Wall Street and war is acceptable. They think that the refusal to save the estimated 2.4 million people who will be forced out of their homes by foreclosure this year is justified by the bloodless language of fiscal austerity. The message is clear. Laws do not apply to the power elite. Our government does not work. And the longer we stand by and do nothing, the longer we refuse to embrace and recognize the legitimate rage of the working class, the faster we will see our anemic democracy die.

Hedges offers as an example Yugoslavia, arguing: "The Balkan war was not caused by ancient ethnic hatreds. It was caused by the economic collapse of Yugoslavia. The petty criminals and goons who took power harnessed the anger and despair of the unemployed and the desperate."

Good stuff, no? I'm glad the piece has also been posted on AlterNet, which is actually where I saw it. It's also on AlterNet that Justine Sharrock posted a provocative interview with trendy left-wing sage Naomi Wolf: "Naomi Wolf Thinks the Tea Parties Help Fight Fascism -- Is She Onto Something or in Fantasy Land?" Sharrock posted her interview on Tuesday, which again by coincidence is the day that Zonker ran into a slight glitch establishing his against-the-man credentials with the Teabaggers:

DOONESBURY: Tuesday

Naomi Wolf is best known in political circles for her 2007 book The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot,in which she argued that the Bush regime had made great progress in advancing the U.S. along the "ten steps" to fascism.
She followed it up in 2008 with Give Me Liberty: A Handbook for American Revolutionaries,a manifesto on the loss of our liberties.

Sharrock notes in the introduction to her interview:

Now, under President Obama, Wolf's book is providing ammunition for the Tea Partiers, Patriots, Ron Paul supporters and Oath Keepers, who also warn of impending tyrannical government. Even when the book first came out pre-Obama, Alex Jones, Michael Savage and Fox News invited her on their shows, and agreed with her.

It’s not just her message. She speaks their language, referring to the Founding Fathers and American Revolution as models, admitting to a profound sense of fear, warning of tyranny, fascism, Nazism and martial law. When Glenn Beck warns of these things we laugh. When Wolf draws those same connections, we listen.

Sharrock asks if Wolf realized that her book "is being lauded within the Tea Party and patriot movements.

Since I wrote Give Me Liberty, I have had a new audience that looks different than the average Smith girl. There is a giant libertarian component. I have had a lot of dialogue with the Ron Paul community. There are [Tea Partiers] writing to me on my Facebook page, but I figured they were self-selective libertarians and not arch conservatives. I am utterly stunned that I have a following in the patriot movement and I wasn’t aware that specific Tea Partiers were reading it. They haven’t invited me to speak. They invited Sarah Palin.

Wolf was invited to speak to a Ron Paul rally last summer,

and I loved it. I met a lot of people I respected, a lot of “ordinary” people, as in not privileged. They were stepping up to the plate, when my own liberal privileged fellow demographic habituates were lying around whining. It was a wake-up call to the libertarians that there’s a progressive who cares so much about the same issues. Their views of liberals are just as distorted as ours are of conservatives.

And thank goodness she set them straight about that! She also knows why "the sides don't understand each other":

Frankly, liberals are out of the habit of communicating with anyone outside their own in cohort. We have a cultural problem with self-righteousness and elitism. Liberals roll their eyes about going on "Oprah" to reach a mass audience by using language that anyone can understand even if you majored in semiotics at Yale. We look down on people we don’t agree with. It doesn’t serve us well.

Wolf has written that some of the Teabagger ideas are "ahead of their time." She provides for-instances:

I used to think “End the Fed people” were crackpots. The media paints them as deranged. But it turned out we had good reason to have more oversight. Or take their platform about states’ rights. Demographically, I’m a hippie from San Francisco and I’m not culturally inclined to be sympathetic to states' rights. My cultural heritage is FDR and Medicare and federal government solutions. But if you think through the analysis, strengthening state rights is a good corrective of the aggregation of an over-reaching federal power. Take California’s challenge of the Patriot Act or states like Vermont leading the way with addressing the corruption of the voting system. It’s a good example of the Tea Party thinking out of the box on how to address a problem.

Are you ready to scream yet? Is this apparently intelligent person really so deluded as to imagine that the right-wing (or Libertarian) hostility to the Fed or passion for states' rights has anything in common with what the vision of America she claims to believe in? Sharrock, an excellent interviewer, pursues this issue, asking, "How do you feel about your books bolstering a fight for policies you don’t agree with?"

If people are taking my book seriously and organizing, getting into office, caring about the constitution, and not waiting for someone else to lead them, I think, God bless them. All of us should be doing that. The left should be doing that. There is always the risk in advocating for democracy that the first people to wake up might not be your team, but that is a risk worth taking. I would rather have citizens I don’t agree with organized and active than an oligarchy of people that I agree with.

DOONESBURY: today

Which bring us back to Chris Hedges. As you'll recall, he's really concerned with the threat of imminent violence. Late in his piece, he writes:

When someone like [Sarah] Palin posts a map with cross hairs on the districts of Democrats, when she says “Don’t Retreat, Instead -- RELOAD!” there are desperate people cleaning their weapons who listen. When Christian fascists stand in the pulpits of megachurches and denounce Barack Obama as the Antichrist, there are messianic believers who listen. When a Republican lawmaker shouts “baby killer” at Michigan Democrat Bart Stupak, there are violent extremists who see the mission of saving the unborn as a sacred duty. They have little left to lose. We made sure of that. And the violence they inflict is an expression of the violence they endure.

These movements are not yet full-blown fascist movements. They do not openly call for the extermination of ethnic or religious groups. They do not openly advocate violence. But, as I was told by Fritz Stern, a scholar of fascism who has written about the origins of Nazism, “In Germany there was a yearning for fascism before fascism was invented.” It is the yearning that we now see, and it is dangerous. If we do not immediately reincorporate the unemployed and the poor back into the economy, giving them jobs and relief from crippling debt, then the nascent racism and violence that are leaping up around the edges of American society will become a full-blown conflagration.

Left unchecked, the hatred for radical Islam will transform itself into a hatred for Muslims. The hatred for undocumented workers will become a hatred for Mexicans and Central Americans. The hatred for those not defined by this largely white movement as American patriots will become a hatred for African-Americans. The hatred for liberals will morph into a hatred for all democratic institutions, from universities to government agencies to the press. Our continued impotence and cowardice, our refusal to articulate this anger and stand up in open defiance to the Democrats and the Republicans, will see us swept aside for an age of terror and blood.

Well, okay, I don't think any of us would disagree. The only thing is, Hedges seems to think he's sounding a brand-new alarm, that he's the first to warn that we could be on a path that leads to fascism. Actually, by my count he is . . . um, let's see, carry the one . . . just about the last to warn that we're on a path to fascism. He has helpfully added Fritz Stern's idea of a "yearning for fascism" that precedes the real thing; I think that's something to think about. But I describe his piece as "almost-important" because for all its smug self-assurance it doesn't seem to me really to advance the discussion.

Listen again: "If we do not immediately reincorporate the unemployed and the poor back into the economy, giving them jobs and relief from crippling debt, then the nascent racism and violence that are leaping up around the edges of American society will become a full-blown conflagration." Um, Chris, do you have any, you know, ideas about how that might be done? Perhaps that's so obvious that it didn't need to be explained, unlike all this other stuff that you explain very eloquently but that really many of us kind of worked out for ourselves.

If Hedges had started the piece by saying, "I don't have a damned clue how we might do it, but if we do not immediately reincorporate the unemployed and the poor back into the economy, giving them jobs and relief from crippling debt, then the nascent racism and violence that are leaping up around the edges of American society will become a full-blown conflagration," I would at least feel that we have something to talk about.

The Teabaggers have grievances. Yeah, I get it. By and large, they don't have a clue what has actually happened to them, or what can be done about it. They're mad as hell and they're not going to take it anymore. Not exactly a blueprint for change we can believe in.

Now, however, it appears that the Teabaggers have Zonker. As if they weren't confused enough!

#

ARE YOU EXPERIENCED? I AM

In today's Washington Post Michael Kinsley ask how important experience is for presidential candidates. On paper Bill Richardson has the best resume but he and two very experienced U.S. Senators, a good one (Chris Dodd) and an exceptionally bad one (Joe Biden) don't seem to be gaining much traction anywhere.

After 7 years of excruciating misrule by one of the-- if not the-- least experienced, worst equipped, least competent men ever elected to find himself in the White House, voters want something more, something better. Kinsley, an Obama supporter, talks about the valuable life experience racked up by Obama and McCain. As usual, his column is superficial and trite. But he does point out an interesting perspective he got from Warren Buffett. "[W]hen people tell him that they've learned from experience, that the trick is to learn from other people's experience. George W. Bush will leave behind a rich compost heap of experience for his successor to sort through and learn from."

The worst-- and most valuable in many ways-- experiences I ever had in the music business was when I worked with the most corporate of record companies, CBS (now SONY). Coming from an idealistic indie label in San Francisco, where all workers and artists were like family, I found CBS' corporate culture foreign and toxic. It didn't take me long to realize that it was inherently catastrophic for the kind of alternative artists I was signing and that it would be impossible for their music to ever receive a fair shot through CBS. I couldn't wait to get out of there. Finally, after watching the inevitable destruction of one artist after another, I decided to go live in Peru. At that moment Seymour Stein offered me a job as general manager of Sire Records.

The CBS experience taught me everything I needed to know about what to never do to any artist. I learned about hubris and I learned about selfishness, greed, craven politics and a lack of respect and humility. I think the years working with CBS made me a far better executive for Sire and Warner Bros. I also agree with Kinsley-- if this is what he meant-- that after 2 terms of George Bush, Americans willing to learn will have gained invaluable experience about electing leaders and about holding them accountable.

A few days ago Don Hazen of Alternet interviewed author Naomi Wolf, someone who is not new to the lessons about Bush. Wolf's new book The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot makes a case for why it is imperative for Americans to start learning from history. (Watch the video of her talking about the how fascism can so easily replace, step by step, fragile democracy when citizens take everything for granted.)

in some ways it is human nature to be in denial ... but Americans have our own special version, which is profoundly dangerous. Europeans know democracies are fragile, and they could close. They had closed. Bismarckian Germany was not a democracy.

But here we're walking around... we usually have that sense that somehow our air will sustain us, even when no one else's air does. And we don't have to do anything about it. We have this like bubble, that somehow democracy will just take care of us, and we don't have to fight to protect democracy.

They can mow down democracies all over the world, but somehow we'll be just fine. But what's so ironic about that is that the Founding Fathers drafted the Bill of Rights in fear. They knew that you had to have checks and balances, because it's human nature to abuse power, no matter who you are. They knew the damage that the army could do breaking into your home... they knew that democracy is fragile, and the default is tyranny. They knew that. And that's why they created the system of checks and balances.

Wolf's entire chat with Hazen is well worth reading and I recommend it heartily-- far more, in fact, than Merle Haggard's song about Hillary Clinton's experience and why he seems to be supporting her: