31 January, 2008

Viral Videos Don't Inspire Hope

Yesterday Dane101 posted video of our senator Russ Feingold explaining new FISA legislation.



This soundbite was latched onto by Paul Soglin who said that this is "why he is the best" (Feingold, that is) and that the clip needs "as much exposure as possible".

Like with the impending rebate checks, this video is probably too little, too late. Read Glenn Greenwald's diatribe from earlier today called "Mukasey's radical worldview in now the norm". Essentially the view that Bush can do whatever he wants is now accepted. Some choice excerpts:

All day long, in response to Mukasey's insistence that patent illegalities were legal, that Congress was basically powerless, and that the administration has no obligation to disclose anything to Congress (and will not), Senators would respond with impotent comments such as: "Well, I'd like to note my disagreement and ask you to re-consider" or "I'm disappointed with your answer and was hoping you would say something different" or "If that's your position, we'll be discussing this again at another point." They were supplicants pleading for some consideration, almost out of a sense of mercy, and both they and Mukasey knew it.

I long ago stopped blaming the Bush administration -- at least exclusively -- for what has happened to our political system. They were responsible in the first instance, but the rest of the country's institutions -- its media, its Congress, the "opposition" party, even the courts -- all allowed it to happen, choosing to do nothing -- or to endorse it -- once it all began to be disclosed.

We live in a system of government where the President seized the power to act without restraints and we allowed that to happen, and so Bush's signing statement and Mukasey's defiant posture are all now normal.

This is why Congress, when they learn of Bush lawbreaking, ends up doing nothing other than voting after the fact to legalize it. They learn Bush has been illegally spying on Americans with no warrants and they enact The Protect America Act to legalize it. They learn Bush has been systematically torturing detainees and imprisoning people with no process and they enact the Military Commissions Act to legalize it.

They learn that telecoms have deliberately broken the law for years -- laws which the Congress passed specifically to make it illegal for telecoms to cooperate with warrantless government spying on Americans -- and they are about to provide full retroactive immunity for the lawbreakers. When they do pretend to investigate, they meekly allow the administration literally to ignore their Subpoenas. Congress does that because we live in a system of lawlessness -- we have decided that the President has the power to break the law without consequences -- and because legalizing the President's lawbreaking is the only way they can be relevant.


Don't get me wrong here – as the kids say these days, I love me some Tovarich Feingold. I've always voted for him and am proud that he is my senator. So please pardon my angry skepticism when I say that it's too little, too late. Bush's ratings are at horrendous lows, polls show that the majority of the country wants out of Iraq, we're veering into a recession if we're not already in one, and on and on. But none of this stops Bush or stops Congress from kowtowing to his every whim. Greenwald also points out that Bush recently told Congress to go fuck itself in one of those signing statements:

President Bush this week declared that he has the power to bypass four laws, including a prohibition against using federal funds to establish permanent US military bases in Iraq, that Congress passed as part of a new defense bill.

Sure, I'll jump on the Go Russ bandwagon – go Russ! – but this video doesn't do squat. With Congress bound and determined to bend over and drop trou whenever the President asks, a viral video will do very little. Trust me, I'd love to get excited about this and convince myself that spreading it around will do something positive, but I don't. Maybe I'm just being a Negative Nelly, but I read the following last week:

Defense-related spending for fiscal 2008 will exceed $1 trillion for the first time in history.

In discussing the fiscal 2008 defense budget, as released to the press on February 7, 2007, I have been guided by two experienced and reliable analysts: William D. Hartung of the New America Foundation's Arms and Security Initiative and Fred Kaplan, defense correspondent for Slate.org. They agree that the Department of Defense requested $481.4 billion for salaries, operations (except in Iraq and Afghanistan), and equipment. They also agree on a figure of $141.7 billion for the "supplemental" budget to fight the "global war on terrorism" -- that is, the two on-going wars that the general public may think are actually covered by the basic Pentagon budget. The Department of Defense also asked for an extra $93.4 billion to pay for hitherto unmentioned war costs in the remainder of 2007 and, most creatively, an additional "allowance" (a new term in defense budget documents) of $50 billion to be charged to fiscal year 2009. This comes to a total spending request by the Department of Defense of $766.5 billion.

But wait! There's more!

But there is much more. In an attempt to disguise the true size of the American military empire, the government has long hidden major military-related expenditures in departments other than Defense. For example, $23.4 billion for the Department of Energy goes toward developing and maintaining nuclear warheads; and $25.3 billion in the Department of State budget is spent on foreign military assistance (primarily for Israel, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, the United Arab Republic, Egypt, and Pakistan). Another $1.03 billion outside the official Department of Defense budget is now needed for recruitment and reenlistment incentives for the overstretched U.S. military itself, up from a mere $174 million in 2003, the year the war in Iraq began. The Department of Veterans Affairs currently gets at least $75.7 billion, 50% of which goes for the long-term care of the grievously injured among the at least 28,870 soldiers so far wounded in Iraq and another 1,708 in Afghanistan. The amount is universally derided as inadequate. Another $46.4 billion goes to the Department of Homeland Security.

Missing as well from this compilation is $1.9 billion to the Department of Justice for the paramilitary activities of the FBI; $38.5 billion to the Department of the Treasury for the Military Retirement Fund; $7.6 billion for the military-related activities of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration; and well over $200 billion in interest for past debt-financed defense outlays. This brings U.S. spending for its military establishment during the current fiscal year (2008), conservatively calculated, to at least $1.1 trillion.


My fellow Madisonian Emily Mills recently repeated Ike's warning about the military-industrial complex. What do you think? Is it a good thing that the U.S. spends more than double the rest of the world when it comes to defense budgets? If not, do you have any confidence in Clinton, Obama, McCain, or Romney actually doing something about it? Personally, I don't. With Edwards out of the race, I tend to support Obama. But he wants to increase the armed forces by 100,000 people and this gives me little hope that he'll do much of anything to tame the military-industrial complex.

Does anyone think that any of the major candidates can affect real fundamental change?

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