America Loves Peace? Odd, Since We’re Always at War

We’ve been in conflict for about half the period between World War II and the present but consider ourselves a “peace-loving” nation.

Americans love to think that we’re a peaceful people and that we fight wars only when we must.

Unfortunately, you can count in nanoseconds how long those assertions hold up when exposed to such insidious commie dirty tricks as the application of logic or the examination of empirical history.

Sure, any war can be spun as some necessity against some Very Bad Person, preferably of brown skin, slanted eyes and/or differing deity. Not only can any war be so spun, probably every war there ever was has been, at least since the days when governments had to start offering some justification or another for their little foreign adventures.

But pick your barometer — any one will work — and you’ll quickly see who the militant folks on the planet really are. For America, it turns out — gulp — to be that bloated, frightened meth-addict staring back at us in the mirror, not some overseas evil emperor du jour.

For example, suppose you wanted to measure comparative national warlike tendencies by simply counting wars. Since World War II, the United States has messed around, in ways big and small, in Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Afghanistan, Nicaragua, Guatemala, El Salvador, Lebanon, Grenada, Iraq, Panama, Colombia, Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Haiti, Afghanistan again, and Iraq again. No country in the world can begin to match this record in the last half-century. And I’m not even listing here the covert operations (almost everywhere), including the ones that toppled democratically elected governments (Iran, Guatemala, Chile, etc.), the long-term occupations of Latin American countries by the U.S. military, the gunboat diplomacy of the American Navy around the world, the aiding and abetting of other killers (Saddam invading Iran, for example, apartheid South Africa or the Israeli occupation of Palestine), the militarization of the oceans and of space, or the myriad other ways in which the United States leads the planet in aggressive tendencies. (For a whole century’s worth of overseas fun — not even counting the big stuff — Stephen Kinzer’s Overthrow is highly recommended reading.)

Who has China been invading lately? Russia? Fidel? Those perfidious (and perfumed) French? Heck, even Saddam couldn’t touch this record for aggression, especially once you account for the fact that the U.S. government assisted his foreign soiree into Iran (complete with the chemical weapons, of course) and likely green-lighted the one into Kuwait as well. And let’s even grant that one or two of those American adventures had some measure of altruism associated with them, as perhaps the Balkan or Somalian affairs might have (I’d like to know the full story before making that judgment). Isn’t the sheer volume of them — especially relative to the number of wars other countries have fought — a bit problematic for maintaining the pretense of America’s pacific intent? My conservative (in both senses of the word) list above goes to nearly 20. Isn’t that a bit much for a peace-loving country?

But scratch that measure if you must (perhaps it cuts too close to the bone). Maybe we can detect America’s dislike for war in another metric, say military spending. Oops. Turns out that’s going to be a bit problematic, too. I guess it won’t be a huge surprise to anybody that the United States spends more on “defense” than any other country in the world. But here’s the truly scary part: The United States not only outspends every other country in the world on military goodies, it outspends ALL other countries of the world. Combined. That’s right. Take all 190-plus countries out there and add together their defense budgets and you still won’t equal America’s alone. What’s more, that doesn’t even include the $100 billion or so that we’re dropping each year in Iraq and Afghanistan, nor the additional costs in veterans’ (so-called) care, munitions replacement and economic losses we have been hemorrhaging for those wars, which will continue, for decades to come, estimated to run up toward 2 trillion bucks total. (Oh, and did I mention that one-sixth of our population doesn’t have healthcare coverage? Never mind. I’m sure those are completely unrelated facts.) Anyhow, does that sound like a peace-loving country to you? And think about this for a second: How absolutely disastrous does your diplomacy have to get so that you need to be able to fight off every other country of the world, all at once?!

OK, OK, so that one didn’t work out so well either. The good news is that at least we don’t make the world an uglier place by continually inventing new and more vicious weaponry. Not us peace-loving Americans! You know, like atom bombs, napalm, bunker-busters, cluster bombs, neutron bombs, space lasers, phosphorous bombs and stuff like that! Who would build such things? What kind of depraved mind would harness so much of its scientific and industrial establishment to such ends? Who would … er … um … Hey, wait a minute! What do you mean that we invented and manufactured all those things?!?! I thought we were the peace-loving people! Meanwhile, can I interest you in some depleted uranium at a very, very attractive price?

OK, but we must be good neighbors, really, because we’re always the ones who are pushing for all sorts of international treaties to limit war, weapons and the worst practices of nasty governments. You know, for example, how we signed on to the United Nations Charter (which we more or less also wrote) and its requirement that states may use militarized aggression only in the case of self-defense or when authorized by the Security Council to do so in a collective security operation. Hey, sometimes we even comply with it! Or maybe you prefer the treaties against land mines, child soldiers or the weaponization of space, which we’re pretty much the only folks not signing? The “quaint” and “obsolete” Geneva Conventions against torture and war crimes? How about the International Criminal Court, which John Bolton led the Bush administration into singlehandedly trying to destroy? Hmmm … Wonder why they would have wanted to get rid of that? Gee, I thought genocide and war crimes were bad things! America is the world leader in supporting human rights and seeking peace. So, remember, if you hear someone tell you that we’ve been abdicating, avoiding, ignoring and destroying all these (and myriad other) treaties that seek to end or prevent war, it’s just the liberal America-hating media elites telling lies again, because they want us to lose our wars. (And why would they want that? That’s easy! So some other country can march in, take away their enormously profitable media franchises, steal their mansions and yachts, and then hang them for treason and pillaging, of course. Who wouldn’t trade their current set-up for that? Trust me, these guys know a good thing when they see it.)

Alright, alright, so it turns out that none of these measures of warlike tendencies turned out so very well. American is winning these contests about as often as is Hillary Clinton on the campaign trail. And with about as much grace, too. But at least the rest of the world thinks of us as nice, peaceful neighbors, right? Well, actually, they sometimes do! Just not now. And just not when we’re, uh, engaged in most of our wars, which has been about half the time between World War II and the present. Vietnam wasn’t exactly appreciated out there in the global community, and that opinion hasn’t changed a whole lot, even after we’ve established a lovely little trading relationship with that same communist country that we once argued would be so dangerous if it went … er, well, communist. You know, like China! That’s why we don’t trade with them now, or — perish the thought — make ourselves vulnerable by allowing them to finance our national binge borrowing. No sense aiding and abetting the enemy, eh?

Sorry — I digress. Despite ourselves, America is in fact sometimes admired in world opinion. But not when we play our war games. They can’t stand America’s duplicity, hypocrisy and arrogance when it comes to so many aspects of international diplomacy, including the aforementioned treaties we’ve avoided when we’re not trying to destroy them. Yet nothing has so inflamed world opinion as the gross transgression against international law and human morality that is Iraq. International polls show that even our allies believe that “the United States contributes the most to world instability along with Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq and North Korea,” and that the U.S. presence in Iraq is considered a greater threat to peace than Iran going nuclear. America’s standing in world opinion isn’t the only measure of how comparatively warlike we are, but it certainly is a valid one. When everybody else in the neighborhood hates you, or hates something you do, it’s a moment for a little reflection and introspection, isn’t it? Unless, of course, you’re just an asshole. Then, why bother?

I don’t want to give the wrong impression. Much as I’d like to be, I’m not a pacifist, because I realize that there are genuinely bad actors out there who can’t be tamed by a Dick Cheney charm offensive, or beaten into submission by a Condoleeza Rice piano sonata. I’m glad the U.S. military was there to stomp Hitler. Maybe even Korea, Bosnia and Kosovo could be justified as a response to aggression, though here it gets murkier. But Vietnam? No way. Today’s Iraq war? Utterly shameful. The Mexican War? Spanish-American War? Cuba? Nicaragua? Guatemala? Grenada? Be serious. Way too often America’s pacific intentions are harder to find than the elusive Higgs Boson particle. Probably you’d need a massive supercollider and a bunch of expensive detection equipment to do it, too.

And god knows I’m not blaming the troops for this. Indeed, too often they’re the second victims (the truth being the first) of policymakers like Lyndon Johnson, George W. Bush and Hillary Clinton, for whom war is a game and people are pawns. When Bush says things like “This generation is rising to the challenge. We’re looking at history, we understand our values, and we’re laying that foundation of peace for generations to come,” smart countries run like hell. Others just laugh and cut mineral rights deals.

Because of these monsters and the record they’ve created, Americans have to face an ugly and unfortunate fact. Despite what your sixth-grade civics teacher told you, we’re not the white hats of the world. Or at least not often enough. We just like to think we are.

But thinking and being are, alas, two different things, as we found out going into Iraq — thinking we’d be greeted with chocolates and flowers.

We may get them yet, however. Perhaps they’ll be handed to us at the exit ramp, as the next president extricates a sobered United States from the disaster of its latest example of bringing love, American-style, to the world.

David Michael Green is a professor of political science at Hofstra University. He is delighted to receive readers’ reactions to his articles (dmg@regressiveantidote.net), but regrets that time constraints do not always allow him to respond. More of his work can be found at www.regressiveantidote.net.

via//AlterNet

Anti-Muslim sentiment surfaces in attacks on Obama

By Michael Conlon

CHICAGO (Reuters) – The controversy caused by a photograph of Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama dressed in turban-topped African garb points to deeper anti-Muslim sentiment in U.S. society, some observers believe.

Ever since the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington Arabs generally and Muslims in particular have become the No. 1 villain in movies and television, according to Jack Shaheen, author of “Guilty – Hollywood’s Verdict on Arabs After 9/11.”

“There’s no balance. It makes as much sense as projecting Asian or African-Americans as terrorists,” he said.

One of the most disturbing trends, he said, is that what started in Hollywood movies spread to television, and has gone from Arabs to Muslims in general.

“It’s the fact that he’s black, let’s be blunt about it,” and that the Somali tribal garb in the picture taken when Obama was on a visit to Kenya, his father’s homeland, reminds people of Muslim dress, Shaheen said.

The Obama campaign accused the campaign of rival Democrat Hillary Clinton of “the most shameful, offensive fear-mongering” when the photograph of the Illinois senator, turned up on a Web site this week.

The Clinton campaign denied releasing the photo.

Obama, a Christian, has fought a whispering campaign from fringe elements that say he is a Muslim. The Democratic front-runner’s middle family name — Hussein — has been used by some to draw a link between him and late Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.

“But it’s interesting,” Shaheen said, “no one has said so what? What if he were a Muslim?”

“PLAIN BIGOTED”

Ahmed Rehab, executive director of the Chicago Chapter of the Council on American Islamic Relations, said the photograph incident sent a poor message to any Muslim growing up in the United States with hopes of running for president.

“It goes against all that I advocate that the mere rumor of a person being a Muslim — let alone actually being one — could be a tool to destroy political aspirations,” he said in a commentary in the Chicago Tribune.

“When it comes to Muslims, the divisive rhetoric coming out of this year’s election ranges from the exclusionary to the just plain bigoted,” he said, adding that neither Obama nor any other candidate had adequately addressed the anti-Muslim climate.

Rehab said the photograph of Obama will be discounted by a large chunk of the electorate. “What I’m seeing now is a sense of cynicism .. you’ve had seven years of this crap,” he said.

“It is a sign of America’s progress that Obama is not eliminated from the public’s consideration because of his race,” remarked Chicago Tribune columnist Clarence Page in a recent commentary in that newspaper.

“Yet he is vulnerable to other prejudices,” he added, and impressions can tip the balance among those who are undecided.

Further attacks focusing on religion and identity seem likely as Obama becomes the favorite to win the Democratic nomination and compete in the November general election.

The Tennessee Republican Party this week put out a news release featuring the Obama photo, headlined “Anti-Semites for Obama” and referring to the Democrat as “Sen. Barack Hussein Obama.”

via//Reuters

related//Dallas Morning News, Huffington Post,  IPS

Obama should be proud to be named Hussein

The attacks on Barack Obama’s middle name have begun, but the likely Democratic nominee joins a long line of famous Americans with Semitic names, from Benjamin Franklin to Omar Bradley.

By Juan Cole

Feb. 29, 2008 | In Cincinnati, Bill Cunningham, according to the Los Angeles Times, introducing presidential candidate John McCain at a rally Tuesday, “ridiculed Democratic contender Barack Obama for his intention to meet with ‘world leaders who want to kill us’ and pointedly referred to the Illinois senator as ‘Barack Hussein Obama.’” John McCain repudiated Cunningham’s low tactics and said that using the middle name like that three times was “inappropriate” and would never happen again at one of his rallies.

I want to say something about Barack Hussein Obama‘s name. It is a name to be proud of. It is an American name. It is a blessed name. It is a heroic name, as heroic and American in its own way as the name of Gen. Omar Nelson Bradley or the name of Benjamin Franklin. And denigrating that name is a form of racial and religious bigotry of the most vile and debased sort. It is a prejudice against names deriving from Semitic languages!

Christian, Western heroes have often been bequeathed Middle Eastern names. Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar, the medieval Spanish hero, carried the name El Cid, from the Arabic al-Sayyid, “the Lord.”

Barack and Hussein are Semitic words. Americans have been named with Semitic names since the founding of the republic. Fourteen of our 43 presidents have had Semitic names (see below). And American English contains many Arabic-derived words that we use every day and without which we would be much impoverished. America is a world civilization with a world heritage, something Cunningham will never understand.

Barack is a Semitic word meaning “to bless” as a verb or “blessing” as a noun. In its Hebrew form, barak, it is found all through the Bible. It first occurs in Genesis 1:22 — “And God blessed (ḇāreḵə) them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth.”

Here is a list of how many times barak appears in each book of the Bible.

Now let us take the name “Hussein.” It is from the Semitic word hasan, meaning “good” or “handsome.” Husayn is the diminutive, affectionate form.

Barack Obama’s middle name is in honor of his grandfather, Hussein, a secular resident of Nairobi, Kenya. Americans may think of Saddam Hussein when they hear the name, but that is like thinking of Stalin when you hear the name Joseph. There have been lots of Husseins in history, from the grandson of the prophet Mohammed, a hero who touched the historian Gibbon, to King Hussein of Jordan, one of America’s most steadfast allies in the 20th century. The author of the beloved American novel “The Kite Runner” is Khaled Hosseini.

But in Obama’s case, it is just a reference to his grandfather.

It is worth pointing out that John McCain’s adopted daughter, Bridget, is originally from Bangladesh. Since Hussein is a very common name in Bangladesh, it is entirely possible that her birth father or grandfather was named Hussein. McCain certainly has Muslim relatives via adoption in his family. If Muslim relatives are a disqualification from high office in the United States, then McCain himself is in trouble. In fact, since Bridget is upset that George W. Bush doesn’t like her “because she is black,” and used her to stop the McCain campaign in South Carolina in 2000, you understand why McCain would be especially sensitive to race baiting of Cunningham’s sort. The question is how vigorously he will combat it; he hasn’t been above Muslim taunting in the campaign so far. (And the McCains really should let Bridget know that she is Asian, not “black.” The poor girl; Bush and Rove have done a number on her, and Cindy’s confusion can’t help.)

The other thing to say about grandfathers named Hussein is that very large numbers of African-Americans probably have an ancestor 10 or 11 generations ago with that name, in what is now Mali or Senegal or Nigeria. And since so many thousands of Arab Muslims were made to convert to Catholicism in Spain after 1501, many Latinos have distant ancestors named Hussein, too. In fact, since there was a lot of Arab-Spanish intermarriage, and since there was subsequent Spanish intermarriage with other European Catholics, more European Americans are descended from a Hussein than they realize. The British royal family is quite forthright about the Arab line in its ancestry going back to Andalusia.

Obama, being a cousin of Dick Cheney on one side and having relatives in Kenya on the other, is just more and more typical of the 21st century United States.

So, anyway, Obama’s first two names mean “blessing, the good.” If we are lucky enough to get him for president, we can only hope that his names are prophetic for us.

Which brings me to Omar Bradley. Omar is an alternative spelling of Umar, i.e., Umar ibn al-Khattab, the second caliph of Sunni Islam. Presumably Gen. Bradley was named for the poet Omar Khayyam, who bore the caliph’s name. Omar Khayyam’s “Rubaiyat,” in the “translation” of Edward FitzGerald, became enormously popular in Victorian America.

Gen. Omar Bradley, who bore a Semitic, Muslim first name, and shared it with the second caliph of Sunni Islam, was the hero of D-day and Normandy, of the Battle of the Bulge and the Ruhr.

Would Cunningham see Omar Bradley as un-American, as an enemy because of his name?

What about other American heroes, such as Gen. George Joulwan, former NATO supreme allied commander of Europe? “Joulwan” is an Arabic name. Or there is Gen. John Abizaid, former CENTCOM commander. Abizaid is an Arabic name. Abi means Abu or “father of,” and Zaid is a common Arab first name. Is Cunningham good enough to wipe their shoes? Is he going to call them traitors because they have Arabic names?

What about Rep. Darrell Issa of California? (“‘Isa” means Jesus in Arabic). Former Cabinet secretary Donna Shalala? (Shalala means “waterfall” in Arabic.)

I won’t go into all the great Americans with Arabic names in sports, entertainment and business, against whom Cunningham would apparently discriminate on that basis. Does he want to take citizenship away from Kareem Abdul Jabbar (meaning “noble the servant of the Mighty”) and Ahmad Jamal (meaning “the most praised, beauty”)? What about Rihanna (“sweet basil,” “aromatic”)? And Tony Shalhoub (i.e., Mr. Monk)?

Let us take Benjamin Franklin. His first name is from the Hebrew Bin Yamin, the son of the Right (hand), or the son of strength, or the son of the South (yamin or right has lots of connotations). The “Bin” means “son of,” just as in modern colloquial Arabic. Bin Yamin Franklin is not a dishonorable name because of its Semitic root. By the way, there are lots of Muslims named Bin Yamin.

As for an American president bearing a name derived from a Semitic language, that is hardly unprecedented.

John Adams really only had Semitic names. His first name is from the Hebrew Yochanan, or gift of God, which became Johan and then John. (In German and in medieval English, “y” is represented by “j” but was originally pronounced “y.”) Adams is from the biblical Adam, which also just means “human being.” In Arabic, one way of saying “human being” is “Bani Adam,” the children of men.

Thomas Jefferson’s first name is from the Aramaic Tuma, meaning “twin.” Aramaic is a Semitic language spoken by Jesus, which is related to Hebrew and Arabic. In Arabic, twin is tau’am, so you can see the similarity.

James Madison, James Monroe and James Polk all had a Semitic first name, derived from the Hebrew Ya’aqov or Jacob, which is Ya’qub in Arabic. It became Iacobus in Latin, then was corrupted to Iacomus, and from there became James in English.

Zachary Taylor’s first name is from the Hebrew Zachariah, which means “the Lord has remembered.”

Abraham Lincoln, of course, is named for the patriarch Abraham, from the Semitic word for father, Ab, and the word for “multitude,” raham. Abu, “father of,” is a common element in Arab names today.

So, Mr. Cunningham, Barack Hussein Obama fits right in this list of presidents with Semitic names. In fact, we haven’t had one for a while. We are due for another one.

A blessed and good one.

via//Salon.com

Pelosi wants Bush aides investigated

WASHINGTON — House Speaker Nancy Pelosi asked the Justice Department on Thursday to open a grand jury investigation into whether President Bush’s chief of staff and former counsel should be prosecuted for contempt of Congress.

Pelosi, D-Calif., demanded that the department pursue misdemeanor charges against former White House counsel Harriet Miers for refusing to testify to Congress about the firings of federal prosecutors in 2006 and against chief of staff Josh Bolten for failing to turn over White House documents related to the dismissals.

She gave Attorney General Michael Mukasey one week to respond and said refusal to take the matter to a grand jury will result in the House’s filing a civil lawsuit against the Bush administration.

The White House branded the request as “truly contemptible.” The Justice Department said it had received Pelosi’s request and anticipated providing further guidance after Mukasey’s review. It noted “long-standing department precedent” in such cases against letting a U.S. attorney refer a congressional contempt citation to a grand jury or prosecute an executive branch. The top House Republican called it “a partisan political stunt” and “a complete waste of time,” according to a spokesman.

The Democratic-controlled House voted two weeks ago to hold Bolten and Miers in contempt for failing to cooperate with committee investigations.

“There is no authority by which persons may wholly ignore a subpoena and fail to appear as directed because a president unilaterally instructs them to do so,” Pelosi wrote Mukasey. She noted that Congress subpoenaed Miers to appear before the House Judiciary Committee, which is investigating the firings.

“Surely, your department would not tolerate that type of action if the witness were subpoenaed to a federal grand jury,” Pelosi wrote.

She added: “Short of a formal assertion of executive privilege, which cannot be made in this case, there is no authority that permits a president to advise anyone to ignore a duly issued congressional subpoena for documents.”

Pelosi sent an additional letter to U.S. Attorney Jeff Taylor, the chief federal prosecutor for the District of Columbia, whose office would oversee the grand jury. The letters point to sections of federal law that require the Justice Department to bring the House contempt citations before a grand jury to investigate.

At the White House, spokesman Tony Fratto said House Democrats “have been trying to redefine the notion of contempt and they succeeded.”

Both Fratto and House GOP leader John Boehner said the House should focus on passing legislation allowing the government to more easily eavesdrop on phone calls and e-mails of suspected terrorists.

“Rather than passing critical national security legislation, they continue to squander time on partisan hijinx,” Fratto said. Boehner spokesman Michael Steel said “this sort of pandering to the left-wing fever swamps of loony liberal activists does nothing to make America safer.”

The chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Rep. John Conyers, said he hoped Pelosi’s demand would spur the department to “put the partisan manipulation of our system of justice behind it” and take the issue to a grand jury. “To do otherwise would turn on its head the notion that we are all equally accountable under the law,” said Conyers, D-Mich.

But the department told the House leadership last July that it generally would not let a U.S. attorney make a grand jury referral or prosecute executive branch officials when they followed a president’s instruction and invoked a claim of executive privilege before a congressional committee, spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said.

The letter was the latest chapter in a yearlong saga that began with the firings of nine federal prosecutors and led to Alberto Gonzales’ resignation as attorney general last August.

The House voted 223-32 this month to hold Miers and Bolten in contempt for failing to cooperate with an inquiry into whether the prosecutors’ firings were politically motivated. Angry Republicans boycotted the vote and staged a walkout in an unusually bitter scene even for the fractious House.

At the time, the Bush administration was no less harsh, saying the information sought by the House was off-limits under executive privilege and that Bolten and Miers were immune from prosecution.

It was the first time in 25 years that a full chamber of Congress voted on a contempt of Congress citation. The White House pointed out that it was the first time that such action had been taken against top White House officials who had been instructed by the president to remain silent to preserve executive privilege.

via//Seattle Post-Intelligencer

You can’t be serious, Ralph …

Ralph Nader sure knows how to marginalize his candidacy for president: He picked a brooding, far-left running mate who couldn’t get elected mayor of San Francisco.

Perhaps Nader sees a younger version of himself in 42-year-old Matt Gonzalez. Each wields a keen intellect, a certitude about his standing in the political struggle between good and evil, and a certain obliviousness to how his ego can get in the way of the cause.

Nader expresses not the least bit of remorse that his 2000 run on the Green Party ticket helped tilt Florida, and thus the presidency, to George W. Bush, in an excruciatingly close race. And he is undeterred by the prospect that he could be a spoiler again. If Democrats can’t win by a landslide in 2008, Nader has suggested, they might as well “wrap up, close down, emerge in a different form.”

“Wrap up, close down” is a pretty fair description of what happened to the progressive movement that Gonzalez energized in his 2003 race against Gavin Newsom. Outspent 5-to-1, Gonzalez gave Newsom – and the city’s Democratic establishment – a big scare by drawing 47 percent of the vote. The Green Party suddenly was poised to greatly expand its foothold in San Francisco.

Within months, however, Gonzalez announced that he was leaving politics to practice law.

The city’s progressive movement was without its endearingly enigmatic apostle, and Newsom coasted to re-election last year.

There is no need to recount all the reasons why Gonzalez was ill suited to be mayor of San Francisco. Let’s just say that an aloofness and ideological rigidity that sometimes undermined his effectiveness at City Hall – in his first two years as supervisor, he would not meet with Mayor Willie Brown – is not going to play in Peoria.

If Republicans were to take the Nader-Gonzalez ticket seriously, they would have a field day with the former supervisor’s proposal to let noncitizens vote in local elections. They would mock the energy he invested into labeling owners of cats and dogs as “pet guardians.” They would resurrect his jailings for contempt of court when he was public defender.

Rest assured, the Republican attack machine will not waste a drop of vitriol on Nader and Gonzalez. Each “progressive” vote they woo will be another small step forward for John McCain.

Report: Record-high ratio of Americans in prison

Some states spend more on prison than higher education

NEW YORK – For the first time in U.S. history, more than one of every 100 adults is in jail or prison, according to a new report documenting America’s rank as the world’s No. 1 incarcerator. It urges states to curtail corrections spending by placing fewer low-risk offenders behind bars.

Using state-by-state data, the report says 2,319,258 Americans were in jail or prison at the start of 2008 _ one out of every 99.1 adults. Whether per capita or in raw numbers, it’s more than any other nation.

The report, released Thursday by the Pew Center on the States, said the 50 states spent more than $49 billion on corrections last year, up from less than $11 billion 20 years earlier. The rate of increase for prison costs was six times greater than for higher education spending, the report said.

The steadily growing inmate population “is saddling cash-strapped states with soaring costs they can ill afford and failing to have a clear impact either on recidivism or overall crime,” the report said.

Susan Urahn, managing director of the Pew Center on the States, said budget woes are pressuring many states to consider new, cost-saving corrections policies that might have been shunned in the recent past for fear of appearing soft on crime.

“We’re seeing more and more states being creative because of tight budgets,” she said in an interview. “They want to be tough on crime. They want to be a law-and-order state. But they also want to save money, and they want to be effective.”

The report cited Kansas and Texas as states that have acted decisively to slow the growth of their inmate population. They are making greater use of community supervision for low-risk offenders and employing sanctions other than reimprisonment for offenders who commit technical violations of parole and probation rules.

“The new approach, born of bipartisan leadership, is allowing the two states to ensure they have enough prison beds for violent offenders while helping less dangerous lawbreakers become productive, taxpaying citizens,” the report said.

While many state governments have shown bipartisan interest in curbing prison growth, there also are persistent calls to proceed cautiously.

“We need to be smarter,” said David Muhlhausen, a criminal justice expert with the conservative Heritage Foundation. “We’re not incarcerating all the people who commit serious crimes. But we’re also probably incarcerating people who don’t need to be.”

According to the report, the inmate population increased last year in 36 states and the federal prison system.

The largest percentage increase _ 12 percent _ was in Kentucky, where Gov. Steve Beshear highlighted the cost of corrections in his budget speech last month. He noted that the state’s crime rate had increased only about 3 percent in the past 30 years, while the state’s inmate population has increased by 600 percent.

The report was compiled by the Pew Center’s Public Safety Performance Project, which is working with 13 states on developing programs to divert offenders from prison without jeopardizing public safety.

“Getting tough on criminals has gotten tough on taxpayers,” said the project’s director, Adam Gelb.

According to the report, the average annual cost per prisoner was $23,876, with Rhode Island spending the most ($44,860) and Louisiana the least ($13,009). It said California _ which faces a $16 billion budget shortfall _ spent $8.8 billion on corrections last year, while Texas, which has slightly more inmates, was a distant second with spending of $3.3 billion.

On average, states spend 6.8 percent of their general fund dollars on corrections, the report said. Oregon had the highest spending rate, at 10.9 percent; Alabama the lowest at 2.6 percent.

Four states _ Vermont, Michigan, Oregon and Connecticut _ now spend more on corrections than they do on higher education, the report said.

“These sad facts reflect a very distorted set of national priorities,” said Sen. Bernie Sanders, an independent from Vermont, referring to the full report. “Perhaps, if we adequately invested in our children and in education, kids who now grow up to be criminals could become productive workers and taxpayers.”

The report said prison growth and higher incarceration rates do not reflect an increase in the nation’s overall population. Instead, it said, more people are behind bars mainly because of tough sentencing measures, such as “three-strikes” laws, that result in longer prison stays.

“For some groups, the incarceration numbers are especially startling,” the report said. “While one in 30 men between the ages of 20 and 34 is behind bars, for black males in that age group the figure is one in nine.”

The racial disparity for women also is stark. One of every 355 white women aged 35 to 39 is behind bars, compared with one of every 100 black women in that age group.

The nationwide figures, as of Jan. 1, include 1,596,127 people in state and federal prisons and 723,131 in local jails. That’s out of almost 230 million American adults.

The report said the United States incarcerates more people than any other nation, far ahead of more populous China with 1.5 million people behind bars. It said the U.S. also is the leader in inmates per capita (750 per 100,000 people), ahead of Russia (628 per 100,000) and other former Soviet bloc nations which round out the Top 10.

The U.S. also is among the world leaders in capital punishment. According to Amnesty International, its 53 executions in 2006 were exceeded only by China, Iran, Pakistan, Iraq and Sudan.

On the Net:

http://www.pewcenteronthestates.org.

via//Sioux City Journal

Want Votes? Take On Nader’s Issues

Instead of criticizing Ralph Nader for exercising his rights as an American citizen to run for public office, Adrienne Fulco should be encouraging her Democratic Party candidate to adopt Nader’s positions on the issues.

If Barack Obama campaigned for true universal, single-payer health care, slashing the military budget and ending corporate abuses of power, there would be no need for a progressive third-party candidate. Remember, the two major political parties do not own the political process.

Equally troubling is the continued insistence by some Democrats that Nader, all by himself, lost the 2000 election for Al Gore. Why, out of all the factors that contributed to that fiasco (Gore losing his home state, five other third-party candidates pulling more votes in Florida than needed by Gore to win, the Democrats not fighting harder during the Florida recount and court proceedings), do they continue to pick on old Ralph?

If the Democrats want my vote, they should stop scapegoating Ralph and start being more democratic.

via//Hartford Courant
related//Globe and Mail: Nader denounces ‘trivializing’ objections to his third run