August 29, 2002—When on August 22, police in Portland pepper sprayed protesters and shot them with rubber bullets, they interfered with the protesters' First Amendment right to peaceably assemble. The first 10 amendments to the U.S. Constitution, the Bill of Rights, protect citizens from being terrorized by their own government.

The First Amendment covers political protests. It reads: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances."

There is no law against peaceable assembly and petitioning the government for a redress of grievances, and according to the Constitution there can be no such law. However, the Portland police used violent force to repress the protesters' efforts to exercise their constitutional rights.

In an August 24 story on the Portland protests, The Portland IndyMedia Center reported that police used pepper spray on children. The children's father said, "We brought our children to a peaceful protest, we stayed in the back and we were walking on the sidewalk. The march stopped at the intersection of 2nd and Alder. We could not see why from our position on the SW corner of the intersection. Police quickly moved up behind us and a moment or two later sprayed pepper spray into the crowd from the NE corner of the intersection. The crowd ran toward us to escape the spray. We asked the officer closest to us how we should exit the intersection. He pointed and said to exit to the NE, into the spraying police opposite him. As the crowd pressed toward us I yelled to him to let us through (south on 2nd) because we had three small children. He looked at me, and drew out his can from his hip and sprayed directly at me. I was at an angle to him and the spray hit my right eye and our 3-year old who I was holding in my right arm. In the same motion he turned the can on my wife who was holding our 10-month old baby and doused both of their heads entirely from a distance of less than three feet."

Who sanctioned this police abuse against peaceful protesters? Why hasn't the Bush administration denounced it?

Evidently the Bush team condones keeping protesters so far away from the alleged president that the protesters' efforts to petition for redress of grievances are virtually nullified. This tells us two things: (1) Bush and company don't care what the people think and don't want the people's input, except when the people agree with them. (2) Bush and company don't care to honor the First Amendment of the Constitution.

The Constitution is merely ink on paper unless Congress and the American people keep enforcing and defending it over time. It becomes weak and ineffective when lawmakers and the public stand by and let power hungry presidents and their handpicked government officials trample it. There is no Constitution unless Congress and the people continue to fight for it.

Since September 11, certain politicians and corporate-owned media commentators have said everything changed after the terrorist attacks. They've suggested we need to further dilute our constitutional protections to make us safe from external enemies. However, if the cure for "terrorism" is throwing out the U.S. Constitution, the cure is worse than the disease.

In reality, what exactly has changed? As author and educator Michael Parenti points out in Covert Action Quarterly, Winter, 2001, the September 11 terrorist attacks gave U.S. opinion makers an issue that "could be selectively treated with conservative effect, an issue that rallies everyone around the flag and points a finger at a fanatical Islamic sect rather than at corporate America or the U.S. national security state."

Parenti adds that very little has changed since September 11, saying: "President Bush proposes billions in tax cuts for the rich just as he did when the World Trade Center stood tall. The White House pushes an 'economic stimulus' package of $100 billion—really nothing more than the usual corporate subsidies, bailouts, and retroactive tax cuts—to help poor little struggling business like IBM, Ford, GE and GM, while doing nothing for the tens of thousands of workers who have been laid off . . . And a compliant Congress pumps billions more into an already bloated military budget. Unfortunately, here is a nation profoundly unchanged by the recent terrorist attacks.

 "Other things in the newly 'transformed' America seem drearily familiar. As in previous decades, our fearless leaders continue to wage devastatingly one-sided aerial wars against small weak impoverished nations, while loading the media with jingoistic hype. They continue to deny the terrorist role they themselves have played around the world. And they continue to neglect human services and loot the Social Security surplus in order that they might claim that Social Security is 'going broke' and must eventually be eliminated . . .

 "Still other things remain the same. As they have done during every crisis, liberal legislators supinely line up with conservatives to vote the president absolute powers. Media lapdogs talk about how the same president has 'risen to the challenge' and 'grown in office.' Flag-waving yahoos call for blood, believing that their government only opposes terrorism and never practices it. Meanwhile, thousands of U.S. residents are subjected to ethnic profiling, African-American communities are terrorized by trigger-happy cops . . . So the struggle to inject reality and justice into the national dialogue continues as always. It feels very much like September 10 to me."

As the saying goes, those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. We should have learned something from history, from an earlier administration that tried to subvert the Constitution. During the 1980s, the Reagan administration circumvented the Constitution with, among other things, its involvement in Iran-contra. The administration justified concealing its behavior from Congress and the people, claiming this secrecy would protect the public from danger. In reality, the secrecy only served to protect the administration from public embarrassment and from coming to justice.

In a PBS special on Iran-contra, journalist Bill Moyers said, "The people who wrote the Constitution lived in a world more dangerous than ours. They were surrounded by territory controlled by hostile powers on the edge of a vast wilderness. Yet they understood that even in perilous times the strength of self-government was public debate and public consensus."

Moyers added, "To put aside these basic values out of fear, to imitate the foe in order to defeat him is to shred the distinction that makes us different. In the end, not only our values but also our methods separate us from the enemies of freedom in the world. The decisions that we make are inherent in the methods that produce them. An open society cannot survive a secret government."

Secrecy let the Iran-contra participants get away with their wrongdoing. Former Congressman Lee Hamilton, chairman of the House Select Committee investigating the Iran-contra affair, was shown ample evidence against Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, but he didn't adequately investigate.

Why did Hamilton choose not to push the investigation? In a late 1980s interview aired on PBS's Frontline, Hamilton said that he did not think it would have been "good for the country" to put the public through another Watergate-style impeachment trial.

In Lee Hamilton's view, it was better to keep the public in the dark than to bring to light another Watergate, with all the implied ramifications. When Hamilton was chairman of the House committee investigating Iran-contra, he took the word of senior Reagan administration officials when they claimed Reagan and G. H. W. Bush were "out of the loop."

Independent counsel Lawrence Walsh later proved that according to White House records, Reagan and Bush had been very much in the loop. If Hamilton had pursued the matter instead of accepting the Reagan administration's word, the congressional investigation would have revealed the truth.

Hamilton later said he should not have believed the Reagan officials. This should serve as a reminder today when the George W. Bush administration asks Congress to merely take its word regarding the need for war with Iraq and other issues, instead of offering proof.

When the G. W. Bush administration asks Congress and the public for freedom to weaken our constitutional protections in the name of protecting us from external enemies; when they ask for secrecy and refuse to engage in serious public debate and work toward public consensus on issues such as possible war with Iraq, they are asking us to let fear cause us to shred the Constitution—and, especially in the case of Iraq, this is fear based only on the Bush administration's secret alleged "inside information." We have been down this road before during the Iran-contra era.

Congress and the public have the right to be heard in the debate on issues such as environmental protection and potential war with Iraq, and this is one thing the protesters in Portland were trying to express. For their efforts, peaceful protesters met with police violence.

The civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s made a meaningful difference, and so did the movement against the Vietnam War. The protesters then were also attacked by police and, in the beginning, they were opposed by authority figures, but they persisted and eventually changed the direction of this country and of the world.

However, the civil rights movement, for example, involved more than protests. It also included thousands of gatherings in black churches over a long period of years, the motivation of thousands of stirring speeches—inspiring because they were rooted in truth—and group dialogue and planning. It involved massive truth-spreading campaigns, including the handing out of informational leaflets and other mobilizing efforts in the black community and beyond, day after day.

If we the people are to keep the momentum going in terms of salvaging the Constitution and keeping democracy alive, we have to organize and get the word out between protests. Keeping our Constitution, our protection under the Bill of Rights and our democracy is an ongoing project.

The Bush administration has in many ways used the "war on terrorism" as an excuse for a war of terrorism against the people of this country, a questionable war on Iraq and a war against the U.S. Constitution. If that's not enough to get us away from our TV screens and cause us to gather in churches, homes, businesses and meeting halls across the country, what more would it take? Let the protests continue, and let the gathering and organizing between protests begin.

Does the George W. Bush administration's proposed war in Iraq deserve the blind loyalty of Congress and the American people? Or does America deserve better than the future we'll probably reap if we give our unthinking loyalty to a highly questionable, recklessly costly and certainly grisly war?

Note: I hope conscientious citizens of this and other countries will call and write the U.S. Congress and ask them to thoroughly and independently investigate—and to question the Bush administration's data—instead of jumping like lemmings into war with Iraq. Feel free to mail this article to members of Congress, and let's send them all the other Bush-administration-free information we can. After all, we ordinary citizens can make a case to Congress, too, and our case won't be motivated by visions of oil, empire, nationalist superiority and world domination.

Carla Binion is an Online Journal Contributing Editor

July 25, 2002-With today's avalanche of corporate scandals, I'm reminded of early warnings from wise journalists. In Who Will Tell The People (Simon & Schuster, 1992) Bill Greider warned that certain multinational corporations, companies largely unaccountable to U.S. law, were slowly eroding American democracy. Greider mentioned that German social critic Wolfgang Sachs had called those corporations and their global marketplace the world's new "closet dictator."

In The American Presidency (Common Courage Press, 1998) Gore Vidal said we are a people "conditioned from birth to believe that Americans possess neither an emperor nor a ruling class." However, today's emperor is not any individual politician, but is, among other entities, the unaccountable corporations referred to by Sachs and Greider.

Gore Vidal also points out that today the emperor and its supporting ruling class have rendered the office of the president "as powerless as it is expensive to gain, rather like elections to the Roman consulships, which were retained to the end of the empire while Caesars did the ruling. They kept the forms of an ancient and revered republic while depriving consuls and Senate of those powers to rule which were now the emperor's sole prerogative."

As an example, Vidal points out the effort to "get" President Bill Clinton was a warning strike from the ruling class to "any politician who might want to divert tax money back to the people in the form of, say, health care." When the Clintons proposed a national health care system that threatened insurance company profits, the insurance industry ("cash cow to the richest 1 percent of the population," according to Vidal) conducted a media blitz against the Clinton plans.

This look back at the get-Clinton effort is not a defense of the Clintons but a defense of the American people's right to select our own leaders. The point is to note that the U. S. ruling class and its right-wing allies have at times gone to great lengths to weaken democracy and oppose the will of the people.

In The Hunting of the President: The Ten-Year Campaign to Destroy Bill and Hillary Clinton, journalists Joe Conason and Gene Lyons say, "Hillary Clinton's remarks about a 'vast right-wing conspiracy to undermine my husband' were initially mocked by pundits as a feeble defense of her husband's bad character. Yet subsequent revelations about OIC's [Office of Independent Council's] behavior lent weight to her accusations."

By the time details emerged regarding "the secretive machinations of Lucianne Goldberg, Linda Tripp, Richard Porter, George Conway, Ann Coulter and Jerome Marcus to buttress the first lady's allegations . . . there was little argument about the existence of a 'conspiracy,' and still less about whether the plotters were 'right-wing,'" Conason and Lyons write.

Conason and Lyons also note that most Americans objected to the fact that during the get-Clinton frenzy, "the Washington press appeared to have joined forces with a partisan prosecutor to void the results of two presidential elections." They add that this effort to nullify the will of the people via the partisan-driven Clinton impeachment was "a ratings-driven coup d'etat."

Gore Vidal says the ruling class initially assumed Clinton would play by their axiom: "Do nothing at home unless the banks give the green light and the boardrooms sign on." Instead, Clinton acted independently to "rev up the economy and even do things that need doing for the people at large." In other words, Clinton was attacked by wealthy, right-wing interests in part because he believed he could in some instances go against the ruling class on behalf of the people.

According to Vidal, the get-Clinton effort was a message from the ruling class to all challengers: "Don't mess with us. It's our country, not yours. We're not selling. And forget about taxing us. Anyway, isn't it pretty exciting now we got just about the whole globe? Soon we'll get into China. Big market. Cheaper than going to war with them but maybe we'll have to go that route too, one of these days. The big one. Meanwhile, just keep government off our backs."

This might also be the message of the stolen election.

Around the time of the 2000 election, oil, insurance, pharmaceutical and other corporations expressed disdain for a Gore presidency, fearing Gore might favor industry regulation. An article, "America in the Grip of Bush's 'Iron Triangle,'" (The Observer, December 3, 2000) noted those corporations wanted to "take over the regulatory bodies of government and regulate themselves."

The efforts to depose Clinton and to steal the 2000 election also happened to subvert democracy and oppose the expressed will of the people, whether they originated primarily with "right-wing" or "ruling class/corporate" interests. Those interests are often the same.

Some of the following paragraphs appeared in an earlier article of mine. They exemplify corporate opposition to the Clinton health care plan.

In 1993, the Clinton administration tried to do something about the high price of prescription drugs, hinting at possible government-imposed price controls. The pharmaceutical industry then turned to the Beckel Cowan PR firm to oppose the administration's designs on lowering the cost of prescription drugs-although, of course, arguably the Clinton plan would have benefited the public.

John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton, (Toxic Sludge is Good for You, Common Courage Press, 1995) write that Beckel Cowan "created an AstroTurf [or, fake grassroots] organization called 'Rx Partners' and began deploying state and local organizers to, in the words of a company brochure, 'generate and secure high-quality personal letters from influential constituents to 35 targeted members of Congress.'"

Pharmaceutical companies weren't the only corporations to oppose the Clinton health care plan and target Congress. The insurance industry went to work to fight against the Clinton proposals, recruiting PR-man Robert Hoopes.

According to Stauber and Rampton, the 300,000 member Independent Insurance Agents of America (IIAA) hired Hoopes as their "grassroots coordinator/political education specialist."

Campaign & Elections magazine reported the IIAA activated "nearly 140,000 insurance agents during the health care debate, becoming what Hoopes describes as a new breed of Washington lobbyists," say Stauber and Rampton.

Hoopes said the lobbyists "have behind them an army of independent insurance agents from each state, and members of Congress understand what a lobbyist can do with the touch of a button to mobilize those people for or against them."

In Campaign & Elections magazine ("Killing Health Care Reform," October/November 1994) Thomas Scarlett wrote of the insurance companies PR moves, "Through a combination of skillfully targeted media and grassroots lobbying, these groups were able to change more minds than the president could, despite the White House 'bully pulpit.' . . . Never before have private interests spent so much money so publicly to defeat an initiative launched by a president."

Propagandist Rush Limbaugh also fueled the anti-health care debate on his radio show with frequent "calculated rants" aimed at his dittohead audience. The insurance industry's PR-man Blair Childs said his coalition ran paid ads on Limbaugh's show to encourage Rush's listeners to call members of Congress and urge them to kill health care reform.

Stauber and Rampton say congressional staffers often didn't know the callers were "primed, loaded, aimed and fired at them by radio ads on the Limbaugh show, paid by the insurance industry, with the goal of orchestrating the appearance of overwhelming grassroots opposition to health reform."

By 1994, the insurance corporations' PR attacks had changed the political environment. Stauber and Rampton write that "Republicans who previously had signed on to various components of the Clinton plan backed away." Even Democratic Party Senate majority leader George Mitchell "announced a scaled-back plan that was almost pure symbolism . . . Republicans dismissed it with fierce scorn."

In George W. Bush, the ruling class and closet dictator have their yes-man. Commentators for the corporate-owned media have no need to attempt to hound him out of office as they did Clinton for daring to try to "rev up the economy and even do things that need doing for the people at large." The insurance and oil industries have no need to battle this president for trying to tax or regulate them, as they might have found necessary if Gore had been allowed to keep his 2000 election win.

As we've seen with Bush's deregulation policies and lax handling of today's corporate scandals, those corporations have little to fear. Bush knows who the "real American emperor" is. He allows the closet dictator to rule while he plays its protector and serves as figurehead.

This may be the only kind of "president" we Americans are allowed to have from now on, unless we identify and challenge the real American emperor and come up with ways to prevent such things as trivially-based, politically motivated impeachment and stolen elections in the future.

Since the various forms of mainstream media are owned by the same ruling corporations Bush now protects, Bill Greider's question is still relevant. Bush and his corporate cronies may know the identity of the real American emperor, today's closet dictator. However, in the interest of keeping democracy alive, who will tell the people? --July 26, 2002

By Carla Binion

On Saturday, July 20, Al Gore accused the Bush administration of lying to Americans about the nation's economy, according to a story by AP writer Bill Poovey.

I think if Gore keeps up this feisty attitude, he will appeal to potential voters who rightfully want Democrats to strenuously oppose certain corrupt Republican policies. Gore said the Bush administration has "lied about the future liabilities they have put on our shoulders as taxpayers."

I like to see Gore fighting the Bush team on such substantial issues. Gore has promised if he were to run again, he would pull out all the stops and battle political corruption more vigorously than he did during his presidential campaign.

Rank and file Democrats and grassroots activists have often asked Democratic leaders to fight on their behalf with greater passion. At times, Democrats wrestle with ways to channel their anger into productive political change. In COLD ANGER, a book recommended by journalist Bill Moyers, author Mary Beth Rogers mentions that anger can become positive when it "seethes at the injustices of life and transforms itself into a compassion for those hurt by life."

Rogers was Deputy Treasurer of the State of Texas from 1983 to 1988. She is also organizer of the Foundation for Democracy Dialogues, has long been involved in public policy issues and has written numerous political publications. Rogers also writes that the healthy form of anger can serve as an impetus, or "can energize a democracy -- because it can lead to the first step in changing politics."

As an example, Rogers says grassroots activist Ernesto Cortes, Jr. and the people he organizes "have chosen to be energized personally and politically by their anger. In turn, they are changing the political process wherever they participate. That is because anger for Cortes and the people he organizes is an emotion of hope, not of despair."

Cortes, a community organizer from San Antonio, Texas, once said that the aphorism "power corrupts" works both ways. "Powerlessness also corrupts," says Cortes. "We've got a lot of people who've never developed an understanding of power. They've been institutionally trained to be passive. Power is nothing more than the ability to act in your own behalf. In Spanish, we call the word 'poder,' to have capacity, to be able." *

"Ernesto Cortes," says Rogers, "is helping new political participants take the hot impulse of their anger and cool it down so that it can become a useful tool to improve individual lives and the quality of the common community. For them 'cold anger' reflects the hope of change."

Democratic party leaders need the kick-start of anger or passion in battling Bush over the economy, over his conduct of the "war on terrorism," over his proposed infringements on civil liberties and other issues. Grassroots Democrats and others should applaud Gore and other Democrats when they stand up and speak out against the worst of the Bush policies.

If Gore continues to show backbone and vitality in his opposition to corrupt Bush administration practices, I think he will receive overwhelming rank and file support. Many ordinary citizens want elected leaders to champion our concerns with the same energetic enthusiasm those leaders would manage to muster if their own families were endangered.

If the health or well being of a senator's or congressperson's own spouse or child were directly threatened by a Bush policy, that member of Congress would forcefully oppose the policy. They wouldn't express their opposition meekly, but firmly and passionately.

Gore expressed that kind of opposition to Bush's economic policies in his July 20 comments. Let's urge other Democratic leaders to follow suit. Anger and passion about political differences may have a bad reputation, but that kind of anger used as an impetus and then channeled into energizing hope, compassion and activism can change the world for the better.

* from "Powerlessness also corrupts," Ernesto Cortes, Jr.'s Speech to Farm Crisis Workers Conference, published in Texas Observer, July 11, 1986.

By Carla Binion

Now isn't the time to divide the Democratic party. I encourage Greens who were once Democrats to consider coming back to the fold. The following takes a look at the battle between Greens and Democrats. It examines flaws of the right-leaning Democrats of the DLC, as well as shortcomings of the Green party.

The American Prospect (July 1, 2002) ran two articles related to the fight between Greens and Democrats. In one, Harold Meyerson talks about the Greens' determination to defeat even the most liberal Democrats, including Paul Wellstone of Minnesota and Henry Waxman of California.

According to Meyerson, the Greens decided to run against progressive Democrat Paul Wellstone in part because he had voted to authorize a military response to the September 11 attacks. However, when Minnesota Green party delegates went to their state convention last month, they didn't arrive with a candidate.

They belatedly nominated Ed McGaa, a man "not familiar to a majority" of the delegates, according to Brian Kaller, co-editor of the Greens' Minnesota newspaper. After the convention, the Greens learned that McGaa supports Wellstone's position regarding the war on terrorism. Because most of the delegates didn't get to know their candidate, they negated one of their main reasons for challenging Wellstone.

Wellstone has battled for worker's rights, single-payer health insurance and a variety of other liberal causes. Meyerson says Wellstone is "the single most effective proponent of lower-case-g green politics in America."

Meyerson also notes that Greens have "tipped congressional races to Republicans in Michigan and New Mexico" and that Nader told David Mosberg of In These Times he would "unhesitatingly back a Green against [liberal Democrat Henry] Waxman of California." Nader added that Democrats should "lose people, whether they're good or bad."

The problem is, we all pay the price when we lose good Democrats and turn Congress and the White House over to Republicans. Yes, the Democratic party could use improvement, but the Greens don't acknowledge that Bush and many Republican members of Congress are far more damaging to the country than the Democratic alternative.

Another article in The American Prospect takes on the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC). Robert Kuttner writes that the DLC was organized by Democratic "defense hawks.social conservatives" and other right-leaning Democrats for the purpose of moving the party "to the center" in order to win elections.

Kuttner says the DLC still allies itself with Republicans on many issues, including trade. Some Senate Democrats helped pass the Dayton-Craig amendment, which made any trade deal that guts antidumping protections subject to floor amendment.

According to Kuttner, "the DLC was outraged," because they "want their Republican president to have an absolutely free hand to negotiate this pro-corporate hemispheric trade deal." The DLC statement on the Dayton-Craig amendment said: "It is critical that this 'gutting' provision be dropped in the House-Senate conference committee."

Although Bill Clinton was backed by the DLC and supported the DLC on some issues, he often fought with the conservative organization. According to Kuttner, a DLC commentator said Clinton rejected the DLC's advice that Democrats distance themselves from liberal issues such as prescription drugs and Social Security.

When in 1993, Clinton unveiled a health care plan that proposed to provide health care coverage for all Americans, the DLC publicly opposed the Clinton plan. According to Kenneth S. Baer (Reinventing Democrats, University Press of Kansas, 2000) after Clinton was inaugurated, conservative Democrats "began to wonder.whether Clinton was a committed New Democrat, as once defined by the DLC."

The DLC's Al From also criticized Al Gore for running a campaign the DLC believed to be too liberal. Though Gore had also been supported by the DLC, he often refused to take marching orders from the organization's conservative members.

Much of the Green party's criticism of the Democrats centers around the fact that Democrats have become too much like Republicans. However, Democratic party liberals have frequently fought with the conservative, Republican-like DLC. Those liberals will stand a better chance of winning future battles with the DLC if they have the support of rank and file Democrats.

For all its flaws, the Democratic party is still our best hope for a brighter future. Rather than abandon the party, we need to support its liberal members and urge them to challenge the DLC when it goes along with Republican proposals such as the effort to dump the Dayton-Craig amendment's "gutting" provision.

After all, the Green party also has its flaws. Although Nader has criticized Bush on some issues, he has turned a blind eye to many of Bush's most malignant faults. Then there's the matter of the party's general lack of organization and forethought, as represented by the Minnesota Greens' belatedly nominating Ed McGaa, the fellow who turned out not to be the anti-Wellstone candidate party members first believed.

With the political scene as dark as it is today, we need to invest our energy in a political party that is fully ready for prime time. The Democrats, for all their faults, are the closest thing to hope we liberals have at present.

I echo something a friend of mine, Mike Hersh, said recently: Nader Democrats, please come home. --Carla Binion, July 14, '02

The views expressed are the writer's own and do not necessarily reflect those of Bush Watch.