The DISH

Unbossed and unbought news and information you can use

Vol. 11 Issue 44…Dedicated to the Dialogue on Race…November 2, 2008

Venue for an Artist

Be Angry At the Sun

By John Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962)

That public men publish falsehoods

Is nothing new.

That America must accept

Like the historical republics corruption and empire

Has been known for years.

Be angry at the sun for setting

If these things anger you.

Watch the wheel slope and turn,

They are all bound on the wheel,

these people, those warriors.

This republic, Europe, Asia.

Observe them gesticulating,

Observe them going down.

The gang serves lies, the passionate

Man plays his part; the cold passion for truth

Hunts in no pack.

You are not Catullus, you know,

To lampoon these crude sketches of Caesar.

You are far from Dante's feet,

but even farther from his dirty

Political hatreds.

Let boys want pleasure, and men

Struggle for power, and women perhaps for fame,

And the servile to serve a Leader

and the dupes to be duped.

Yours is not theirs.

About Me: An American poet, J. R. Jeffers was known for his work about the central California coast. Most of his poetry was written in classic narrative and epic form. He is also known for his short verse, and he is considered an icon of the environmental movement and advocacy of in-humanism, the belief that mankind is too self-centered and too indifferent to the "astonishing beauty of things." As articulated in the first half of the 1900s, in-humanism suggests that men may strive but will always be unable to "un-center" themselves.

Hood Notes

Police Election Day Preparations

By Dot

The Internet is abuzz with stories of police departments nationwide gearing up for possible civil unrest on Election Day. According to an Associated Press survey of major metropolitan police chiefs, it appears police and security officials are principally concerned about an Obama loss. With Senator Barack Obama, the Democratic presidential nominee, leading in all national polls and history as our guide, many folks, not just the police, are justifiably worried that another election could be stolen. And, public response to such a theft is unlikely to be pleasant.

The Internet examples of civil unrest and riots include fan reaction following major sporting events and the jury verdict in the Rodney King police beating. Unlike any of those events, this is an historic national election, whichever way it turns out.

For the first time ever, the US will have either its first black president or the first woman to serve as vice president. No doubt, the outcome will have huge implications for how the nation will be run over the course of the next four to eight years. No one seriously expects an immediate or dramatic policy shift. Neither Senator John McCain nor Senator Obama is outside the American mainstream; both have pledged to preserve the republic. But, even small incremental changes have huge implications. A lot is riding on this election. Hence, the volatile mix of vested interests and expectations. Throw in an abundance of aggressive police, and who knows what can happen?

In addition to watching out for the police, know your rights. Be prepared to request a provisional ballot if your name has been scrubbed from the voter rolls. Know who to call, if you need legal assistance in order to exercise your right to vote. Be prepared for a long wait; election day turnout, like early voting, is expected to set a record.

Senator Ted Stevens: Arrogance of Power

By John Burl Smith

Although Republicans talk a lot about integrity, morality and family values, they are very tolerant of lying, moral lapses and corrupt activities by their politicians. Let them tell it, they are all staunchly conservative, "born again" Christians, who set the example for the rest of the country. The latest example of why Americans need to take off their rose-tinted glasses and not only turn the page, but start reading another book, is the recent faux pas of Alaska Senator Ted Stevens.

Last week, after deliberating less than a day, a Washington DC jury found Senator Stevens guilty on seven felony counts of lying on financial disclosure forms to conceal gifts and expensive renovations to his house. Each count carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison for the 84 year old six-term Republican. Despite the guilty verdict, Stevens will remain on the ballot seeking a seventh full term. Locked in a tight race against Anchorage's Democratic Mayor, Mark Begich, Stevens arrogantly vowed he would be re-elected.

Indicted in July, Stevens demanded an expedited trial to clear his name before Election Day. Unable to convince the jury of 8 women and 4 men of his innocence, Stevens could cling to his Senate seat for months while appealing the verdict, if he pulls off a win on November 4. Tradition allows him to exhaust all of his appeal options before the Senate ethics committee can even begin expulsion hearings, according to the Senate Historical Office. It takes 67 votes to expel a senator and everyone remembers Idaho Senator Larry Craig, who despite his guilty plea escaped expulsion with only a slap on the wrist.

Known as "Uncle Ted" in Alaska, Stevens has been a major figure in Alaskan politics for more than four decades and has brought home billions of dollars in federal aid during his six terms, including the infamous "bridge to nowhere." The powerful Republican accused Justice Department lawyers of "repeated prosecutorial misconduct" during the trial. Prosecutors with the Justice Department's Public Integrity Section alleged Stevens approached a close friend for help remodeling his house in Girdwood, Alaska. That friend, Bill Allen, chief executive of the now-defunct oil services company Veco, testified that his company financed extensive renovations to Stevens' house from 2000 through 2002.

Stevens was also accused of accepting other gifts, including a sled dog and a $2,700 massage chair. He received the dog from a friend who bought it for $1,000 from a nonprofit at a 2003 auction. Stevens reported the value of the dog as $250 on disclosure forms. Prosecutor Brenda Morris said of Stevens, "He is a miser who worked so hard to hide the dog's true value that it makes his misdeeds believable since he went to such lengths over a dog."

Stevens's attorney attacked the credibility of Allen, who previously pled guilty to federal bribery charges in a wide-ranging investigation of corruption in Alaska politics. Political handicappers talk of Alaska as though it is a foreign country when it comes to Stevens, and they refuse to write him off even though his chances of winning are greatly diminished.

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, the GOP's vice presidential candidate would only say, "This is a sad day for Alaska and for Senator Stevens and his family. I'm confident Senator Stevens will do what's right for the people of Alaska." DO WHAT'S RIGHT! That is the whole point of the trial, the prosecution's case and the seven-count conviction. For everyone, except people in Alaska, like with the dog, Stevens has no intention of doing "what's right."

Arriving back in Alaska, Stevens displayed his arrogance and disdain for justice at an airport welcome home party, complete with balloons, band and dancing girls. With that kind of reception after being found guilty of lying, what's the incentive to do right? Stevens is reminiscent of machine politicians like Boss E. H. Crump of Memphis, Tennessee back in the 1930-50s. Boss Crump had black people under his thumb; he held all the power. Trapped in a system of discrimination, repression, corruption and racism, blacks did whatever Boss Crump wanted. Each election Boss Crump rounded up blacks by the truckloads and carried them to the polls. After voting for Boss Crump, they were 'paid off' with a watermelon and barbeque party. Crump would say, "My niggers don't know how to oppose me. They have been down on their knees so long, they don't know what it is to stand up."

If Alaskan voters re-elect Stevens, what does that say about people like Gov. Sarah Palin? Is it that they like goodies like watermelons and barbeque so much they will sell their votes for such treats, or is greed and corruption such commonplace occurrences in Alaska that being found guilty of seven counts of lying is dismissed like southerners excused racism and lynching during Jim Crow segregation?

Intuit's Vibe

The Presidency: Do We Need It? (Excerpts)

By Paul Barrow

I worked for a newspaper publisher several years ago during the Nixon administration who, as a zealous Republican, shared with me, a young naive, fledgling writer, his undoubtedly most coveted position that Republicans don't believe in a democracy. They believe, he declared, in a republic.

I thought at the time, boy, that sure took balls to say. Don't live in a democracy and don't want to live in a democracy.

It took awhile for the realization to really set in that, if this is Republican catechism 101, there has to be a lot of people in this country who consciously do not want to live in a democracy. What that also suggests is that when we as progressives raise our voices of indignation, appalled by what we see as very undemocratic initiatives being unveiled with an almost predictable discipline from the White House, taking the moral high ground perched with our sad selves upon the fine pillars of democracy, it damn sure isn't good strategy. Power only understands power. Judy Ramsey, my Co-Director, pointed that out awhile back in another article. Our belief that moralizing will somehow persuade our masters to be a little more considerate of our views is like asking a slave in Georgia in 1789 to protest the immorality of his lack of voice in the matter of any contemplation of his being put up for auction. Obviously, that doesn't work very well if the person you're trying to lay a guilt trip on doesn't feel guilty. He doesn't, of course, because he believes in a different kind of morality.

The problem here is in the semantics we use to define what it is we've really got in this country. We have egg yolk and egg white, two very different properties, and we've scrambled them so much we can't see the difference any more. One part holds the very essence of life; the other something left over on the fringes that is viewed as parasitic to the rest. The distinctions between a republic and a democracy are obviously not lost on Republicans, but I believe that they clearly are for the rest of us. Half of us know that we live in a republic. The other half think that we live in a democracy and merely call it a republic.

That's really a critically dangerous concoction to eat for breakfast because the metaphor goes astray through the implication that a republic and democracy are somehow merged into some sort of bland blob like imitation Halloween puke that has no central core. It would only be correct if the appearance represented something real. What non-Republicans believe about democracy is the illusion that we all believe in democracy and also have some semblance of one. But when someone like Dick Cheney uses the word democracy, he means a republic, and he really means a republic.

While the liberals, progressives and Democrats and a few other fringe lunatics fume that this condition or that condition in society isn't democratic, the other half are saying, Well, so what? We don't live in a democracy, and we don't want a democracy. We live in a republic. A Republican's idea of democracy is what John McCain likes to call socialism. Equal what? Re-distribution of what? The other half of us believe that we have a democracy and simply call it a republic because we have a "representative" form of government. The other half know that we live in a republic and are actively constructing legal mechanisms that reinforce it and strengthen it with absolutely no illusions about it ever being a democracy. Does it make any difference?

Dana D. Nelson has just published a book that demonstrates very clearly that it does. In Bad for Democracy: How the Presidency Undermines the Power of the People, she shows how presidents have been accumulating power very gradually over the entire course of American history. And there's where another illusion rests. We believe that they don't have a right to do it. It doesn't ever seem to register that the Supreme Court interprets law based upon Constitutional foundations that favor republicanism rather than either democratic principles or the contradictory and impossible effort to balance the branches of government that were put in place by the founders. The very idea that republics are better than democracies goes directly back to the founders' belief, from which the Court receives its authority, that too much democracy could be dangerous.

Democracy is self rule, rule by the people. In our republic, we sacrificed our rule for representative rule, and representative rule becomes slavery the more it deviates from our own will. A republic and a democracy have diametrically opposed propositions that form the foundations of their core ideas. One proposes that power should be concentrated in the hands of a few, led by one man. The other proposes that power should be distributed equally through the proposition of one person one vote.

A one person one vote concept implies inherently an equal distribution of power. It implies that the people rule, not a republican oligarchy or a president. It implies that my will is just as important as yours. If our one person one vote system was structured so that the people rather than Congress voted on measures now before the House or the Senate, that would be a whole lot closer to anything considered self rule. The government would then have to expedite the wishes of at least the majority of the people rather than simply ignoring them as they do now, for just one example, in continuing to advance our wars in the Middle East.

A democracy is concerned with the people and the general will. A republic is concerned with power and who holds it. Unfortunately, my Republican employer was right: a republic, even if we get to select our king, is not a democracy. In a republic, as he defined it, the citizens are supervised and protected from their own tendency toward folly, even though they are allowed some freedom to direct their own affairs through "representative" proxy. And it is the president and the office of the presidency that is a true hallmark of republics, a chief authority figure at the top who has become the modern-day substitute for a monarch.

Power to republicans is not and was never derived from the people. It is held in spite of the people, and at their complete expense.

Real democracies, it may come as a surprise to some of you, and as Dana D. Nelson has so clearly articulated, don't need presidents. Democracies don't hand the full weight of their accumulated and collective, unarticulated wisdom over to one man to articulate for them. Democracy is something we do, not something we have. It is when we ourselves engage the process and make decisions ourselves that we have democracy. Democracy, as defined by the Greeks meant (demos), "the people," and (kratos)," rule." In a republic, the people are not sovereign. In a democracy, they are. Democracies and republics obviously stand at opposite ends of the spectrum of who rules. If you play chess and start out the game by giving away your queen, your bishops, and your rooks, what are the odds that you're going to be in the game very long? (Note: Read the essay in its entirety at http://www.unitedprogressives.us)

Disgruntled says: In response to last week's question regarding abolishing the Electoral College, which is not an educational institution, but a relic of slavery, the answer is a resounding YES! There should be no debate on this topic. If this nation is truly a democracy, the people should determine the nation's chief executive officer, rather than some arcane system designed to grant small rural states -- white people -- more clout in determining who occupies the Oval Office. Continuing it, while fighting wars abroad to bring freedom and democracy to other nations, as we endeavor to control their natural resources or other strategic interests, makes the US a blazing hypocrite in the eyes of the global community, not to mention the fact that it makes your everyday Joe-the-Plumber or Joe-Six-Pack look stupid for loudly proclaiming the US is a democracy.

Disgruntled wants to know: Georgia Governor Sonny Perdue (R) and the Republican-controlled state legislature have acknowledged that the state's $428 million homeowner tax relief grant programs has failed. Instead of reducing homeowners' property tax burden, it has primarily supplemented local government spending. So, in August, Perdue froze the grant payments to counties, mainly because of the state's budget crisis, rather than any genuine concern for homeowners' tax burden. At the time, Republicans running for re-election vowed to protect the property tax relief program. Now, these Republicans are in sync with Perdue on ending the grant program and are calling for limiting residential tax assessments. Property tax bills for 2008 have already been mailed out and, if unpaid, are overdue. Do you believe Georgia Republicans are serious about limiting property tax assessments, or is this tax relief rhetoric just another election-year gimmick?

Disgruntled feels: Apprehensive! Many of us have already voted. We have braved the weather, stood in long lines, completed absentee ballots or whatever to do our duty as US citizens. Now, we are wondering whether or not those votes will be counted. Polls on early voting show Senator Barack Obama is leading Republican Senator John McCain and should win the Electoral College vote by a comfortable margin, if the trend pans out. Still, we worry! Many of us in black communities across this country believe the presidential elections of 2000 and 2004 were stolen. After all, Vice President Al Gore won the 2000 popular vote, thousands of votes were not counted in Florida for various reasons and countless others were purged from voter rolls by Republican election officials employing faulty processes to scrub voter rolls. Nothing has changed to prevent another such theft or alter our perception. So, it is with a great deal of apprehension that we await the outcome of the 2008 Election!

Mailbox: E-Mails, Faxes and Phone Calls

Email www.forbes.com ...The biggest tax cheats: Rich folks. Confirming what you might've always suspected, a new study shows that those with high incomes are more likely to underreport what they make. A new study based on unpublished Internal Revenue Service data shows the rich are different when it comes to paying taxes: They hide more of their income. The previously unreported study estimates that taxpayers whose true income was between $500,000 and $1 million a year understated their adjusted gross incomes by 21% overall in 2001, compared with an 8% underreporting rate for Americans earning $50,000 to $100,000 and even lower rates for those earning less. (The "net misreporting rate," as the IRS calls it, includes both underreported income and inflated deductions.)

Email kimcastellano@gmail.com ...Sign marking site of 1955 murder vandalized...By Sheila Byrd...A sign marking the site where Emmett Till's battered body was pulled from a river in 1955 has been ripped down by vandals, authorities said. The sign posted on a road near the Tallahatchie River was among eight that were erected after the county adopted a resolution last year apologizing to Till's family because an all-white jury acquitted two white men of murdering Till for whistling at a white woman. Tallahatchie County Sheriff William Brewer Jr. said his office is investigating the incident. Till, who was from Chicago, had come to Mississippi in August 1955 to visit his uncle. J.W. Milam and Roy Bryant, the husband of the woman Till whistled at, snatched Till from his bed one night at the family's home. The 14-year-old's body was found in the river three days later, a cotton gin fan tied around his neck with barbed wire. His left eye was missing, as were most of his teeth; his nose was crushed, and there was a hole in his right temple. His slaying shocked the nation, and nearly 100,000 people visited his open casket during a four-day public viewing in Chicago. Bryant and Milam were acquitted in 1955. They confessed to the killing in a 1956 Look magazine article.

Email nathanw123@firestorm.com German economist apologizes for Jewish comparison...By Geir Moulson...A leading German economist apologized Monday for drawing a much-criticized parallel between corporate managers today and the Nazi-era persecution of Jews that followed the 1929 financial crisis. Hans-Werner Sinn, the head of the Munich-based Ifo institute, was quoted as telling the daily Tagesspiegel in an interview about the global economic meltdown that "in every crisis, people look for culprits, for someone to blame." "No one wanted to believe in an anonymous systemic error in the world economic crisis of 1929 either," he added, according to the report. "Back then it hit the Jews in Germany; today, it's the managers." Recent weeks have seen widespread condemnation of perceived failings by financial experts prior to today's financial crisis. In contrast, the 1929 crisis was followed by the rise to power in 1933 of the Nazis, who set in motion a systematic persecution of Jews that culminated with the death of 6 million Jews in the Holocaust. Sinn drew strong criticism from the government and the opposition, from Germany's Central Council of Jews and from the Simon Wiesenthal Center. He issued an apology a few hours after the interview hit newsstands.

Email www.legitgov.org ...Thousands Erroneously Tagged Ineligible to Vote --In New Databases, Many Are Wrongly Flagged as Ineligible...Thousands of voters across the country must reestablish their eligibility in the next three weeks in order for their votes to count on Nov. 4, a result of new state registration systems that are incorrectly rejecting them. In Alabama, scores of voters are being labeled as convicted felons on the basis of incorrect lists. Michigan must restore thousands of names it illegally removed from voter rolls over residency questions, a judge ruled this week. Tens of thousands of voters could be affected in Wisconsin. Officials there admit that their database is wrong one out of five times when it flags voters, sometimes for data discrepancies as small as a middle initial or a typo in a birth date.