BOVARD

Wednesday 14th May 2008

Now Online: Podcast of BMW Horse**** Interview!

Talk show host Brian Wilson and I had a rattlin’ good chat on WSPD in Toledo today. We kicked hell out of the Homegrown Terrorism and Violent Radicalization BS Act now before the Senate. There were wine, beer, and cigar jokes, as well as expressions of condolence to the Israeli Prime Minister who might be indicted for taking bribes on the same day Bush arrives to visit. But at least Olmert has a great character witness: Bush announced yesterday that Olmert is an “honest man.”

At the end of the interview, we discussed Bob Barr’s candidancy for the LP presidential nomination.

The whole shebang is @ 16 minutes and is accessible at this website.

** The title of this blog entry refers to comments regarding how Congress names legislation.

Sunday 11th May 2008

Terrorist Cabal on the Potomac?

4:56 pm | Terrorism | Bovard | Comments: 2

I don’t know for sure that those two were with Hezbollah - or maybe Hamas - but you can’t be too careful in an area perfect for launching kayak attacks on the DC bridges. Unless of course the kayakers drowned before getting that far (as often happens in these waters).

Seems like half the people that throng near this vantage point speak foreign languages. I recognized an Iranian there recently - he was doubly suspicious, since he’s also on an Home Owners Association board. Bound to be some people passing through this area who are already listed on the Terrorist Watch List. Almost none of the cars in the nearby parking lot had yellow “Support Our Troops” stickers.

Where is Homeland Security Czar Mike Chertoff when you need him???

The photo works better in the full size version here.

Ellsberg’s Excellent Memoir

4:24 pm | Attention Deficit Democracy | Bovard | Uncategorized | Comments: 2

My latest article in Freedom Daily is “Ellsberg’s Lesson for Our Time.” I should have read Daniel Ellsberg’s excellent memoirs - SECRETS: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers - long ago. But better late than never.

Here is the lead of the article:

Daniel Ellsberg is the kind of American who should receive a Medal of Freedom. Except that the Medals of Freedom are distributed by presidents who routinely give them to “useful idiots” and apologists for their wars and power grabs. It should be renamed the Medal for Enabling or Applauding Official Crimes in the Name of Freedom.

Ellsberg knowingly risked spending a life in prison to bring the truth about the Vietnam War to Americans. He had hoped truth would set Americans free from the spell of official lies. But the experience in Iraq indicates that Americans have learned little if anything from the Vietnam-era deceits.

(The Future of Freedom Foundation puts the full text of Freedom Daily articles online a few months after the print/email version appears).

Thursday 8th May 2008

GoLeft TV Interview Now Online -Radio Broadcast on Saturday

5:31 pm | Attention Deficit Democracy | Bush | Bovard | Comments: 0

Mike Papantonio of the “Ring of Fire” nationally-syndicated radio program “Ring of Fire” recently interviewed me regarding article on “The 9/11 Servility Reflex.” I just heard from his producer Farron Cousins: “Your interview is going to run on this Saturday’s program, at the top of the second hour. We air from 3p - 6p Eastern on Saturday, and we are rebroadcast from 8p - 11p on Sunday evening. In addition, we’ve got the interview up on GoLeft TV now, and you can get to it by clicking on the link below.”

Here is the website for the Ring of Fire radio show. I think it will list the times and frequencies for local shows.

Tuesday 6th May 2008

AmeriCorps’ Latest Triumphs

7:58 am | Attention Deficit Democracy | Bovard | Uncategorized | Comments: 1

The current issue of Ripon Forum includes a piece I wrote on the case against AmeriCorps and other national service boondoggles. The Forum is published by the Ripon Society, an organization of liberal Republicans founded in 1965. The same issue of the magazine features articles by Bob Dole, George HW Bush, and Chris Shays. I fit right into the line-up.

The National Service Illusion Ripon Forum April/May 2008

JAMES BOVARD

National Service is one of the hottest causes of presidential candidates. Both Barack Obama and John McCain are gung-ho for expanding Americorps to hire a quarter million people to perform federally-orchestrated good deeds. Former presidential candidate Senator Chris Dodd wanted to make community service mandatory for high school students and boost AmeriCorps to a million members. John Edwards also favored making national service mandatory.

But does America have a shortage of government workers?

AmeriCorps is the epitome of contemporary federal good intentions. AmeriCorps, which currently has roughly 75,000 paid recruits, has been very popular in Washington in part because it puts a smiley face on Uncle Sam at a time when many government policies are deeply unpopular.

AmeriCorps has consumed more than $4 billion in tax dollars since its creation in 1993. During the Clinton administration, AmeriCorps members helped run a program in Buffalo that gave children $5 for each toy gun they brought in — as well as a certificate praising their decision not to play with toy guns. In San Diego, AmeriCorps members busied themselves collecting used bras and panties for a homeless shelter. In Los Angeles, AmeriCorps members busied themselves foisting unreliable ultra-low-flush toilets on poor people. In New Jersey, AmeriCorps members enticed middle-class families to accept subsidized federal health insurance for their children.

President George W. Bush was a vigorous supporter of AmeriCorps in his 2000 campaign, and many Republicans expected that his team would make the program a pride to the nation. But the program is still an administrative train wreck. In 2002, it illegally spent more than $64 million than Congress appropriated – and yet was rewarded with a higher budget.

Bush’s first AmeriCorps chief, Leslie Lenkowsky, started out as a visionary idealist who promised great things from the federal program. But, when he resigned in 2003, Lenkowsky conceded that AmeriCorps is just “another cumbersome, unpredictable government bureaucracy.”

Though AmeriCorps abounds in “feel good” projects, it has never provided credible evidence of benefit to the United States. Instead, it relies on Soviet bloc-style accounting — merely counting labor inputs and pretending that the raw numbers prove grandiose achievements. The Office of Management and Budget concluded in 2003 that “AmeriCorps has not been able to demonstrate results. Its current focus is on the amount of time a person serves, as opposed to the impact on the community or participants.” The General Accounting Office noted that AmeriCorps “generally reports the results of its programs and activities by quantifying the amount of services AmeriCorps participants perform.” GAO criticized AmeriCorps for failing to make any effort to measure the actual effect of its members’ actions.

Most AmeriCorps success claims have no more credibility than a political campaign speech. The vast majority of AmeriCorps programs are “self-evaluated”: the only evidence AmeriCorps possesses of what a program achieved is what the grant recipients claim. One of the agency’s consultants encouraged AmeriCorps programs to inflate the number of claimed beneficiaries: “If you feel your program affects a broad group of individuals who may not be receiving personal services from members… then list the whole community.”

The advocates of a vast national service program assume that there are legions of unmet needs that the new government workers could perform. But the reason such needs are currently unmet is that politicians have either considered them not part of government’s obligation or because meeting the need is not considered worth the cost to taxpayers. There are hundreds of thousands of government agencies across the land, counting federal, state, and local governments. There are already more than 20 million people working for government in this country. Yet national service advocates talk as if the public sector is starved of resources.

National Service programs are more profitable for politicians than for citizens. USA Today noted in 1998 that AmeriCorps’ “T-shirted brigade is most well known nationally as the youthful backdrop for White House photo ops.” President Bush politically exploited AmeriCorps members almost as often as did Clinton.

Some congressmen also profiteer off AmeriCorps’ image. After some congressmen showed up one day in March 2004 to hammer some nails at a Habitat for Humanity house-building project in Washington, AmeriCorps issued a press release hyping their participation in the good deed. The press release named eight members of Congress and noted, “Working alongside the elected officials were two dozen AmeriCorps members from the D.C. chapter of Habitat for Humanity and AmeriCorps.” The home they helped build was to be given to a single mother of three. Photos from the appearance could add flourishes to newsletters to constituents or for reelection campaigns. Congressmen also benefit when they announce AmeriCorps grants to organizations in their districts.

Some national service advocates insist that AmeriCorps’ failings should not be held against proposals to expand the federal role in service because their preferred program would leave it up to communities to decide how to use the new “volunteers.”

But if programs are not centrally controlled, local “initiatives” will soon transform it into a national laughingstock. This happened with CETA, a make-work program that was expanded to its doom under President Carter. CETA bankrolled such job-creating activities as building an artificial rock in Oregon for rock climbers to practice on, conducting a nude sculpture class in Miami where aspiring artists practiced Braille reading on each other, and sending CETA workers door-to-door in Florida to recruit people for food stamps.

More than 60 million Americans work as unpaid volunteers each year. Even if AmeriCorps was expanded to a quarter million recruits, it would amount to less than one half of one percent of the total of people who donate their time for what they consider good causes. And there is no reason to assume that paying “volunteers” multiplies productivity.

Rather than expanding national service programs, Congress should pull the plug on AmeriCorps. At a time of soaring deficits, the federal government can no longer afford to spend half a billion dollars a year on a bogus volunteer program whose results have been AWOL since the last century.

–###–

James Bovard is the author of Attention Deficit Democracy (Palgrave, 2006), Feeling Your Pain (St. Martin’s 2000), Lost Rights (St. Martin’s, 1994), and other books.

Monday 5th May 2008

Warring as Lying

1:54 pm | Lying | Attention Deficit Democracy | Bovard | Comments: 4

The Future of Freedom Foundation posted online today my article from the February issue of Freedom Daily on lying & warring. Amazing to see how much hokum politicians get away with when they commence killing foreigners…..

Warring as Lying Throughout American History
by James Bovard Freedom Daily February 2008

Americans are taught to expect their elected leaders to be relatively honest. But it wasn’t always like that. In the mid 1800s, people joked about political candidates who claimed to have been born in a log cabin that they built with their own hands. This jibe was spurred by William Henry Harrison’s false claim of a log-cabin birth in the 1840 presidential campaign.

Americans were less naive about dishonest politicians in the first century after this nation’s founding. But that still did not deter presidents from conjuring up wars. Presidential deceits on foreign policy have filled cemeteries across the land. George W. Bush’s deceits on the road to war with Iraq fit a long pattern of brazen charades.

In 1846, James K. Polk took Americans to war after falsely proclaiming that the Mexican army had crossed the U.S. border and attacked a U.S. army outpost — “shedding the blood of our citizens on our own soil.” Though Polk refused to provide any details of where the attack occurred, the accusation swayed enough members of Congress to declare war against Mexico. Congressman Abraham Lincoln vigorously attacked Polk for his deceits. But Lincoln may have studied Polk’s methods, since they helped him whip up war fever 15 years later.

In 1917, Woodrow Wilson took the nation to war in a speech to Congress that contained one howler after another. He proclaimed that “self-governed nations do not fill their neighbor states with spies” — despite the role of the British secret service and propaganda operations in the prior years to breed war fever in the United States. Wilson hailed Russia as a nation that had always been “democratic at heart” — less than a month after the fall of the tsar and not long before the Bolshevik Revolution. He proclaimed that the government would show its friendship and affection for German-Americans at home — but his administration was soon spearheading loyalty drives that spread terror in many communities across the land.

In 1940, in one of his final speeches of the presidential campaign, Franklin Roosevelt assured voters, “Your president says this country is not going to war.” At the time, he was violating the Neutrality Act by providing massive military assistance to Britain and was searching high and low for a way to take the United States into war against Hitler.

In his 1944 State of the Union address, Roosevelt denounced those Americans with “such suspicious souls — who feared that I have made ‘commitments’ for the future which might pledge this Nation to secret treaties” at the summit of Allied leaders in Tehran the previous month. In early 1945, Roosevelt told Congress that the Yalta Agreement “spells the end of the system of unilateral action and exclusive alliance and spheres of influence.” In reality, he signed off on Soviet domination of Eastern Europe and the crushing of any hopes for democracy in Poland.

In August 1945, Harry Truman announced to the world that “the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base. That was because we wished in this first attack to avoid, in so far as possible, the killing of civilians.” Hiroshima was actually a major city with more than a third of a million people prior to its incineration. But Truman’s lie helped soften the initial impact on the American public of the first use of the atomic bomb. (The U.S. government also vigorously censored photographs of Hiroshima and its maimed survivors.)

Vietnam falsehoods

Presidential and other government lies on foreign policy are often discounted because they are presumed to be motivated by national security. But as Hannah Arendt noted in an essay on the Pentagon Papers, during the Vietnam War, “The policy of lying was hardly ever aimed at the enemy but chiefly if not exclusively destined for domestic consumption, for propaganda at home and especially for the purpose of deceiving Congress.”

CIA analysts did excellent work in the early period of the Vietnam conflict. But “in the contest between public statements, always over-optimistic, and the truthful reports of the intelligence community, persistently bleak and ominous, the public statements were likely to win simply because they were public,” Arendt commented. The truth never had a chance when it did not serve Lyndon Johnson’s political calculations.

Vietnam destroyed the credibility of both Lyndon Johnson and the American military. Yet the memory of the pervasive lies of the military establishment did not curb the gullibility of many people for fresh government-created falsehoods a decade or so later.

During the 1980s, the U.S. State Department ran a propaganda campaign that placed numerous articles in the U.S. media praising the Nicaraguan Contras and attacking the Sandinista regime. As the Christian Science Monitor noted in 2002, the State Department “fed the Miami Herald a make-believe story that the Soviet Union had given chemical weapons to the Sandinistas. Another tale, which happened to emerge the night of President Ronald Reagan’s reelection victory, held that Soviet MiG fighters were on their way to Nicaragua.” The General Accounting Office investigated and concluded that the State Department operation was illegal, consisting of “prohibited, covert propaganda activities.” There was no backlash against the government when the frauds were disclosed. Instead, it was on to the next scam.

Reagan, Bush, and Clinton

Reagan paved the way for subsequent presidents in immersing anti-terrorist policy in swamps of falsehoods. In October 1983, a month after he authorized U.S. Marine commanders to call in air strikes against Muslims to help the Christian forces in Lebanon’s civil war, a Muslim suicide bomber devastated a U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, killing 242 Americans. In a televised speech a few days later, Reagan portrayed the attack as unstoppable, falsely claiming that the truck “crashed through a series of barriers, including a chain-link fence and barbed-wire entanglements. The guards opened fire, but it was too late.” In reality, the guards did not fire because they were prohibited from having loaded weapons — one of many pathetic failures of defense that the Reagan administration sought to sweep under the carpet.

In 1984, after the second successful devastating attack in 18 months against a poorly defended U.S. embassy in Lebanon, Reagan blamed the debacle on his predecessor and falsely asserted that the Carter administration had “to a large extent” gotten “rid of our intelligence agents.” A few days later, while campaigning for reelection, Reagan announced that the second embassy bombing was no longer an issue: “We’ve had an investigation. There was no evidence of any carelessness or anyone not performing their duty.” However, the Reagan administration had not yet begun a formal investigation.

On May 4, 1986, Reagan bragged, “The United States gives terrorists no rewards and no guarantees. We make no concessions; we make no deals.” But the Iranian arms-for-hostage deal that leaked out later that year blew such claims to smithereens. On November 13, 1986, Reagan denied initial reports of the scandal, proclaiming that the “‘no concessions’ [to terrorists] policy remains in force, in spite of the wildly speculative and false stories about arms for hostages and alleged ransom payments. We did not — repeat — did not trade weapons or anything else for hostages nor will we.” But Americans later learned that the United States had sold 2,000 anti-tank weapons to the Iranian government “in return for promises to release the American hostages there. Money from the sale of those weapons went to support the Contras’ war in Nicaragua,” as Mother Jones magazine noted in 1998.

Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in the summer of 1990 provided a challenge for the first Bush administration to get Americans mobilized. In September 1990, the Pentagon announced that up to a quarter million Iraqi troops were near the border of Saudi Arabia, threatening to give Saddam Hussein a stranglehold on one of the world’s most important oil sources. The Pentagon based its claim on satellite images that it refused to disclose. One American paper, the St. Petersburg Times, purchased two Soviet satellite “images taken of that same area at the same time that revealed that there were no Iraqi troops ‘near the Saudi border — just empty desert.’” Jean Heller, the journalist who broke the story, commented, “That [Iraqi buildup] was the whole justification for Bush sending troops in there, and it just didn’t exist.” Even a decade after the first Gulf war, the Pentagon refused to disclose the secret photos that justified sending half a million American troops into harm’s way.

Support for the war was also whipped up by the congressional testimony of a Kuwaiti teenager who claimed she had seen Iraqi soldiers removing hundreds of babies from incubators in Kuwaiti hospitals and leaving them on the floor to die. George H.W. Bush often invoked the incubator tale to justify the war, proclaiming that the “ghastly atrocities” were akin to “Hitler revisited.” After the United States commenced bombing Iraq, it transpired that the woman who testified was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador and that her story was a complete fabrication, concocted in part by a U.S. public relations firm. Dead babies were a more effective selling point than one of the initial justifications Bush announced for U.S. intervention — restoring Kuwait’s “rightful leaders to their place” — as if any Americans seriously cared about putting Arab oligarchs back on their throne. (A few months before Saddam’s invasion, Amnesty International condemned the Kuwaiti government for torturing detainees.)

Bill Clinton’s unprovoked war against Serbia was sold to Americans with preposterous tales of the Kosovo Liberation Army’s being freedom fighters, with absurd claims that a civil war in one corner of southeastern Europe threatened to engulf the entire continent in conflict, with wild and unsubstantiated claims of an ongoing genocide, and with a deluge of lies that the U.S. military was not targeting Serb civilians.

Lying and warring appear to be two sides of the same coin. Unfortunately, many Americans continue to be gullible when presidents claim a need to commence killing foreigners. It remains to be seen whether the citizenry is corrigible on this life-and-death issue.

James Bovard is the author of Attention Deficit Democracy [2006] as well as The Bush Betrayal [2004], Lost Rights [1994] and Terrorism and Tyranny: Trampling Freedom, Justice and Peace to Rid the World of Evil (Palgrave-Macmillan, September 2003).

Thursday 1st May 2008

NOW ONLINE Mp3 of the Interview with Brian Wilson

5:53 pm | Attention Deficit Democracy | Bovard | Comments: 0

The zippety interview from last Friday with talk show host Brian Wilson is now online here. (The MP3 list is on the left side).

The same page has surprising background on Brian. I was not aware of the two weeks he teamed up with Seigfried and Roy.

That explains why he dislikes beer.

Friday 25th April 2008

Listen Live Radio 2 pm Friday (4/25) Brian Wilson Show in Baltimore

8:14 am | Attention Deficit Democracy | Bovard | Comments: 7

Talk show legend Brian Wilson is back on air in Baltimore. As the Baltimore Sun reported a few weeks ago, “No matter what happens, Brian Wilson can’t seem to stay away from Baltimore for long.”

I will be on his program on WHFS (105.7 FM) at 2 pm today (Friday, 4/25). You can listen live here. (The listen live link is in the upper right hand corner of the page).

Thursday 24th April 2008

Finally - a Good Ron Paul Antiwar TV Ad!

2:59 pm | Ron Paul | Bovard | Comments: 8

The folks at American Liberty Coalition have crafted a powerful antiwar ad promoting Ron Paul for president. This minute long ad conveys Ron Paul’s passion and his concern about the ruinous costs of the current wars and the peril of Bush attacking Iran.

The Liberty Coalition solicited donations to help pay for airing the ad, and this may have contributed to the Paul campaign’s 16% tally in the Pennsylvania primary. Their efforts - and the elbow grease of many other volunteers in Pennsylvania - made a big difference.

The private ad is in sharp contrast to this “Ron Paul - Conservative Choice” radio ad created by the Paul campaign and run on Pennsylvania stations. The ad seems confusing and diffident. It starts out mentioning amnesty for illegal aliens and campaign finance reform’s restrictions on free speech - but doesn’t specify that these are John McCain positions. The ad mentions that Ron Paul has received more contributions from active duty military than all other candidates combined - but fails to mention that this is largely the result of Paul’s staunch opposition to the Iraq debacle.

It is good that Ron Paul got 128,000 votes in Pennsylvania. But how many more votes might the campaign have harvested across the nation if they had used the $35 million Americans donated to them to send a clear antiwar message from start to finish?

I would be curious to know the impressions of Pennsylvanians (and others) on how the campaign there played out.

Thursday 17th April 2008

Congress Quietly Repeals Martial Law Provision

8:42 am | Bovard | Comments: 7

In late 2006, Congress revised the Posse Comitatus Act and the Insurrection Act to make it far easier for a president to declare martial law. Those changes were repealed at the end of this January as part of Public Law 110-181 (HR 4986), the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2008 (signed into law by President Bush on January 28, 2008).

Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vt), who championed the opposition to the original law, was also the hero of the repeal. It helped that all the nation’s governors opposed the 2006 law.

Boise State Professor Charlotte Twight, the author of the excellent Dependent on DC, alerted me to the change last night. I checked on Nexis and the only news coverage I found regarding the repeal was a 322-word Gannett News wire story from February 1 that focused on how the repeal made governors happy.

I first wrote about the Posse/Insurrection peril for American Conservative a year ago. My most recent piece on the subject was an article for the January issue of the Future of Freedom Foundation’s (FFF) Freedom Daily. The law was changed between the time the article was published and when FFF posted the January article online on April 9.