Clay Burell's Bookmarks tagged democracy →  View Popular

BILL MOYERS:
When you say they fought you, help us understand what actually happens. What do they do?

SENATOR DICK DURBIN:
Some won't even sit at the table. The American Bankers Association walked away. The Community Bankers walked away. Some credit unions would take no part in this conversation. They wouldn't even discuss the possibility of what we could do to deal with this mortgage foreclosure crisis.

Others participated initially, and when the time came, turned and walked away as well. I was left standing, having basically accepted many of their changes. Meanwhile, they were working feverishly in the halls of the Senate, going office to office, trying to convince people to vote against Durbin's bill. And I knew that I had an uphill battle. They're pretty convincing. They're pretty powerful.

And I have to say that the group I was trying to help, the people facing mortgage foreclosure, don't have that kind of political clout. By and large, these are people who are on the skids. They're running into trouble and voting is perhaps, you know, a sacrifice for some of them. Being involved in lobbying is beyond anything that they'd ever done or could consider doing. So I really was trying to speak for some of those people against some pretty powerful political forces.

SENATOR DICK DURBIN ON THE SENATE FLOOR:
Why is it in this country, in America, that we can find hundreds of billions of taxpayers' dollars from hard-working people all over the United States to come to the rescue of bad banking decisions, rotten investments, mortgages that were fraudulent on their face, but can't summon the political will to do something about 8 million families in America who are going to face foreclosure? That is where we are.

BILL MOYERS:
What would your provision have done for those people?

SENATOR DICK DURBIN:
If you're facing foreclosure and at least 60 days delinquent in your mortgage payments, you would have to present to your mortgage institution all of your documents to apply for a new mortgage. They would look through your income statements and your net worth and decide if you could qualify for a mortgage at a lower interest rate or a principal that brings it down to fair market value. If they didn't offer you a mortgage, you could raise it in bankruptcy court. Just as people can do now, legally, when it comes to a vacation home, a farm or a ranch.

SENATOR DICK DURBIN ON THE SENATE FLOOR:
The law prohibits the bankruptcy court from rewriting the terms of the mortgage of a person's home. Why? Why does that make any sense? If the bankruptcy court can rewrite the mortgage on your vacation condos, your farm, or your ranch, why can't they do it for your home? That is what this bill does.

BILL MOYERS:
What you just acknowledged is that there is a two-tier standard here. What did the lobbyists say, when you said to them, "Look, rich people can get this provision. They can get their mortgages renegotiated, but ordinary people can't." What did they say to you?

SENATOR DICK DURBIN:
Well, they argue about the sanctity of the contract, Bill.

BILL MOYERS:
Contract with--

SENATOR DICK DURBIN:
With the original mortgage, and I have to tell you that it is a little hard to swallow, when we're dealing with a banking industry that has entered into so many bad contracts, creating these rotten portfolios of mortgage securities. And then in desperation, turn to the taxpayers at large, who had to come in and bail them out with hundreds of billions of dollars. Their holy contracts that exploded in their faces really weren't that holy, when it came down to it. They were ready to take taxpayers' money to stay in business. But I offered this same amendment a year ago. At the time, the projection was two million homes in foreclosure in America. Moody's now projects eight million. That's one out of every six home mortgages in foreclosure. That means that there'll hardly be a block untouched in America, without a foreclosed home, which will affect the other people around them, and the value of their property.

Which seemed more unlikely a few decades ago: that you would be the most famous graduate of 1960s radicalism in America or that you would appear on "Good Morning America" along with a segment about a pregnant man?

I really wanted a segment about the two-headed monkey to follow. That's exactly how I think of most of the mainstream media. It's amazing when you think about that this broad and amazingly diverse and committed and passionate antiwar movement of 40 years ago gets reduced in the narrative put up by the Republican campaign to a single organization which was tiny and on the margins [the Weather Underground] and a single individual who was co-founder of that and a single sentence that individual said. The parallel to that is that the powerful black freedom movement gets reduced to a single preacher in a single church and a single phrase.

Martin Luther King?

No, I'm talking about the reduction of the civil rights movement to Jeremiah Wright. So the civil rights movement becomes Jeremiah Wright and the antiwar movement becomes me. It all seems entirely preposterous to me -- and I think that we should reject that.

The New York Times headline on the morning of Sept. 11 was "No Regrets for a Love of Explosives; In a Memoir of Sorts, a War Protester Talks of Life with the Weathermen."

That headline "No Regrets" was also the headline of the Chicago magazine article a week earlier and it was the headline of several articles. And remember all these interviews were done before 9/11. What I have said continually, and I still say, that while I regret many things (you can't be 63 years old and not have many, many regrets), what I don't regret is opposing the war in Vietnam. A murderous, violent, terrorist war against an entire population. I don't regret resisting that war with every ounce of my being.

Now having said that, that's not a tactical statement. That's a sense of both hope and despair and rethinking. In 1965, I was first arrested in Ann Arbor for opposing the war in Vietnam. And at that time, something like 60 to 75 percent of Americans supported the war in Vietnam. Three years later, in 1968, something like 65 percent of Americans opposed the war. A lot of things happened in those three years. But by 1968, when we really had won the argument about Vietnam, we thought that the war would really come to an end. Especially when Lyndon Johnson announced that he would step down.

This is where we probably part company. One of the reasons, in my view, that Nixon got away with pursuing the war was that, in part, the violence of the Weather Underground -- and some of the other extreme parts of the antiwar movement -- discredited the overall antiwar movement. And that led to a further polarization of American life, which led to the first round of demonology involving yourself.

I don't see it that way. You could be partly right. I don't know how to make those cause-and-effect relationships. I would posit a different explanation. I think what happened was cynical and thought through and it was deliberate. And I think what happened was that the Nixon administration determined that they could keep the war going without a domestic upheaval that they couldn't handle. So they stopped bringing dead soldiers home. So they made it an air war and a sea war that was no longer a ground war. So they withdrew troops and they punished Vietnam and pounded it into the ground. When I say it was a war of terror, that is not idle talk. There were entire areas of Vietnam that were designated free fire zones. If you were a pilot and had leftover ordinance, you could just drop it in those villages and they did. So a couple of thousand people every month were dying, innocent people ...

It was a crime against humanity on an enormous scale. We were trying to end it. In the six years that the Weather Underground existed, we did everything we could to end it. We never hurt or killed anyone -- by design. We didn't want to. Was it risky, were we a little nuts, were we a little off the track? Yes. Did we cross lines of legality and propriety and common sense? I think we did. On the other hand, I don't think we were the cause of any kind of reaction. I think we were a small part of an upheaval against war and against killing.

What's your biggest hope for an Obama presidency?

Most of all, what I really hope is that we put an end to the era of 9/11, the era of fear and war -- and that's what I think most people hope. That spirit in Grant Park was that spirit of hope and that spirit of "yes, we can." "Yes, we can put an end to this." "Yes, we can reimagine the future." I think it's a time when we could redefine what are we basing our foreign policy on, what are we basing our education policy on. I think this election is automatically a historic moment. It automatically restores a certain amount of goodwill in the world. I hope he uses it. I hope he closes Guantánamo immediately. I hope he withdraws from Iraq immediately. But those hopes aren't idle. They are built on building an irresistible social movement to see that those things happen...

One of the delicious ironies of being in Grant Park on Nov. 4, 2008, was that I was weeping for a lot of reasons. But one of them was that I couldn't help remembering 40 years earlier I was beaten bloody in that same park. And there's something sweet about 40 years later, something unimaginable happening...

We [Ayers and Dohrn] got there around 10:00. We were so glad that we had because it was a moment that we wanted to share. We didn't want to be by ourselves. It was just too sweet. It felt like a page of history was being turned. And, of course, there are going to be challenges, obstacles, setbacks, disappointments, reversals up ahead. But who doesn't want to savor that? Who doesn't want to wish this young man and his beautiful young family all the best in the world because it's their moment. We invest a lot of hope in them. Let's not lose hope in ourselves. But let's wish them all the best.

It's true -- the way that the U.S. is portrayed on Al Jazeera matters, and we take that responsibility very seriously. We followed up the initial piece by sending the reporter to get reaction from African-American Obama supporters. We gave the last word in this saga to the owner of a PR firm in Atlanta:

"They are not America. They don't reflect America, they don't represent the America that I live in and am a part of, and they don't reflect the majority of Americans."

We will have to wait until November 4 -- or the early hours of November 5 -- to know who Americans will choose to be their next President. But there are certain things we do know now.

After the dark and gloomy years of recent times, this race has electrified the world. It's a U.S. election that has more international resonance that perhaps any in our lifetime.

And all of these issues have been debated and explored in hundreds of hours of coverage on Al Jazeera English, an award-winning channel that is broadcast in more than 100 countries.

Except for most of the United States. Political and financial interests have pressured American cable companies from carrying Al Jazeera English.

In a country that regards itself as the world's leading democracy, that is regrettable because Al Jazeera's coverage has been fair, comprehensive and respectful of different points of view. And a window on the world.

As the world welcomes this new and exciting U.S. era, isn't it time for Americans -- when it comes to being able to see Al Jazeera - to actually be allowed to make their own judgment?

Police say there are inconsistencies in the story of a McCain campaign staffer who told them she was mugged in Bloomfield on Wednesday night by a man who etched a "B" on her cheek when he saw a McCain sticker on her car.

Ashley Todd, 20, of College Station, Texas, spent five hours with robbery detectives last night at police headquarters, where she took a polygraph test. She told police that a man robbed her as she tried to take money from an ATM machine at Pearl Street and Liberty Avenue around 9 p.m. Wednesday.

Ms. Todd told police she then began walking to her car, which had McCain stickers on it. She told police that although the robber had moved away from her, he became agitated when he saw her car, punched her in the back of the head, pushed her to the ground and carved the letter into her face. Yesterday, she said the man sexually assaulted her, a detail that police said she didn't mention in the initial report.

Police today said that security camera footage from the Citizens Bank doesn't show the incident, but it could have happened outside the camera's range. Police also said they have found no witnesses to the attack.

Phantom Voters

The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now,
or ACORN, has a nasty habit of hiring day workers who register
thousands of phantom voters, often in swing states. ACORN denies
responsibility, insisting it culls for bogus names, fires whoever
turned them in and flags any irregularities to authorities.

If you doubt ACORN's story and worry that fake registrations
can lead to false voting, I don't blame you. But you will
probably strike out if you try to find phony votes that were
actually cast. Officials verify registrations before accepting
them.

Whatever you make of ACORN, don't let its misdeeds blind you
to the rest of the picture.

Consider Nathan Sproul, former Republican Party chief for
Arizona, who ran a multistate voter drive in 2004. Some of his
former employees have told reporters that his group destroyed
registration forms filled out by Democrats, fired canvassers who
turned them in and submitted to state authorities only the
registrations of those who said they were Republicans. Sproul
denied the allegations.

Oregon Probe

An Oregon investigation into Sproul's 2004 operation there
confirmed ``instances of wrongdoing'' but found insufficient
evidence to prosecute, according to the state's Justice
Department.

Bad as it is to submit fake registrations, no harm is done
unless one of those made-up registrants gets approved by the
state and then shows up at the polls and votes.

``Keep in mind with these stories about potentially bad
registrations, they don't equal bad votes,'' says Terri Enns, a
senior fellow at Election Law @ Moritz, out of Ohio State
University.

But if you register voters and then shred their registration
forms because they support the wrong candidate, you rob
legitimate voters of their ballots in an attempt to tilt the
election result.

Ancient history, you say? This year Sproul has a new group
which the Republican Party and the McCain campaign have hired for
voter drives.

Conservatives came to believe that if they repeated phrases such as "Joe the Plumber" often enough, they could persuade working-class voters that policies tilted heavily in favor of the very privileged were actually designed with Joe in mind.

It isn't working anymore. No wonder conservatives are turning on each other so ferociously.

postchat@aol.com

For years, the Republican response to the rising number of non-white voters in particular has been: If you can't win their vote, suppress it. So the GOP has propagated the myth that large numbers of people are voting who shouldn't be, that voter registration groups such as ACORN, which the Republican ticket regularly attacks, are, like the big-city machines of yore, casting ballots in the name of the dead and stealing elections.

Ferreting out these nefarious activities became a central focus of the Justice Department under John Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzales at the direction of the Bush White House. The department instructed all U.S. attorneys that the prosecution and conviction of voter-fraud perpetrators was, in Gonzales's words, a "top priority." Extensive investigations were undertaken across the nation. Yet, by 2005, as Art Levine reported in the American Prospect this April, only two people had been charged with falsifying or fabricating voter registration forms, and nobody had been charged with impersonating another voter.

But the current attacks on ACORN provide the pretext for attempts to turn black voters and college students away from their polling places. In Ohio, the Republican war on voting has already begun. Hamilton County (that's Cincinnati) prosecutor Joseph Deters, who is also the Southwest Ohio regional chair of the McCain campaign, subpoenaed the records of 266 new voters who have cast absentee ballots because he suspected their addresses might not comport to other public records. A GOP fundraiser in the state is asking the Ohio Supreme Court to deny 200,000 recent registrants the right to vote because their addresses on their registration forms don't match those on their driver's licenses, a discrepancy that suggests that the voters have moved or that the addresses were entered incorrectly by the registrar's offices.

If you can't find the crime here, you're not alone. A number of the U.S attorneys fired by Gonzales got the ax for failing to uncover such crimes, though they conducted far-reaching investigations. David Iglesias, the former U.S. attorney for New Mexico, told Levine that voter fraud "is like the boogeymen parents use to scare their children. It's very frightening, and it doesn't exist."

But it's still a quite serviceable myth if Republicans can invoke it to block many thousands of new registrants from voting. It's serviceable even if McCain is defeated, as the right can then claim that the election was stolen and that Barack Obama isn't a legitimate president. On such racist garbage as African Americans voting fraudulently so they can collect welfare checks again is McCain staking his claim for the presidency.

In the same speech in which he promised a surge, Bush vowed that
he would never allow the Taliban to return to power in Afghanistan.
But they have already returned, and only negotiation with them can
bring any hope of stability. Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan "are
all theaters in the same overall struggle," the president declared,
linking his administration's three greatest foreign-policy
disasters in one broad vision. In the end, Bush said, we must have
"faith in the power of freedom."

But the Taliban have their own faith, and so far, they are
winning. On my last day in Kabul, a Western aid official reminds me
of the words of a high-ranking Taliban leader, who recently
explained why the United States will never prevail in
Afghanistan.

"You Westerners have your watches," the leader observed. "But we
Taliban have time."

In preparation for the presidential election, 15 Florida counties complied with a new edict to abandon their touch-screen voting machines, and switched to optical scan machines, which leave a physical record of each voter's ballot in case of a recount. But this August in Palm Beach County, a close local primary where 3,400 ballots went uncounted - followed by a series of recounts - led officials to worry and re-test the optical scan voting machines.



"We feel pretty good about the machines," said Jennifer Krell Davis, the communications director for the Florida secretary of state, who said most had had a test-run in this year's presidential primaries.



But just in case, "All of the supervisors have been encouraged to plan as if there is definitely going to be a county-wide recount," she said.

Some observers say that the main problem may simply be delays, and depressed turnout, as voters navigate the new machines.



"To me it's the possibility of the long lines that's the issue," said Susan McManus a political science professor at the University of South Florida in Tampa.