The Union War on Charter Schools

As New York shows, they want to kill any education choice.

President Bush’s aides have been scrambling to change rules and regulations on the environment, civil liberties and abortion rights, among others — few for the good. Most presidents put on a last-minute policy stamp, but in Mr. Bush’s case it is more like a wrecking ball. We fear it could take months, or years, for the next president to identify and then undo all of the damage.

Here is a look — by no means comprehensive — at some of Mr. Bush’s recent parting gifts and those we fear are yet to come.

In a 43-page opinion, Murphy ruled that Michigan's Secretary of State violates federal law through two methods it uses to purge names from its list of qualified voters.

Murphy ordered election officials to immediately halt and attempt to rectify one of the two practices -- canceling voter registrations for those whose voter identification card is returned as undeliverable.

He ordered the state to remove the "rejected" marking in the qualified voter file for all people whose original voter ID cards have been returned as undeliverable since Jan. 1, 2006. About 1,500 people have been removed from the voter list in that manner this year, according to evidence presented in the case.

Murphy said a second Michigan practice -- immediately canceling the voter registration of those who apply for a driver's license in another state -- also violates the National Voting Rights Act.

The genius of the economic right and the neo-conservatives has been their ability to ignore this fact and work instead to fill in the blanks in the vast empty spaces within the worldview of the religious right with militarist and pro-corporate ideas.

The tasks of progressives is to tear apart the conservative consensus of the past thirty years by advocating agendas that will consistently split the constituencies of the religious right from its corporate right partners.

If progressives are serious about winning victories that can realign our politics, they must find a way to marry the legitimate criticism of the decadence of popular culture with criticism of the decadence of an economic system that create the savage inequalities we see in America today. Once that is done, the entire project of the right collapses under the weight of its own contradictions.

The mastery of the political right over the past thirty years has been primarily to better understand the irrational factors in politics. Conservatives have always understood that when it comes to politics, people rarely act in their rational self-interest but instead on emotion, fears and the perception of their interests.

The first principle of organizing any successful new political movement is not new ideas but the identification of new enemies.

When I first learned about Naomi Wolf's book, The End of America--in which she chronicles America's slide toward becoming a police state, I considered it a well-played game of "what if...?" I regarded it much in the same way that I regarded Alan Weisman's The World Without Us--as a mental exercise exploring alternate realities, which serves to make us more appreciative and better stewards of our own reality.

Sadly, I was mistaken.

The ten steps to fascism that Wolf laid out in The End of America have occurred--all ten--like clockwork. Steps nine and ten occurred recently with the mass arrests of citizens and journalists at the RNC, and October 1st's U.S. military missions against U.S. citizens made possible by the suspension of Posse Comitatus in 2006. (Yes, reinstated later, but a signing statement made by Bush on the law frees him from obeying it.)

This is not an exercise in alternate realities. This is happening in America. With all that we know of human nature, the lessons from history, and the inevitably corrupting effect of power on the human brain, there should be no doubt left in our minds that if all the chess pieces are aligned, it is only a matter of time until checkmate.

So why do we do nothing?

many WWII-era German immigrants in this country are able to recall the pre-WWII German population's inaction through disbelief. "This happened in Germany, and we did nothing," Wolf recalls hearing repeatedly.

Much in the same way, I grew up thinking "They won't suspend habeus corpus, this is America." And, "They won't tamper with the voting system, this is America." And, "They won't tap our phone lines, this is America." And, "They won't use the military against us, this is America." But they've all happened. And yet, my kneejerk reaction--even after all these crimes against my freedom and voice as a citizen--is still, "They won't declare martial law, this is America."

Why!? And why is this true for so many fellow Americans? And what's more, why is mentioning these crimes met with scorn and contempt--as though I'm just stirring up trouble.

I'm not crazy. I'm just reading the news! Upon first glance the administration has plenty of excuses it could use to declare martial law: the plummeting economy, a potentially botched election, racists rioting at Palin rallies, domestic terrorists (real or make-believe), even simply not getting its petulant way (as with the bailout, as the video below will point out).

It seems that the folks over at CorbettReport are reading the news as well. They've put together this timely video explaining that the threat of martial law is real, and likely.

So, my fellow Americans, I ask you: What do we do to save our democracy...and our own skin?