Evergreene Digest A Journal of Progress for the Rest of Us

• The way to stop this endless war, this endless brutalizing of their people and ours, this endless drain of borrowed money  and missed opportunities, is to stop funding the war.
• Cost of War is budgetary "Elephant in the Room"
• Poverty is hitting the suburbs with more sting

Peter G. Cohen, BuzzFlash.com

Submitted by Evergreene Digest Contributing Editor Thomas Sklarski

While Moody’s is saying that the U.S. could lose its gold-plated AAA credit rating, if the budget deficit is not reduced, President Obama is requesting $33,000,000,000 FY 2010 supplemental to fund the troop buildup in Afghanistan.

This is in addition to the war-funding budget for 2011 of $159,300,000,000.

What can this huge sum accomplish? Will we end up bribing thousands of opposition fighters not to blow up our troops by putting them on the payroll as we are now doing in Iraq? Will we ever be able to overcome the intense desire of most Afghanis to have us leave? Will we be able to rebuild an area so fractured by war and death into a friendly nation? Who will benefit? Is this all for large corporations to exploit Afghan’s mineral resources, or to build a gas pipeline from Turkmenistan?

How are we more secure? It is unlikely that the Taliban would again host al Qaeda after seeing the destruction of their country. Does anyone benefit from this war other than those who make the munitions and want to keep the Pentagon budget unlimited? Tragedy abounds; must we invade every nation that lacks a decent government?

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As soon as it actually became possible to pass it, the 50 votes magically vanished.  Senate Democrats (and the White House) were willing to pretend they supported a public option only as long as it was impossible to pass it.

Glenn Greenwald, Common Dreams

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about what seemed to be a glaring (and quite typical) scam perpetrated by Congressional Democrats:  all year long, they insisted that the White House and a majority of Democratic Senators vigorously supported a public option, but the only thing oh-so-unfortunately preventing its enactment was the filibuster:  sadly, we have 50 but not 60 votes for it, they insisted.  Democratic pundits used that claim to push for "filibuster reform," arguing that if only majority rule were required in the Senate, then the noble Democrats would be able to deliver all sorts of wonderful progressive reforms that they were truly eager to enact but which the evil filibuster now prevents.  In response, advocates of the public option kept arguing that the public option could be accomplished by reconciliation -- where only 50 votes, not 60, would be required -- but Obama loyalists scorned that reconciliation proposal, insisting (at least before the Senate passed a bill with 60 votes) that using reconciliation was Unserious, naive, procedurally impossible, and politically disastrous.

• Our last, forlorn hope it that we avoid the worst. That this confused, self-absorbed man just hangs on long enough for those frightening forces to expire from an overdose of their own noxious eruptions.
• It's not about positive change any more; it's about warding off calamity.

Michael Brenner, Huffington Post

Submitted by Evergreene Digest Contributing Editor Coleen Rowley

The longest taps American politics has ever known is being sounded. You can hear the bugler's first notes when the din of infernal Washington subsides briefly in the darkest hours of these chill winter nights. It will haunt us until January 2013 - or, maybe, January 2017. The Obama star has begun its long, slow fadeout. We already ask ourselves: "Whither is fled the visionary gleam; where is it now the glory and the dream?"

U.S. Rep. Patrick Kennedy has a withering assessment of news media coverage: ‘despicable.’ The Democrat says reporters are focusing ‘24/7′ on sexual harassment allegations against a New York lawmaker while ignoring the war in Afghanistan.

Normon Solomon, Media Channel

The event on the House floor Wednesday (March 10) afternoon was monumental — the first major congressional debate about U.S. military operations in Afghanistan since lawmakers authorized the invasion of that country in autumn 2001. But, as Rep. Patrick Kennedy noted with disgust on Wednesday, the House press gallery was nearly empty. He aptly concluded: “It’s despicable, the national press corps right now.”

Sure enough, the Thursday (March 11) edition of the New York Times had no room for the historic debate on its front page, which did have room for a large Starbucks ad across the bottom.

Despite the news media and the lopsided pro-war tilt on Capitol Hill (reflected in the 356-65 vote Wednesday against invoking the War Powers Act), antiwar organizing has a lot of hospitable terrain at the grassroots. National polling shows widespread opposition to the Afghanistan war effort — a far cry from the dominant lockstep conformity in Congress.

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• It’s time to ask some very basic questions, like: What are banks for? What are houses for? What’s credit for? What’s the economy for? Or, for that matter, what’s the environment for?
• A 10-point economic detox programme.

Vanessa Baird, New Internationalist

Illustration by Kate Charlesworth

We should thank Bernard Madoff – the Wall Street broker with ‘impeccable credentials’ – who is charged with having swindled investors (including some of his best friends) to the tune of $50 billion. Few individuals have so eloquently exposed how easily gulled are the supposed experts of the financial world.

Madoff highlighted a simple truth: that one of the best ways to fool people is to make things appear rather complicated. Vanity kept ‘sophisticated investors’ from admitting that they didn’t really understand the intricacies of Madoff’s get-richer-even-quicker scheme. Greed and laziness kept them from asking the crucial questions. As long as the money came rolling in – and at 15 per cent the returns were abnormally high – who cared?