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Nir Rosen, Rolling Stone Magazine, March 6, 2008

It’s a cold, gray day in December, and I’m walking down Sixtieth Street in the Dora district of Baghdad, one of the most violent and fearsome of the city’s no-go zones. Devastated by five years of clashes between American forces, Shiite militias, Sunni resistance groups and Al Qaeda, much of Dora is now a ghost town. This is what “victory” looks like in a once upscale neighborhood of Iraq: Lakes of mud and sewage fill the streets. Mountains of trash stagnate in the pungent liquid. Most of the windows in the sand-colored homes are broken, and the wind blows through them, whistling eerily. House after house is deserted, bullet holes pockmarking their walls, their doors open and unguarded, many emptied of furniture. What few furnishings remain are covered by a thick layer of the fine dust that invades every space in Iraq. Looming over the homes are twelve-foot-high security walls built by the Americans to separate warring factions and confine people to their own neighborhood. Emptied and destroyed by civil war, walled off by President Bush’s much-heralded “surge,” Dora feels more like a desolate, post-apocalyptic maze of concrete tunnels than a living, inhabited neighborhood. Apart from our footsteps, there is complete silence.

My guide, a thirty-one-year-old named Osama who grew up in Dora, points to shops he used to go to, now abandoned or destroyed: a barbershop, a hardware store. Since the U.S. occupation began, Osama has watched civil war turn the streets where he grew up into an ethnic killing field. After the fall of Saddam, the Americans allowed looters and gangs to take over the streets, and Iraqi security forces were stripped of their jobs. The Mahdi Army, the powerful Shiite paramilitary force led by the anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, took advantage of the power shift to retaliate in areas such as Dora, where Shiites had been driven from their homes. Shiite forces tried to cleanse the district of Sunni families like Osama’s, burning or confiscating their homes and torturing or killing those who refused to leave.

“The Mahdi Army was killing people here,” Osama says, pointing to a now-destroyed Shiite mosque that in earlier times had been a cafe and before that an office for Saddam’s Baath Party. Later, driving in the nearby district of Baya, Osama shows me a gas station. “They killed my uncle here. He didn’t accept to leave. Twenty guys came to his house, the women were screaming. He ran to the back, but they caught him, tortured him and killed him.” Under siege by Shiite militias and the U.S. military, who viewed Sunnis as Saddam supporters, and largely cut out of the Shiite-dominated government, many Sunnis joined the resistance. Others turned to Al Qaeda and other jihadists for protection.

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Glenn Hurowitz, Maisonneuve Press, February 22, 2008

Like many progressives, I’d heard all the explanations for Democratic failings, and they all boiled down to this: a lack of smarts or competence. But was that realistic? After all, we’re the egghead party, the party of science, the party of the PhD. Could we really just be as stupid as we say George Bush is? What I’ve seen is something quite different: a lack of courage that makes Democrats afraid of implementing the strategies that work. It’s why even when Democrats win, they lose.

After Democrats took back Congress in 2006, Republicans still manage to bully Democrats and the media into controlling their agenda. It seems like Democrats forgot James Carville’s basic lesson of political summer school “It’s hard for your opponent to say bad things about you when your fist is in his mouth.” Unfortunately, too often, the Democrats are the ones coughing up fingernails. What follows is an excerpt from my new book, Fear and Courage in the Democratic Party (Maisonneuve Press), which illustrates this debilitating weakness in the Democratic Party.

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“The senator agrees with you, but he’s not sure about the politics,” the senior Democratic Senate aide told me. “But if the politics changes, the senator would definitely like to vote your way — so good luck; we’re behind you.” The aide was explaining to me why his boss, a Democrat who represents a rural, Republican-leaning state, hadn’t supported higher fuel efficiency standards for cars and trucks in a recent vote. The aide told me that though the senator agreed with the environmental group I was working for that increased auto mileage made sense, he was afraid that his constituents might not support his stance, especially after being bombarded with auto industry ads on the airwaves.

It was a response I would hear over and over again from Democrats as I went from leading local and state level environmental campaigns to helping direct those campaigns on the national level. When Democrats voted against us, it was rare to hear them say they didn’t agree with us on the merits. Instead, they’d tell us they were afraid: afraid that their constituents wouldn’t support a pro-environment position; afraid of defying President Bush and the Republican noise machine; or they’d even admit they were afraid of angering this or that corporate lobby and losing campaign contributions to the Republicans.

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Robert Scheer TruthDig, February 19, 2008

The resignation of Fidel Castro is more promising for the burnishing of his legacy than the mostly septuagenarian Cuban hard-liners in Miami and their fawning allies in the Bush administration would like to believe. After all, Mao Tse-tung is still honored in communist China, the fastest-growing capitalist power in the world, and former KGB agent Vladimir Putin is, at least for now, a very popular elected Russian leader.

Those hoping for a “freedom flotilla” of Cuban exiles returning to remake Havana in the image of 1959, threatening the very future of Las Vegas with legalized prostitution as well as gambling, are likely to be disappointed. Odds are that Castro’s successors, beginning with his rhetoric-weary brother, are likely to finally get serious, after decades of fitful starts and reversals, about ending the grip of a moribund statist economy. Reform leading significantly down the path of the Chinese model, or more appropriately that of Venezuela, which has thrown a lifeline to the ailing Cuban economy, is more likely than sudden upheaval.

But those changes will come too late to justify the suffering of the Cuban people for half a century at the hands of a revolutionary, as arrogant as he is idealistic, who witnessed his vision flounder on the rocks of an incredibly cynical U.S. policy. Prime responsibility for that suffering does go to the Colossus of the North, which in the pursuit of economic exploitation and Cold War paranoia consistently preferred Latin American dictatorships to serious experiments in popular rule and strangled the Cuban economy with an embargo in place for the almost five decades since Castro dared move against the U.S. corporations that claimed to own much of the island.

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Howard Zinn, The Progressive, March 2008 Issue

There’s a man in Florida who has been writing to me for years (ten pages, handwritten) though I’ve never met him. He tells me the kinds of jobs he has held-security guard, repairman, etc. He has worked all kinds of shifts, night and day, to barely keep his family going. His letters to me have always been angry, railing against our capitalist system for its failure to assure “life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness” for working people.

Just today, a letter came. To my relief it was not handwritten because he is now using e-mail:

“Well, I’m writing to you today because there is a wretched situation in this country that I cannot abide and must say something about. I am so enraged about this mortgage crisis. That the majority of Americans must live their lives in perpetual debt, and so many are sinking beneath the load, has me so steamed. Damn, that makes me so mad, I can’t tell you. . . . I did a security guard job today that involved watching over a house that had been foreclosed on and was up for auction. They held an open house, and I was there to watch over the place during this event. There were three of the guards doing the same thing in three other homes in this same community. I was sitting there during the quiet moments and wondering about who those people were who had been evicted and where they were now.”

On the same day I received this letter, there was a front-page story in the Boston Globe, with the headline “Thousands in Mass. Foreclosed on in ’07.”

The subhead was “7,563 homes were seized, nearly 3 times the ’06 rate.”

A few nights before, CBS television reported that 750,000 people with disabilities have been waiting for years for their Social Security benefits because the system is underfunded and there are not enough personnel to handle all the requests, even desperate ones.

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Jon Ponder, Pensito Review, February 22, 2008

Rush Limbaugh, the drug-addled radio entertainer and provocateur, used the New York Times article suggesting John McCain had a too-cozy relationship with a female lobbyist a decade ago – a story sourced to, and apparently leaked by, Republican operatives in the 2000 McCain presidential campaign – to castigate McCain with a rambling discourse on his dark and paranoid view of Americans who do not share his political views:

The lesson is liberals are to be defeated. You cannot walk across the aisle with them. You cannot reach across the aisle. You cannot welcome their media members on your bus and get all cozy with them and expect eternal love from them. You are a Republican. Whether you’re a conservative Republican or not, you are a Republican. At some point, the people you cozy up to, either to do legislation or to get cozy media stories, are going to turn on you. They are snakes. If the right lesson is not learned from this, then it will have proved to be of no value. There’s a great opportunity here for Senator McCain to learn the right lesson and understand who his friends are and who his enemies are. He’s had that backwards for way too long. He has thought the New York Times is his friend. He has thought Chris Matthews and these other people in the Drive-By Media are his friends. They aren’t. That’s the lesson today.

The story is not the story. The story is the Drive-By Media turning on it’s favorite maverick trying to take him out. The media picked the Republican candidate. The New York Times endorsed that candidate while they sat on this story, and now with utter predictability, they are trying to destroy him. This is what you get when you walk across the aisle and try to make these people your friends. Why should any of us be surprised or even angry at what the New York Times is doing here trying to take out John McCain? Those of you who listen regularly should have been expecting this all along because it’s utterly predictable. It’s as predictable as the sun rising in the morning. It’s as predictable as Ted Kennedy finding a bar at happy hour.

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