Here’s to Three Years of Fighting Monarchy
April 11th, 2008
Under the Microscope
by Glynn Wilson
It is hard to believe it has only been three years since we launched The Locust Fork Journal, the Weblog part of this Website. It seems like a decade has passed.
They say time flies when you are having fun. Maybe time drags when your self-appointed task is to document the bad news in Bush’s world.
It was three years ago this week that this blog became live on the Web. Perhaps this a good time to reflect on that time and on what we’ve learned doing it.
Three years ago, a jury in Birmingham failed to convict HealthSouth founder Richard Scrushy for direct knowledge of cooking the books in one of the worst corporate fraud scandals in American business history.
Two years before, I had made a conscious decision to abandon a quest for an academic career and to get back into journalism full-time, a decision motivated in part by my own trauma after the tragedy of Sept. 11, 2001.
But after one hell of a run as a free-lance journalist working out of New Orleans, I moved to Washington, D.C. to try and get in on the media fight to stop George W. Bush from being reelected to a disastrous second term. Alas, not enough people listened. So here we are in 2008 still having to listen to the dumbest, worst president in American history lie on TV on a daily basis.
In my last assignment working for the Bill Keller New York Times in the winter of 2005, I covered the Scrushy trial in Birmingham and made enough to pay cash for a Chevy van. It had long been a dream to mount a canoe on a van and write from the road.
By April, 2005, I was living that dream and back in DC doing some free-lance reporting for the now defunct States News Service, thanks to an old friend from Vestavia, Brooks Boliek, who was and still is the Washington bureau chief for The Hollywood Reporter.
I was sitting in front of an iMac computer at the desk in his kitchen in Silver Spring, Maryland, checking my e-mail and reading the Washington Post after a night out listening to blues at the Half Moon Barbecue, when I heard from my programmer in Knoxville, Tennessee that the blogging software was live online and available for Web publishing.
So as I often like to do on a Sunday, after reading the Sunday papers, I sat down at the computer with a strong cup of coffee and wrote this column.
Since then, I have written hundreds of columns and breaking news stories and news features and investigative reports and blog posts, reaching out to thousands of readers, and I dare say we have had some fun - and made a difference here and there.
On no story is that more apparent than the story of Jill Simpson’s affidavit in the case of Alabama’s former Governor Don Siegelman, who was jailed by a federal judge in spite of much evidence that to do so would be a miscarriage of justice and based on corrupt, political actions by the Bush Justice Department.
Hundreds of bloggers have since joined us in covering that story, most in the wake of the story as depicted on the CBS News magazine show “60 Minutes.”
In the wake of that story, we have received a number of comments on the blog and in e-mail congratulating us for making a difference in Siegelman’s case, which is still not over.
But if you take the time to scan these Web musings in the archives, you may notice that there is an underlying theme to it all that has still not fully penetrated down to the masses, which means there is still much work left to do.
Sure, other blogs and magazines have picked up on it since. But it actually goes back to columns I was writing at Southerner.net before the LocustFork.Net Website went up in March 2005. It even goes back to the ending to a story I wrote in January 2004 on the Bush-AWOL situation.
That theme is and must remain the continuing fight to keep the American government from backsliding from a democratic republic into a monarchy from which we came.
This has become even more clear to me as I have watched the Home Box Office series on John Adams over the past few weeks.
Unfortunately the TV mini-series has its drawbacks, chief among them the fact that Adams is not the most exciting of the American founding fathers to watch in action. He is a short man of considerable ego who was never as popular in his time or in history as Benjamin Franklin, George Washington or Thomas Jefferson, even though he was the first vice president and the second president.
But it is in many ways the legacy of John Adams that we fight for here at LocustFork.Net on almost a daily basis.
It was Adams who led the fight at the Continental Congress in Philadelphia in 1776 to break from the British monarchy and create a new and independent nation founded on the natural rights of man. It was Adams who led the way in setting up a government based on laws passed by men, not derived from God to the throne of a king.
And in spite of some mass sentiment to the contrary, it was not a Christian nation he envisioned. Freedom of religion was a necessary part of the plan to get all 13 colonies to go along. Without a significant nod to the pastors of the day, there would never have been enough public support to ratify the Declaration of Independence and raise an army to fight the British.
I was laughed at in 2004 and scorned in 2005 for raising the monarchy issue. But now if you do a Google search for “Bush and Monarchy,” you will get 85,800 hits, starting with this one:
The Neo-Monarchy of George W. Bush
We were one of the first independent news outlets to call for Bush’s impeachment three years ago. Now if you do a Google search for “Impeach Bush,” you get 140,000 hits.
Based on a study of the traffic numbers, there are still millions of people in Alabama and America who have not embraced this thing called a blog. And based on my experience in conducting an informal focus group with people in the South, we have a long way to go to convince enough people of these facts to turn things around.
The so-called mainstream media is still profiting from a Sir Walter Scott, Pollyanish and overly romantic view of the notion that everything will work out fine as long the press panders to people’s base prejudices in the name of objective profits.
But we will not stand idly by and watch this great experiment in individual liberty go down in the flames of history at the hands of the Bush’s and Cheney’s of the world, aided at every turn by the economic and social conservatism of the corporate press.
If you would like to join us and help us keep up this fight, we need your help to raise enough money to keep at it on a daily basis. Please consider making a donation today.
April 11th, 2008 at 11:38 am
Post column notes:
We are going to try opening the comments to non-moderation mode, since the spam seems to have slowed or stopped for now.
Also, after I posted this, the Christian Broadcasting News, for some reason ran on the NBC affiliate in Birmingham, ran a story from a preacher talking about the “war against radical Islam.”
We are not in what has to be a 100-year war with “radical Islam.” We are in a war between science and religion, between reality and faith-based BS, between radical Christiondom and radical Islam. We need to stop the religious-based killing on both sides - and get a grip on reality. That is one of our primary purposes here. To report on that reality and make it known, free on the Web.
April 11th, 2008 at 12:25 pm
Your war against the neo-monarchy will likely go on, since the fundamental problem is not who the president happens to be. The nemesis is how the office itself has come to be viewed by the American people, a phenomenon whose roots go back at least as far as Teddy Roosevelt.
Almost every U.S. president starting with Roosevelt has sought to expand the powers of the office. This expansion has come at the expense of the Constitution, of Congress, and the Bill of Rights.
The office has been a neo-monarchy since the days of Franklin Roosevelt. Bush’s departure will do nothing to eliminate the precedents set already. No president since then has made the slightest attempt to retreat from any power arrogated to the office by a predecessor, although some have been a little more thuggish than others in using it.
Gene Healy’s forthcoming book “The Cult of the Presidency” documents and details the growth of the neo-monarchy over the last century,
Indeed, if statements by the three leading candidates for president are to be taken at face value, the next president will attempt to wield just as much, if not more, power than Bush. Whoever ends up in the Oval Office may certainly try to wield it in different ways, but wield it he or she will.
Unfortunately, many of those now outraged at the abuses of the Bush administration will be inclined to ignore or gloss over abuses by the next president, if that president is a Democrat.
It should not, but likely will, matter that the abuser is more likeable, or is saying things we may want to hear, or hangs out with people we’d be more likely to hang with, than Bush. Once in office, any president should be subjected to extremely rigorous journalistic inspection on a daily basis — impartial, sober-eyed and issues-oriented.
My bet is that most media folk will give a Democrat in the White House a virtual get-out-of-jail free card for at least two years, if not more. They might even do that for McCain should he win.
We need better from the Fourth Estate than doing the public relations work of one side or another of the U.S. political spectrum.
Here’s hoping that’s forthcoming.
April 11th, 2008 at 1:22 pm
I doubt the corporate press will give any Democrat much of a honeymoon. The scandal coverage will begin right away. In fact, it has already.
Remember, it was the Howell Raines’ New York Times editorial page which led the charge to impeach Bill Clinton. That’s how Maureen Dowd won her Pulitzer.
We will be glad to leave it to the mainstream media to try and attack the next Democrat in the White House. They do a fine job of screwing that up.
Personally, I can’t wait to get back to covering science. The one issue I will be holding the next president’s feet to the fire on will be the environment, especially global warming. I know you are with James Spann the ABC weatherman on this, Yana, but our research indicates it’s THE issue of our time. It’s a fight the entire human race can get in on winning.
Forget the religious wars. Our hope lies in the science, not the faith…
April 11th, 2008 at 2:52 pm
Global warming is indeed an issue, but it’s been made hysterical by misinformation from folks such as Al Gore.
For instance, Gore contends that global warming is happening at a rate twice what climatologists have observed and documented over recent years. That’s a significant distortion, and it’s not the only one. Computer models depend on the data fed into them, and if you put in a rate twice as high as reality, you get a distorted prediction.
Another question that hasn’t been asked in the hysteria about global warming: what’s the most sensible course to follow? To try to get CO2 emissions down — practically impossible when you consider that the greatest increase is from China and India, nations whose governments are not inclined to adopt policies of the Green Party, just as they are emerging from centuries of abject poverty.
Or, should we adapt? There have been other periods of global warming throughout human history, including the one that ended around 1300 CE when a 500 year period of colder weather began.
In every instance, and with far less advanced technology, humans adapted. The global warming that happened at the end of the last Ice Age around 10,000 years ago is another example. Not yet out of caves and huts, our ancestors adapted.
Last, but not least, please be advised that I do not watch ABC local news, either here nor over the net from Alabama, so I have no idea what James Spann thinks about anything.
That comment, “I know you are with James Spann the ABC weatherman on this, Yana” is the same kind of semi-ad hominem jibe as the comment about watching the Fox News Channel.
Let’s debate the issues on the issues and refrain from trying to artificially weaken an opposing viewpoint by claiming the proponent of the viewpoint is ipso facto associated with some less-than-admirable personality or source.
Please note that I am agreeing that global warming is indeed happening. My disagreements with those hysterical about it, like Al Gore, have to do with the actual rate of the warming, and that the course of adaptation has not even been considered.
Adaptation seems to me a scenario much more likely to succeed, unless we are prepared to concede draconian new powers to our government in the hope, not guarantee, that global warming can be stopped and that this is, in fact, the best course of action.
April 11th, 2008 at 9:56 pm
Yana Davis
How dare you propose that people spend their time attempting to answer your absolute nonsense. Just because you can string some words together does not mean anyone has to waste their time taking your fantasies seriously. Sorry, got better things to do.
April 12th, 2008 at 12:26 am
I’m glad you’re in this fight, and I’m especially glad you’re in the South. We do have a long way to go.
I think your reference to Sir. W. Scott is very apt, but there’s some Kipling in there, too.
I totally agree with your remarks about the “Christian nation” myth and about science. I’m appalled by the number of people who don’t know that the references to God in the pledge of allegiance and on the money are artifacts of the Cold War.
April 12th, 2008 at 8:54 am
Yana,
You can easily search the blog for James Spann by using the Google search engine on the news page. I covered the controversy. He is the weatherman in Birmingham who made national news last year disputing the Weather Channel reporter’s facts on global warming trends.
Since we have had this conversation before, I thought you knew. It wasn’t meant as a semi-ad hominem jibe, just a funny line : )
And if THE VAST MAJORITY of the scientific community is right about global warming, it is going to take drastic action to address it. Al Gore won an Oscar and a Nobel Prize for his work on it, so taking him on and calling him “hysterical” seems misplaced.
It doesn’t have to be economically devastating to take on, unless you are heavily invested in fossil fuel stocks. It’s the same alternatives in technology we need to fight air pollution - and our dependence on Arab oil. We might actually be able to bring our economy back by shifting it toward alternatives. Think about it…
April 14th, 2008 at 10:29 am
The vast majority of the scientific community agrees that global warming is taking place. The disagreement comes in about the actual rate of warming, how harmful the effects will be, and whether it would be more advantageous to try to stop global warming or simply make plans to adapt to it.
As noted, Gore’s film cites computer modeling that uses a rate of warming increase twice what the scientific data shows. Given the dramatic differences in consequences just from that, it’s arguable that Gore tends toward the hysterical.
Also as noted, global warming is being driven by rapid industrial expansion in China and India more than any other factor. China, for example, brings a new coal-fired electric plant on line every week on average. Telling China and India they must start reducing carbon emissions, or even reducing the rate of increase, translates in their minds to stopping economic growth. It’s highly unlikely to happen.
As far as reducing American dependence on Arab oil, I guess as opposed to Russian, North Sea and Carribean oil goes, oil is a fungible commodity. It will continue to be sold worlwide, at whatever price the international market will bear, so long as an economically viable alternative is unavailable.
OPEC can, to some extent, dictate the price of oil, but it cannot hold off market forces forever. If OPEC gets too greedy, other energy sources become competitive and they’re faced with having to cut prices to stimulate demand.
“Green” sources of energy can indeed provide economic benefits, but only when they become truly competitive in the market. Otherwise, they require continual, politically-manipulated government subsidies.
Food prices are rising right now precisely because corn and soy farmers have rushed to sell crops for ethanol and biodiesel production, both of which offer subsidized high prices for the commodities. Result? Less corn and soy both for direct human consumption and as livestock feed. Further result? Those much higher food prices at the grocery store today versus a year ago.
While the cost of food may not matter much to my favorite villains — folks a lot like me whom I call white middle class Woodstockian Boomers — or to the wealthy — it does matter a great deal to people on or below the poverty line. It matters a great deal to senior citizens on fixed incomes.
The policy makers in D.C. did not think too much about this huge downside to subsidizing politically-popular forms of energy such as ethanol and biofuels. The cause de jour for my fellow Woodstockian Boomers is “green energy,” and no amount of government meddling and subsidy is too great to get it.
This is just one example of the chaos, and harm, caused when government attempts to plan and manage the economy. While there may be “benefits” for some — in this case making white Woodstockian Boomers feel righteous, warm and fuzzy — there are serious problems caused for others, in the case of ethanol and biofuel for low and fixed income Americans.
When the economy is managed politically, rather than being free to respond to consumer demand, it invariably involves creating hardship and suffering, almost always for the poor and middle class, the very people social democrats claim to be trying to help.
Let there be enough freedom, let taxes be low enough, and let government meddling be minimal enough, and we the people will solve all these problems without the “expert guidance” of Bush, Obama, Clinton, McCain and 4 million federal bureaucrats.
Incidentally, I was not really upset about the James Spann remark. It was humorous, but it did tend a little bit toward ad hominem, nonetheless.
April 14th, 2008 at 10:57 am
Why ignore the massive tax breaks for big oil in the equation? And the tax incentives that fed the car culture explosion in the mid-20th century that is a big part of the cause of the problem we face today?
In the John Adams story on HBO, it is interesting to go back and see the original debates between Jefferson and Hamilton on some of these questions. I’ve been wondering of late about how we ended up with such strong private property rights on these shores anyway. Maybe you are familiar with that history. There was no word in any native American language for it.
And, you must admit that most government regulations of industry were implemented because industry wanted the regulation to prop them up in hard times.
What would the energy industry in this country do if anybody could power their own house with solar cells and sell the power back? Where is the tax incentive for that?
What if the roofing industry had a tax incentive to sell white roofing materials instead of black? That alone might solve the global warming problem.
And if you are so concerned with China, how do you stand on boycotting the Olympics?
April 15th, 2008 at 10:56 am
As a libertarian I am of course against any special tax breaks for any particular industry or company. Unfortunately, the amendment giving Congress the power to tax incomes says nothing about whose income and how much. Congress, the courts have ruled, can tax anyone at any rate it wants, and give exemptions to anyone for any reason, or no reason at all. Such is the result of an unlimited grant of power.
The concept of private property rights came, as you suspect, to North America from England. The writings of John Locke were probably the most critical in that regard.
English history for centuries was a story of off-and-on oppression by the monarchy first of vassal lords and later other property owners, the chief feature of which was the use of royal “eminent domain” to punish the king’s opponents, and reward his friends, through taking away or granting income-producing property.
Private property, Locke contended, is first and foremost an individual’s life and person, and second that which he or she has acquired with his life and labor. Without an absolute right to that property, except in cases of due process where liberty or property is taken away for violation of criminal or civil laws, the individual is at risk, at any time, of losing everything at the whim of authority.
America’s founders understood this, in both theory - most were students of Locke - and in experience, suffering through the tyranny of King George’s royal governors before rising in rebellion in 1776. The Revolutionary War was fundamentally a rebellion of classical liberals (libertarians) against a European mercantilist regime which did not recognize people as the source of government authority and more specifically did not recognize individual liberty and rights as antecedent to any government. Kings were, after all, still claiming divine appointment, absent the need for the consent of the governed.
The intentions of the founders regarding the marketplace were, as you suggest, not followed in full. Beginning a little over a century ago various financial institutions, businesses and professions sought government subsidies, then protection through the “regulation” process. This is not an indictment of the free market, but an indictment of a subset of wealthy corporate leaders who wanted to lock in their dominance through politics. It is a development that classical liberals-libertarians believe was a major mistake. All the special subsidies, special tax breaks, graft, sweetheart government contracts, etc., flow from this development.
But all of that, again, does not reflect pure capitalism or the workings of a truly free market, but rather, the workings of a quasi-collectivized system in which large, elite institutions (government, corporations, trade organizations) collude to extract power and wealth from everyone else through the use of government coercion in one form or another.
It’s no accident, for instance, that the push to establish a new central bank — the Federal Reserve — was born from an infamous gathering of wealthy New York bankers at Jekyll Island, Georgia in 1908. Most people don’t realize that the Fed is not a government agency, it’s privately owned by member banks, and still dominated pretty much by the banks which descended from the ones present at Jekyll Island.
The Fed is the major controller of the money in the United States — even the currency is “Federal Reserve” notes. The flow of credit, interest rates, the amount of money available, etc., are all dictated by the Fed and the principal beneficiaries of Fed policy are — the big banks. Andrew Jackson, for whom I have little sympathy otherwise since he stole the land of the Five Civilized Tribes and shipped them to Oklahoma illegally and unconstitutionally, at least had the good sense to veto the renewal of the old Bank of the United States during his final term. He understood how central banks worked to steal from everyone else.
If it were economically feasible for every person to be using solar energy, they would be. I imagine that if you could equip your house with solar cells for, let’s say, the price of a good used car or less, plenty of people would be out there selling the units, and plenty of people would be around to lend you the money, just as they do for cars, to pay for it. And there have been tax incentives, at least in the past, for alternative energy use. But the real issue is price for most homeowners. What is the bottom line monthly cost of using coal-generated electricity over a power grid versus solar power? Does the area you live in have enough sunny days, does your house get enough direct sunlight, to make it cost-effective for you?
Rather than enact a plethora of new tax incentives for various industries, which is, after all, a way of engineering a supposedly-virtuous behavior, let’s go to a low, flat tax, and leave people much more money in their pockets to pay all their bills. Let’s stop subsidizing rich agribusiness and thereby running up the cost of food for poor people and seniors on fixed incomes. This is doubly oppressive since the taxpayer first subsidizes agribusiness through billions in subsidies, and then pays again in the form of higher-than-world-market prices for U.S. produced food. It is truly criminal, and it’s courtesy your federal government.
Let’s end all special tax exemptions for all businesses big and small when we enact a low, flat tax.
Of course we should — but probably won’t — boycott the Olympics. My position on the People’s Republic of China is, and always has been, that it’s a repressive, despotic, tyrannical regime that hopefully will go the way of the Soviet Union very soon.
My purpose in citing China on the global warming issue, along with India, was to point out that they are unlikely, even if a democratic regime were to suddenly come into being tomorrow, forgo economic development by capping carbon emissions anytime in the near future. And, further, that it is also unlikely the West can do anything to change that. Chinese leaders do not take well to being instructed what to do by Western politicians, as we have seen over and over again. That being the case, all the brouhaha in Western countries about capping carbon emissions is really much ado about nothing since the chief polluters, China and India, will go merrily along doing what they’re doing into the foreseeable future.
Add that to legitimate questions about the rate of global warming, its impact, and whether a strategy of adaptation would be better, and there emerges a different picture of this issue. Without looking at this perspective, we may actually make the wrong policy choices. That’s obviously not impossible since we’ve made incorrect policy choices many times over the last century, in particular.
May 28th, 2008 at 6:12 pm
Kuben…
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