Think we live in a "Post Racial" Society...Think again!

With the election of Barack Obama, the ultimate racial glass ceiling appeared to have been broken!  The dialogue changed to talk of America as being a "post racial" society.  We have finally gotten past the issues of racism and discrimination.  The playing field is now leveling and people of all races and religions have the opportunity to achieve their goals if they work hard enough.  At least that is the montra peddled by the mainstream media and those of use who would like to forget about the painful realities of our past.

But, just because you say it enough times doesn't make it true.  While the visibility of racism and discrimination have been minimized, or swept under the carpet so to speak, the vestiges of our past are very much alive and well.  In fact, while we may not be openly segregated society anymore (i.e. white only drinking fountains), the subtle walls of division are very firmly in place.  Our suburbs and neighborhoods are gentrified, our education system unequal, our prisons disproportionally populated with minorities, our social safety-net programs stripped of funding, unemployment rates among minority disproportionately high, and yet none of these facts seem to factor in when we blissfully talk about the colorblind society that we now live.

Thus, I will say it again...JUST BECAUSE WE SAY IT DOESN'T MAKE IT SO!  We need to remove the blinders and take a long hard look at just how discriminatory America still really is.  And, to exemplify this point, I would encourage you to read the article below that was just recently published in the Nation Magazine.  The facts are sobering and the reality may be disheartening...but you can take solace in the concept that admitting you have a problem is the first step toward recovery.  Please take this message to heart and encourage others to question those who are willing to brush the topic of race aside as an issue of yesteryear.

The New Jim Crow

Michelle Alexander, March 9, 2010
Ever since Barack Obama lifted his right hand and took the oath of office, pledging to serve the United States as its forty-fourth president, ordinary people and their leaders around the globe have been celebrating our nation's "triumph over race." Obama's election has been touted as the final nail in the coffin of Jim Crow, the bookend placed on the history of racial caste in America.

Obama's mere presence in the Oval Office is offered as proof that "the land of the free" has finally made good on its promise of equality. There's an implicit yet undeniable message embedded in his appearance on the world stage: this is what freedom looks like; this is what democracy can do for you. If you are poor, marginalized, or relegated to an inferior caste, there is hope for you. Trust us. Trust our rules, laws, customs, and wars. You, too, can get to the promised land.

Perhaps greater lies have been told in the past century, but they can be counted on one hand. Racial caste is alive and well in America.

Most people don't like it when I say this. It makes them angry. In the "era of colorblindness" there's a nearly fanatical desire to cling to the myth that we as a nation have "moved beyond" race. Here are a few facts that run counter to that triumphant racial narrative:

·        There are more African-Americans under correctional control today--in prison or jail, on probation or parole--than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began.

·        As of 2004, more African-American men were disenfranchised (due to felon disenfranchisement laws) than in 1870, the year the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified, prohibiting laws that explicitly deny the right to vote on the basis of race.

·        A black child born today is less likely to be raised by both parents than a black child born during slavery. The recent disintegration of the African-American family is due in large part to the mass imprisonment of black fathers.

·        If you take into account prisoners, a large majority of African-American men in some urban areas have been labeled felons for life. (In the Chicago area, the figure is nearly 80 percent.) These men are part of a growing undercaste--not class, caste--permanently relegated, by law, to a second-class status. They can be denied the right to vote, automatically excluded from juries, and legally discriminated against in employment, housing, access to education, and public benefits, much as their grandparents and great-grandparents were during the Jim Crow era.

Excuses for the Lockdown

There is, of course, a colorblind explanation for all this: crime rates. Our prison population has exploded from about 300,000 to more than 2 million in a few short decades, it is said, because of rampant crime. We're told that the reason so many black and brown men find themselves behind bars and ushered into a permanent, second-class status is because they happen to be the bad guys.

The uncomfortable truth, however, is that crime rates do not explain the sudden and dramatic mass incarceration of African-Americans during the past thirty years. Crime rates have fluctuated over the last few decades--they are currently at historical lows--but imprisonment rates have consistently soared. Quintupled, in fact. And the vast majority of that increase is due to the War on Drugs. Drug offenses alone account for about two-thirds of the increase in the federal inmate population, and more than half of the increase in the state prison population.

The drug war has been brutal--complete with SWAT teams, tanks, bazookas, grenade launchers and sweeps of entire neighborhoods--but those who live in white communities have little clue to the devastation wrought. This war has been waged almost exclusively in poor communities of color, even though studies consistently show that people of all colors use and sell illegal drugs at remarkably similar rates. In fact, some studies indicate that white youth are significantly more likely to engage in illegal drug dealing than black youth. Any notion that drug use among African-Americans is more severe or dangerous is belied by the data. White youth, for example, have about three times the number of drug-related visits to the emergency room as their African-American counterparts.

That is not what you would guess, though, when entering our nation's prisons and jails, overflowing as they are with black and brown drug offenders. In some states, African-Americans comprise 80 percent-90 percent of all drug offenders sent to prison.

This is the point at which I am typically interrupted and reminded that black men have higher rates of violent crime. That's why the drug war is waged in poor communities of color and not middle-class suburbs. Drug warriors are trying to get rid of those drug kingpins and violent offenders who make ghetto communities a living hell. It has nothing to do with race; it's all about violent crime.

Again, not so. President Ronald Reagan officially declared the current drug war in 1982, when drug crime was declining, not rising. From the outset, the war had little to do with drug crime and nearly everything to do with racial politics. The drug war was part of a grand and highly successful Republican Party strategy of using racially coded political appeals on issues of crime and welfare to attract poor and working class white voters who were resentful of, and threatened by, desegregation, busing, and affirmative action. In the words of H.R. Haldeman, President Richard Nixon's White House chief of staff: "[T]he whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to."

A few years after the drug war was announced, crack cocaine hit the streets of inner-city communities. The Reagan administration seized on this development with glee, hiring staff who were to be responsible for publicizing inner-city crack babies, crack mothers, crack whores and drug-related violence. The goal was to make inner-city crack abuse and violence a media sensation, bolstering public support for the drug war which, it was hoped, would lead Congress to devote millions of dollars in additional funding to it.

The plan worked like a charm. For more than a decade, black drug dealers and users would be regulars in newspaper stories and would saturate the evening TV news. Congress and state legislatures nationwide would devote billions of dollars to the drug war and pass harsh mandatory minimum sentences for drug crimes--sentences longer than murderers receive in many countries.

Democrats began competing with Republicans to prove that they could be even tougher on the dark-skinned pariahs. In President Bill Clinton's boastful words, "I can be nicked a lot, but no one can say I'm soft on crime." The facts bear him out. Clinton's "tough on crime" policies resulted in the largest increase in federal and state prison inmates of any president in American history. But Clinton was not satisfied with exploding prison populations. He and the "New Democrats" championed legislation banning drug felons from public housing (no matter how minor the offense) and denying them basic public benefits, including food stamps, for life. Discrimination in virtually every aspect of political, economic and social life is now perfectly legal, if you've been labeled a felon.

Facing Facts

But what about all those violent criminals and drug kingpins? Isn't the drug war waged in ghetto communities because that's where the violent offenders can be found? The answer is yes... in made-for-TV movies. In real life, the answer is no.

The drug war has never been focused on rooting out drug kingpins or violent offenders. Federal funding flows to those agencies that increase dramatically the volume of drug arrests, not the agencies most successful in bringing down the bosses. What gets rewarded in this war is sheer numbers of drug arrests. To make matters worse, federal drug forfeiture laws allow state and local law enforcement agencies to keep for their own use 80 percent of the cash, cars and homes seized from drug suspects, thus granting law enforcement a direct monetary interest in the profitability of the drug market.

The results have been predictable: people of color rounded up en masse for relatively minor, nonviolent drug offenses. In 2005, four out of five drug arrests were for possession, only one out of five for sales. Most people in state prison have no history of violence or even of significant selling activity. In fact, during the 1990s--the period of the most dramatic expansion of the drug war--nearly 80 percent of the increase in drug arrests was for marijuana possession, a drug generally considered less harmful than alcohol or tobacco and at least as prevalent in middle-class white communities as in the inner city.

In this way, a new racial undercaste has been created in an astonishingly short period of time--a new Jim Crow system. Millions of people of color are now saddled with criminal records and legally denied the very rights that their parents and grandparents fought for and, in some cases, died for.

Affirmative action, though, has put a happy face on this racial reality. Seeing black people graduate from Harvard and Yale and become CEOs or corporate lawyers--not to mention president of the United States--causes us all to marvel at what a long way we've come.

Recent data shows, though, that much of black progress is a myth. In many respects, African-Americans are doing no better than they were when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated and uprisings swept inner cities across America. Nearly a quarter of African-Americans live below the poverty line today, approximately the same percentage as in 1968. The black child poverty rate is actually higher now than it was then. Unemployment rates in black communities rival those in Third World countries. And that's with affirmative action!

When we pull back the curtain and take a look at what our "colorblind" society creates without affirmative action, we see a familiar social, political, and economic structure--the structure of racial caste. The entrance into this new caste system can be found at the prison gate.

This is not Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream. This is not the promised land. The cyclical rebirth of caste in America is a recurring racial nightmare.

Source: The Nation

A 2010 Elections Primer - Changing the Message

With the onslaught of shape-shifting Republicans who seem to act like the Bush years never happened, TEA Party activists who are very angry but have no real idea about what they want other then to oppose Obama, and main-stream Democrats who speak of progressive ideals while acting to protect the corporate and financial... status-quo, its really easy to become quite cynical about this whole mess that is also known as the USA.

But this article provides an interesting perspective about how the progressive reform that is sooo badly needed can still win in the 2010 mid-term elections. 

A 2010 Elections Primer

John Nichols, February 11, 2010
No one needed a surprise result from Massachusetts or unexpected Congressional retirements to figure out that the dynamics of the 2010 election season are volatile. With an unstable economy, an ill-defined "war on terror" and polls showing Americans who thought the country was steered off course by Republicans now think it's headed in the wrong direction under Democrats, this is shaping up as a wild race through uncharted territory. For progressives--as frustrated by Democratic compromises and missteps as they are frightened by the extremism of a reconstituted right and suddenly swaggering Republicans--it's an unsettling moment.

With Washington Democrats wrangling among themselves and spinning off-message, and with Republicans shape-shifting with agility, it's easy to imagine the worst. But the 2010 cycle, while complex and demanding, need not be a nightmare for us: it should be understood as a multi-tiered challenge with opportunities to get things right. Here are seven ways to think about the fight for Congress and the statehouses:

1. It's Not About Sixty Senators. The obsession in 2009 with building a caucus big enough to thwart Republican filibusters made it seem like a substantial Democratic majority was meaningless. Democrats handcuffed themselves by adhering to rules that gave power to "moderate" Republicans, corporate-toady Democrats like Nebraska's Ben Nelson and Montana's Max Baucus, and Connecticut Independent Joe Lieberman. It's unlikely that a GOP tidal wave will shift control of the chamber, but it is equally unlikely, given the retirements and incumbent vulnerability, that Democrats will get to, let alone beyond, sixty. Worrying about either scenario is madness. For progressives, the point should be to make the Democratic caucus more left-leaning and activist. Don't fret too much about the fate of Southern and border-state compromisers (Arkansas's Blanche Lincoln, Indiana's Evan Bayh). Worry about re-electing progressives like California's Barbara Boxer and Wisconsin's Russ Feingold. Think about helping progressive, or at least mainstream, Democrats win seats vacated by GOP incumbents in Missouri, New Hampshire and Ohio. The point is not merely to elect Democrats but to forge a caucus that is less tied to the old ways of doing things and more inclined to scrap antidemocratic Senate rules and start governing.

2. Don't Just "Keep" the House; Make It More Populist. President Obama's State of the Union address noted that Speaker Nancy Pelosi's House has done a far better job of passing legislation than the Senate. But it wasn't easy. Blue Dogs and New Democrats erected every obstruction they could. This year they'll try to suggest that the only way to "save" the House is to run to the right, while their consultant allies will peddle the fantasy that the best response to the Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling allowing corporations to spend more freely on elections is to be more business-friendly. That would be disastrous. The Democrats' greatest vulnerability is not in the South, where Blue Dog seats are in play (and will in many instances be lost), but in the upper Midwest and the Northeast, where Democrats must preserve recently won seats representing hard-hit manufacturing towns and farm regions. Whether or not the White House is prepared to deliver it, the most effective message for Democratic incumbents--and challengers for the thirty-four Republican-held districts that backed Obama in 2008--is a progressive populist one that emphasizes job creation, smart farm policy and radically altering trade rules that have battered the heartland and the Northeast.

3. Democrats Will Define Themselves in Primaries. To hear major media tell it, the only primary fights are Republican battles between mainstream conservatives and tea party rebels. In fact, some of the most critical fights of 2010 are Democratic primaries: the California Congressional contest between incumbent Jane Harman, a frequent Republican ally on foreign policy, and progressive Marcy Winograd; a potential challenge from the right to Maryland progressive Donna Edwards; and Senate contests in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Kentucky and a number of other states--perhaps even New York. Savvy groups like Progressive Democrats of America and Democracy for America and websites like Firedoglake recognize that the first step to electing progressives is to nominate them in primaries.

4. State Races Matter. State and local governments maintain the social safety net and pay for education. For that reason alone, the thirty-seven gubernatorial and several thousand state legislative races are important. But this year's state contests matter even more because immediately after election day Congressional district lines will be redrawn using data from the 2010 Census. In states like Ohio, Michigan, California and Florida, electing the right governor could do more to define the character of Congress in the 2010s than winning a particular US House or Senate seat.

5. Direct Democracy Works. The spin says Americans are in an anti-tax, cut-government frenzy. But Oregonians just voted by overwhelming margins to tax the rich and big corporations in order to preserve social services and public education. As the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center reminds us, referendums and initiatives are no longer the province of right-wing zealots. When politicians go cautious, direct democracy becomes a powerful tool. Progressives should be far more engaged with referendum fights, from California to Maine, that will focus more than ever on taxes, spending and economic policy.

6. It's Not Just Democrats and Republicans. If this becomes a throw-the-bums-out year, some of the most exciting runs may be against the two-party system. There will be too much talk about tea party renegades; there are far more significant--if underreported--campaigns: former Senator Lincoln Chafee's independent run for governor of Rhode Island, Green Party gubernatorial candidate Rich Whitney (who won 10.5 percent of the vote four years ago) in Illinois, and those of the Vermont Progressive Party and the Working Families Party in New York and Connecticut.

7. Issues Are Important; Narratives Are More Important. The top issue in 2010 is the economy. But there's a difference between chirping about green shoots and outlining a bold agenda to create family-supporting jobs and swing the policy pendulum from Wall Street toward Main Street. There can be only one party of change in an election. Democrats proved in 2006 and '08 that they could be that party merely by offering an alternative to those in power; Republicans will try to do the same in 2010. Progressives must pressure Democratic leaders and candidates, in primaries and with their general election resources and energy, to stand for something more than managing the status quo--and to recognize that talking up the Obama administration's record will not be enough.

There's going to be a great wrestling match for control of the Democratic message this year. Those who say the party should present itself as a management team that will do a better job than the Republicans on cutting domestic spending, worrying about the deficit and promoting free trade aren't writing a platform; they're penning a political suicide note. Voters are frightened and frustrated. If scared Republicans and conservative independents pack the polls while disenchanted Democrats and liberal independents stay home, it could be 1994 all over again. But if Democrats present a progressive populist message about what must be done to win not just an election but the fight for jobs, education and healthcare, they can still be the party of change, and perhaps even of hope.

It's time to take off the transportation blinders

This is a great op-ed piece that provides some spot-on commentary about the current state of our transportation system.  Enjoy!

http://host.madison.com/ct/news/opinion/column/dave_zweifel/article_e240fcf0-e7f2-5db4-a313-2d0092fff1df.html

Dave Zweifel is editor emeritus of The Capital Times. 

It’s long been a myth that the streets, highways and bridges that accommodate our love affair with the automobile are all paid for by highway taxes.

Far from it. Just check your local city and county budgets and see how much general purpose tax revenue is siphoned into street repair every year. Property taxes help fund a lot of those orange trucks you always see on the roads.

Or how about the $8 billion that the Bush administration funneled into the highway trust fund in 2008 and the $7 billion that the Obama administration ponied up in 2009 because the gas tax money is falling short? And that’s not counting the $3 billion of taxpayers’ funds that went into the “cash for clunkers” automobile fix or the $81 billion in federal aid to GM and Chrysler.

So it’s always with some amusement that I hear politicians insist that — come hell or high water — passenger rail improvements need to pay for themselves. They’re demanding from rail what they don’t demand from every other mode of transportation, airlines included.

It’s a primary reason that America’s public transportation systems lags the rest of the developed world’s.
There was reason to rejoice earlier this year when President Obama announced that $8 billion of the country’s massive stimulus program would go to help build “high-speed” rail projects, which, hopefully, will include a Chicago-Milwaukee-Madison segment that has been on the drawing boards for years now.

But even our high-speed projects are laughable when compared to those that exist elsewhere. Japan is running its “bullet” trains at 188 miles an hour. France’s new high-speed railroad runs at 125 mph. Israel’s new Tel Aviv-to-Jerusalem line is upgrading to 120 miles an hour. China, which recently committed a trillion dollars to develop fast trains, plans on running them at 235 miles an hour.

Should the “high-speed” train between here and Chicago ever come to fruition, it will probably run at 79 miles an hour initially, but could be upgraded eventually to 110 mph. That’s because our rail infrastructure is designed mainly to handle freight trains, which operate at much lower speeds and don’t need the tighter standards and banked corners that faster trains need.

Ironically, our passenger trains in 2009 are slower than they were in the 1940s. According to Woodrow Wilson Center fellow Mark Reutter, “streamliners” such as the Super Chief, 20th Century Limited, Denver Zephyr and Hiawatha routinely topped 90 to 100 miles an hour between stops. And that was with the old steam locomotives.

“While the rest of the world has advanced, America’s passenger rail has stalled, if not reversed direction,” he says.

Most of Amtrak’s routes today are lucky if they average 50 miles an hour. Even the acclaimed Acela Express along the East Coast, the nation’s supposed answer to the bullet trains, averages only 67 mph along much of its route, even though it can hit 150 miles an hour on some short stretches of improved track.
This should be a national embarrassment, yet there are strong special interests in the country that fight passenger rail development, fiercely protecting transportation funding for more and wider roads that serve only to promote yet more automobile traffic.

If we’re ever going to develop a balanced transportation system in the United States, we need to take the blinders off. Rail, for all the efficiencies it represents, needs to get the monetary assistance that other modes of transit routinely receive. Once the infrastructure is brought up to snuff, then passenger rail can actually work to pay for itself.

Dave Zweifel is editor emeritus of The Capital Times.
dzweifel@madison.com

We are at a moment critical moment in our Nation's history; the decision has just been made on the future of the war in Afghanistan. And sadly, President Obama is announced that we will be sending more troops and escalating a conflict that appears doomed to fail. Below is the speech that I wish Obama had the courage to deliver.

It is time that the majority stood up and demanded an end to maintaining the status-quo! We will not accept the loss of more American solders or the further bankrupting of our Treasury in order to take the politically safe route and capitulate to the fear mongering within the Beltway and the neoconservatives who are concerned about protecting their legacy. Do we want to repeat the same mistake of Vietnam?

The Afghan Speech Obama Should Have Given (But Didn't)

Source: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20091214/engelhardt

Next Tuesday, President Obama is slated to address the American people in prime time about the war in Afghanistan from West Point. "It is my intention," he said in a press conference with Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Tuesday, "to finish the job." Every sign indicates that he will be sending 30,000 or more new American troops into that country.

Undoubtedly, the president's speechwriters are already preparing the text for his address. In the nearly three months since he began his strategic review of the Afghan War--with leaks pouring out almost every day--the rest of us have had all the disadvantages of essentially being in on the president's councils, and none of the advantages of offering our own advice. But I don't see why we shouldn't weigh in.

What follows, then, is my version of the president's Afghan announcement. Here's my President Obama--in, I hope, something like his voice--doing what no American president has yet done and what, unfortunately, he's not going to do. So sit down, turn on your TV, and see what you think.

The White House

Office of the Press Secretary

A New Way Forward:

The President's Address to the American People on Afghan Strategy

Oval Office

For Immediate Release

December 2

My fellow Americans,

On March 28th, I outlined what I called a "comprehensive, new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan." It was ambitious. It was also an attempt to fulfill a campaign promise that was heartfelt. I believed--and still believe--that, in invading Iraq, a war this administration is now ending, we took our eye off Afghanistan. Our well-being and safety, as well as that of the Afghan people, suffered for it.

I suggested then that the situation in Afghanistan was already "perilous." I announced that we would be sending 17,000 more American soldiers into that war zone, as well as 4,000 trainers and advisers whose job would be to increase the size of the Afghan security forces so that they could someday take the lead in securing their own country. There could be no more serious decision for an American president.

Eight months have passed since that day. This evening, after a comprehensive policy review of our options in that region that has involved commanders in the field, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, National Security Advisor James Jones, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Vice President Joe Biden, top intelligence and State Department officials and key ambassadors, special representative on Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Holbrooke, and experts from inside and outside this administration, I have a very different kind of announcement to make.

I plan to speak to you tonight with the frankness Americans deserve from their president. I've recently noted a number of pundits who suggest that my task here should be to reassure you about Afghanistan. I don't agree. What you need is the unvarnished truth just as it's been given to me. We all need to face a tough situation, as Americans have done so many times in the past, with our eyes wide open. It doesn't pay for a president or a people to fake it or, for that matter, to kick the can of a difficult decision down the road, especially when the lives of American troops are at stake.

During the presidential campaign I called Afghanistan "the right war." Let me say this: with the full information resources of the American presidency at my fingertips, I no longer believe that to be the case. I know a president isn't supposed to say such things, but he, too, should have the flexibility to change his mind. In fact, more than most people, it's important that he do so based on the best information available. No false pride or political calculation should keep him from that.

And the best information available to me on the situation in Afghanistan is sobering. It doesn't matter whether you are listening to our war commander, General Stanley McChrystal, who, as press reports have indicated, believes that with approximately 80,000 more troops--which we essentially don't have available--there would be a reasonable chance of conducting a successful counterinsurgency war against the Taliban, or our ambassador to that country, Karl Eikenberry, a former general with significant experience there, who believes we shouldn't send another soldier at present. All agree on the following seven points:

1. We have no partner in Afghanistan. The control of the government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai hardly extends beyond the embattled capital of Kabul. He himself has just been returned to office in a presidential election in which voting fraud on an almost unimaginably large scale was the order of the day. His administration is believed to have lost all credibility with the Afghan people.

2. Afghanistan floats in a culture of corruption. This includes President Karzai's administration up to its highest levels and also the warlords who control various areas and, like the Taliban insurgency, are to some degree dependent for their financing on opium, which the country produces in staggering quantities. Afghanistan, in fact, is not only a narco-state, but the leading narco-state on the planet.

3. Despite billions of dollars of American money poured into training the Afghan security forces, the army is notoriously understrength and largely ineffective; the police forces are riddled with corruption and held in contempt by most of the populace.

4. The Taliban insurgency is spreading and gaining support largely because the Karzai regime has been so thoroughly discredited, the Afghan police and courts are so ineffective and corrupt, and reconstruction funds so badly misspent. Under these circumstances, American and NATO forces increasingly look like an army of occupation, and more of them are only likely to solidify this impression.

5.Al Qaeda is no longer a significant factor in Afghanistan. The best intelligence available to me indicates--and again, whatever their disagreements, all my advisers agree on this--that there may be perhaps 100 Al Qaeda operatives in Afghanistan and another 300 in neighboring Pakistan. As I said in March, our goal has been to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat Al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and on this we have, especially recently, been successful. Osama bin Laden, of course, remains at large, and his terrorist organization is still a danger to us, but not a $100 billion-plus danger.

6. Our war in Afghanistan has become the military equivalent of a massive bail-out of a firm determined to fail. Simply to send another 40,000 troops to Afghanistan would, my advisers estimate, cost $40-$54 billion extra dollars; eighty thousand troops, more than $80 billion. Sending more trainers and advisers in an effort to double the size of the Afghan security forces, as many have suggested, would cost another estimated $10 billion a year. These figures are over and above the present projected annual costs of the war--$65 billion--and would ensure that the American people will be spending $100 billion a year or more on this war, probably for years to come. Simply put, this is not money we can afford to squander on a failing war thousands of miles from home.

7. Our all-volunteer military has for years now shouldered the burden of our two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Even if we were capable of sending 40,000-80,000 more troops to Afghanistan, they would without question be servicepeople on their second, third, fourth, or even fifth tours of duty. A military, even the best in the world, wears down under this sort of stress and pressure.

These seven points have been weighing on my mind over the last weeks as we've deliberated on the right course to take. Tonight, in response to the realities of Afghanistan as I've just described them to you, I've put aside all the subjects that ordinarily obsess Washington, especially whether an American president can reverse the direction of a war and still have an electoral future. That's for the American people, and them alone, to decide.

Given that, let me say as bluntly as I can that I have decided to send no more troops to Afghanistan. Beyond that, I believe it is in the national interest of the American people that this war, like the Iraq War, be drawn down. Over time, our troops and resources will be brought home in an orderly fashion, while we ensure that we provide adequate security for the men and women of our Armed Forces. Ours will be an administration that will stand or fall, as of today, on this essential position: that we ended, rather than extended, two wars.

This will, of course, take time. But I have already instructed Ambassador Eikenberry and Special Representative Holbrooke to begin discussions, however indirectly, with the Taliban insurgents for a truce in place. Before year's end, I plan to call an international conference of interested countries, including key regional partners, to help work out a way to settle this conflict. I will, in addition, soon announce a schedule for the withdrawal of the first American troops from Afghanistan.

For the counterinsurgency war that we now will not fight, there is already a path laid out. We walked down that well-mined path once in recent American memory and we know where it leads. For ending the war in another way, there is no precedent in our recent history and so no path--only the unknown. But there is hope. Let me try to explain.

Recently, comparisons between the Vietnam War and our current conflict in Afghanistan have been legion. Let me, however, suggest a major difference between the two. When Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson faced their crises involving sending more troops into Vietnam, they and their advisers had little to rely on in the American record. They, in a sense, faced the darkness of the unknown as they made their choices. The same is not true of us.

In the White House, for instance, a number of us have been reading a book on how the United States got itself ever more disastrously involved in the Vietnam War. We have history to guide us here. We know what happens in counterinsurgency campaigns. We have the experience of Vietnam as a landmark on the trail behind us. And if that weren't enough, of course, we have the path to defeat already well cleared by the Russians in their Afghan fiasco of the 1980s, when they had just as many troops in the field as we would have if I had chosen to send those extra 40,000 Americans. That is the known.

On the other hand, peering down the path of de-escalation, all we can see is darkness. Nothing like this has been tried before in Washington. But I firmly believe that this, too, is deeply in the American grain. American immigrants, as well as slaves, traveled to this country as if into the darkness of the unknown. Americans have long braved the unknown in all sorts of ways.

To present this more formulaically, if we sent the troops and trainers to Afghanistan, if we increased air strikes and tried to strengthen the Afghan Army, we basically know how things are likely to work out: not well. The war is likely to spread. The insurgents, despite many losses, are likely to grow in strength. Hatred of Americans is likely to increase. Pakistan is likely to become more destabilized.

If, however, we don't take such steps and proceed down that other path, we do not know how things will work out in Afghanistan, or how well.

We do not know how things will work out in Pakistan, or how well.

That is hardly surprising, since we do not know what it means to end such a war now.

But we must not be scared. America will not--of this, as your president, I am convinced--be a safer nation if it spends many hundreds of billions of dollars over many years, essentially bankrupting itself and exhausting its military on what looks increasingly like an unwinnable war. This is not the way to safety, but to national penury--and I am unwilling to preside over an America heading in that direction.

Let me say again that the unknown path, the path into the wilderness, couldn't be more American. We have always been willing to strike out for ourselves where others would not go. That, too, is in the best American tradition.

It is, of course, a perilous thing to predict the future, but in the Afghanistan/Pakistan region, war has visibly only spread war. The beginning of a negotiated peace may have a similarly powerful effect, but in the opposite direction. It may actually take the wind out of the sails of the insurgents on both sides of the Afghan/Pakistan border. It may actually encourage forces in both countries with which we might be more comfortable to step to the fore.

Certainly, we will do our best to lead the way with any aid or advice we can offer toward a future peaceful Afghanistan and a future peaceful Pakistan. In the meantime, I plan to ask Congress to take some of the savings from our two wars winding down and put them into a genuine jobs program for the American people.

The way to safety in our world is, I believe, to secure our borders against those who would harm us, and to put Americans back to work. With this in mind, next month I've called for a White House Jobs Summit, which I plan to chair. And there I will suggest that, as a start, and only as a start, we look at two programs that were not only popular across the political spectrum in the desperate years of the Great Depression but were remembered fondly long after by those who took part in them--the Civilian Conservatio n Corps and the Works Progress Administration. These basic programs put millions of Americans back to work on public projects that mattered to this nation and saved families, lives, and souls.

We cannot afford a failing war in Afghanistan and a 10.2 percent official unemployment rate at home. We cannot live with two Americas, one for Wall Street and one for everyone else. This is not the path to American safety.

As president, I retain the right to strike at Al Qaeda or other terrorists who mean us imminent harm, no matter where they may be, including Afghanistan. I would never deny that there are dangers in the approach I suggest today, but when have Americans ever been averse to danger, or to a challenge either? I cannot believe we will be now.

It's time for change. I know that not all Americans will agree with me and that some will be upset by the approach I am now determined to follow. I expect anger and debate. I take full responsibility for whatever may result from this policy departure. Believe me, the buck stops here, but I am convinced that this is the way forward for our country in war and peace, at home and abroad.

I thank you for your time and attention. Goodnight and God bless America.

Question of the Day

Why do our elected officials find it acceptable to pay hundreds of billions of dollars a year to fund foreign wars, yet find it unacceptable to pay much less then that for universal health care for our own citizens?

Could it be that the health of our military industrial complex is more important then the health of the American people?

Yet Another Reason why Republicans love Large Prison Populations

According to the Prison Policy Initiative (PPI), which studies how prison populations affect state and local politics nationwide, New York is a grand perpetrator of prison-based gerrymandering. Despite the fact that the state Constitution explicitly declares that a person's residence doesn't change while in prison, thirteen upstate counties continue to ignore that, claiming inmates as constituents even though they can't vote in those upstate counties. Without these so-called constituents, seven districts wouldn't be drawn the way they are now. PPI argues that the disparity in population creates an extra Senate seat for upstate New Yorkers while disenfranchising downstaters.

Unfortunately, while New York may be one of the most exceptional examples of prison-based gerrymandering, it is not alone. PPI has found similar abuses in Pennsylvania, Ohio, New Hampshire, Virginia, Nevada, Wisconsin and Texas, among others.

Source: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090817/noted

For more information about PPI: http://www.prisonpolicy.org/

Give All The High Speed Rail Funds To California

Jay Yarow|Aug. 25, 2009

Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/the-government-should-just-give-all-the-high-speed-rail-funds-to-california-2009-8

Yesterday, a number of states applied for a share of the $8 billion in stimulus spending on high speed rail.

They should all be rejected. Except for California, which should get all of it. And it should get the other $5 billion coming down the pike.

Getting the country to build a better system of trains is darn near impossible. If we let $8 billion scatter in staggered sums across the nation it's going to be tough to track how useful the money really is, making any further investment in trains difficult to justify, and open to more debate.

One of the biggest problems with building a high speed rail system in the United States, is all the unknowns. That's why we get highly questionable, back of the envelop guess work done by Harvard's Ed Glaeser.

If we built the train system proposed for California, we would get real, measurable, results. If the train is a flop, at least we'll know for sure. If it's a raging success, then we can choose the next part of the country in which to build a better train system.

However, if we give a $76 million to North Carolina, and $28 million to Pennsylvania

, what will we really learn?

The Washington Post, citing a GAO study, says construction costs vary from $22 million a mile to $132 million a mile for high speed rail. At the low end of that estimate, that means North Carolina could lay out around 3.5 miles of track with its stimulus money.

California is ready to go. It has a plan in place for high speed rail system. California voters approved a $9.95 billion bond sale to fund the rail line. Add in $13 billion from the federal government, and the project is more than half way funded.

Last Friday we argued that we're just not the type of nation that can build big sweeping public work projects, and that's why our stimulus has seemed so pitiful. Here's a chance to prove us wrong.

We can get a big shiny play thing out of our stimulus. It's the type of project--whether it's successful, or a boondoggle--that we can say came about because of the Great Recession.

Of equal importance, we get to have a definitive test case about whether or not high tech trains can work here in the United States.

Spread the wealth around, and it's just going to look like more of the same.