Iraq Everlasting

By Frank Rich, New York Magazine

05 June 14

 

hen Michael Hastings was killed in a single-car crash in Los Angeles at age 33 last June, journalism lost a rare specimen of the breed it needs most: a reporter who doesn’t care whom he pisses off. Hastings was the hothead whose 2010 Rolling Stone article “The Runaway General” led to the dismissal of the Afghanistan commander, General Stanley McChrystal, for the infraction of trash-talking his civilian bosses. Hastings, too, was pilloried after the piece—by his own journalistic peers, in a manner that would prefigure some of the profession’s more recent hostility toward Glenn Greenwald. “Michael Hastings has never served his country the way McChrystal has,” said Lara Logan of CBS News.

We now know that Hastings served both his country and profession with more honor than Logan, who later maimed her own career and 60 Minutes by perpetrating a Benghazi hoax. And his service isn’t done yet. After Hastings died, a former colleague at Newsweek, where he worked as an intern and war correspondent from 2002 to 2008, sent his widow, Elise Jordan, the draft of a novel he had finished just before his 2010 embed with McChrystal. Titled The Last Magazine, it is being published this month on the anniversary of his passing.

We’ll never know how Hastings might have revised this scrappy debut effort or whether it would have led to a career as a novelist. But as a provocative piece of thinly fictionalized nonfiction, it’s a posthumous mission accomplished. The Last Magazine—set at a fictional newsweekly called The Magazine that might as well go by Newsweek—tells the story of the run-up to the Iraq War from a perspective that many of his colleagues would like to forget or suppress: as an embed deep inside the so-called liberal media, much of which cheered on the war with a self-­righteous gravity second only to Dick Cheney’s. Hastings’s book is a message in a bottle that has belatedly washed up on shore to force us to remember how we landed where we are now.

Where are we, exactly? As President Obama implicitly reconfirmed in last week’s West Point address calling for a restrained American role abroad, the massive blunder of Iraq remains the nation’s inescapable existential burden two and a half years after our last troops departed. Indeed, the war continues to pile up collateral damage and defeats daily. Without America’s wrong turn into Iraq, perhaps the Taliban would be extinct rather than resurgent in Afghanistan as we head for the exits to meet Obama’s new 2016 pullout deadline. Without the taint of the Iraq debacle, a war deceitfully carried out in the name of 9/11, perhaps ticket sales at the new 9/11 museum would not be moving so slowly that one can imagine them ending up at the half-price booth; perhaps even George W. Bush might have dared to show up for the museum’s opening rather than plead a “scheduling conflict.”

As for Iraq itself, the just-completed election (few photos of purple fingers this time) all but guaranteed a third term for Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, a mercurial autocrat like the other leaders America sponsored after 9/11, Afghanistan’s Hamid Karzai and Pakistan’s Pervez Musharraf. Under Maliki, Iraq is an ally of Iran, its partner in supporting the criminal Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. And though Iraq was not a terrorist stronghold when “shock and awe” toppled Saddam Hussein in 2003, it is today. The Anbar-province city of Fallujah, liberated by American forces in our country’s bloodiest warfare since Vietnam, fell to Al Qaeda earlier this year. As Mark Danner summarized in his ongoing assessment of the war’s origins and legacy for The New York Review of Books, “The Sunni-Shia struggle set in motion by the American invasion of Iraq has become the vortex of a violent political struggle that stretches from South Asia to the Gulf.” Iraq itself has become a one-stop-shopping jihadist laboratory for car bombs, IEDs, and kidnapping scenarios like the one enacted by Boko Haram in Nigeria.

Iraq’s legacy in America goes well beyond the steep toll of casualties, injuries, and billions wasted on corruption and folly. Of the 2.6 million Americans who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, more than half have physical or mental-health problems and give the government low marks for meeting their needs, according to a Washington Post–Kaiser Family Foundation survey published in March. Barely a third of the public—and only 44 percent of post-9/11 service members—believes the Iraq War was worth fighting, according to CBS News and Post-­Kaiser polls. Such is the bipartisan backlash to both post-9/11 wars that a Pew survey last fall found that 52 percent of Americans want their country to “mind its own business internationally”—a record high in the poll’s five-decade history.

It’s the default position of liberals to lay the blame for this apocalyptic legacy—a failing Iraq, unchecked international jihadism, a neo-isolationist America—on the Bushies, who deployed cooked evidence and outright lies to sell the country on the war and then executed their own strategy with breathtaking recklessness and incompetence. The Iraq War cheerleaders on the right, whether think-tank-funded neocon armchair generals or flag-pin-bearing bloviators at Fox News, are also easily identifiable culprits in this story. So are those reporters and editors in the mainstream press who at best failed to vet and at worst jingoistically inflated Bush-administration propaganda about Saddam’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction.

What tends to be swept under history’s rug is the leading role that the liberal Establishment played in this calamity. A majority of Senate Democrats voted to authorize the war, including the presidential aspirants Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, John Kerry, and John Edwards. Most of the liberal pundits and public intellectuals who might have challenged the rationale for the invasion enlisted in the stampede instead, giving the politicians cover. They are the target of Michael Hastings’s rude little book.

For those who don’t instantly recognize the principal characters in this roman à clef, a minute of Googling will decode it. Sometimes Hastings tosses in actual names, including his own, the 22-year-old protagonist bouncing among the higher-ups succumbing to war fever in their lofty midtown-Manhattan offices. The titular magazine is a relic from a time capsule—when newsweeklies had millions of ­subscribers and covers that could move markets and the world. But if print news­magazines have been slouching toward extinction ever since, the culture Hastings captures—like some of the specific Iraq enablers he skewers—is alive and well. The slippery prewar bellicosity at The Magazine (one cover is ingeniously headlined “The Case for War?”) seems as contemporary as ever, as does the disingenuous backpedaling once public opinion starts to go south (another cover: “How They Got It Wrong [And What They Can Do to Make It Right]”). The herd mentality, situational ethics, and fear of standing up to authority depicted in The Last Magazine survive today on op-ed pages, at panels where elite thinkers meet in the mountains of Aspen and Davos, on thumb-sucking talk shows of lofty policy pretensions, and, yes, sometimes in magazines. It’s a bubble where career advancement, as measured through television ubiquity and the sales of books pandering to received middlebrow opinion, matters more than actual thought or intellectual integrity. When the “Michael Hastings” of Hastings’s novel reads a new book by one of the two senior editors competing to be The Magazine’s new editor-in-chief, he doesn’t expect to learn what his boss is really thinking, only what the boss has “pretended to think” to advance his personal brand.

In a post he wrote for the now-defunct site True/Slant in 2009 (around the time he was finishing his draft of The Last Magazine), Hastings anticipated his novel’s themes. “Supporting the Iraq War was the smart career move, the savvy play,” he wrote, adding that he witnessed “this career pressure at work, first-hand” when, between the summer of 2002 and the start of the invasion in March 2003, “the views of a number of big names at Newsweek flipped like light switches.” Why did they? A big incentive, he wrote, “was the pressure to stay relevant. Being for the war was seen as the cutting edge of thinking. If you were against the war, you were marked as some kind of left-wing throwback, or an isolationist, someone who didn’t get it.” And, as Hastings marveled in 2009, “the consequences for getting it wrong” were “zip.” Indeed, many of those who got it wrong, in his estimation, had become more successful after the war spun out of control. Some have just slunk away from the ruins of the fiasco they supported as if they bear no culpability or responsibility for the wreckage. Now and then, they write lovely pieces thanking those Americans who fought the war for their service.

A month before the invasion in 2003, Bill Keller, then a Times op-ed columnist, took a census of the “I-Can’t-Believe-I’m-a-Hawk Club” he unexpectedly found himself in. It was a large group that included “op-ed regulars at this newspaper and the Washington Post, the editors of The New Yorker, The New Republic and Slate, columnists in Time and Newsweek.” Contrary to Hastings’s harsh view of their motivations, the liberal hawks all claimed their stands were based on the merits of the case. They believed that Saddam, indisputably a mass murderer of his own people, could be taken out in a surgical military action (“rapid, accurate and dazzling,” in Christopher Hitchens’s formulation). Some believed, as the Bush administration hectored, that Iraq’s arsenal was a ticking time bomb threatening America. Paul Berman imagined that an invasion might “foment a liberal revolution in the Middle East.” Thomas Friedman argued that “America needed to hit someone in the Arab-Muslim world” in addition to Afghanistan to puncture the “terrorism bubble” and tilt the region “onto a democratizing track.”

When these rationales started to collapse, most (though not all) of the original liberal hawks started to scatter. Slate smartly convened periodic online symposia in which its nearly united caucus for war could publicly reconsider. But as the blogger Matthew Yglesias would write at ThinkProgress in 2010, it remained puzzling why the war’s liberal supporters were “so slow to turn against it.” Yglesias had been a mere college student when he supported the invasion, but he was still wise enough to figure out that things were going “badly amiss” when Bush and Tony Blair “pulled the plug on the inspections process” and when, a few months later, it became clear that “there was no scary WMD program and also that there was no real plan for what to do.” Yet, as he wrote, it took “until 2005–2006 for ‘this was a mistake’ to become a conventional view even though no really important new information became available during the interim.”

There were exceptions to this groupthink, of course. Among the boldest was the Slate military-affairs columnist Fred Kaplan, who joined his colleagues in coming down in favor of the Iraq War after hearing Colin Powell’s presentation on Saddam’s alleged WMD before the United Nations Security Council on February 5, 2003. Kaplan pulled back a mere month later—two weeks before the invasion began—after reading a piece by another liberal hawk, George Packer, in the Times Magazine, reporting that at a meeting with Iraqi exiles, Bush revealed his ignorance of the Sunni-Shia division in the country he intended to remake. “I knew immediately they were going to fuck it up,” Kaplan recalled recently. (Packer stayed the course until 2005.) A few other prominent liberal writers—a short list led by Danner, James Fallows, Michael Kinsley, John Judis, and Paul Krugman—opposed the war from the start, for a variety of prescient reasons. Why did so many more, seeing the same evidence that the skeptics did, get it wrong?

The liberal hawks’ explanations are fairly similar: They were bamboozled by the WMD “evidence.” They never imagined that the Bush administration would have gone to war with no plan for the morning after Saddam’s fall. Some pinned the blame on the Brookings Institution fellow Kenneth Pollack, a former CIA analyst, whose book The Threatening Storm, a compendium of errant intelligence, was the go-to case for war. (It is now out of print.) By 2004, the libertarian magazine Reason was seeing a “neat arrangement of responsibility by the liberal hawks: all the blame falls on the president, none on themselves.” Or, as the late British historian Tony Judt put it two years later, most liberal hawks (“Bush’s useful idiots,” he labeled them) “focused their regrets not on the catastrophic invasion itself (which they all supported) but on its incompetent execution.”

What made some of the liberal hawks offensive was their swaggering assumption of moral (and intellectual) superiority to those who challenged their thinking. Many of them slurred the present and former United Nations weapons inspectors Hans Blix and Scott Ritter, who contradicted the Dick Cheney–Judith Miller case for Saddam’s WMD. Hitchens belittled war opponents as leftist “masochists.” Peter Beinart, then editor of The New Republic, accused the war’s critics of “intellectual incoherence” and “abject pacifism.” Dan Savage labeled them “squish-brains,” and Jacob Weisberg, then editor of Slate, wrote that Democratic war critics failed “to take the wider, global battle against Islamic fanaticism seriously.” To their credit, some of these hawks, however tardily, owned up fully to their mistakes and excesses. “I was wrong,” wrote Beinart—simple words that eluded so many others. Andrew Sullivan, who had impugned the patriotism of those who disagreed with his post-9/11 effusions, became a tireless writer on the crimes revealed at Abu Ghraib and more recently went so far as to publish an e-book titled I Was Wrong containing almost his entire hawkish output. He admitted that he had become “enamored” of his own morality, and likened his support for the war to that of “a teenage girl supporting the Jonas Brothers.” Dan Savage, in his inimitable way, said in 2013, “I was not just wrong. I was an asshole about it, and I was an asshole to the people who were right.” After Iraq, he stopped writing about foreign affairs altogether.

A few liberal hawks have also conceded Hastings’s point—that they went along with the pack for reasons that may not have been entirely based on an independent, empirical weighing of the case for war. “The first thing I hope I’ve learned from this experience of being wrong about Iraq,” Weisberg wrote in 2008, “is to be less trusting of expert opinion and received wisdom.” Les Gelb, the longtime foreign-policy hand and commentator, said with notable candor that his “initial support for the war was symptomatic of unfortunate tendencies within the ­foreign-policy community, namely the disposition and incentive to support wars to retain political and professional credibility.” Bill Keller wrote that it was “surely relevant” that his I-Can’t-Believe-I’m-a-Hawk cohort was “exclusively a boys’ club,” and observed that Samantha Power, the writer who had written more eloquently on the case for American humanitarian interventions than anyone, had chosen not to join it. In his lengthy mea culpa, Keller’s most telling self-observation may be that he had wanted “to be on the side of doing something, and standing by was not enough.” After all, using one’s perch to try to slow down a precipitous rush to war could hardly qualify as action in the feverish, testosterone-thick atmosphere of post-9/11 America.

Some liberal hawks—editorialists and op-ed columnists at the Washington Post, most conspicuously—never recanted. Others conceded their mistakes with so many caveats, so much blame-shifting, or in such soft whispers that it hardly mattered. They just kept marching on as if it were all blood under the bridge. Even as Iraq tumbled into chaos, the “only people qualified to speak on the matter,” Tony Judt marveled in 2006, were “those who got it wrong initially.” That’s largely the case with foreign affairs today. And, as Krugman wrote on the tenth anniversary of Operation Iraqi Freedom, so few lessons have been learned from the debacle that an “exaggerated and inappropriate reverence for authority” now infects so-called serious debate on domestic policy, too. The apocalyptic debt crisis constantly trumpeted by Washington’s bipartisan Establishment for the past several years has proved as illusory as Saddam’s phantom nuclear warheads.

“We live in a world the Iraq War has made,” Danner wrote last December. For the time being, we are defending ourselves against that reality with denial. The public doesn’t want to hear more about the war from anyone, period. That the latest round of Department of Veterans Affairs scandals arrived as a shock to much of Congress, the news media, and the populace shows just how deaf we’ve been even to the longtime complaints of our wounded warriors. All of Hollywood’s serious 9/11-Iraq-Afghanistan movies except one have struggled to find audiences, with The Hurt Locker proving to be the lowest-grossing Best Picture Oscar winner in movie history. (The one hit has been Zero Dark Thirty, which told of our sole clear-cut victory, the killing of Osama bin Laden.) When foreign-policy debate sporadically erupts on the campaign trail or in Washington—whether over Libya, Syria, Egypt, or Russia—the public tunes it out.

That debate, if it can even be labeled as such, is paralyzed at its core by the specter of Iraq. In both political parties, the talking points rarely get beyond the question of whether Barack Obama is enough of an Alpha Dog in his saber-rattling rhetoric and actions—an empty exercise in intellectual vamping given that the country wouldn’t support the hawks’ inchoate prescriptions for Putin-esque action by an American president even if Obama signed on to them. The Vietnam syndrome, supposedly buried after the first Gulf war, is back. When the same liberal hawks who sped us into Iraq call for intervention in Syria, the public shrugs them off just as it does the discredited Bush-Cheney and neocon claques. Little short of another attack on America will rouse the citizenry to enlist in any battle that cannot be waged with drones. But the potential consequences of the public’s disengagement from the global arena extend well beyond matters of war and peace. At a time of seismic change, the last thing America needs to do is “mind its own business internationally.”

Over the long term, there may well be a reckoning: Should the aftershocks set off by the Iraq invasion continue to unravel the world, or a large chunk of it, history will look back at the liberal and conservative hawks alike as having flunked the biggest judgment call of their time. They will be seen not just as counterparts to the bipartisan promoters of the Vietnam quagmire but as frivolous sleepwalkers akin to those who a century ago greased the skids for the catastrophe of World War I.

Over the short term, the domestic political fallout of this failure is still very much with us. Obama’s West Point speech was regarded by many as a riposte to the lengthy recent cri de coeur from the ­foreign-policy analyst Robert Kagan in The New Republic warning of dire consequences should a war-weary America continue to retreat from the world now as it did in the post–World War I 1920s. But even if Kagan’s fears are justified, he is oblivious to how flawed a messenger he is, as a major proponent of the Iraq War. And he underestimates how hard it will be to mobilize the country to mount any kind of military horse again after the disaster he did so much to cheer on.

Americans may have soured on President Obama since 2008, but they still do agree with him on this point, at least: Iraq was a “dumb war.” That distinction is not the least of the reasons they chose him over Hillary Clinton and John McCain. What both the liberal and conservative elites fail to appreciate as they express continued bafflement over the unexpected rise of a foreign-policy renegade like Rand Paul is that he shares this distinction with the president. Like Obama, he may wield it against his hawkish presidential-primary opponents, and, should it come to that, against Clinton as well. The ironies in this are both so wicked and profound, and so rooted in the epic liberal failure exhumed in The Last Magazine, that it’s all the more tragic that Michael Hastings won’t be here to hold everyone to account.

A National Call to Link Arms for Democracy

By Victoria Collier and Ben Zion-Ptashnik, Reader Supported News

04 June 14

 

or Americans, these are dangerous and momentous times. We have only a small window of opportunity to break the grip of moneyed interests on our government, before an advancing oligarchy consolidates power and locks in tyranny.

This article is an urgent call to organize a mass-based political movement in the coming months and through the 2016 elections. If we rise to the occasion and fight, we can reclaim democracy, regain control of our future, and preserve the dreams of our children, and for the coming generations.

Without a sweeping grassroots movement, loudly pushing and protesting for reforms, populist candidates, or coalitions in Congress will never have the power to defeat the forces of a corrupt ruling class. Robber barons have resurfaced with a vengeance in the past four decades, openly attacking our democratic system, while buying power to extend and protect their privilege in perpetuity.

The immense tide of social progress that flourished in the 20th century, from antitrust reforms and the New Deal social safety net, to environmental regulation, civil rights and women's rights, are collectively in the bull's eye of a demolition ball. As manufactured austerity and deep cuts to essential social services continue, Wall Street banks and US multinational corporations remain the true welfare queens. In 2013, corporate tax breaks amounted to $176 billion. Incredibly, companies like General Electric, Boeing, Verizon, Bank of America, and Citigroup paid no income tax at all, and some even received a refund!

Economic disenfranchisement of working Americans has metastasized since the 1980s, when right-wing and corporatist coalitions began limiting wage growth, outsourcing, union-busting, and transferring jobs to so-called "right-to-work" states or sending them overseas.

We know we are under siege. Less clearly understood is how the oligarchs achieved their goals of privatization, a disempowered workforce and a weakened populace.

A variety of dirty strategies have been deployed to fully subvert "government of the people, by the people and for the people." All around the country, and particularly in states like North Carolina, Michigan, Florida, Ohio and Wisconsin, they have gerrymandered electoral districts, suppressed millions of votes, and outright rigged and stolen high-stakes elections. Now, they are attempting to further rig blue states by changing Electoral College rules from winner-take-all to proportional representation. Meanwhile, the activist right-wing Supreme Court’s anti-democratic decisions that money equals speech and corporations are persons have ensured that voters are out-gunned by billions of corporate dollars unleashed into the bribery system known as campaign financing.

"We have to be every bit as ambitious, and every bit as holistic in seeking to defend democracy, as those who are seeking to destroy it."  This galvanizing call to action by Mike McCabe, executive director of the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, is a roadmap for our nascent democracy movement.

We cannot continue struggling separately for myriad causes, while social progress is reversed piecemeal and democracy itself dismantled. Unless we organize to preserve the ability of the people to shape public policy, it is crystal clear that there will be no justice, no peace, no ecological sustainability, no amelioration of climate change and no end to poverty and economic oppression.

Now is the time to link our formidable strengths as organizers and activists.

At this 11th hour, the corruption of the US political system is endemic and has become a global threat. All the criminals involved in Wall Street's massive Ponzi conspiracies, which crashed the world's economy, have escaped indictment. Climate change deniers are elected to Congress and financed through campaign contributions from fossil fuel billionaires. Diabolically, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) treaty provisions are being crafted in secret by lobbyists, targeting every sector of society for corporate domination, while members of Congress are kept in the dark.

Our political system is now fully rigged to allow the ruling elite to permanently manipulate our economic future, while granting corporations the freedom to exploit and pollute the world at will.

The malignant strategy began in 1971 when Lewis Powell – then a corporate tobacco lawyer -- galvanized the US Chamber of Commerce. The Powell Memo was a call to arms for corporate interests to mobilize against the "frontal assault" of 1960s progressive activism. Powell recommended monitoring textbooks, infiltrating campuses, forcibly injecting "free market" propaganda into the media, stacking the courts and packing government with allies. The effort spawned theAmerican Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the Heritage Foundation, and other powerful consortiums of far-right think tanks and lobbyists. Over decades they succeeded in dramatically warping the American political and economic landscape in the image of Ayn Rand; champion of laissez-faire extremism and the deranged, sophomoric "virtue of selfishness."

The result is that not mere selfishness, but obscene greed has been elevated to virtue.

Over the past 30 years,60% of all wealthhas been funneled to the top 1% of the population.Wall Street and their lobbyists are at war with Main Street; offshore tax loopholes inflate corporate balance sheets, while creating a disincentive for investing in American factories, infrastructure and jobs. The United States is not "broke," as austerity pundits proselytize - we are being deliberately starved. Our debt, and our balance of trade would be healthy if we had not cut taxes for the wealthy and mega-corporations, while outsourcing industry. The ultimate travesty, of course, was the (fraudulently elected) Bush-Cheney administration and its accomplices using the 9/11 tragedy to orchestrate a privatized war on false evidence. Iraq has cost $2 trillion to date, and with interest may increase to $6 trillion.

Never before in American history have we simultaneously conducted a war and cut taxes.

The brutal conflict itself, and the sham economic crisis that ensued, has endangered millions of Americans' health and survival, including Iraq veterans whose suicide rate skyrockets while benefits are delayed or denied.

Barack Obama's presidency put an end to the hopes of many progressives that profound change will come through the Democratic party. Hillary Clinton certainly will not take on Wall Street. The truth is that too many Democratic politicians spent the past decades sucking up to corporate donors, and are now trapped in a lobbyist-controlled box canyon, where bag-men for industry hold most of the cards for their elections. Moderate, progressive and populist candidates who may truly want to restore democracy are overpowered by increasingly expensive campaigns, and a ruthless cabal that doesn’t hesitate to cheat and surreptitiously buy elections. In 2013, the Koch brothers spent over half a million dollars in anonymous campaign donations to derail the Wisconsin recall campaign against Tea Party favorite, Governor Scott Walker.

All together, it is a multi-pronged assault, crippling our ability to confront the barrage of regressive laws aimed at social progress and the democratic process itself - legislation often disseminated in the states by ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council).

Yes, the situation is dire. We can despair, or we can act - we choose to act.

The story of the American people is one of unyielding struggle to make real the promise of opportunity, democracy, justice and equal rights. Our struggle may have been derailed, but it is not dead. We do have the power to pull together a political movement to stop this onslaught.

Our constituency for democracy is vast and growing. Veterans who have fallen through the cracks share the outrage of victims of fraudulent home foreclosure. Working parents holding down multiple jobs share the exhaustion of students struggling under insupportable debt. The unemployed who lost skilled jobs to outsourcing, and underpaid workers without labor rights, share the anger of retirees who lost their pensions and seniors who fear for the social safety net.

The list goes on. Minorities, whose votes are suppressed, women once again fighting - and being arrested - for reproductive rights, victims of the for-profit prison industry and the “war on drugs." Millions opposed to wars of aggression, to drones, to the NSA spy network and attempted corporate domination of the internet - the last bastion of democracy.

We are a potentially massive constituency, comprised of entire cities - like Detroit and Flint - forced into bankruptcy and "emergency corporate management," whole communities threatened by fracking and extreme environmental degradation. And finally, the younger generations; millenials who know that climate change is fundamentally jeopardizing their future.

Together, we cannot fail to effect change. We must be ready to put aside parochial and ideological differences, stand together, and link arms to pass on a working democracy and a livable planet.

Growing a Mass Movement

History provides us with time-tested strategies for success. Our people's movement must be as rooted in democratic values as Gandhi’s India was in its struggle against the British Empire; as morally grounded as the Civil Rights and the anti-Vietnam War movements; as indefatigable as women's suffrage activists. Imagine what these brilliant democracy warriors could have done with the power of the internet and social media to instantly reach millions.

Coalition-building is the critical first step among established organizers, recognizing that our key issues will ultimately be won only by uniting to radically rebalance the political playing field.

The fix will require nothing less than a coordinated grassroots democratic revolution, emerging from rural towns and cities, building state-by-state and initially tackling with laser-like focus:

• The issue of money and corruption in politics and elections
• Preventing vote rigging, suppression and gerrymandering of pivotal elections in 2014 and 2016
• Economic justice reform
• Ending corporate personhood / passing campaign finance reform (CFR)
• Establishing public financing of elections in cities and states
• Requiring transparency of political contributions and contributors
• Closing the revolving door of politician-lobbyists
• Protecting voting rights and preventing suppression
• Restoring transparency of the vote count
• Taxing all Wall Street transactions up to 1%
• Ending corporate welfare tax loopholes
• Supporting cities being forced into bankruptcies
• Supporting families in bank foreclosure or auction
• Creating public financing of elections
• Organize boycotts and protests at the Wall Street banks

The exceptionally good news is that powerful democracy movement-building efforts are already gaining traction, spearheaded by organizations like the NAACP's Moral Mondays, Move to Amend, the New Hampshire Rebellion, Wolf Pac, Represent Us, and dozens of others.

Long-term strategies include ending “corporate personhood" by a constitutional amendment or convention, and closing Washington's corporate lobbyist revolving door through federal anti-corruption legislation. Immediate legislative victories are being won at the state level for transparency and limits of campaign contributions, and public financing of elections. Voting Rights organizations are defeating ALEC's new Jim Crow Voter ID laws in multiple state courts. Election Integrity activists are struggling to protect our ballots, but need the muscle of a real movement to secure full transparency of our voting systems, as Germany and Ireland have done by outlawing riggable electronic voting machines we still use in the US.

Meanwhile, online activist networks are exploding daily across the internet, while protests and marches are proliferating. Citizens of all ages and classes are risking arrest in nonviolent civil disobedience in frontline states like Wisconsin, North Carolina and Michigan. Activists across myriad "issue silos," are beginning to link arms, coalescing toward the inevitable movement to reclaim American democracy.

We are very near to reaching the tipping point.

In Detroit on July 24, a federal court will decide how the bankrupted city's assets - including pensions - will be carved up and privatized by banks, Koch-funded extremists and a corporate "emergency manager" appointed by right-wing governor Dick Snyder. Citizens will protest the hostile takeover. Lets join them!

We are natural allies with the burgeoning global climate change movement. An unprecedented climate mobilization is planned for the weekend of September 20-21 in New York City, where heads of state from around the world will gather. This is an opportunity for the democracy and climate movements to converge in mutual support.

To become a more unified democracy movement, we should debate tactics and solutions, but we must avoid toxic divisiveness, unnecessary competition and negative criticisms of each other's efforts. During the 1960s' anti-war movement, many organizations fought for dominance, imagining their organization was the "vanguard of the revolution." Mutual respect alone will deter infiltration and prevent dissolution of our efforts.

However, to reach our ultimate goal - to inspire tens of millions of Americans to act boldly and in concert to save democracy - our movement must catalyze around a set of demands that will also clearly lead to economic, social and environmental justice.

Rebuilding Main Street: Taxing Wall Street and Ending Corporate Welfare

The Democracy Movement can rapidly build broad public support for a Financial Transaction Tax (FTT) on all Wall Street trades of stocks, derivatives, bonds and other financial instruments, which could generate  trillions of dollars over the coming decade. A properly designed FTT (0.05% up to 1%  - depending on how risky the trade) - will not affect small individual investors, normal consumer activity, or pensions and savings. However it will impact hedge funds, casino-style speculative banking and high frequency trading - the very activity that crashed our economy in 2008 and is certain to do so again. The FTT should be designed to suppress the type of speculative gambling that led to the 2008 crash.

Ending corporate welfare by closing tax loopholes would bring trillions of tax dollars and capital back into the American economy. Of the top 100 publicly traded companies, 83 engage in pervasive tax evasion.

Why are these two essential economic reforms ideal for building a movement? Because they are already popular on both the left and the right, and they have powerful moral justification: Polls show that Americans do not believe justice was served after the financial crisis, and that Wall Street, the wealthy and corporations do not pay their fair share.

The massive derivative Ponzi scheme perpetrated by Wall Street bankrupted millions of families and homeowners. Yet in the aftermath of the bailout, Wall Street and its clients gained practically all the wealth created, while Americans lost their livelihoods, security, and trillions of dollars in home equity. As the nation drifts further into debt, the Dow is up 3,000 points from pre-crisis levels; financial markets continue producing trillions in profits for their "high-value clients" who anonymously squirrel away wealth - currently estimated to be a substantial portion of the $21 to $32 trillion hidden in Bermuda, Cayman Islands or other offshore shelters.

Most importantly, these financial reforms provide tangible hope for Main Street. Think of it: We could use the funds to rebuild our nation's decaying infrastructure, create millions of good jobs in construction and technology, including renewable and green industry, and environmental restoration projects. We could publicly finance higher education, keeping our workforce competitive, and preserve senior pensions and medical programs. Finally, we could eliminate the deadlock in Congress over how we should balance the budget and begin to reduce the national debt.

Alone, these reforms could stop our collective bleeding and reverse our feudal austerity-bound economy.

These proposals are not radical: An FTT tax is going into effect soon in 11 European Union countries. A US sales tax on Wall Street stocks and bonds existed between 1914 and 1966. Currently, a new FTT tax has been proposed by the National Nurses Union, the Robin Hood organization, and the Tax Wall Street Party.

Occupy Wall Street activists proposed a financial transaction tax, just before the police forcefully attacked their encampments in multiple cities. The demand was dropped soon after. Some suspect deliberate infiltration of Occupy squashed this brilliant organizing goal and directed the movement into a "no demand" zone.

Currently, Occupy-inspired groups nationwide are developing innovative ideas for democratic, social and economic change. Perhaps the Wall Street FTT will once again become a strategic rallying point for the movement that brought us the most illuminating, slogan of the 21st Century: We are the 99%.

Grassroots Organizing, Goals, Strategies and Actions

Movement building can grow quickly at the grassroots by organizing where local activists meet to build the relationships and coalitions that are the basis of a mass movement.

A strong movement builds around activists who have been involved in organizing efforts, creating local democracy assemblies. Such assemblies should embrace the positive leadership of those who are respectful and listen well, avoid male dominance and ensure diverse participation. It is absolutely necessary that we create a cohesive, optimistic common vision of democratic social change, and guard that it is not corrupted by anger or extremism. Vigilance should be maintained against disruption of meetings or campaigns by intelligence agencies or private security companies.

Community assemblies are best used to educate through readings, videos or guest speakers. They should define the negative effects that attacks on democratic institutions have had on their various constituencies. Citizens who lost their homes in the fraudulent loan modification foreclosures should be invited to share their experiences.

From these assemblies, spokespersons can be elected to attend city-wide, regional or state organizing conferences to develop legislation initiatives, coordinate protests and define overall state and regional goals.

Additional goals can be added by local organizers, based on local conditions and issues (please forgive us if your core issues are not mentioned).

Another critical area of focus is to stop the mass suppression of First Amendment rights. In all states where capitol buildings have been recently closed to speech, petition, assembly, singing and other peaceful conduct, we need to mount legal teams to eliminate the restriction of protest by "free speech zones."

Actions, Protests, Marches and Nonviolent Civil Disobedience

Like previous effective movements, ours must have its base in education and peaceful direct actions aimed at gaining mass support. Experienced activists should be welcomed to share the successful tactics and strategies employed by groups such as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference Civil Rights organization and the antinuclear Clamshell Alliance.

Absolute nonviolence is essential, knowing that the illegal COINTELPRO - style efforts begun in the 1960s are still underway, and that 99 percent of the time, violence is perpetrated by provocateurs sent to infiltrate and disrupt effective movements. We must follow the traditions of nonviolent resistance set forth by Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King and Cesar Chavez. Always, always disassociate from violence!

Each community and individual can decide what kind of activism they are comfortable embracing, and this can change over time, and in differing circumstances.

Local democracy organizing work can focus on public education, voter registration, citizen Election Day watchdog groups, ballot initiatives, legislative and regulatory reform. Each state has different electoral laws and regulations, run by a secretary of state or other officials; every county has election offices. Many officials may be sympathetic or helpful, so should not be approached as "the enemy." However, in some states, they are the enemy; deliberately obfuscating honest reform attempts or attempting to suppress voters for a partisan agenda.

When reform is resisted, demonstrations and protests may be warranted, including nonviolent civil disobedience (NVCD).

NVCD should not be taken lightly, especially in repressive states or cities. Activists need training, legal support and a fund for bail. They must isolate aggressive and violent infiltrators if they appear in the midst of a demonstration. Each assembly or network should have a nonviolence agreement that all members must sign. Discussions with local police departments before actions may keep violence by security forces to a minimum. Police departments can be approached by ministers, rabbis and priests in advance of demonstrations to set a civil tone.

All protest movements need a target that focuses public attention on a glaring injustice that is easily identifiable and channels anger toward reform. Highly effective targets today are Wall Street Banks. A primary action could be to boycott and protest at the banks that perpetrated massive fraud in mortgage modifications and illegal foreclosures. These include JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, CitiBank Group, and Wells Fargo.

JP Morgan Chase was recognized as the worst perpetrator of mortgage and foreclosure fraud following its $25 billion dollars government bailout; just Google "Chase loan modification scam" to find thousands of complaints and lawsuits. This abuse continues today. Millions of people have lost their homes or have friends and relatives who lost their homes. Chase offers more than 5,100 branches and 16,100 ATMs nationwide.  A national boycott of JP Morgan Chase, or a coordinated protest by millions of democracy movement activists at Chase bank offices in thousands of communities is recommended, at the same time demanding that Wall Street and its political allies in Congress and the White House pass the Financial Transaction Tax and corporate-welfare reform legislation.

A focused protest movement targeting Chase can - and almost certainly will - go viral nationally and internationally. Chase operates in more than 85 countries. When President Nixon derailed the United Farm Workers grape boycott by shipping grapes to Europe, Cesar Chavez convinced European unions to take up the boycott, ensuring the grapes could not be unloaded in Europe's docks by union members. Think about a Chase boycott by our pro-democracy, anti-austerity allies in Europe.

Si, Se Puede!

Yes, we can. And, we must.

We know that the coming years are critical to the well-being and survival of our communities, our society and our environment. In our hearts, and in our guts, we know that we must birth this democracy movement now. We owe nothing less to the coming generations. The elders of past movements must contribute and pass the baton of dedicated, nonviolent resistance. We must teach our children by example how to fight for freedom and justice. Only in this way will we fulfill the dream of opportunity for millions of Americans, and in the spirit of Martin Luther King, bend the moral arc of the universe back toward justice.

Will you join us?

Without you, we can't win. With you, we can't lose.