A lod of Bush baloney enacted since 9/11
Looting the treasury
Also in this issue
- congressional grab bag
- resurrecting cointelpro
- mr. schwab’s ducky deal
- please, bill, go away
- assembly-line surgery
Hightower Lowdown
"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act." --George Orwell
In This Issue
A lod of Bush baloney enacted since 9/11
December's Lowdown
The many REASONS TO BE CHEERFUL after Election Day 2008
After casting her ballot for Barack Obama, Amanda Jones said simply, "I feel good about voting for him." Ms. Jones, of Cedar Creek, Texas (a town just south of Austin), is African-American, and what gives her vote some historic punch is that she's 109 years old. Her father was a slave. Her mother was born right after Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. She's been through it all--Jim Crow segregation, women's suffrage, the Great Depression, the poll tax, FDR, the civil-rights movement, desegregation, 13 years of George W (five as guv, eight as prez), and now: Barack Obama. This last change fills her with joy, she says.
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resurrecting cointelpro
Just when you think that John Ashcroft will finally bottom out in terms of the depths he’s willing to go to subvert the Bill of Rights, he manages to plunge even lower.
The latest news is that our autocratic attorney general is out to revive Cointelpro, the notorious FBI domestic-surveillance program that J. Edgar Hoover established during his reign of error. Cointelpro spooks secretly spied on, infiltrated, and tried to undermine such peaceful dissidents as the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Students for a Democratic Society, and the anti-war movement.
Cointelpro agents were directed to “disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize” groups that the Powers That Be simply didn’t like. Now, Ashcroft wants to bring this dark force into your church or political-discussion group.
Oh, no, cries Ashcroft, I’m only after bad people, and I merely need to “modify” our civil-liberty protections in order to get these terrible terrorists. But Cointelpro never was restricted to terrorists or violent groups. And American history — from the Alien and Sedition Acts to the vicious McCarthy period — shows how easy it is for ambitious authorities to define even the most benign group or person as an “enemy of the state.