Why Republicans and Tories no longer see eye-to-eye

(I found this article to be most educational as to how American conservatives agenda of destroying government, rather than reshaping government, is again evident and different from not just democrats and progressive here but also from conservatives in the UK, our closest ally.)

By Michael Goldfarb,
Writer and broadcaster

Once upon a time, and not so long ago in political terms, the Anglo-American world was joined at the hip, and the surgical pin that held the two together was "conservatism".

Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, and the "isms" attached to their name were so close you could hardly understand why there had ever been all that commotion in 1776.

The recent mid-term election demonstrates that is no longer the case.

A lesson from British history illustrates my point: from the time the welfare state was created, Britain ran a three-level secondary education system. The top level was the grammar school - entry was gained by outstanding performance on a test given at the age of 11. State-funded grammar schools opened the door to elite education for many working-class and lower-middle-class kids. If you've seen Alan Bennett's The History Boys, you know the story.

Throughout the 1960s, Harold Wilson's Labour government brought changes to the education system, the old elite versus equal argument was deployed. Grammar schools were forced to close, or accept pupils regardless of their academic ability.

If you are a conservative by preference you are probably snorting as you read this. That's socialism for you, you are probably thinking, reduce everything to the lowest common denominator.

Undoing what's done

In 1970, the Conservative Party under Edward Heath won the election and took office. The newly appointed education secretary did not reverse the Labour Government's policy and allowed grammar school closures to continue. The name of the education secretary was Margaret Thatcher. Yes, the distaff patron saint of modern conservatism ended up overseeing more grammar school closures than her socialist predecessor even though she, and Mr. Heath, had both attended grammars.

The reason I tell you this story is that it shows how Margaret Thatcher - the conservative's Conservative - believed that in order for democracy to work, new governments cannot come into office and simply spend their time undoing what the previous government has done.

Yet in the wake of their victories in the mid-term election, the Republican Party has nailed its colors to repealing the health legislation passed earlier this year.
Ohio Republican John Boehner, who will be the next Speaker of the House of Representatives said after election night: "We have to do everything we can to try to repeal this bill."

Senate Republican Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky plans to file a friend-of-the-court brief in Florida supporting states who want to repeal the act.

There is also a contrast with how the Conservatives have behaved on their return to power this year, after 11 years out of office.

Getting the house in order

With their Liberal Democrat coalition partners, they are focused on getting Britain's financial house in order, not undoing the legislation passed during the Blair-Brown years. Republicans want to repeal health legislation, Conservatives know they would not have been returned to office without Mr. Cameron's eloquent commitment to the NHS.

Structural deficit reduction - double quick, inside four years - is the goal of Prime Minister David Cameron's government. American conservatives would say deficit reduction is our goal as well. But British Conservatives are putting up taxes, to get the deficit down, as well as making cuts to government spending across all departments except one: the National Health Service.

Republicans want to repeal health legislation, Conservatives know they would not have been returned to office without Mr. Cameron's eloquent commitment to the NHS.
This is only one of many examples of how "conservatism" no longer means the same thing among people who call themselves "conservative" on either side of the Atlantic.

Culture wars

Cameron and Co are cutting defense spending. Yes, cutting defense, by 8%. The coalition government has not challenged the view that this means Britain will no longer be able to march to war with America the next time the US wants to fight in the Middle East.

Welfare is being cut - dramatically - but it is not being eliminated. It is being reformed.

To the chagrin of some of its old guard, Britain's Conservative Party would not waste a moment campaigning against the idea of man-made climate change - indeed it campaigned last spring on how to grow the economy by funding solutions to the problem. Compare that to the Tea Party/Republican Party view on climate change.

To modern British Conservatives fighting culture wars seems a waste of political time. Gay lifestyles? That's a non-issue, there are a number of out gay men in the British cabinet. Science using stem cells derived from human fetuses? Prime Minister David Cameron's son suffered horribly in his brief life from a variety of nervous system disorders. Mr. Cameron would not stand in the way of any research that might help future sufferers of Ivan's myriad problems.

Perhaps the most profound difference today between British and American Conservatives is in the response to terrorism. British Conservatives are libertarian in striking the balance between security and personal liberty when it comes to living in a world where al-Qaeda operates.

They have stopped funding for national ID cards - an expensive program of the Labour government - and shut down many of Britain's CCTV cameras. Critically, they are considering repealing Britain's 28-day detention law for terror suspects. This law allows police to hold those suspected of plotting terrorism for 28 days without charging them. No other Western democracy gives the police this kind of power.

Republicans have been against shutting down Guantanamo and trying those detained there in civilian courts. I cannot see them renouncing a law allowing police to detain a suspect for a month without charge.

Unlike Margaret Thatcher, British Conservatives no longer echo Ronald Reagan's view that government is the problem not the solution.

But the important point is this: Mrs. Thatcher and Mr. Reagan shared a governing philosophy: ideology and pragmatism. Ideology was great for speech-making and letting people know what you thought, pragmatism was necessary for governing. As American and British Conservatives drift apart, like Gondwana and Pangaea, it seems that American Republicans have let go of their pragmatic inheritance.

Without pragmatic respect for what previous governments have done, can they really be considered "conservative" in the true meaning of the term?

(This article is copyrighted by the BBC and its author. It is re-printed here only as a courtesy and for educational purposes.)

Israeli Soldiers Admit to Deliberate Killing of Gaza Civilians

Published on Friday, March 20, 2009 by the Times Online (UK)

by James Hider

JERUSALEM - The Israeli army has been forced to open an investigation into the conduct of its troops in Gaza after damning testimony from its own front line soldiers revealed the killing of civilians and rules of engagement so lax that one combatant said that they amounted on occasion to "cold-blooded murder".

The revelations, compiled by the head of an Israel military academy who declared that he was "shocked" at the findings, come as international rights groups are calling for independent inquiries into the conduct of both sides in the three-week Israeli offensive against Palestinian Islamists.

The soldiers' testimonies include accounts of an unarmed old woman being shot at a distance of 100 yards, a woman and her two children being killed after Israeli soldiers ordered them from their house into the line of fire of a sniper and soldiers clearing houses by shooting anyone they encountered on sight.

"That's the beauty of Gaza. You see a man walking, he doesn't have to have a weapon, and you can shoot him," one soldier told Danny Zamir, the head of the Rabin pre-military academy, who asked him why a company commander ordered an elderly woman to be shot.

"I gathered the graduate students of the course who fought in Gaza, to hear their impressions from the fighting. I wasn't prepared for any of the stuff I heard there. I was shocked," Mr Zamir said. "I think that the writing was on the wall, but we just didn't want to see it, we didn't want to face it."

One non-commissioned officer told Mr Zamir, himself a deputy battalion commander in the reserves, that the army "fired a lot of rounds and killed a lot of people in order for us not to be injured or shot at.

"When we entered a house, we were supposed to bust down the door and start shooting inside and just go up storey by storey... I call that murder. Each storey, if we identify a person, we shoot them. I asked myself - how is this reasonable?"

The same unnamed NCO said that his commanding officer ordered soldiers on to a rooftop to shoot an old woman crossing a main street during the fighting, which a Palestinian rights groups said left 1,434 people dead, 960 of them civilians.

"I don't know whether she was suspicious, not suspicious, I don't know her story," the NCO said. "I do know that my officer sent people to the roof in order to take her out... It was cold-blooded murder."

Another NCO recounted a military blunder that led to a mother and her two children being shot dead by an Israeli sniper. "We had taken over the house... and the family was released and told to go right. A mother and two children got confused and went left... The sniper on the roof wasn't told that this was okay and that he shouldn't shoot... you can say he just did what he was told... he was told not to let anyone approach the left flank and he shot at them.

"I don't know whether he first shot at their feet or not, but he killed them," the soldier said.

The soldiers' accounts were submitted anonymously at a meeting at the academy around a month ago. The Israel army said that it had started an investigation, but that this was the first time it had heard such testimony, despite having debriefed troops itself.

Breaking The Silence, an organisation of former soldiers who gather witness accounts from troops in the Palestinian territories, said that its own investigation into Operation Cast Lead, as the war was known in Israel, had revealed a similar picture of the fighting.

"It's definitely in line with what we are hearing," said one of the researchers.

Another disturbing element reported by the soldiers was the role of military rabbis in distributing booklets that framed the fighting as a religious war. "All these articles had a clear message: we are the Jewish people, we have come to the land by miraculous means, and now we have to fight to remove the Gentiles who are getting in our way and preventing us from occupying the Holy Land... a great many soldiers had a feeling throughout this operation of a religious war," said one soldier.

There were also accounts of soldiers being ordered to throw all the furniture out of Palestinians' homes as they were taken over.

"We simply threw everything out the windows to make room and order. The entire contents of the house flew out the windows: refrigerator, plates, furniture. The order was to remove the entire contents of the house."

Copyright 2009 Times Newspapers Ltd.

Rupert Murdoch Calls the President of the United States the “N” Word

A Call to Action #1 (February 18, 2009)

On February 16, 2009, a once-famous advertising Chimp went nuts. Attacked the fifty-something year-old friend of his seventy-something year-old owner immediately upon her entering the house the chimp shared with the elder woman. The chimp bit and gnawed and tore at the flesh woman. Her shoulders and face bled profusely. She remains in critical condition. When police arrived some dozen plus minutes later, and it seems they did not arrive as quickly as one would hope, they shot the 200-lb. chimp dead.

In 1977, Rupert Murdoch purchased The New York Post. The newspaper is best known for its tabloid-style headlines; however, like all Murdoch’s media purchases, The Post has become conservative. Not just conservative, actually, but virulently right wing. Murdoch also owns FoxNews where a viewer can hear outright lying by its talking head hosts each and every night. They make up “facts.” They misrepresent; they present partial truths; they blame Democrats for the very sins of their beloved Republican Cabal. FoxNews is best termed FalseNews.

On February 17, 2009, President Barack Obama signed the $787 billion American Reinvestment Act. He spoke about this piece of legislation being the beginning of the end and he acknowledged that there is more work to be done. Twenty-nine minutes later the first shovel-ready project was underway in Missouri where a bridge began undergoing repairs.

One strategy southern racists used to keep “uppity” blacks in line was intimidation. The KKK, the local police force or just a group of local good ol’ boys would remind the uppity one to mind their place. So, today when The New York Post published a cartoon that tied together a chimp[1] that got out of line and was shot dead with the symbols of keeping people in line – read police – it was Rupert Murdoch, the representative of corporate royalism and elitism warning The Most Powerful Man in the Free World that he ain’t nothing compared to the corporate elite and that he had better watch himself OR ELSE.

Here’s the cartoon:

All of us, Black, white, Latino, Asian, progressive, liberal, true conservative, gay, straight, abled or differently-abled, man, woman and even every child must stand up now against this hateful, sly innuendo of a threat.
We must flood the Secret Service with requests to investigate. We must ask everyone in New York and its environs to write to The Post in protest, to stop buying that rag and to complain to each and every advertiser that we will not support them if they do not support our President, THE President of the United States.
We must contact every republican in Congress and tell them that living out a politics of “no” will not do.
We must tell every friend and family member of the hatred that flows forth from these so called Republicans.
We must use our freedom of speech to defeat their threat to our democracy.
We must use our power by the people, for the people and of the people to crush fear and hatred and idiocy of the powerful who think threats will make us tremble.
As FDR says: We have nothing to fear but fear itself.
As Pat Robertson said, yes, Pat Robertson: Anybody who would pull against our president is not exactly thinking rationally.

What three things will you do in the next 24 hours to denounce this racist, hateful, counter-productive, un-American assault on our President? __________________________________________________

[1] Chimps, apes, monkeys and other primates have, historically, been derogatory terms used to describe African-Americans.

Would a Lame Duck Session of Congress Really be Lame?

(Recently I sent this email to some colleagues. We participate in a listserv of leaders in an industry that has been under attack by the current administration and the question came up this week about whether or not there will a lame duck session of Congress post-election and pre-swearing in of the next president. Here was my response to two of the people on the board.)

Dear G and S,

A lame duck session may or may not happen. On Friday, Pelosi says another financial rescue package aimed at the middle class is unlikely because the administration is not interested, so there is no point. On Saturday, Bush announced there will be a summit with world economic leaders to discuss the financial crisis after November 4, though his press secretary spent Friday saying the date is not set and Bush himself is saying that the crisis will be up to the next president to address – there is a list of crises to deal address.

So, yeah, a lame duck session would be lame…or so it seems. Under what circumstances might one not be lame?

Let’s assume some things, just for the sake of cognitive fun:
1. The democrats add 9-12 representatives to their majority in the House and 6 senators.

2. Okay, now assume, Obama wins and has coattails and the Democrats add 20, 25 or even 30 to the House, which would be the very best they could do, and assume Obama’s coattails bring 9 senators and perhaps as many as 11 if Republicans completely collapse. It is important to note that never before has such an event happened in American politics where two giant gains for the same party in back-to-back elections, but perhaps that is the reason it will happen. Nothing remains 100% or 0% forever.

3. Let’s put in the mix that Bush, who appears more and more disengaged and “weak” and, well, lame. He could be sold on the idea that a lame duck session is his last best hope of recouping some of his reputation and of un-tarnishing a legacy to which historians will certainly be taking an extra hard look.

4. Further, given the Blue Tide that will take over in January, current Republicans will want the lame duck session as well because it is their last best hope for economic influence for at least 2 years and perhaps longer. They would get some thing(s) for their corporate constituents before their cold January departures, especially if the Democrats have 60 votes in the senate.

5. If Obama, assuming he is elected, is true to his word, then he too would want a session. Why?
a. He would be in the thick of the efforts, would be seen as already working hard though admittedly his role is limited by his title of senator unless Bush defines a broader role for him in the ‘tween period.
b. His “reconstruction” would have a head start and he will need all the time he can get as there is plenty to work on.
c. His “reaching across the aisle” beginning the Monday after Thanksgiving (or whenever) boosts American’s confidence – the world’s confidence that a bold, globally united action is underway. This is good for financial markets.
d. He would be seen as – and confirmed as – being the change he has pledged.

Some History
In three brief weeks in small town New Hampshire in July 1944, the Western industrialized world met, discussed, planned and established three entities that would shape the economic development of the global economy for 60 years. During those 21 days the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the International Trade Organization were outlined as treaties. Within a year, two of them had been created. Only the trade treaty failed to be established because of resistance within the US. The World Trade Organization replaced it in 1995. The conference in 1944 is referred to as the Bretton Woods Conference. It cleared the way for world-wide reconstruction in a post-war world. Three weeks that changed everything.

Bretton Woods may have had more to do with how modern life is lived out that how events like The Great Depression and World War II did. Who knows, though it is an interesting question to ponder.

In 1971, Nixon unilaterally removed the USA from the gold standard, the agreed upon monetary standard established at Bretton Woods. From that point forward the US dollar has been considered the reserve currency. Though now the drop in the dollar’s value has in large measure caused a credit crisis. Your credit is in large measure determined by a ratio of what you are worth compared to what you owe. The more you owe, the less you are worth; the less you are worth, the less power you have in the marketplace. The less the dollar is worth, the less power the US has in the world.

Gordon Brown, prime minister of the UK and its former treasury secretary (if you will), has called for another Bretton Woods conference. Thousands of economists have called for integrated laws, policies and practices across industries to deal with the complete webification of global finance. We need to put the best leaders and the leaders we happen to have at this moment in our history and our best thinkers – not the yes-men and cronies and lackeys of the most powerful and richest players – we need to put the best leaders and thinkers together with the explicit purpose of a global redesign of our laws, their implementation, and interpretation, and pair it with the best of Madison Avenue’s marketers to teach in easy and accurate terms what the plan is, why it is what it is, how it will impact them in concrete terms, what naysayers will say and what their secret motivations will be, and how to practically assist leaders in getting it passed, implemented and lived out.

Capitalism has never been about getting rich. Living in a republic is not about me, myself and I above all other at all times. Value is not a word most commonly preceded by a dollar sign.
Americans have always rallied around an honest president who called on them to serve, to do, to commit, to do for common good. We are one nation, indivisible.

The people, by the people, for the people, with the people, about the people, surrounding the people, embracing the people, raising up the people, making stronger the people is what the unique, democratic republic in which we live the most precious – where people in partnership and oversight with government in partnership and oversight with free enterprise in partnership and the dreams of people make an infinite number of impossibilities possible.

So, for me, there is nothing lame about a lame duck session. It could save Bush, get the new president off on the right, allow out-going congressional Republicans a last (saving grace) contribution, provide congressional Democrats with a chance to start again on a better foot, and – above all else – it may just restart the world economy and help Americans believe again in the promise of better tomorrows.

Thanks!
D.