The JvL Bi

US CEOs make 23 times as much as CEOs in mainland China, 10 times as much as CEOs in India and 9 times as much as CEOs in Taiwan, according to the latest Towers Perrin worldwide survey.

European and Japanese CEOs run many of the world's leading companies for a lot less pay than Americans. US CEOs make five times as much as CEOs in Japan, four times as much as CEOs in Spain, three times as much as CEOs in the United Kingdom, France, Italy and the Netherlands, and twice as much as CEOs in Germany and Switzerland.

US CEOs have put American factory workers, computer programmers and engineers in a race to the bottom with workers around the world while keeping themselves in a rigged race to the top.

"Supersize me" remains our CEO pay mantra. CEOs on Business Week's Executive Pay Scoreboard of 365 major US companies hauled in an average $8.1 million in 2003 – up 9 percent from 2002 – including salary bonus and long-term compensation such as restricted stock and exercised stock options;. That's more than $22,000 every day of the year.

The average CEO made $6.7 million more in 2003 than in 1980 when they made $1.4 million, adjusted for inflation. The average full-time production and non-supervisory worker made $31,928 in 2003 and $31,769 in 1980, adjusted for inflation -- a gain of $159. CEOs often spend more than that on dinner.

CEO pay skyrocketed 480 percent during 1980-2003, adjusted for inflation, while domestic corporate profits rose 145 percent, worker productivity rose 61 percent and worker pay stalled. If CEO and worker pay had increased at the pace of worker productivity, CEOs would have made $2.3 million in 2003 and workers $51,148.

CEOs made 44 times as much as workers in 1980, and 254 times as much in 2003. British CEOs make just 28 times as much as workers. You'd thing the Brits were the ones who rebelled against royalty, not us.

American CEOs are paid like kings when they are hired, fired, retire and expire. Cendant CEO Henry Silverman provides an obscene example. On top of his $54.4 million in 2003 pay, he has more than $287 million in stock options not yet cashed in. In retirement, he'll get a lavish pension and perks such as the use of company cars and aircraft. When he dies, his heirs will collect his company-provided $100 million life insurance policy.

Why are workers and shareholders earning less so descendants of CEOs can live like aristocrats for generations to come?

Colgate-Palmolive's Reuben Mark was the highest paid CEO in 2003 with compensation totaling $141.1 million. He was also on Business Week's list of CEOs who gave shareholders the least for their pay; shareholder return for 2001-2003 was a negative 19 percent.

The poster child for mad cash disease is Disney CEO Michael Eisner. His compensation averaged $121.2 million a year over the last six years, reports Forbes, while Disney shareholders had an annualized total return (including dividends) of negative 5 percent. Eisner's average yearly pay was 3,796 times as much as the average worker's and 300 times as much as the US president's.

Overpaying CEOs is bad business. Compensation experts Joseph Blasi and Douglas Kruse analyzed executive pay at more than 1,500 top US companies from 1992 to 2002. Corporations with significantly higher than average shares of employee stock options going to the CEO and the next four top executives had lower average total shareholder returns for the decade.

"Too many boards of directors think that only the top executives make a difference in the company's value, and the rest of the employees are just static factors of production like machinery," Blasi and Kruse observe in a new report. "But a growing body of evidence shows that regular employees can really make a difference." Research shows that "broad-based stock option plans, employee ownership plans, and profit sharing plans are associated with future improvements in total shareholder return."

You'll know compensation polices have changed for the better if CEO pay goes down while worker pay goes up.

2. VANISHING VOTES

GREGORY PALAST

On October 29^th, 2002, George W. Bush signed the help America Vote Act (HAVA). Hidden behind its apple-pie-and-motherhood name lies a nasty civil rights time bomb.

First, the purges. In the months leading up to the November 2000 presidential election, Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, in coordination with Governor Jeb Bush, ordered local election supervisors to purge 57,700 votes from the registries, supposedly ex-cons not allowed to vote in Florida. At least 90.2 percent of those on this "scrub" list, targeted to lose their civil rights, are innocent. Notably, more than half--about 54%--are black or Hispanic. You can argue all night about the number ultimately purged, but there's no argument that this electoral racial pogrom ordered by Jeb Bush's operatives gave the White House to his older brother. HAVA not only blesses such purges, it requires all fifty states to implement a similar search-and-destroy mission against vulnerable voters. Specifically, every state must, by the 2004 election, imitate Florida's system of computerizing voter files. The law then empowers fifty Secretaries of state—fifty Katherine Harrises—to purge these lists of "suspect" voters.

The purge is back, big time. Following the disclosure in December 2000 of the black voter purge in Britain's Observer newspaper, NAACP lawyers sued the state. The Civil rights group won a written promise from Governor Jeb and from Harris's successor to return wrongly scrubbed citizens to the vote rolls. According to records given to the courts by ChoicePoint, the company that generated the computerized lists, the number of Floridians who were questionably tagged totals 912,000. Willie Steen is one of them. Recently, I caught up with Steen outside his office at a Tampa Hospital. Steen's case was easy. You can't work in a hospital if you have a criminal record. (My copy of Harris's hit list includes an ex-con named O'Steen, close enough to cost Willie Steen his vote.) The NAACP held up Steen's case to the court as a prime example of the voter purge evil.

The state admitted Steen's innocence. But a year after the NAACP won his case, Steen still couldn't register. Why was he still under suspicion? What do we know about this "potential felon," as Jeb called him? Steen, unlike our President, honorably served four years in the US military. There is, admittedly, a suspect mark on his record: Steen remains an African-American.

If you're black, voting in America is a game of chance. First, there's the chance your registration card will simply be thrown out. Millions of minority citizens registered to vote using what are called motor-voter forms. And Republicans know it. You would not be surprised to learn that the Commission on Civil Rights found widespread failures to add these voters to the registers. My sources report piles of dust-covered applications stacked up in election offices.

Second, once registered, there's the chance you'll be named a felon. In Florida, besides those fake felons on Harris's scrub sheets, some 600,000 residents are legally barred from voting because they have a criminal record in the state. That's one state. In the entire nation 1.4 million black men with sentences served can't vote, 13 percent of the nation's black male population.

At step three, the real gambling begins. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 guaranteed African-Americans the right to vote—but it did not guarantee the right to have their ballots counted. And in one in seven cases, they aren't.

Take Gadsden County. Of Florida's sixty-seven counties, Gadsden has the highest proportion of black residents: 58 percent. It also has the highest "spoilage" rate, that is, ballots tossed out on technicalities: one in eight votes cast but not counted. Next door to Gadsden is white-majority Leon County, where virtually every vote is counted (a spoilage rate of one in 500).

How do votes spoil? Apparently, any old odd mark on a ballot will do it. In Gadsden, some voters wrote in Al Gore instead of checking his name. Their votes did not count.

Harvard law professor Christopher Edley Jr., a member of the Commission on Civil Rights, didn't like the smell of all those spoiled ballots. He dug into the pile of tossed ballots and, deep in the commission's official findings, reported this: 14.4 percent of black votes—one in seven—were "invalidated," i.e., never counted. By contrast, only 1.6 percent of non-black voters' ballots were spoiled.

Florida's electorate is 11 percent African-American. Florida refused to count 179,855 spoiled ballots. A little junior high school algebra applied to commission numbers indicates that 54 percent, or 97,000, of the votes "spoiled" were cast by black folk, of whom more than 90 percent chose Gore. The non-black vote divided about evenly between Gore and Bush. Therefore, had Harris allowed the counting of these ballots, Al Gore would have racked up a plurality of about 87,000 votes in Florida—162 times Bush's official margin of victory.

That's Florida. Now let's talk about America. In the 2000 election, 1.9 million votes cast were never counted. Spoiled for technical reasons, like writing in Gore's name, machine malfunctions and so on. The reasons for ballot rejection vary, But there's a suspicious shading to the ballots tossed into the dumpster. Edley's team of Harvard experts discovered that just as in Florida, the number of ballots spoiled was—county by county, precinct by precinct—in direct proportion to the local black voting population.

Florida's racial profile mirrors the nation's—both in the percentage of voters who are black and the racial profile of the voters whose ballots don't count. "In 2000, a black voter in Florida was ten times as likely to have their vote spoiled—not counted—as a white voter," explains political scientist Philip Klinkner, co-author of Edley's Harvard report. "National figures indicate that Florida is, surprisingly, typical. Given the proportion of nonwhite to white voters in America, then, it appears that about half of all ballots spoiled in the USA, as many as 1 million votes, were cast by nonwhite voters."

So there you have it. In the last presidential election, approximately 1 million black and other minorities voted, and their ballots were thrown away. And they will be tossed again in November 2004, efficiently, by computer—because HAVA and other bogus reform measures, stressing reform through complex computerization, do not address, and in fact worsen, the racial bias of the uncounted vote.

One million votes will disappear in a puff of very black smoke. And when the smoke clears, the Bush clan will be warming their political careers in the light of the ballot bonfire. HAVA nice day.

3. TWIN PARTIES

MEMBERS OF A.N.S.W.E.R.

The twin parties of the war machine are gathering this summer in Boston and New York City to anoint their candidates for the upcoming presidential election. It is urgent that the progressive movement be in the streets in Boston and New York City.

This is a critical time for all progressives and targeted communities to take a clear stand against the political framework that is championed by the Republican and Democratic parties alike. The Bush administration has engaged in a lawless war of aggression and occupation against the people of Iraq. It is attempting to abrogate civil rights and liberties of all while simultaneously falsely positioning Arab-Americans and Muslims as "enemies within." It has been engaged in multiple projects to destabilize nations and rob people of their sovereignty and freedom. From imprisoning the Palestinian people within an apartheid Wall, to occupying Haiti through death-squad proxies and the deployment of US troops, to turning Afghanistan and Central Asia into a US sphere of influence, the US government is using its military power to carry out the corporate looting of the world's natural and human resources.

The war on Iraq did not just begin a year ago, nor is it Bush's alone. The Democratic Party leadership and the solid majority of Democrats in Congress voted in October 2002 to fully support the threatened aggression against Iraq even though their offices were being overwhelmed with calls demanding that they vote no to the war. In July 2003, the Senate voted unanimously in support of continuing the occupation of Iraq – there was not one opposition vote.

Bush insists that US troops continue to occupy Iraq for the foreseeable future. John Kerry, who voted to authorize the war, is not supporting the removal of US troops. In fact, he is calling for adding 40,000 troops to the Army on a temporary basis to ease the personnel shortage created by the Iraq deployment. The Bush administration and Kerry joined together in condemning the new Spanish government when it announced the withdrawal of Spanish troops from Iraq. The Bush administration pursued its strategy of "regime change" to its logical – and illegal – conclusion with the March 20, 2003, invasion. But "regime change" in Iraq became the official policy of the US government in October 1998 during the Clinton administration. It was in December 1998 that the Clinton administration insisted that weapons inspectors be removed from Iraq and the near-daily bombing of the country began. Both the Democratic and Republican administrations maintained genocidal sanctions on Iraq that killed nearly 1.5 million people according to the United Nation's own statistics.

As the Bush administration gave the green light to Ariel Sharon to wage terror against the Palestinian people, John Kerry issued a paper in February titled, "The Cause of Israel is the Cause of America." Both oppose the legitimate right of Palestinian people to self-determination and return. The US government – with the support of both parties – funds the war against the Palestinian people at the cost of $15 million a day.

The Bush-Ashcroft regime has carried out a full assault against civil rights and civil liberties, exemplified with the passage on October 26, 2001, of the USA Patriot Act. Kerry and the Democratic Party supported the passage of the Patriot Act. In the House, the vote was 357 to 66. Only one US Senator (Russell Feingold) voted in opposition, and he had previously cast the deciding committee vote that ultimately allowed John Ashcroft to become Attorney General.

George W. Bush and John Kerry represent extreme wealth and privilege. Bush and his family have accrued tens of millions in personal wealth from oil and other corporate holdings. John Kerry is the richest person in the US Senate, whose wealth is estimated by Forbes to be at least $525 million. Bush has been slashing vitally needed social programs. Kerry, in spite of his fabulous wealth, decided that welfare recipients were receiving excess benefits when he voted in 1996 for the Welfare Reform Act that stripped millions of poor people, 70 percent of whom were children, of their right to food and housing. The Bush administration's tax cuts for the rich, enacted with support from the Democrats, will provide over $181,000 a year to each millionaire if made permanent. At the same time, the administration has proposed cutting funds for housing which will deprive more than 100,000 families with children from receiving Section 8 vouchers that ensure affordable housing.

George Bush is proposing a constitutional amendment to ban marriage rights for all. Instead of a constitutional amendment, John Kerry proposes that each state enact a similar ban.

Bush's reactionary "No Child Left Behind Act" passed with the support of the Democratic Party, including John Kerry. The bill punishes working class and poor communities by stripping funds from schools that fail to meet testing performance standards. This bill is inherently racist as it especially victimizes already underfunded schools in predominantly African-American and Latino communities. The bill is also known as "No Child Left Unrecruited," as it requires schools to turn over the name, address and phone number of every junior and senior to local military recruiters or face cuts in federal funding.

As the federal government rapidly shifts funds to the already bloated Pentagon budget, a move initiated by Bush and supported by Kerry, funds available for states and cities and especially needed social programs are being slashed. Devastating cuts in housing, education, job training, veterans benefits, and healthcare are imposing a new level of human suffering especially in working class and poor communities. Hardest hit are African-American and Latino communities. Both parties are opposed to providing benefits and legal safeguards to undocumented workers and their families. Both parties have engaged in scapegoating and targeting of immigrant communities and their legal and social rights.

In the last three years, nearly three million jobs have been lost in the United States, as corporations engage in layoffs, outsourcing, and the moving of factories outside the country to exploit lower wage workers. While the Democrats assail Bush, this phenomena is the consequence of capitalist globalization that puts the maximizing of corporate profits first and the rights of workers last whether they are in the US or other countries. The Democratic Party, like the Republican Party, are instruments of this economic and social order.

The emergence of mass global movement in the last three years has shown the depth of outrage against the Bush Administration's global agenda, its criminal actions and is propensity to limitless violence in the pursuit of world domination, empire and Pax American. The whole world is threatened by the Bush regime. Not only have there been wars and occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan and the US coup and occupation of Haiti, the first free Black republic in the western hemisphere, but all the people of the would realize that they too are in the cross-hairs. The establishment of new military bases in the former Soviet Republics in the Caspian region and the re-introduction of US military forces in the Philippines indicates the new dangers posed by the Bush government. The administration is committed to the overthrow of the government of Cuba and the Chavez government in Venezuela. They are committed to the overthrow of the government of Zimbabwe and the semi-colonial reconquest of Africa with its vast untapped oil reserves and other natural resources. It is recklessly and rapidly building its so-called Missile Defense system which puts the US on a collision course with the People's Republic of China and North Korea. The people of the Middle East recognize that the Iraq war was designed to set the stage for further threats, aggression and intervention in Syria, Lebanon, Iran and other countries in the region.

The administration has arrogantly announced through its preemptive war doctrine that it not only has the right to invade other countries but to carry out assassinations all over the world against individuals who are designated the "enemy" and marked for death by the Bush government. It has asserted the right to lock up anyone indefinitely, without charge of wrongdoing, trial, or access to counsel, at its concentration camp in Guantanamo, Cuba, and to do the same to US citizens, in military prisons in the US.

The Bush administration has also declared war against the environment, withdrawing from the Kyoto Protocol, working to turn the Artic wilds into drilling fields and the parklands of the US into clear-cut forests. They lifted restrictions on the amount of mercury, arsenic and other poisons in the air and water children breathe and drink. The administration is eviscerating social programs at home by causing an unprecedented transfer of wealth from poor and working people to the rich. The right wing ideologues in the White House seek to overturn all the civil, social and democratic rights achieved by the people in recent decades. Affirmative action and voting rights are under assault. A top priority has been the elimination of women's reproductive rights by criminalizing and eliminating a woman's access to needed healthcare, as well as the destruction of girls' equal education rights. The Bush administration poses a genuine peril to the people of the world. The people of the United States and the people of the world recognize that if reelected the Bush administration is likely to intensify its global assault against anything that stands in the way of its plans for US hegemony and world domination along with its ultra right wing domestic program.

We also know what has not stopped the Bush administration is the Democratic Party, because that Party is an expression of the same corporate establishment and Military-Industrial-University Complex in whose interest the Bush administration functions. Although the Democratic Party leadership opposes some of the most right-wing elements of the Bush agenda, its record proves time and time again that it willingly capitulates to the Bush program and turns its back on the communities it claims to represent.

Both parties and both conventions represent the concentration of power in the hands of corporate and banking elites, the extension of militarism and war, and the assault carried out by the corporate establishment against workers' rights, civil rights and civil liberties. It was the massive and independent mobilization of the people that won union rights before the 1930s, civil rights in the 1960s, and the advance in women's and lesbian/gay/bi/trans rights. It was the people of the US, combined with the resistance in Vietnam and around the world, which brought that criminal war in southeast Asia to an end.

When Bush and the Republicans gather in New York City, hundreds of thousands of people will protest their crimes at home and abroad. The Democratic Party is expecting that it can cynically rely on our outrage over the Bush Administration's crimes such that the people will rubber stamp its agenda --- an agenda that largely supports the same violent and repressive policies and programs of corporate exploitation as Bush. They expect our anger at Bush will manifest into automatic support for the coronation of John Kerry. They expect that they need not do anything to address real human needs and demands for global justice; that being a false "alternative" is sufficient to take the reigns of government power and become the current beneficiaries and advocates of the corporate agenda in the US. We cannot afford to be silent. We cannot stand by. We must take action.

The plans to demonstrate mass opposition to both conventions on the eve of the presidential election should in no way be understood to mean that the organizers are unmindful of the potential significance of this or any election. Clearly, the recent election in Spain which repudiated the pro-Bush Aznar government, just days after the horrific Madrid bombings, could be seen as nothing other than a powerful referendum on that government's complicity with the Iraq war.

If Bush were to be defeated in November the world would have a similar joyous reaction as that which accompanied the defeat of Aznar. But if Bush is defeated and Kerry takes the presidency it is crystal clear that the occupation of Iraq and all other associated projects of the Pentagon, CIA, and corporate establishment will continue unabated.

Many thought that the collapse of the Soviet bloc and the end of the cold war would result in a lessening of world tension and create a "peace dividend" whereby funds could be shifted from war production to programs serving human needs. Rather, it opened up a new opportunity for the US as the unipolar power in the world to advance its long sought objectives of subjecting every region and every country to the dictates of US political and corporate power and control. The US is endeavoring to become the unchallenged world empire, acting with the tools of massive military power and deceit to carry out conquest and brutal exploitation. The war in Iraq was not merely the project of one man, or one group. This war is the product of decades of world capitalism, the natural outcome of a structure that demands ever greater profits for the tiny few be achieved by the subjugation of human and natural resources and by total domination over world markets. The entire pre-emptive war and global conquest doctrine, as detailed in the September 2002 National Security Strategy speaks to this goal.

The real hope for change, not cosmetic alterations but the urgently needed profound social change in the United States, will come about from an enlarged and politically conscious mass movement of the people. This movement is in an embryonic state, its potential dynamic evolution is the real source of optimism in global politics but its potential will rapidly evaporate if it settles for the meager role of tail to the kite of the Democratic Party establishment. As the ruling political and economic establishment has moved dramatically to the right since the end of the Vietnam war, with the objective of eviscerating all the social achievements of the 1960s and 70s, the Democratic Party has dutifully followed suit. The progressive movement must go in another direction – it must develop its own independent program, its own independent strategy and it must compete against both Republican and Democratic leaderships for the hearts and minds of the people.

4. MEDIA SOLDIERS

AMY GOODMAN

Army Psyops (Psychological: operatives, operations, warfare) is forbidden by law from manipulating US media. So what happens when Psyops troops are the media? That's exactly what occurred at CNN and National Public Radio.

In February 2000 the Dutch newspaper Trouw (Truth) and France's Intelligence Newsletter revealed that officers from the US Army's Fourth Psychological Operations (Psyops) Group at Fort Bragg were working in the news division of the Atlanta headquarters of CNN. Five Psyops sergeants began working at CNN in the final days of the Kosovo War in 1999: two in radio, two in television, and one in their satellite department. Alexander Cockburn broke the story in the United Stats in Counter Punch.

In April 2000, TV Guide broke the news that Psyops personnel had also worked at NPR in 1998 and 1999 on flagship programs including Morning Edition, All Things Considered, and Talk of the Nation. Major Jonathan Withington of the US Army Special Operations Command confirmed to Current magazine that the interns had conducted "background research." Several NPR officials stated that the interns had been given only menial tasks such as copying and filing.

CNN news chief Eason Jordan told Democracy Now! that "no government or military propaganda expert has ever worked on news at CNN." But Staff Sergeant Jose A. Velasquez insisted to TV Guide, "I made calls and researched stories on the internet." And Trouw reporter Abe de Vries told Cockburn, "The US Army US Special Operations Command, and CNN personnel confirmed to me that military personnel have been involved in news production at CNN's news desks. I found it simply astonishing."

As Cockburn wrote in the Los Angeles Times, "Maybe CNN was the target of a psyop penetration and is still too naïve to figure out what was going on."

The media watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting investigated the reasons that psyops soldiers might be interested in gaining access to a major network. FAIR wrote: "Rear Admiral Thomas Steffens, a psychological warfare expert in the Special Operations Command, recently told a psyops conference that the military needed to find ways to 'gain control' over commercial news satellites to help bring down an 'informational cone of silence' over regions where special operations were taking place."

Quoting an unofficial strategy paper published by the US Naval War College, FAIR reported that military commanders were seeking ways to "leverage the vast resources of the fourth estate" for the purposes of "communicating the [mission's] objective,… playing a major role in deception of the enemy, and enhancing intelligence collection."

Army psyops commander Christopher St. John, whose soldiers interned at CNN, said the program was an example of the type of "greater cooperation between the armed forces and media giants which he hoped to see more of."

Major Thomas Collins of the US Army Information Service proudly told de Vries that the interns "worked as regular employees of CNN. Conceivably, they would have worked on stories during the Kosovo war. They helped in the production of the news."

While CNN and NPR executives claimed they were unaware of the interns, blaming the placement on their respective human resources departments, Sergeant Velasquez says everyone at the CNN Southeast Bureau, including its chief, knew where he was from.

Many people within CNN and NPR knew they were working alongside psyops soldiers. But the revolving door between the media and the military is spinning so fast that media organizations now have trouble distinguishing between their paid generals and the spies.

5. NEUROLOGICAL IMPRINTING AND MARTIN LUTHER KING

REPORTED

WILLIAM F. PEPPER

James Earl Ray died on April 23, 1998. His trial began on November 16^th, 1999.

"Mrs. Coretta Scot King led off the group of witnesses whose testimony provided evidence about the historical background and events leading up to the assassination. They offered various perspectives and facts and described the official hostility to Dr. King's vigorous opposition to the war in Vietnam and his commitment to lead a massive contingent of poor and alienated people to Washington, where they would take up a tent city residence in the Capitol and lobby the Congress for long overdue social legislation. Dr. King's support of the sanitation workers' strike was described by Reverend James Lawson, as was the eruption of violence in the march of March 28 which, Dr. Coby Smith of the Invaders testified, appeared to be the work of out-of-state provocateurs.

"At this point I remind the reader of expert witness Bill Schapp's trial testimony on the effects of long-term neurological imprinting.

"Half a day was occupied with the testimony of Attorney William Schapp, who we qualified as an expert on government use of the media for disinformation and propaganda purposes. After providing the jury with a survey of these practices by governments throughout history in a detailed question and answer exchange, Schapp introduced the court to these practice of the United States government in other cases, or issues, where intelligence and/or national security interest were believed to be involved. A number of examples were cited. One, for example, involves a CIA propaganda story that was spread all over the world and widely believed for some four years, that Cuban troops fighting in Angola had:

1) raped Angolan women

2) were tried and convicted of these crimes

3) were executed by the victims.

"In fact none of the above was true. The story was revealed by the agent who promulgated it to be false and to have been totally concocted at the CIA station in Zaire and disseminated through the extensive world-wide agency network. Schapp revealed that the agency alone – not to mention its counterparts in the rest of the American intelligence community – owned or controlled some 2,500 media entities all over the world. In addition, it has its people ranging from stringers to highly visible journalists and editors in virtually every major media organization. As we have seen and were indeed experiencing every day of the trial, this inevitably results in the suppression or distortion of sensitive stories and the planting and dissemination of disinformation.

"Schapp then turned to the coverage of the King assassination and examined the extraordinary universal media hostility against Dr. King when he came out against the Vietnam War, and the same reaction against his family when they decided to advocate a trial for James Earl Ray. Cited were specific examples of media distortion and blatant lies, which characterized the media coverage of the case and James Earl Ray's alleged rôle for over 30 years. Particular mention was made of the totally baseless New York Times front page-column piece reporting on alleged investigations by the FBI, the HSCA (House Sub-Committee on Assassinations), and the Times of the 1967 Alton Illinois bank robbery. This piece was far worse than distorted or slanted reporting, since the investigations did not take place and the Ray brothers were never even suspects as the Times article stated. It was a domestic example of the type of pure fabrication similar to the story about the Angolan rapes.

"Schapp explained that a Harvard Neurologist had helped him to understand the power of the neurological impact upon human cognizance, intellectual functioning, and reasoned decisions making when the same story is told over and over again. That impact makes the story a knee jerk part of the people who are exposed to it. Even if they are convinced on one occasion by powerful evidence to the contrary, the next day will usually find them reverting to the long-held belief, which has become a part of themselves – often integral to their very identity. Nothing less than some sort of intense deprogramming experience with ongoing reinforcement is required.

"After analyzing the powerfully comprehensive control of the media by the forces who control American public policy and examining their identical policy and coverage in terms of the assassination, the systematic brainwashing of Americans in respect of this case became abundantly clear to the court, jury, and those present. Bill Schapp's analysis and testimony highlighted the absence of the media in our courtroom. In effect by not being there, they proved his point. Only one local television journalist stayed.

"Considering all of the aspects of the cover-up in this case, the ongoing media role is the most sinister precisely because it, if not powerfully controverted, as was done with the trial, perpetuates the lies and disinformation from one generation to the next, for all time."

6. THE CHALLENGE AND OPPORTUNITY OF 2004

KEVIN B. ZEESE

(How to build a Common Sense, Populist Political Movement and Remove President Bush from Office)

I joined Ralph Nader's campaign, not only because I admire Nader, but also because I want to see George Bush removed from office. He is the worst president of my 49-year life and I see his administration as a threat to my hopes for the US and the health of the planet. However, it is important that we remove him while standing for what we believe in – and educating others about our views – so we can expand the populist base seeking common sense solutions to our common problems.

If we fail to stand for what we believe in – equal rights for all, peace and justice, elimination of corporate political power, environmental and economic stewardship as well as expansion of human rights around the globe, then we fail to create the electoral and political movement necessary to create the paradigm shift needed in the US.

We are a nation at war – internationally and domestically – and that war wounds us every day draining our budget, enriching war-corporations, undermining our values and Constitution, making us less safe and creating enemies of much of the world. For me, the litmus test for 2004 is whether the candidate we support threatens or feeds the bloated military industrial complex.

George Bush is the war president who has demonstrated that he will give the military industrial complex as much as it can consume. Senator Kerry is the candidate who supported the bombing of Afghanistan, voted for the Shock and Awe Iraq invasion, voted for the Patriot Act, sponsored Plan Colombia (the war approach to drug addiction) and the candidate who is calling for 40,000 additional , new soldiers. Both agree there should be no right of return for Palestinians, give the green light to assassinating Palestinian leaders and that Israel should be allowed to keep illegal settlements in occupied land. Sure, Kerry is better than Bush, but he is not a president who shares the values of tens of millions who took to the streets to oppose the war. Ralph Nader is the only peace and justice candidate in the race until the November general election. The question is whether the peace and justice community will stand with him.

The only way to have a debate on the war in this presidential race is for the peace and justice community to support the peace candidate.

Of course, I recognize that Senator Kerry would be an improvement over President Bush. Mr. Bush is driving our nation into a brick wall at 90 miles an hour. Kerry would slow to 60. But we don't need to slam into the wall at a slower pace; we need to change direction.

Before he announced his candidacy, Ralph Nader sent a detailed letter to both political parties. He raised urgent issues: the below-living-wage of tens of millions of American workers, the expanding number of people lacking health insurance, the roadblocks to workers organizing trade unions, the record deficit that is a tax on our children, the inequality in education, jobs and opportunity based on race, gender and sexual orientation in contrast to the gluttonous expanding wealth of the wealthiest as well as racial profiling and other forms of prejudice in our nation. Nader highlighted the central problems of our corporate-government where corporate domination of our political system walks hand in hand with a largely unprosecuted corporate crime wave, massive corporate welfare dependency and omnipresent corporatizing where even our children grow up corporate. Nader raised the critical need to protect our environment from its deadly reliance on fossil and nuclear fuels, the need for greater efficiency in housing offices and automobiles and to protect our air, water and natural resources so we do not bring our species, or others, to extinction. And, of course, he raised the issue of ending the Iraq War and converting our military industrial budget to one that focuses on human needs first and wages peace around the world.

The responses were what we should have expected. The Republicans said they supported the Bush agenda, the Democrats said they opposed the Bush agenda.

The two corporate political parties do not take our concerns seriously – issues needing urgent attention they ignore. Bush can energize his faith base by supporting a homophobic constitutional amendment; Kerry can play to his base with his Bush-scare songs and both can assure the corporate paymasters who support their campaigns – Bush by promising to make permanent his tax cuts for the rich, Kerry by promising corporate tax cuts disguised as his jobs program – both will continue to fatten the bloated and redundant military industrial complex.

So where does that leave us? It highlights our failure to organize beyond a small sliver of left progressives. It highlights the need for us to build new electoral and political vehicles that cut across the political spectrum and represent our common sense populist values. It shows the need for us to build a broader movement that can elect people who share our values.

If we do not recognize our failures and politically organize in a deadly serious way there is no reason for people to join our cause. We cannot promise African Americans, Latinos, Muslims and Arabs a fair shake in the US if we cannot start to elect people who stand for our values. We need to begin to elect women to political office, women who stand for equal rights peace and justice. A political paradigm shift is needed.

When Ralph Nader announced that he was going to run as an Independent, I was disappointed. As a Green Party activist I saw him as the strongest potential Green candidate. But as I have worked for his campaign, I have discovered that the Independent run has allowed many more people to hear his message.

Activists with the Reform and Libertarian Parties, as well as Independents, have told me that they agree with much of Nader's agenda but that they would not have even considered it if he had run as a Green. Running Green, Nader was categorized by many voters who closed their minds and ears to his ideas.

This is not to say that Nader has broken with the Green Party. He supports their values and agenda, has helped them to grow and will be supportive of serious Green candidates. In fact, he has said he would welcome their endorsement if they decided not to run a candidate.

Many of Nader's positions on the deficit, the loss of jobs due in part to bad trade agreements, corporate welfare, corporate crime, the need for electoral reform, the unfair tax system, the failure of the drug war and protection of the environment – are issues that many Americans agree with. They cut across a broad swath of the electorate – especially independents and third party members.

Nader continues to stand for the same issues he has always stood for. But, the problems the US is facing have grown and become so obvious that more people are seeing things more clearly. Americans across the political spectrum do not like to hear that one-third of full-time workers don't earn enough to live on – under $10 per hour. They don't like to see businesses close in the US as jobs are shipped to China, India and Mexico. They don't like seeing Americans sent to war on misinformation, distortions and falsehoods.

Thus the Nader campaign presents an opportunity for the peace and justice movement to continue to stand firmly for – peace and justice. It is an opportunity to show people who did not see themselves as progressives that in fact they support progressive issues. It presents an opportunity to build a bigger movement of concerned citizens who can work together to change the paradigm – to create a government responsive to their needs. The electoral challenge of 2004 is an opportunity to grow our movement to new levels so that we can become politically effective.

By doing so do we necessarily re-elect the worst president of my life? In fact, we can increase the chance of beating Bush by making Kerry a better candidate and fracturing Bush's base.

The progressive wing of the Democratic Party seems beaten back by the DLC corporate wing of the Party Progressive leaders – Kucinich and Sharpton – were soundly defeated in the primaries and Howard Dean shouted himself down and showed he was not the ally we hoped when he criticized Kucinich for urging cuts in defense spending. By joining the Nader coalition we provide a counterbalance to the pull of the corporate Democrats. Senator Kerry will not be able to take the progressive base of the Party – workers, African Americans, Latinos and women – for granted. He will have to work for their vote – promise them something so he has a mandate for more than merely being 'anybody but Bush' when he is elected.

Some progressives doubt we can pull voters from Bush's base. But there are many people who voted for President Bush in the last elections who are unhappy with his policies. They now see that the trade agreements that Nader always opposed are resulting in jobs going overseas. Many conservatives are concerned about the erosion of Constitutional rights by the Patriot Act and John Ashcroft's Justice Department. Union members who voted for Bush are not only seeing their jobs go overseas, they are recognizing that busting unions is becoming all too common in the Bush Inc. years. Voters are also recognizing that the US has been bamboozled into a war of choice that has become a quagmire. These are all issues where we share common ground. And, by having a strong populist candidate who raises these issues we can pull voters from Bush's base.

When we are put in the position of voting for "anybody" but Bush then we are being given a false choice. In 2004 we need to find a way to stand up for what we believe, build a movement and remove President Bush from office. These are not mutually exclusive goals; in fact if handled properly they are synergistic goals – each helping the other.

(Editor's Note: I would like to recommend two books: "An Act of State" The Execution of Martin Luther King by William F. Pepper, 2003. And: "The Exception to the Rulers" Exposing Oily Politicians, War Profiteers, and the Media That Love Them by Amy Goodman and David Goodman, 2004.)