BILL BERKOWITZ FOR BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT

Based on the information I’ve garnered over the past week or so, it would not be fair to characterize Archbishop Jorge Mario Bergoglio – now Pope Francis – as having been complicit with the military dictatorship’s imprisonment, torture and murder of more than 30,000 Argentinians during that country’s “Dirty War.” It would be a lot closer to the truth, however, to see him as a man of inaction; one who, for whatever political, religious and/or personal reasons, chose to remain silent.

While it may be understandable that Bergoglio was unwilling to risk his life during the “Dirty War,” which would have been threatened had he vigorously spoken out against the military dictatorship’s human rights abuses, it is far less understandable why, for the longest time, he has remained virtually indifferent to those who suffered at the hands of sexually abusive clergy in Argentina.

The Washington Post’s Nick Miroff recently reported on the case of Father Julio Cesar Grassi, an Argentine priest who, in 2009 was convicted of sexual abuse, and is now free on appeal. According to Miroff, “in the years after Grassi’s conviction, Bergoglio … has declined to meet with the victim of the priest’s crimes or the victims of other predations by clergy under his leadership. He did not offer personal apologies or financial restitution, even in cases in which the crimes were denounced by other members of the church and the offending priests were sent to jail.”

ROBERT C. KOEHLER FOR BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT

We’ve lost a war without being able to surrender — and thus divest ourselves of the consciousness that got us into it. We are unable to look honestly at what we did and why, and determine not to do it again.

My friend Catherine Menninger sent me a note the other day that began: “The days are long past when the poison of DU (depleted uranium) was our shared preoccupation. Now an even deeper poison, a soul poison, is seeping into the body politic and beyond. It is touching us all.”

Ten years later, an enormous question looms: How do we get the poison out of our system? I think that’s what atonement means.

ANN DAVIDOW FOR BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT

Words are important, not just in the obvious, superficial sense but because of the ideas that inspire them and the speakers who articulate them. They can, however, be dangerous vehicles for individuals who confuse listeners with overblown images and phony premises. Freedom and liberty are used as if they were the property of people with an agenda that says they are the true Americans - - those freedom-loving folks who think they should be the movers and shakers of our political lives.

At the Conservative conference this past weekend speakers were hard pressed to find significant failings in the Republican brand. Perhaps they just needed to deliver the party’s message more clearly. As Marco Rubio and Mitt Romney declared, they haven’t lost the country they love. Apparently they’re just on a kind of hiatus, but freedom and liberty will soon be restored if they keep up the good fight. And throughout the laborious speech-infested affair, speaker after speaker spent their time taking potshots at the president - - no new ideas or innovative policies from these hardliners, just the same old crowd-pleasing jokes that seem to find a home at CPAC.

JACQUELINE MARCUS FOR BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT

The Bush administration’s Iraq war has cost the U.S. more than $2 trillion so far and with interest could swell to more than $6 trillion, according to a study released Thursday.

Meanwhile, Jeb Bush is making his rounds to run for President 2016.

Those who are familiar with Noam Chomsky’s work have learned about the United States’ brutal history of intervention in Latin America for corporate control via the CIA and how the CIA creates havoc and chaos to pave the way for overthrowing democratically elected leaders that have socialistic leanings, i.e. leaders who want to improve conditions for the poor, whose policies strengthen middle-class economies. 

STEVEN JONAS MD, MPH FOR BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT

One must consider the currently running MSNBC documentary, “How the Bush administration sold the Iraq war” (1), based on a book by Michael Isikoff and David Corn, to be a rather remarkable document, given that it comes to us from an element of the mainstream media (NBC), as relatively liberal as that element may be.  Most (if not all) of the readers of this column-series and the journal(s) in which it appears know that the whole premise upon which the invasion was based was totally false.  Neither were there Iraqi “weapons of mass destruction” nor was there any connection between the Saddam Hussein regime and Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda.  In approximately 50 minutes of air time, one can hardly expect that all of the details of the Grand Deception and Big Lie can be covered.  It is very possible that many of those details that I retell below are to be found in the book.  Nevertheless, here a few additional facts and observations.

First, the documentary very justifiably notes the later proved-to-be-false “Tonkin Gulf Incident” that President Lyndon Johnson used to vastly expand the War on Vietnam.  That war actually found its origins yeas before in work done by the Dulles Brothers, John Foster (State) and Allen (CIA), to undermine the Geneva Accords of 1954 which had brought the French-Indochinese War to its conclusion.  Nationwide elections were to have been held by 1956.  “Everyone knew” that the Communist leader, Ho Chi Minh, would win in an overwhelming landslide.  The Dulles Brothers, very concerned about that happenstance, in collusion with the reactionary forces in Viet Nam, made sure that the elections were never held.  We all know what happened subsequently. 

What is not generally acknowledged is that, in terms of the US objective of making sure that there would not be a peaceful, electoral, victory for Communism in southeast Asia, with its implications for the rest of the region (yes, the Domino Theory was real and of real concern), the US did not lose the Viet Nam War.  Rather, given what has happened and not happened to Viet Nam and the rest of Southeast Asia since then, in the context of the Dulles’ original goals, the US won it.  In contrast, we do not yet know whether the US achieved the primary objective of the Cheney/Bush regime, which was the creation of a state of Permanent War (2).

WALTER BRASCH FOR BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT

Judges who wish to assure that a jury has no outside influence will sequester them.

Legally, a sequestered jury is seized by authority and isolated from all outside influences. The jurors are escorted into and out of the courtroom. They aren’t allowed to read newspapers, listen to radio news, or watch TV news, ’lest they could be influenced by the media. They are escorted to and from meals, and isolated from other customers. They can’t discuss the case with family or friends. They can’t even go home at the end of the day; they’re housed in hotel rooms.

In the summer of 2011, a bipartisan “super-committee” was supposed to come up with a reasonable budget to eliminate $1.2–$1.5 trillion from the national deficit. The Congressionally-mandated sequester went into effect two weeks ago when Congress couldn’t come up with a better idea about the budget. The draconian cuts across all federal programs was supposed to be enacted only as a last-ditch measure. The concept was that Congress and the Administration would be so fearful of the results of the sequester, which the media and elected officials often called a “poison pill,” they would take the time to thoughtfully work out a proper budget, and the sequester would never happen.

But, the Republicans dug in their heels, refused to compromise, and even continued their vacations the last week before the sequester went into effect.

ROBERT C. KOEHLER FOR BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT

“Indeed,” writes DavidKorten, “we have become so entranced in the illusion that money is a measure of real wealth and a storehouse of value that we have allowed it to displace life as our object of sacred veneration and become the ultimate arbiter of human priorities.”

As the economy twists downward for most of us — as the politics of money tightens like a noose around everything we love — I think about the disintegration of human values, which insane logic and the Republicans tells us we can no longer afford.

A few days ago, Paul Buchheit wrote on Common Dreams about the poisonous nature of the ongoing privatization process: the inexorable corporate takeover of the human commons. As markets expand, the public domain — physical, social, spiritual — shrinks. It’s not simply that public land is auctioned off or that water rights are taken away from us, but that our right to care for others, to organize society around a modicum of compassion, is being confiscated in the name of “sorry, can’t afford it.”

BILL BERKOWITZ FOR BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT

Considering the church’s serial obfuscations and cover-ups, it is worth asking what role Cardinal Jorge Maria Bergoglio, now Pope Francis I, might have played during Argentina’s Dirty War.

The election of Argentina’s Jorge Maria Bergoglio, now Pope Francis I, as the first pope from Latin America is a truly historic moment. The purported runner up in 2005 to then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (the now-retired Pope Benedict XVI), Bergoglio is now the worldwide leader of the Catholic Church.

JANE STILLWATER FOR BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT    Jane Stillwater

My friend Gordon Lau works for a charitable foundation in Jakarta that tries to help the poorest of the poor -- and so he decided to see exactly what his clients are going through by being "Poor for a Day" himself.

I wanna be poor for a day too -- and have just been given the perfect opportunity to do so.  My housing co-op is being re-habbed and I have to be out of my apartment for three weeks while they do everything to it except install a new chimney for Santa Claus to come down.

 (Photo: Courtesy of Jane Stillwater)

STEVEN JONAS MD, MPH FOR BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT

The modern Republican Party finds its origins in the first post-Mexican War election, that of 1848 (1).  The victory in the Mexican War had brought the nation a huge amount of new territory.  The question of “what to do” about the potential expansion of the institution of slavery into the new states that might be created from the conquest came very much, and very quickly, to the fore.  The South, of course, which had seen limits placed on the expansion of slavery west (and north west) by the Missouri Compromise of 1820, wanted unlimited expansion.  Opposed were two major forces: those that simply wanted to prevent the expansion into the territories and those that wanted not only the former but also wanted the abolition of slavery in the states in which it already existed.

Starting with the said election of 1848, both major national parties, the Democrats and the Whigs, were beginning to come apart at the seams over the above question.  For 1848, the Whigs nominated a general, Zachary Taylor, who was a Southerner and who owned slaves.  However, he did not own much of a public record on the major political question of the time.  He won.  Once in office, Taylor surprised just about everyone by taking a free-soil position for the Territories.  However, by the 1854 mid-terms, out of the by-then accumulated Whig wreckage the Republican Party had been born.  The history is very complex, which much movement backwards and forwards, but the Republican Party picked up four other pieces of the political pie of the time that eventually led to its victory in the four-way election of 1860.