Jonathan supports the impeachment of the president and the vice-president. He also supports the censure proposal by Senator Russ Feingold and, as the Senator from New York, would work hard to rally support for Feingold and his proposal.

While impeachment is a very serious step that should not have been trivialized the way it was during the last presidential administration, it is also an indispensable part of a system of checks and balances that sustains our democracy. When strong evidence exists of the most serious crimes, we must use impeachment or lose the ability of the legislative branch to compel the executive branch to obey the law.

This is not a question of supporting one party over another, but of upholding the rule of law over both of them. Jonathan supports impeachment not to promote a party, but to protect our democracy.

President Bush and Vice-President Cheney deserve to be impeached because their actions rise to the Constitutional threshold of “high crimes and misdemeanors”:

1. Intentionally misleading Congress and the public regarding the threat from Iraq in order to justify a war against Iraq, and intentionally conspiring with others to defraud Congress in this regard.

cont'd...
http://www.tasinifornewyork.com/node/183

INTRODUCTION

When I was a young boy, I once asked my father what the difference was between a recession and a depression. He replied with the now over-used cliché: a recession is when the economy goes sour for your neighbor, it's a depression when it hits your pocketbook.

The essential point of the cliché is that how one looks at the economy depends on one's vantage point. Every day we are bombarded with facts and figures that tell us what to think about the economy yet we often have no way of knowing who is telling the truth, where they get their information and, more important, what are their own biases. Over time, we begin incorporating into our personal language and way of thinking a whole set of ideas--for example, the need to be "competitive" in the global economy--that may in fact be harmful to us and the people around us.

Ordinary Americans are angry and confused by the conventional economic analysis espoused by pundits and politicians. We simply do not believe what we hear on the evening news or read in newspapers because what journalists and pundits tell us doesn't fit with their own daily experience. When most Americans are working for less money and are deeper in debt, why is Dan Rather so excited when he announces a rise in the Gross Domestic Product (GDP)? Indeed, what does an increase in the GDP mean for most people? Is it good or bad? We have good cause to have these emotions.

In part, we tend to forget that economics doesn't just happen. The economy we live in is not an independent, unbiased current, nor a natural phenomena like the sun rising every day or the ebb and flow of the ocean's tide. It functions because of decisions made by political and financial people or institutions, many of whom are unknown or only vaguely familiar to the American public. The traditional labels of "liberal" or "conservative" do not explain the more important factor shaping the economy: self-interest.

cont'd...
http://www.workinglife.org/Cake.htm

Wal-Mart's Free Market Fallacy
Jonathan Tasini - TomPaine.com

Conservatives run around singing the praises of Wal-Mart, proclaiming it an American success story. None other than Dick Cheney calls the Beast of Bentonville his favorite company. But what I love about Wal-Mart is the way the company highlights the phoniness of two centerpieces of the conservative movement's sloganeering propaganda: the so-called "free market" and "local control."

In the mythical world of the free market-for which Wal-Mart supposedly serves as a shining example-prices for goods and labor should rise and fall based on the magic of the "invisible hand" of market supply and demand. In the nirvana of the so-called free market, workers can sell themselves for whatever the market can bear.

So let me introduce you to a place called China. Wal-Mart - in its never-ending quest to promote its heartland, Arkansan family values - is a willing customer of the Chinese labor system, where people work 12- to 18-hour days, earn meager wages and have no days of rest-all for the honor of laboring inside factories full of chemical toxins and hazardous machines, leading to sickness and death at the highest rates in world history. Wal-Mart says its business with China is just a virtue of the free market.

Putting aside the morality of forcing people to work in slave-like conditions, the so-called free market does not exist in China when it comes to wages. China artificially suppresses wages by anywhere from 47 to 85 percent below what they should be, according to the AFL-CIO's complaint about China's labor policies filed with the United States Trade Representative last year. With Wal-Mart as its willing customer, an authoritarian regime ruthlessly warps the market for wages by enforcing a system that controls where people can work and imprisons and tortures people who attempt to organize real unions or strike. Maybe the rock-bottom labor costs are really behind Wal-Mart's slogan "always low prices," but the company is certainly not an example of how to win in a free market economy.

more...
http://www.banderasnews.com/0504/edat-free...

That President George W. Bush comes to power with the intention of invading Iraq is a fact not open to dispute. Pleased with the image of himself as a military hero, and having spoken, more than once, about seeking revenge on Saddam Hussein for the tyrant's alleged attempt to "kill my Dad," he appoints to high office in his administration a cadre of warrior intellectuals, chief among them Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, known to be eager for the glories of imperial conquest. At the first meeting of the new National Security Council on January 30, 2001, most of the people in the room discuss the possibility of preemptive blitzkrieg against Baghdad. In March the Pentagon circulates a document entitled "Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oil Field Contracts"; the supporting maps indicate the properties of interest to various European governments and American corporations. Six months later, early in the afternoon of September 11, the smoke still rising from the Pentagon's western facade, Secretary Rumsfeld tells his staff to fetch intelligence briefings (the "best info fast… go massive; sweep it all up; things related and not") that will justify an attack on Iraq. By chance the next day in the White House basement, Richard A. Clarke, national coordinator for security and counterterrorism, encounters President Bush, who tells him to "see if Saddam did this." Nine days later, at a private dinner upstairs in the White House, the President informs his guest, the British prime minister, Tony Blair, that "when we have dealt with Afghanistan, we must come back to Iraq."