Saturday, March 21, 2015

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/12/clinical-psychologist-explains-how-ayn-rand-helped-turn-the-us-into-a-selfish-and-greedy-nation/#.VQ1-cACF5KI.facebook

Friday, March 20, 2015

http://labor411.org/411-blog/729-five-dumb-things-stupid-people-believe-about-unions

Directory Listing and Good Pagekeeping Award goes to the OutFOXedNEWS.com page

The 695th Directory Listing and Good Pagekeeping Award goes to the OutFOXedNEWS.com page. This page is "Fairly Counterbalanced" against the cable TV channel that Conservatives (and other brainless morons) trust the most. Petitions to sign and damning material galore are posted to set the record straight about the station that most Americans love to hate. Please <VISIT> and <LIKE> this New Directory Page. Thank You.

Please also visit The Blue Book: A Directory of Progressive and Liberal Pages and give us some love.

Did The Bush Family Help Hitler Into Power?

Did The Bush Family Help Hitler Into Power?

The family that produced two Presidents made its fortune and established its power in the era when Hitler and the Nazis rose to power in Europe, and changed the world forever.

However, worrying connections were found between Prescott Bush, grandfather of George W., and the finances behind the Nazi Party.

Did Prescott Bush help Hitler get power in Germany? Comment below the video to let us know what you think.

- See more at: http://yournewswire.com/the-bush-family-helped-hitler-rise-to-power-video/#sthash.37iZ7iA6.dpuf

Why the right hates American history

THURSDAY, FEB 26, 2015 02:25 PM EST

Why the right hates American history

Thomas Jefferson knew that education is vital to a functioning Democratic Republic. Conservatives have other ideas

THOM HARTMANN, ALTERNET

Thomas Jefferson (Credit: White House Historical Association)

This article originally appeared on AlterNet.

Sure, the war on education helps Republican lawmakers destroy unions and slash government spending, but it’s our history of progressive change that makes Conservatives hate accurate depictions of our past.

Just think about Social Security, The New Deal, freeing the slaves, or child labor laws… all represent great turning points in our nation that progressives made possible. The fact is, our entire history – from our revolution to healthcare reform – is filled with progressive accomplishments, and it’s hard to sell the Conservative brand to people who know that history.

Many of the today’s biggest political issues, like our privacy rights, would not even be up for debate today had it not been for the attack on education. If more Americans had had a strong understanding of our history, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney would have never been able to pull off the Patriot Act. And, we wouldn’t be discussing the Orwellian government spy agencies like the NSA in this day and age.

While we can’t undo the damage to the Fourth Amendment overnight, we can protect our remaining rights by passing on accurate history, and protecting public education.

Thomas Jefferson recognized that education is vital to a functioning Democratic Republic.

In a letter to James Madison, Jefferson wrote: “And say, finally, whether peace is best preserved by giving energy to the government, or information to the people. This last is the most certain, and the most legitimate engine of government. Educate and inform the whole mass of the people. Enable them to see that it is their interest to preserve peace and order, and they will preserve them…. They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty.”

In light of Oklahoma’s recent attack on AP History, it would be easy to argue that today’s Republicans don’t recognize the value of a good education. However, the reality is that they do, and that the spreading attack on public education is far more sinister.

When the Patriot Act was signed, Bush and his ilk claimed the power to violate citizens’ private lives because, they said, there is no “right to privacy” in the United States. In that, they – perhaps purposefully – overlooked the history of America and the Declaration of Independence, signed on July 4, 1776. And they missed a basic understanding of the evolution of language in the United States.

Of course, they weren’t the first to have made these mistakes. And, the Conservatives waging today’s war on education hope that they won’t be the last.

When I was a teenager, it was a felony in parts of the United States to advise a married couple about how to practice birth control. This ended in 1965, in the Griswold v. Connecticut case before the U.S. Supreme Court, when the Court reversed the criminal conviction of a Planned Parenthood program director who had discussed contraception with a married couple, and of a doctor who had prescribed a birth-control device to them.

The majority of the Court summarized their ruling by saying, “Would we allow the police to search the sacred precincts of marital bedrooms for telltale signs of the use of contraceptives? The very idea is repulsive to the notions of privacy….”

However, Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart disagreed back in 1965, saying that he could find no “right of privacy“ in the Constitution of the United States. Using his logic, under the laws of the day, the couple in question could themselves have been sent to prison for using birth control in their own bedroom.

As Justice Stewart wrote in his dissent in the case, “Since 1879 Connecticut has had on its books a law which forbids the use of contraceptives by anyone…. What provision of the Constitution, then, makes this state law invalid? The Court says it is the right of privacy ‘created by several fundamental constitutional guarantees.’ With all deference, I can find no such general right of privacy in the Bill of Rights, in any other part of the Constitution, or in any case ever before decided by this Court.”

In that view of American law, Justice Clarence Thomas—who still holds a seat on our nation’s highest court—agrees.

In his dissent in a 2003 Texas sodomy case, Thomas wrote, “just like Justice Stewart, I ‘can find [neither in the Bill of Rights nor any other part of the Constitution a] general right of privacy,’ or as the Court terms it today, the ‘liberty of the person both in its spatial and more transcendent dimensions.’”

This type of rationale is how we ended up with the Patriot Act and the NSA, but someone with a real knowledge of our history would see where these men were wrong. The Constitution doesn’t grant a right to eat, or to read, or to have children. Yet do we doubt these are rights we hold?

The simple reality is that there are many “rights” that are not specified in the Constitution, but which we daily enjoy and cannot be taken away from us by the government. But if that’s the case, Thomas would argue, why doesn’t the Constitution list those rights in the Bill of Rights?

If you know your history, you know that the reason is simple: the Constitution wasn’t written as a vehicle to grant us rights. We don’t derive our rights from the constitution.

Rather, in the minds of the Founders, human rights are inalienable—inseparable—from humans themselves. We are born with rights by simple fact of existence, as defined by John Locke and written by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence. “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” the Founders wrote.

Humans are “endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights….” These rights are clear and obvious, the Founders repeatedly said. They belong to us from birth, as opposed to something the Constitution must hand to us, and are more ancient than any government.

The job of the Constitution was to define a legal framework within which government and business could operate in a manner least intrusive to “We, The People,” who are the holders of the rights. In its first draft it didn’t even have a Bill of Rights, because the Framers felt it wasn’t necessary to state out loud that human rights came from something greater, larger, and older than government. They all knew this; it was simply obvious.

Thomas Jefferson, however, foreseeing a time when the concepts fundamental to the founding of America were forgotten, strongly argued that the Constitution must contain at least a rudimentary statement of rights, laying out those main areas where government could, at the minimum, never intrude into our lives.

Jefferson’s insistence on a bill of rights exemplifies the progressive thoughts and actions that fill our rich history, and provide a perfect example of why education is vital to our democratic republic.

Jefferson was in France when Madison sent him the first draft of the new Constitution, and he wrote back on December 20, 1787, that, “I will now tell you what I do not like [about the new constitution]. First, the omission of a bill of rights, providing clearly, and without the aid of sophism, for freedom of religion, freedom of the press, protection against standing armies, restriction of monopolies, the eternal and unremitting force of the habeas corpus laws, and trials by jury in all matters of fact triable by the laws of the land….”

There had already been discussion among the delegates to the constitutional convention about whether they should go to the trouble of enumerating the human rights they had held up to the world with the Declaration of Independence, but the consensus had been that it was unnecessary.

The Declaration, the writings of many of the Founders and Framers, and no shortage of other documents made amply clear the Founders’ and the Framers’ sentiments that human rights were solely the province of humans, and that governments don’t grant rights but, rather, that in a constitutionally limited democratic republic We, The People—the holders of the rights—grant to our governments whatever privileges our government may need to function (while keeping the rights for ourselves).

This is the fundamental difference between kingdoms, theocracies, feudal states, and a democratic republic. In the former three, people must beg for their rights at the pleasure of the rulers. In the latter, the republic derives its legitimacy from the people, the sole holders of rights.

Although the purpose of the Constitution wasn’t to grant rights to people, as kings and popes and feudal lords had done in the past, Jefferson felt it was necessary to be absolutely unambiguous about the solid reality that humans are holders of rights, and that in no way was the Constitution or the new government of the United States to ever be allowed to infringe on those rights.

The Constitution’s authors well understood this, Jefferson noted, having just fought a revolutionary war to gain their “self-evident” and “inalienable” rights from King George, but he also felt strongly that both the common person of the day and future generations must be reminded of this reality.

“To say, as Mr. Wilson does, that a bill of rights was not necessary,” Jefferson wrote in his December 1787 letter to Madison, “…might do for the audience to which it was addressed….” But it wasn’t enough. Human rights may be well known to those writing the constitution, they may all agree that governments may not infringe on human rights, but, nonetheless, we must not trust that simply inferring this truth is enough for future generations who have not so carefully read history or who may foolishly elect leaders inclined toward tyranny.

“Let me add,” Jefferson wrote, “that a bill of rights is what the people are entitled to against every government on earth, general or particular; and what no just government should refuse, or rest on inference.”

Madison took Jefferson’s notes and shared them with Hamilton, Adams, Mason, and others, and then sent a letter to Jefferson outlining the objections to a Bill of Rights that had been raised by the members of the constitutional convention.

On March 15, 1789, Jefferson replied to Madison: “I am happy to find that, on the whole, you are a friend to this amendment. The declaration of rights is, like all other human blessings, alloyed with some inconveniences, and not accomplishing fully its object. But the good in this instance vastly overweighs the evil.

“I cannot refrain from making short answers to the objections which your letter states to have been raised [by others]:

“1. ‘That the rights in question are reserved, by the manner in which the federal powers are granted.’ Answer: A constitutive act [the Constitution] may, certainly, be so formed, as to need no declaration of rights. …In the draught of a constitution which I had once a thought of proposing in Virginia, and I printed afterwards, I endeavored to reach all the great objects of public liberty, and did not mean to add a declaration of rights. …But…this instrument [the U.S. Constitution] forms us into one State, as to certain objects, and gives us a legislative and executive body for these objects. It should, therefore, guard us against their abuses of power, within the field submitted to them.”

In this, Jefferson is stating openly that the purpose of the Constitution—and even the Bill of Rights—is not to grant rights to the people, but to restrain government. It doesn’t grant, it limits.

And, Jefferson said, his proposed Bill of Rights was only a beginning and imperfect; it would be nearly impossible to list in detail all the rights humans have. But a start, a try, is better than nothing—at least it will make clear that the purpose of the constitution is to limit government:

“2. ‘A positive declaration of some essential rights could not be obtained in the requisite latitude.’ Answer: Half a loaf is better than no bread. If we cannot secure all our rights, let us secure what we can.”

His third point was that the states may try to limit peoples rights if the explicit nature of government and rights wasn’t spelled out in the Constitution through a Bill of Rights, so the constitution protected citizens from tyrannical state governments who may overreach (as the Supreme Court ultimately ruled Connecticut had done in banning birth control).

And, finally, Jefferson noted that if they were to err, it would be better to err on the side of over-defining rights—even if past efforts had proven unnecessary or nonviable—than under-defining them.

“4. ‘Experience proves the inefficacy of a bill of rights.’ True. But though it is not absolutely efficacious under all circumstances, it is of great potency always, and rarely inefficacious. A brace the more will often keep up the building which would have fallen, with that brace the less. There is a remarkable difference between the characters of the inconveniences which attend a declaration of rights, and those which attend the want of it. The inconveniences of the declaration are, that it may cramp government in its useful exertions. But the evil of this is short-lived, moderate and reparable. The inconveniences of the want of a declaration are permanent, afflicting and irreparable.”

A Bill of Rights wasn’t necessary, but it was important. We all knew the constitution was designed to define and constrain government, but it’s still better to say too much about liberty than too little.

Even though this thrown-together-at-the-last-minute Bill of Rights doesn’t cover all the rights we consider self-evident, and may inconvenience government, it’s better to include it than overlook it and risk future generations forgetting our words and deeds.

Beyond that, there’s good reason to believe—as the majority of the Supreme Court did in the Griswold case, the Texas sodomy case, and at least a dozen others—that the Founders and Framers did write a right to privacy into the Constitution. But, you probably had to sit through an AP history course to hear about that reason.

Living in the 18th Century, the Founders never would have actually used the word “privacy“ out loud or in writing. In fact, a search, for example, of all 16,000 of Thomas Jefferson’s letters and writings produces not a single use of the word “privacy.” Nor does Adams use the word in his writings, so far as I can find.

The reason is simple: “privacy“ in 1776 was a code word for toilet functions. A person would say, “I need a moment of privacy” as a way of excusing themselves to go use the “privy” or outhouse. The chamberpots around the house, into which people relieved themselves during the evening and which were emptied in the morning, were referred to as “the privates,” a phrase also used to describe genitals.

Privacy, in short, was a word that wasn’t generally used in political discourse or polite company during an era when women were expected to cover their arms and legs and discussion of bedroom behavior was unthinkable.

It wasn’t until 1898 that Thomas Crapper began marketing the flush toilet and discussion of toilet functions became relatively acceptable. Prior to then, saying somebody had a “right to privacy” would have meant “a right to excrete.” This was, of course, a right that was taken for granted and thus the Framers felt no need to specify it in the Constitution.

Instead, the word of the day was “security,” and in many ways it meant what we today mean when we say “privacy.” Consider, for example, the Fourth Amendment: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated….”

Similarly, “liberty” was also understood, in one of its dimensions, to mean something close to what today we’d call “privacy.” The Fifth Amendment talks about how “No person shall be… deprived of life, liberty, or property…” and the Fourteenth Amendment adds that “nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property….”

And, of course, the Declaration of Independence itself proclaims that all “are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”

So now, thanks to the war on education that began with Ronald Raegan, we have come to that remote period in time Jefferson was concerned about. Our leaders, ignorant of or ignoring the history of this nation’s founding, make a parody of liberty and flaunt their challenges even to those rights explicitly defined in the Constitution. And, perhaps worse, they allow monopolistic corporations to do the same.

Our best defense against today’s pervasive ignorance about American history and human rights is education, a task that Jefferson undertook in starting the University of Virginia to provide a comprehensive and free public education to all capable students. A well-informed populace will always preserve liberty better than a powerful government, a philosophy which led the University of California and others to once offer free education to their states’ citizens.

As Jefferson noted in that first letter to Madison: “And say, finally, whether peace is best preserved by giving energy to the government, or information to the people. This last is the most certain, and the most legitimate engine of government. Educate and inform the whole mass of the people. Enable them to see that it is their interest to preserve peace and order, and they will preserve them…. They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty.”

The majority of the Supreme Court wrote in their opinion in the 1965 Griswold case legalizing contraception that, “We deal with a right of privacy older than the Bill of Rights [and] older than our political parties…” saying explicitly that the right of privacy is a fundamental personal right, emanating “from the totality of the constitutional scheme under which we live.” But, they never would have understood that inalienable right without a real education about our history.

We must teach our children and inform the world about the essentials of human rights and how our constitutional republic works—deriving its sole powers from the consent of We, The People who hold the rights—if democracy is to survive. And, we must stand up to anyone who tries to block us from sharing our progressive history.

MORE THOM HARTMANN.

The Only Place It Was Cold This Winter Was The East Coast Of The United States

BY JOE ROMM POSTED ON MARCH 18, 2015 AT 2:06 PM UPDATED: MARCH 19, 2015 AT 10:20 AM

If you live on the East Coast of the United States, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has just released some statistics that may surprise you:

Globally, this has been the hottest winter on record, topping the previous record (2007) by 0.05°F.
This was “the 19th warmest winter for the contiguous US.”
Globally it’s easily been the hottest start to any year (January-February), beating the previous records (2002, 2007) by 0.07°F.
This was the second warmest February globally, and “slightly below” the 20th-century average in the contiguous U.S.

As the NOAA map above shows, other than the “cooler than average” northeast, this winter has been “warmer than average” and “much warmer than average” and “record warmest” over every other land area in the world.

In particular, many Western states saw their hottest winter on record — which is not a surprise if you live in drought-stricken California or its neighbors:

Where this winter ranks (by state) in the 120-year NOAA record. A “120” means it was the hottest winter on record for that state.

Now entering its fourth year, the drought in California is so bad that NASA senior water scientist Jay Famiglietti warned that “the state has only about one year of water supply left in its reservoirs, and our strategic backup supply, groundwater, is rapidly disappearing.” Global warming-driven record heat has made this the worst California drought in 1200 years, as scientists explained in December.

The Earth keeps setting the record for the hottest 12 months in the surface temperature record, as we reported Saturday. NOAA’s global data show we’ve started this year at a record pace — and early indications are that March will be warm globally — so we are on track for what is likely to be the hottest calendar year on record.

How Americans Are Brainwashed to Fear Exactly the Wrong Things

FEAR IN AMERICA

How Americans Are Brainwashed to Fear Exactly the Wrong Things

Hyped threats and propaganda promote fears, some real and most fake.

By Steven Rosenfeld / AlterNet

March 19, 2015

Editors Note: The following is the latest in a new series of articles on AlterNet called Fear in America that launched this March. Read the introduction to the series.

What is a bigger threat to most Americans: big government or big business?

In December 2013, the Gallup pollfound that nearly three out of four people feared “big government” more than “big business” or “big labor.” After President Obama took office in 2009, 55 percent feared Big Brother. By late 2013, the last time Gallup asked, the government-fearing figure was 72 percent, the highest in 50 years.

Only 21 percent of Americans said that big business was a bigger threat.

Gallup attributed the jump to “government policies specific to the period, such as the Affordable Care Act—perhaps coupled with recent revelations of government spying tactics by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.”

This is a curious coupling that reveals much about fear-mongering and what’s deceitful in American media and politics. Is an effort bringing health insurance to millions who lack it a big threat? No. On the other hand, the revelation that the most secretive U.S. spy agencies are grabbing and warehousing all domestic electronic communications is eerie. Anything we say can and might be used against us long before it gets to a court of law.

But most big businesses, especially those online, also are violating our privacy daily, spying on us, profiling us, and reselling that information. Banks monitor our balances. Insurers say yes or no to medication refills. The list goes on. The government might be ultimately more powerful and threatening, but a strong case can be made that big businesses are more overtly interferring with our lives, whether that’s seen as an annoyance or a threat.

“You’re absolutely right,” said George Lakoff, a nationally known linguist andauthor who has analyzed how language and the media shape conservative and liberal dogma. “Basically, what you’ve got are monopolies running your life in any dimension and it’s not mentioned. It’s not discussed. It’s not a topic of conversation. It’s not a topic of legislation. It isn’t something that’s out there.”

Instead, American media is filled with pro-corporate and anti-government propaganda.

“Corporations run your life all the time,” Lakoff continued. “Look at the corporate ads on TV. Corporation ads are innocent. They have nice little sounds. Think of the music in oil company ads and the people in them. It’s like, ‘We’re pleasant. We’re progressive. We’re making progress. We’re cute,’ etc., when they’re actually running your life.”

What’s going on is Americans are endlessly being bombarded with media messages that are fearful and deceitful. The result not only affects our politics and policies, as we are insistently told to fear and respond to exaggerated or fake threats. But, going deeper, this onslaught literally shapes how brains work and what people end up believing, Lakoff and other astute observers have said. The result is many small problems get undue attention while widespread problems go unacknowledged and unanswered.

For example, taxpayers have spent millions to create the flashing highway alerts about supposedly kidnapped children, which usually end up being with angry family members. In contrast, Americans continuously overlook the millions of children nationally who lack health insurance, who are malnourished and have rising illiteracy rates. Nobody needs to be reminded which of these two issues is likely to be on the evening news.

“Whenever one group uses fear to manipulate another, someone benefits and someone pays,” wrote sociologist Barry Glassner, in the 10th anniversaryedition of The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things,where that example originated. As he noted, “Threats to the U.S. financial system, obscured from public view in part by endless attention to the ‘war on terror,’ undermined America’s national security more than Osama bin Laden and his organization ever did.”

And yet, Gallup found Americans feared big government much more than big business. Gallup didn’t cite more tangible reasons why many Americans fear government. It didn’t mention abusive policing, being arrested for victimless crimes, being followed or harrassed by faceless law enforcement, or targeted by overzealous prosecutors. It cited a right-wing bugaboo, Obamacare, and Snowden’s revelations.

In an interview, Glassner said he was not surprised by Gallup’s finding and cited reasons why Americans are especially susceptible to fears about government, even as they rely on government services like roads. “Our self image is a nation of self individualists,” he said. “You make it on your own and success comes from your own hard work. That doesn’t mesh well with any kind of collective or community notion.”

“There’s that and then just being able to take an entity and demonize it,” he said. “To be able to do that it [the target] has to be very abstract, and there have to be very powerful forces who are working in consort to demonize it. That’s where successful fear mongering happens in pretty much every case I’ve looked at and that’s true here too… I can’t think of a more abstract entity than government.”

These factors are all seen in American politics and media, especially on the right where fanning anti-government flames also serve corporations that profit from less effective government.

“When politicians run fear campaigns about government, they’re able to do that because it’s an implicit way of being a populist,” Glassner said. “They say they’re for the people as opposed to what they portray as these big anonymous organizations.”

Obviously, major corporations can be very big and anonymous. And unlike government, there are fewer transparency and public accountability laws to learn about what they’re doing.

Glassner said his goal was to decrease fear mongering—not shift it from one exaggerated target to another. “The kind of scares that are thrown out there about government apply at least as much to businesses, or certainly large corporations,” he said. “My sense is these scare campaigns are just as destructive in both cases.”

Why Some Fears Stick And Others Don’t

But fear-based messaging differs on the political right and left, Lakoff said, as does its impact—and this explains why right-wing fears often stick more than left-wing fears. Two high profile recent examples begin to illustrate his point.

At the Oscars, Laura Poitras, the winning documentary filmmaker who madeCitizen Four, gave a cerebral speech that said the Snowden whistleblower film not only exposed “a threat to our privacy but to our democracy itself. When the most important decisions being made affecting all of us are made in secret, we lose our ability to check the powers that control. Thank you to Edward Snowden for his courage and for the many other whistleblowers. And I share this with Glenn Greenwald and other journalists who are exposing truth.”

Lakoff said it was not surprising that her words flashed by and barely sank in.

“You have all of these progressives out there who went to [liberal arts] school and did well thinking that all you have to do is tell people something once, give them the facts, they’re all reasons to the right conclusion,” he said. They think “that’s all you can do, or should do, when that’s utterly false… That’s not how the brain works.”

In contrast, consider the e-mail message from Rand Paul, Kentucky’s Republican Senator and likely 2016 presidential candidate—opposing the recent Federal Communications Commission decision to reclassify the Internet as a public utility. It was filled with many right-wing buzzwords—adjectives and nouns, not concepts—that Republicans have heard over and over. He called the FCC’s move “aggressive, invasive, and harmful regulation,” and adding, “We’ve seen this movie before—it’s called Obamacare.”

Lakoff said repetitive, fear-based moralizing sticks—and the GOP knows it, in the same way that corporate marketing experts do. “In politics everything is based on morality,” he said. “Mainly, you want your policies to be right, not wrong. What counts as right varies between progressives and conservatives. The conservatives, when they go to school, take business courses and marketing courses. Marketing professors study neuroscience and cognitive science… They’ve been doing it very well for 40 years.”

Repetition of fear-based messaging—without a steady counterpoint or context to stop that drumbeat—has been shown to affect the brain patterns that determine how people think, Lakoff said. It is akin to repetitive exercise that creates muscle memory. Depending on whether one is more inclined toward a liberal or conservative ideology, one can hear the same words but reach different conclusions. Fear of big government is an example.

“For conservatives, democracy is about the liberty to do what you want to do to anybody and meet no public responsibility,” he said. “With progressives, people care about each other and work through the government to provide public resources so that private life can function and private business can function… The whole idea of public resources for well being and freedom isn’t there for conservatives.”

Lakoff said pollsters have spread a false myth that there is a political center. What really exists are varying degrees of conservatism and liberalism—two bell curves, not one. The absence of strong, clear, morally based messages from Democrats has allowed the GOP to demonize government, which pleases their corporate sponsors. Meanwhile, corporate publicists keep touting their good deeds, he said, and “you don’t hear anything else.”

“You don’t hear anything at all,” Lakoff said. “Let me give you a simple example. What are pensions? Pensions are late payments for work already done. They’re part of wages. When a company says, ‘Well, I can’t afford to pay your pension anymore,’ or when they cut public servant pensions, they’re stealing your money. They’re stealing your wages. Who say it? …The Democrats say, ‘Oh, well, we can’t say stuff like that.’”

And so, as Gallup found in late 2013, more than three times as many Americans say the government is more threatening than big business. And he doesn’t expect that to change with Hillary Clinton’s likely presidential campaign. Lakoff said he has already been contacted by some of her biggest pre-2016 organizers and they still don’t get it.

“They think this is about words and slogans,” he said. “They write to me and they’re saying, ‘What’s the best slogan for this?’ No, that’s not what this is about. This is about how you understand things, morally, and how you project that moral understanding… Words aren’t labels. They mean things. They link up to your brain. People don’t understand what words are.”

Steven Rosenfeld covers national political issues for AlterNet, including America's retirement crisis, democracy and voting rights, and campaigns and elections. He is the author of "Count My Vote: A Citizen's Guide to Voting" (AlterNet Books, 2008).

The CIA Just Declassified the Document That Supposedly Justified the Iraq Invasion

By Jason Leopold

March 19, 2015 | 1:10 pm

Thirteen years ago, the intelligence community concluded in a 93-page classified document used to justify the invasion of Iraq that it lacked "specific information" on "many key aspects" of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs.

But that's not what top Bush administration officials said during their campaign to sell the war to the American public. Those officials, citing the same classified document, asserted with no uncertainty that Iraq was actively pursuing nuclear weapons, concealing a vast chemical and biological weapons arsenal, and posing an immediate and grave threat to US national security.

Congress eventually concluded that the Bush administration had "overstated" its dire warnings about the Iraqi threat, and that the administration's claims about Iraq's WMD program were "not supported by the underlying intelligence reporting." But that underlying intelligence reporting — contained in the so-called National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) that was used to justify the invasion — has remained shrouded in mystery until now.

The CIA released a copy of the NIE in 2004 in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, but redacted virtually all of it, citing a threat to national security. Then last year, John Greenewald, who operates The Black Vault, a clearinghouse for declassified government documents, asked the CIA to take another look at the October 2002 NIE to determine whether any additional portions of it could be declassified.

The agency responded to Greenewald this past January and provided him with a new version of the NIE, which he shared exclusively with VICE News, that restores the majority of the prewar Iraq intelligence that has eluded historians, journalists, and war critics for more than a decade. (Some previously redacted portions of the NIE had previously been disclosed in congressional reports.)

'The fact that the NIE concluded that there was no operational tie between Saddam and al Qaeda did not offset this alarming assessment.'

For the first time, the public can now read the hastily drafted CIA document [pdf below] that led Congress to pass a joint resolution authorizing the use of military force in Iraq, a costly war launched March 20, 2003 that was predicated on "disarming" Iraq of its (non-existent) WMD, overthrowing Saddam Hussein, and "freeing" the Iraqi people.

A report issued by the government funded think-tank RAND Corporation last December titled "Blinders, Blunders and Wars" said the NIE "contained several qualifiers that were dropped…. As the draft NIE went up the intelligence chain of command, the conclusions were treated increasingly definitively."

An example of that: According to the newly declassified NIE, the intelligence community concluded that Iraq "probably has renovated a [vaccine] production plant" to manufacture biological weapons "but we are unable to determine whether [biological weapons] agent research has resumed." The NIE also said Hussein did not have "sufficient material" to manufacture any nuclear weapons. But in an October 7, 2002 speech in Cincinnati, Ohio, then-President George W. Bush simply said Iraq, "possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons" and "the evidence indicates that Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program."

One of the most significant parts of the NIE revealed for the first time is the section pertaining to Iraq's alleged links to al Qaeda. In September 2002, then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld claimed the US had "bulletproof" evidence linking Hussein's regime to the terrorist group.

"We do have solid evidence of the presence in Iraq of al Qaeda members, including some that have been in Baghdad," Rumsfeld said. "We have what we consider to be very reliable reporting of senior-level contacts going back a decade, and of possible chemical- and biological-agent training."

But the NIE said its information about a working relationship between al Qaeda and Iraq was based on "sources of varying reliability" — like Iraqi defectors — and it was not at all clear that Hussein had even been aware of a relationship, if in fact there were one.

"As with much of the information on the overall relationship, details on training and support are second-hand," the NIE said. "The presence of al-Qa'ida militants in Iraq poses many questions. We do not know to what extent Baghdad may be actively complicit in this use of its territory for safehaven and transit."

The declassified NIE provides details about the sources of some of the suspect intelligence concerning allegations Iraq trained al Qaeda operatives on chemical and biological weapons deployment — sources like War on Terror detainees who were rendered to secret CIA black site prisons, and others who were turned over to foreign intelligence services and tortured. Congress's later investigation into prewar Iraq intelligence concluded that the intelligence community based its claims about Iraq's chemical and biological training provided to al Qaeda on a single source.

"Detainee Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi — who had significant responsibility for training — has told us that Iraq provided unspecified chemical or biological weapons training for two al-Qai'ida members beginning in December 2000," the NIE says. "He has claimed, however, that Iraq never sent any chemical, biological, or nuclear substances — or any trainers — to al-Qa'ida in Afghanistan."

Al-Libi was the emir of the Khaldan training camp in Afghanistan, which the Taliban closed prior to 9/11 because al-Libi refused to turn over control to Osama bin Laden.

Last December, the Senate Intelligence Committee released a declassified summary of its so-called Torture Report on the CIA's "enhanced interrogation" program. A footnote stated that al-Libi, a Libyan national, "reported while in [redacted] custody that Iraq was supporting al-Qa'ida and providing assistance with chemical and biological weapons."

"Some of this information was cited by Secretary [of State Colin] Powell in his speech to the United Nations, and was used as a justification for the 2003 invasion of Iraq," the Senate torture report said. "Ibn Shaykh al-Libi recanted the claim after he was rendered to CIA custody on February [redacted] 2003, claiming that he had been tortured by the [redacted], and only told them what he assessed they wanted to hear."

Al-Libi reportedly committed suicide in a Libyan prison in 2009, about a month after human rights investigators met with him.

The NIE goes on to say that "none of the [redacted] al-Qa'ida members captured during [the Afghanistan war] report having been trained in Iraq or by Iraqi trainers elsewhere, but given al-Qa'ida's interest over the years in training and expertise from outside sources, we cannot discount reports of such training entirely."

All told, this is the most damning language in the NIE about Hussein's links to al Qaeda: "While the Iraqi president "has not endorsed al-Qa'ida's overall agenda and has been suspicious of Islamist movements in general, apparently he has not been averse to some contacts with the organization."

The NIE suggests that the CIA had sources within the media to substantiate details about meetings between al Qaeda and top Iraqi government officials held during the 1990s and 2002 — but some were not very reliable. "Several dozen additional direct or indirect meetings are attested to by less reliable clandestine and press sources over the same period," the NIE says.

The RAND report noted, "The fact that the NIE concluded that there was no operational tie between Saddam and al Qaeda did not offset this alarming assessment."

The NIE also restores another previously unknown piece of "intelligence": a suggestion that Iraq was possibly behind the letters laced with anthrax sent to news organizations and senators Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy a week after the 9/11 attacks. The attacks killed five people and sickened 17 others.

"We have no intelligence information linking Iraq to the fall 2001 attacks in the United States, but Iraq has the capability to produce spores of Bacillus anthracis — the causative agent of anthrax — similar to the dry spores used in the letters," the NIE said. "The spores found in the Daschle and Leahy letters are highly purified, probably requiring a high level of skill and expertise in working with bacterial spores. Iraqi scientists could have such expertise," although samples of a biological agent Iraq was known to have used as an anthrax simulant "were not as pure as the anthrax spores in the letters."

Paul Pillar, a former veteran CIA analyst for the Middle East who was in charge of coordinating the intelligence community's assessments on Iraq, told VICE news that "the NIE's bio weapons claims" was based on unreliable sources such as Ahmad Chalabi, the former head of the Iraqi National Congress, an opposition group supported by the US.

"There was an insufficient critical skepticism about some of the source material," he now says about the unredacted NIE. "I think there should have been agnosticism expressed in the main judgments. It would have been a better paper if it were more carefully drafted in that sort of direction."

But Pillar, now a visiting professor at Georgetown University, added that the Bush administration had already made the decision to go to war in Iraq, so the NIE "didn't influence [their] decision." Pillar added that he was told by congressional aides that only a half-dozen senators and a few House members read past the NIE's five-page summary.

David Kay, a former Iraq weapons inspector who also headed the Iraq Survey Group, told Frontline that the intelligence community did a "poor job" on the NIE, "probably the worst of the modern NIE's, partly explained by the pressure, but more importantly explained by the lack of information they had. And it was trying to drive towards a policy conclusion where the information just simply didn't support it."

The most controversial part of the NIE, which has been picked apart hundreds of times over the past decade and has been thoroughly debunked, pertained to a section about Iraq's attempts to acquire aluminum tubes. The Bush administration claimed that this was evidence that Iraq was pursuing a nuclear weapon.

National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice stated at the time on CNN that the tubes "are only really suited for nuclear weapons programs, centrifuge programs," and that "we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."

The version of the NIE released in 2004 redacted the aluminum tubes section in its entirety. But the newly declassified assessment unredacts a majority of it and shows that the intelligence community was unsure why "Saddam is personally interested in the procurement of aluminum tubes." The US Department of Energy concluded that the dimensions of the aluminum tubes were "consistent with applications to rocket motors" and "this is the more likely end use." The State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research also disagreed with the intelligence community's assertions that Iraq had reconstituted its nuclear weapons program.

The CIA's 25-page unclassified summary of the NIE released in 2002 did not contain the State or Energy Departments' dissent.

"Apart from being influenced by policymakers' desires, there were several other reasons that the NIE was flawed," the RAND study concluded. "Evidence on mobile biological labs, uranium ore purchases from Niger, and unmanned-aerial-vehicle delivery systems for WMDs all proved to be false. It was produced in a hurry. Human intelligence was scarce and unreliable. While many pieces of evidence were questionable, the magnitude of the questionable evidence had the effect of making the NIE more convincing and ominous. The basic case that Saddam had WMDs seemed more plausible to analysts than the alternative case that he had destroyed them. And analysts knew that Saddam had a history of deception, so evidence against Saddam's possession of WMDs was often seen as deception."

According to the latest figures compiled by Iraq Body Count, to date more than 200,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed, although other sources say the casualties are twice as high. More than 4,000 US soldiers have been killed in Iraq, and tens of thousands more have been injured and maimed. The war has cost US taxpayers more than $800 billion.

In an interview with VICE founder Shane Smith, Obama said the rise of the Islamic State was a direct result of the disastrous invasion.

"ISIL is a direct outgrowth of al Qaeda in Iraq that grew out of our invasion," Obama said. "Which is an example of unintended consequences. Which is why we should generally aim before we shoot."

Follow Jason Leopold on Twitter: @JasonLeopold

Iraq October 2002 NIE on WMDs (unedacted version)