Donations influence Cuba embargo support.

This is just one small example where it seems quite clear that donations have bought support. In many instances politicians changed their positions on the embargo and were rewarded with donations as a result. One might think that it would be mostly right wing Republicans who are getting all these donations but as the article shows this is far from the truth. Many democratic politicians are also feeding at the anti-Cuba trough. In fact since 2008 the Democrats have received over half of the donations!


Money talks: Report links donations, Cuba embargo support
By Lesley Clark McClatchy Newspapers
WASHINGTON — Supporters of the U.S. embargo against Cuba have contributed nearly $11 million to members of Congress since 2004 in a largely successful effort to block efforts to weaken sanctions against the island, a new report shows.

In several cases, the report by Public Campaign says, members of Congress who had supported easing sanctions against Cuba changed their position — and got donations from the U.S.-Cuba Democracy Political Action Committee and its donors.

All told, the political action committee and its contributors have given $10.77 million nationwide to nearly 400 candidates and members of Congress, the report says.

The contributions include more than $850,000 to 53 Democrats in the House of Representatives who sent a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi earlier this month opposing any change to U.S.-Cuba policy. The average signer, the report says, received $16,344.

The top five recipients of the embargo supporters' cash: Miami's three Cuban-American Republican members of Congress, 2008 Republican presidential nominee John McCain and New Jersey Democratic Sen. Robert Menendez, whose parents fled Cuba before his birth.

The report comes as defenders of the embargo fend off efforts to repeal a decades-old ban against U.S. travel to Cuba. Proponents of greater engagement with Cuba contend that they have the votes, and a hearing on the issue is scheduled for Thursday before the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

Critics of U.S.-Cuba policy long have suggested a link between campaign contributions and policy. Public Campaign — which advocates for public financing of political campaigns — says the contributions raise questions about the role that money plays in lawmakers' decision-making.

"The pressure they get to raise money plays heavier in their decisions than it ought to," said David Donnelly, the national campaigns director for Public Campaign. "We think this is a damning pattern. We think these are good people caught in a bad system. If members of Congress have to spend too much time raising money, they have to listen to people who give money."

The director of the U.S.-Cuba Democracy PAC, Mauricio Claver-Carone, defended the contributions as support for lawmakers who side with Cuban-Americans who think that easing sanctions against Cuba will only benefit the Castro regime.

"I will not apologize for the Cuban-American community practicing its constitutional, democratic right to support candidates who believe in freedom and democracy for the Cuban people over business and tourism interests," Claver-Carone said. "Unions help elect pro-union candidates. The Chamber of Commerce helps elect pro-business candidates. AIPAC (the American Israel Public Affairs Committee) helps elect pro-Israel members. Who are we supposed to help? Pro-Castro members?"

Public Campaign looked at the Cuba committee because of a seeming disconnect between congressional votes and public opinion polls that suggest most Americans support lifting a ban on travel to Cuba, Donnelly said.

"On this issue there appears to be a clear distinction between what the American public appears to want and what some in Congress are advocating," Donnelly said, pointing to a World Public Opinion survey in April that found 70 percent of Americans support travel to Cuba.

Rep. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., who backs greater engagement with Cuba, said the report wasn't a surprise.

"I don't know how else you can explain how our current policy has survived for so long without yielding any meaningful results; it's all politics," Flake said.

The report says that at least 18 House members — including several from agriculture-rich districts — received campaign contributions from the PAC or its donors and switched their positions on Cuba, from voting in favor of easing travel restrictions to voting against any efforts to soften the embargo.

Rep. Mike McIntyre, D-N.C., said his changed views came from humanitarian interests and concerns about oppression in Cuba. He said he spoke with Florida Republican Reps. Lincoln and Mario Diaz-Balart about their family's experience in Cuba under Fidel Castro.

"I thought, 'This is not right, and it's not humanitarian, and it doesn't promote democracy and I'm not going to support someone who is repressive and evil,' " McIntyre said. "Yes, I changed my vote. That's the reason I changed: the horrors they suffered."

"They're really savvy people," Lars Schoultz, a professor of political science at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and the author of "That Infernal Little Cuban Republic: The United States and the Cuban Revolution," said of the U.S.-Cuba Democracy PAC. "They know one vote is one vote. They scratch around and see who might be open to their way of thinking."

Claver-Carone, who started the PAC in 2003, said agricultural and business interests had heavily lobbied members of Congress before the committee was in operation.

"The farm lobby came in and they were telling people, 'Cuba is like Costa Rica,' " Claver-Carone said. "We came in and started telling people, 'Hey, here's what's really happening in Cuba.' "

Though hard-line embargo supporters traditionally have been considered Republicans, the report shows the PAC shifting contributions to Democrats as they assumed control of the House and Senate in 2006.

In the 2004 election cycle, the PAC gave just 29 percent to Democrats. By 2008, the Democrats' share was up to 59 percent.

(Barbara Barrett and David Goldstein contributed to this article

Krugman: Progressives to Arms

Krugman has an excellent point about bi-partisanship and polarization. Inevitably policies that generate real change as against marginal issues about which most can agree will involve polarisation although with the majority on the side of progressive change. US politics though is stuck in a two party logjam in which each party tries to stick to the middle that in effect means catering to those who have the funds to buy support for their interests and leaving the vast majority to be fed by patriotic rhetoric and only minimal attention to their needs.

SLATE politics

Progressives, To Arms!
Forget about Bush--and the middle ground.

By Paul Krugman

Here's a thought for progressives: Bush isn't the problem. And the
next president should not try to be the anti-Bush.

No, I haven't lost my mind. I'm not saying that we should look kindly
on the Worst President Ever; we'll all breathe a sigh of relief when
he leaves office 405 days, 2 hours, and 46 minutes from now. (Yes, a
friend gave me one of those Bush countdown clocks.) Nor am I
suggesting that we should forgive and forget; I very much hope that
the next president will open the records and let the full story of the
Bush era's outrages be told.

But Bush will soon be gone. What progressives should be focused on now
is taking on the political movement that brought Bush to power. In
short, what we need right now isn't Bush bashing—what we need is
partisanship.

OK, before I get there, a word about terms—specifically, liberal vs.
progressive. Everyone seems to have their own definitions; mine
involves the distinction between values and action. If you think every
American should be guaranteed health insurance, you're a liberal; if
you're trying to make universal health care happen, you're a
progressive.

And here's the thing: Progressives have an opportunity, because
American public opinion has become a lot more liberal.

Not everyone understands that. In fact, the reaction of the news media
to the first clear electoral manifestation of America's new
liberalism—the Democratic sweep in last year's congressional
elections—was almost comical in its denial.

Thus, in 1994, Time celebrated the Republican victory in the midterm
elections by putting a herd of charging elephants on its cover. But
its response to the Democratic victory of 2006—a victory in which
House Democrats achieved a larger majority, both in seats and in the
popular vote, than the Republicans ever did in their 12-year
reign—was
a pair of overlapping red and blue circles, with the headline "The
center is the place to be."

Oh, and the guests on Meet the Press the Sunday after the Democratic
sweep were, you guessed it, Joe Lieberman and John McCain.

More seriously, many pundits have attributed last year's Republican
defeat to Iraq, with the implication that once the war has receded as
an issue, the right will reassert its natural political advantage—in
spite of polls that show a large Democratic advantage on just about
every domestic issue.

In a way, it's understandable that many political analysts are finding
it hard to grasp how much things have changed. After all, not long ago
it was conventional wisdom among the chattering classes that America
had entered an era of long-term Republican—and
conservative—dominance.
I have a whole shelf of books with titles like One Party Country and
Building Red America, all of them explaining why movement
conservatism—the interlocking set of institutions, ranging from the
Heritage Foundation to Fox News, that make up the modern American
right—is invincible.

And it's true that even now, polls suggest that Americans are about
twice as likely to identify themselves as conservatives as they are to
identify themselves as liberals.

But if you look at peoples' views on actual issues, as opposed to
labels, the electorate's growing liberalism is unmistakable. Don't
take my word for it; look at the massive report Pew released earlier
this year on trends in "political attitudes and core values." Pew
found "increased public support for the social safety net, signs of
growing public concern about income inequality, and a diminished
appetite for assertive national security policies." Meanwhile,
nothing's the matter with Kansas: People are ever less inclined to
support conservative views on moral values—and have become
dramatically more liberal on racial issues.

And it's not just opinion polls: Last year, the newly liberal mindset
of the electorate was reflected in actual votes, too. Yes, some of the
Democrats newly elected last year were relatively conservative. But
others, including James Webb of Virginia and Jon Tester of Montana,
have staked out strikingly progressive positions on economic issues.

The question, however, is whether Democrats will take advantage of
America's new liberalism. To do that, they have to be ready to
forcefully make the case that progressive goals are right and
conservatives are wrong. They also need to be ready to fight some very
nasty political battles.

And that's where the continuing focus of many people on Bush, rather
than the movement he represents, has become a problem.

A year ago, Michael Tomasky wrote a perceptive piece titled "Obama the
anti-Bush," in which he described Barack Obama's appeal: After the
bitter partisanship of the Bush years, Tomasky argued, voters are
attracted to "someone who speaks of his frustration with our polarized
politics and his fervent desire to transcend the red-blue divide."
People in the news media, in particular, long for an end to the
polarization and partisanship of the Bush years—a fact that probably
explains the highly favorable coverage Obama has received.

But any attempt to change America's direction, to implement a real
progressive agenda, will necessarily be highly polarizing. Proposals
for universal health care, in particular, are sure to face a firestorm
of partisan opposition. And fundamental change can't be accomplished
by a politician who shuns partisanship.

I like to remind people who long for bipartisanship that FDR's drive
to create Social Security was as divisive as Bush's attempt to
dismantle it. And we got Social Security because FDR wasn't afraid of
division. In his great Madison Square Garden speech, he declared of
the forces of "organized money": "Never before in all our history have
these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today.
They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred."

So, here's my worry: Democrats, with the encouragement of people in
the news media who seek bipartisanship for its own sake, may fall into
the trap of trying to be anti-Bushes—of trying to transcend
partisanship, seeking some middle ground between the parties.

That middle ground doesn't exist—and if Democrats try to find it,
they'll squander a huge opportunity. Right now, the stars are aligned
for a major change in America's direction. If the Democrats play nice,
that opportunity may soon be gone.

Paul Krugman is a columnist for the New York Times.
--

Pat Buchanan: Retreat of the Antiwar Democrats

I am no fan of Buchanan but I must admit that he often gets things right! This is one time he is sure close to being on the bullseye. The article is well written and gives good evidence for his points.

Pat Buchanan
Retreat of the Antiwar DemocratsTue Sep 11, 3:00 AM ET


In November 2006, Republicans were voted out of power in the Congress and Democrats installed to bring an end to U.S. involvement in the war in Iraq.



The war had been going on as long as America's war on Nazi Germany. No end was in sight. U.S. casualties and costs were rising. Bush's approval rating had sunk to record lows.

The day after the GOP rout, Bush cashiered his war minister, Donald Rumsfeld. In December, the Iraq Study Group, chaired by Bush I Secretary of State James Baker, released its report.

"The situation in Iraq is grave and deteriorating. ... A slide toward chaos could trigger the collapse of Iraq's government and a humanitarian disaster. ... The situation in Baghdad and several provinces is dire. ... Pessimism is pervasive. ... Violence is increasing in scope, complexity and lethality."

His policy collapsing, Bush made a last throw of the dice. Gen. David Petraeus was named to command U.S. forces, and his request for a "surge" of 21,500 additional U.S. troops accepted. Petraeus also demanded and got 10,000 more support troops.

Still, by April, as the "surge" brigades began to arrive, Harry Reid, Senate majority leader, was declaring, "This war is lost, and this surge is not accomplishing anything." Democrats, the party base goading them on, tried to impose upon Bush, as a condition of further funding for the war, deadlines for the withdrawal of U.S. forces.

Bush vetoed the bill. He was sustained. Then, he rubbed the Democrats' noses in their defeat by demanding and getting $100 billion more to finance the surge and the war. There are today 30,000 more troops in Iraq than when the Democratic Congress was elected.

As Petraeus testifies, the antiwar movement appears broken. Reid has said his party will not try to de-fund the war or impose new deadlines. It will follow GOP Sen. John Warner, who has suggested it might be helpful if the president withdrew a brigade by Christmas, to signal the Iraqi government to get its house in order. Petraeus has agreed to that.

Next April is the date when the Iraq Study Group said all U.S. combat brigades should be out of Iraq. By then, Bush and Petraeus will have tens of thousands more troops in Iraq than when the Democrats were elected and the ISG reported. The lame duck is not all that lame.

What happened to the party of Speaker Pelosi and Reid, which was going to end U.S. involvement in the war and not permit Bush to pursue victory the way Richard Nixon pursued it in Vietnam for four years?

Answer: Terrified of the possible consequences of the policies they recommend, Democrats lack the courage to impose those policies.

When it comes to issues of war, Democrats are an intimidated lot. Sens. Clinton, Edwards, Biden, Dodd and Reid were all stampeded by Bush into voting him a blank check for war in October 2002. Why? Because they feared Bush would declare them weak or unpatriotic if they denied him the authority to go to war, at a time of his choosing, until he had made a more compelling case for war.

Now they regret what they did. But, in a showdown, they will do it again. For Democrats have been psychologically damaged by 60 years of GOP attacks on them as the party of retreat and surrender.

Their hero, FDR, was posthumously ripped apart for Yalta, the appeasement of "Uncle Joe," and the abandonment to communism of Poland and Eastern Europe. Truman fired Gen. MacArthur, fought a no-win war in Korea and was savaged, along with Gen. Marshall and Dean Acheson, by Joe McCarthy. By 1952, Truman was at 23 percent and finished. In January 1954, the Tailgunner was riding high at 50 percent.

Came then Vietnam and the credible charge that the Liberal Establishment, The Best and the Brightest, had marched us in, then cut and run, abandoning our Vietnamese and Cambodian allies to a holocaust, and bringing on the worst strategic defeat in U.S. history.

When Ronald Reagan, in the closing days of the 1980 campaign, declared Vietnam a "noble cause," the liberal media leapt on it as a gaffe. It wasn't. Reagan was wired in to Middle America.

John Kerry understood this. Thus, he ran in 2004 as a decorated Vietnam vet, not the onetime icon of the antiwar movement.

Bush is winning today because he has jettisoned the jabber about global democracy and argues that a U.S. withdrawal risks a strategic disaster, national humiliation, massacre of our friends and triumph for al-Qaida. Democrats, fearing he may be right, are in paralysis.

Scourged for 20 years over "Who Lost China?" they don't want to spend the next 20 years answering "Who Lost the Middle East?"

Thus the rout of the peace Democrats. But the movement will be back. For, Petraeus' good news notwithstanding, there is no light yet visible at the end of this tunnel.

To find out more about Patrick Buchanan, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web page at www.creators.com.

Democratic Controlled Congress on Brink of Irrelevance on Iraq

This article just about sums it up. Government of the people by the people for the crony capitalists with only illusory choices. Of course it is hardly "by the people" The people only come in as buying(voting for) almost identical products to keep the process legitimate.

Democratically Controlled Congress Stands on the Brink of Irrelevance
on
Iraq

By Joshua Holland, AlterNet

Posted on September 6, 2007, Printed on September 6, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/61506/

Next week, Ryan Crocker, the U.S. Ambassador to Iraq, and General David
Petraeus, the army's counter-insurgency guru, will brief Congress on
the
Bush administration's claims of progress in Iraq. At stake is not only
the upper hand in the political debate over the continuing occupation,
but an enormous amount of money -- $147 billion -- that was supposedly
conditioned on tangible measures of progress, specifically 18
"benchmarks" attached to the 2007 supplemental spending bill.

According to a report by the non-partisan Government Accountability
Office (GAO), only three of those benchmarks have been met, and those
were among the minor ones (The White House has promised to "water down"
the GAO's findings). In addition to rampant insecurity throughout much
of the country, Iraq's political situation is, objectively, a disaster,
and most Iraqis agree that U.S. troops cause more violence than they
prevent.

But despite the reality on the ground, the administration last week
threw a Hail-Mary pass, announcing that it would ask for another $50
billion for war-fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan through next Spring.
That's in addition to $147 billion already requested for the two
countries.

There's no reason to believe the administration won't get it --
consider
how many times congressional Democrats have uttered some variant of
"It's time we stopped giving Bush a blank check for Iraq" as they
signed
a series of blank checks for Iraq. Bush has proved that he can continue
moving the goalposts again and again without being called on it by the
media, and Congress has shown that it will let him, even eight months
after the Democratic take-over of Capitol Hill.

It has become a game. The reality is that there is no $50 billion
supplemental, and there won't be for several weeks (if at all this
year). The stories about the new funding request are White House
"plants," announced on the eve of the much-anticipated Iraq progress
report in order to show confidence in the face of waning public support
for the occupation and, more importantly, to divert the national
conversation from the failure of the troop escalation -- a failure that
should lead to a debate about how to exit Iraq with the minimum of
damage -- to a new debate about whether higher troop levels should
remain until next spring. You don't have to look too hard to see the
goalposts moving.

It's much like the surge itself, a stop-gap measure that nobody
seriously believed had a chance of changing the ugly situation in Iraq.
It was, however, spectacularly successful in distracting the country
from its post-election discourse about ending the occupation, focusing
instead on the now-familiar argument that war opponents should wait
until September's progress report. At that point, the tacit
understanding was that Congress would rise up and demand an end to the
war if the 18 benchmarks weren't met. Now that September is here, we're
supposed to focus on the next shiny object.

The Democrats are reacting to this charade by conceding the battle
before it begins, with Michigan's Carl Levin offering to remove a
deadline from the amendment he and Jack Reed, D-R.I., co-sponsored (the
deadline was already riddled with loopholes) and Senate Majority Leader
Harry Reid offering to "compromise" with Senate Republicans by dropping
his already watered-down demand for a spring "withdrawal."

As Dick Durbin, the senate majority whip, told the Chicago Tribune,
"When it comes to the budget, I face a dilemma that some of my
colleagues do." He opposes the war, but "felt that I should always
provide the resources for the troops in the field."

That mean throwing good money (and lives) after bad. Here's the reality
of the "surge":

* Iraqi civilian and U.S. and Iraqi military and police deaths are
up

* The Iraqi government is tottering, and there is credible talk of
an impending coup

* The Iraqi people, still without regular electricity and water
and
fearing for their lives whenever they go out to buy groceries, want the
United States out

* 40 percent of the middle class has fled the country

For more details, see "A Preview to General Petraeus' DC Dog-and-Pony
Show" in AlterNet's War on Iraq special coverage.

What all this means is that unless the Democratic majority makes a
dramatic turnaround and stops playing along with the White House -- a
risky move, but one that's within their Constitutional authority --
they, along with the entire institution, will no longer be relevant
voices in the debate over Iraq.

Consider, after all, that the "Petraeus" report is being prepared by
the
White House; that Petraeus is a reliable partisan who's inspired talk
of
a GOP presidential run and who wrote an op-ed on the eve of the 2004
elections in which he promised that the momentum was shifting in Iraq
and said that local security forces were improving every day; that
Petraeus has said that he "softened" the intelligence community's
assessment of the security situation in Baghdad, while he's told people
privately that he needs ten years to put down the insurgency.

That Congress is treating the report as a serious and impartial
analysis
of the situation in Iraq is essentially an acknowledgment that the
Republicans have a working majority on issues of war and peace,
regardless of the fact that the Democrats control the agenda.
Significant majorities of Democrats have voted to end the occupation
(to
one degree or another) on different occasions so far, and each time one
or two dozen "Bush Dog" Democrats crossed the aisle to kill the efforts
to get out of Dodge.

We're seeing a caucus that is controlled by fear -- fear that the hawks
who were responsible for the disaster in Iraq will shift the blame
their
way; fear that arguing against U.S. militarism will make them look like
wimps, or traitors, in the eyes of voters; fear that they'll be proven
disastrously wrong and be held responsible for the often fancifully
exaggerated consequences of ending the occupation that the hawks
whisper
about in excited tones; terror that the wrong move could cost them the
electoral advantage that everyone agrees they'll have in 2008 or,
worse,
prompt a right-wing backlash like that which ushered in the Reagan/Bush
era after Vietnam.

But calling out the Democrats for their feckless support of the
occupation isn't enough. Opponents of the war face a perfect political
storm in DC that transcends party politics.

The backdrop is a presidential race in which the leading Democrats
appear to be intent on proving that they can match their opponents'
mindless belligerence, and the leading Republicans feel that they have
no choice but to embrace Bush's war or face the wrath of GOP primary
voters.

The debate has also been influenced by a massive propaganda campaign
that's allowed the White House and its backers to claim success in Iraq
out of thin air. As Greg Sargeant pointed out in a must-read item, if
one looks at "the totality of media's performance this summer on the
Iraq debate, it becomes a good deal clearer just how awful it's all
been
-- and just how complicit these failings were in helping to shift the
debate" on the Iraq "surge."

CBS Evening News' anchor Katie Couric said this week of Iraq: "We hear
so much about things going bad, but real progress has been made there
in
terms of security and stability." The contrast between Couric's bubbly
credulity and Walter Cronkite's famous 1968 broadcast in which he
concluded of the Vietnam war that the US was "mired in stalemate"
couldn't be more pronounced.

At the end of the day, Washington's strategic class is frozen, unable
to
concede defeat because to admit that the U.S. project in Iraq has
failed
is to admit that in the 21st century, the most powerful country in the
history of humanity can be humbled by a small dysfunctional state whose
armed forces it destroyed more than a decade earlier, a country that it
spent 12 years slowly and leisurely strangling under some of the
harshest sanctions in history before shocking and awing it a second
time, dismantling its government and hanging its erstwhile dictator in
the process.

To admit that is to beg the question of whether maintaining all that
costly hard power is really worth it in the first place. Leaving Iraq
means begging the question of whether America is comfortable with its
neocolonial policies, and that's a debate that Bush -- like every
imperial-minded U.S. president since Thomas Jefferson -- wants
desperately to avoid.

Ultimately, while Congress is sidelining itself on the most important
issue of our time, it will be the Iraqis -- Iraqis from across the
country's political spectrum -- who will eventually force a U.S.
withdrawal, either by negotiation or by violence, just as they kicked
out the Brits before us and the Turkmen, Ottomans and Salafids before
them. The tragedy is that a little bit of courage on the part of our
own
law-makers could go a long way towards making that inevitable
withdrawal
a lot less painful than it is likely to be.

Joshua Holland is an AlterNet staff writer