So I called the senate ethics committee who told me that it would be very simple to file a complaint. There is no form to fill out, simply a statement of the charges you believe your senator is guilty of.
So I called the secretary of the senate who faxed me a copy of the oath the senators took upon taking office. It reads:
"Do you solemnly swear that you will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that you will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that you take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that you will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which you are about to enter: So help you God?"
It seems to me that if they vote to acquit that these senators have violated their oath in several ways.
I was told that the complainant would receive a letter confirming receipt of the complaint. The staff would do the investigation separate and apart from the 3 democrats and 3 republican who sit on the committee. And they are Chairman Bob Smith of R-NH, Pat Robertson R,
George Voinovich, R-OH. The Democrats are Harry Reid of Nevada, Conrad of ND and Dick Durbin of Illinois.
Next I asked if a complaint for violation of their oath would be a legitimate complaint and they said yes. Next I asked what if the complaint is filed against any of the members on the committee (which they said has never happened) and I was told that they would possibly have to recuse themselves.
And finally I was told that one of the penalties is removal from the senate. Music to my ears.
Well, how about it folks? Shall we?
The address to the Senate Ethics Committee is:
Senate Committee on Ethics
Hart Senate Office Building
Room 220
Washington, DC 20510
Since everything is done in a confidential fashion, the only way for us to find out the progress of our complaint is by calling the committee from time to time but I can live with that. What sayeth ye?
A foreign army general known to have the blood of his countrymen on his hands travels on a diplomatic passport to a democratic country. If the general's name is "Pinochet" and the democratic country is Britain, he is stripped of his diplomatic status, placed under arrest and threatened with extradition into the hands of his accusers.
But what if the general's name is "Zhang" or "Xu" or "Chi"? And what if the blood on their hands comes from Chinese young people? And what if the democratic country they visit is the United States? An entirely different result.
When Gen. Zhang Wannian slipped into Washington in mid-September, the White House was more than a bit uneasy. Although Zhang was the highest ranking People's Liberation Army (PLA) officer ever to visit the United States, the Pentagon refused to provide reporters with his biography; "Classified," they said. China's state-run news agency, Xinhua, ran the Oval Office picture (above) of Gen. Zhang in his green army uniform with President Clinton on the front pages of Chinese and Hong Kong newspapers only. So far as we can discover, no picture of Zhang and Clinton was ever released in the United States.
What was so sensitive about Gen. Zhang's visit? Perhaps the White House did not want the American public to know that another "butcher of Beijing" was getting the royal treatment in Washington. According to the U.S. consulate general in Hong Kong, all PLA military region commanders sent troops to Beijing to participate in the Tiananmen Square massacre of June 3-4, 1989. At the time, Zhang was the commander of the Guangzhou Military Region, and his 15th Airborne Army troops assaulted the square from the south, filling hospitals with dead and wounded. We can well understand why the administration would not want President Clinton's picture with such a man to circulate on this side of the Pacific.
By our count, at least six PLA general officers with substantial responsibility for murdering their own young people have received full military honors here. Most also have had an Oval Office visit. And most of the visits have been outside of public view.
The first post-Tiananmen visitor was Gen. Xu Huizi, deputy chief of staff at the time. According to an American general with direct knowledge of the event, Gen. Xu was in "tactical control" of the PLA troops at the massacre. In effect, he gave the "mount up and move out" order. According to the now declassified account of his August 1994 visit, the Pentagon intended to keep it a secret. If his presence was discovered by the press, they were prepared to say that Xu was just following orders at Tiananmen. They would not have wanted the press to probe into Xu's military career. He fought against United Nations forces in Korea from 1950 onward and is widely known to China specialists for expressing his strongly held anti-American views to U.S. officials in private conversations. Gen. Xu also participated in the PLA's attack on India in 1962 and was the chief of staff of the PLA army thatinvaded northern Vietnam in 1979.
Defense Secretary Chi Haotian, also a Korean War veteran, was another controversial 1996 visitor to Washington. At Tiananmen he was PLA chief of staff and in operational control of the troops. For more than a month, he gathered armored and mechanized infantry forces from all over China, placing them in a noose around Beijing. When the order was given, his troops made a multidivisional assault from all four cardinal points of the compass. By the account of noted China specialist David Aikman, an eyewitness that night, Chi "bears the major responsibility for the violence unleashed upon Beijing citizenry."
Unarmed students and workers had no chance to defend their democracy from such raw power, and they paid with their lives. With their school banners flying, students from Beijing's most prestigious universities blocked one intersection on the road to Tiananmen only to be machine gunned and run over by Chi's armored personnel carriers.
Administration officials knew they could not hide such a high-profile visitor, so they did the next best thing: They timed the visit for a period when Congress was out of session and distributed an official bio on the general without mentioning Tiananmen. This, in turn, led to a public-relations disaster when the press found out and Congress became involved. Finally, Chi didn't help himself by telling a news conference that no one had died at Tiananmen.
Three other 1997 PLA visitors also deserve mention, Gens. Li Jijun, Kui Fulin and Xiong Guangkai. At Tiananmen Gen. Li was in the General Office of the Central Military Commission, in effect Deng Xiaoping's military aide. Gen. Kui was the operations department director and directly involved in the massacre. Xiong, the head of military intelligence at Tiananmen, ran provocation operations against the students. All came to Washington, received full military honors and departed without public notice.
But these visits are noticed in China. Typically, the controlled press spreads accounts of them across the front pages of the newspapers, with color pictures of the generals with the highest-ranking American official possible. The message to Chinese patriots who aspire to a democratic China is unmistakable: "Forget it. The Americans are backing the PLA, not you."
We believe that the administration's program of rehabilitating the Chinese people's oppressors while keeping it secret from the American people represents both a fundamental error of foreign policy and a violation of the public trust. It's time to show that the Law Lord's decision in the Pinochet case has a wider application.
"Education today is not about basics, it's not about proficiency at anything, it's not about literacy," contends Beverly K. Eakman, a former teacher. "What education is about is mental hygiene. As soon as you understand that, everything you see in the classroom -- or everything you don't see -- starts to make sense."
In her book, "The Cloning of the American Mind: Eliminating Morality Through Education," Mrs. Eakman blames an "illiteracy cartel" for replacing academic fundamentals with psychological manipulation in America's schools.
The illiteracy cartel, she says, "derives its power from those who stand to benefit financially and politically from ignorance and educational malpractice."
Using personal information about students and their families, Mrs. Eakman argues, educators are able to "get into the belief systems of the students and correct the viewpoints they find distasteful."
Tests assess how well students respond to these manipulations, she says. Combining this knowledge with schools' ability to determine a child's academic path toward a career -- enhanced by "School-to-Work" legislation --educators can now predicate "children's job prospects on whether or not they hold 'acceptable' viewpoints," Mrs. Eakman said.
She calls this "the holy grail of social engineering."
Mrs. Eakman maintains that a key weapon in the cartel's arsenal is "psychographics," a method defined by one dictionary as "the study of social class based upon the demographics ... income, race, color, religion and personality traits," characteristics that "can be measured to predict behavior."
Used by marketers and advertisers, psychographics "is based on the proposition that all consumer behavior is predictable," Mrs. Eakman says, and she worries that educators -- combining psychographics with behavioral modification methods -- are using schools "to mold future public opinion."
This emphasis on shaping students' opinions and attitudes, she believes, explains why less time in class is spent on academic fundamentals.
Mrs. Eakman, who lives in Kensington, Md., is a District of Columbia native who taught school for nine years in California and Texas. She later wrote speeches for the late Warren Burger, former chief justice of the Supreme Court, and worked for Voice of America.
Her research into the "illiteracy cartel" began at an education conference in 1986, when she met Anita Hoge, a parent from West Alexander, Pa., who had begun investigating an Educational Quality Assessment test given to children in her school district.
That EQA test asked students to respond to such statements as: "The prospect of working most of my adult life depresses me." Mrs. Hoge's requests for more information about the test were stonewalled by local and state education officials.
The tests were "held tighter than the Pentagon Papers," Mrs. Eakman says.
When the tests were finally released, "I looked at this thing, and it was 70 percent personality profile," she recalls. "Then I got hold of the scoring mechanism [which] gave points for a 'minimum positive attitude.' ... The interpretive literature [for the EQA test] spelled out exactly what they were looking for: 'locus of control,' 'willingness to receive stimuli,' 'conform to group goals.'"
This was psychological testing under the guise of "assessment," Mrs. Eakman contends. Because the test had been created by federally funded agencies, Pennsylvania had also violated a 1970 law enacted by Congress that forbids the federal government from exercising "direction, supervision or control over" public schools, including curriculum and "instructional materials."
Mrs. Hoge's battle over the Pennsylvania EQA test and what it revealed about the direction of public education was the subject of Mrs. Eakman's first book, "Educating for the New World Order."
Published in 1991, the book was "a surprise, a sleeper," according to its author, going through five printings and selling more than 30,000 copies. She describes the reaction as "overwhelming," and it prompted her to join with civil rights attorney William Adair Bonner to form the National Education Consortium, which has "started a new field of education law" involving testing and student privacy issues.
While public schools tout the importance of "parental involvement," Mrs. Eakman says, the difficulty parents face in finding out what goes on in the classroom -- as illustrated by the battle over the Pennsylvania EQA tests -- points in a different direction.
"What [schools] really want is for parents -- especially traditional parents -- to be pushed out of the way," she says. "They want to generate a 'Lord of the Flies' mentality, where the kids absorb more of their values from their peers than from their parents."
Her new book traces the origins of this educational philosophy, examining the ideas of social theorists such as Erich Fromm and Theodor Adorno, who viewed the traditional family as a breeding ground for fascist tendencies --what Adorno called "the authoritarian personality."
Believing that schools required new methods to change traditional attitudes, Mrs. Eakman says, activists developed tactics to get approval for new programs. Those tactics were described in a 1974 book, "Training for Change Agents," commissioned by the U.S. Office of Education, the predecessor to the Department of Education, created in 1979.
Mrs. Eakman's new book offers tips on fighting the tactics of "change agents," but she realizes that many parents have given up on the public school system altogether, opting instead for private schools or home schooling.
She says "franchisable private schools" may be part of the solution, but legal changes are necessary to make such schools feasible.
"We need to take the red tape out of starting a private school," Mrs. Eakman says, noting that she attended Maret School in the District. "My little school, Maret, was started with three sisters from Switzerland. You can't do that today."
Because the education establishment is successful in "de-legitimizing" its critics, Mrs. Eakman says, reformers who advocate a return to academic basics have probably "lost the war" for control of public schools.
"We are a resistance movement," she says, "and we'd better start acting like it."
While this is an event sponsored by the MSU Libertarian Party, the main organization of the event is being handled by Jason Van Dyke, a freshman in James Madison College at Michigan State University. Van Dyke wants this to be an event "to educate the students of MSU and the East Lansing community about their right to keep and bear arms." "The object of this event is inform people that anti-gunners are lying to them and that the right to keep and bear arms truly is our most important right today" claims Van Dyke. He is personally optimistic about the event but has run into a few troubles. "We need to find funding for this event", he says, "and we would like a high profile speaker to attract a wider range of students into the audience as our target for attendance is 700 people."
Robb Zimmerman, president of the MSU Libertarians, supports Van Dyke's effort wholeheartedly but is also worried about the financial side of things. "We have a very small amount of money in our account - not nearly enough to fund an event this large." The MSU Libertarians have asked the gun industry for funding but have had no success, a fact which Van Dyke claims he is somewhat offended by. "At this point", Van Dyke says, "we may need to seek fund elsewhere - but this event will be held as long as I have something to say about it."
Letters alleged to contain anthrax were sent to three health clinics in three states on October 30, 1998, CDC officials report in the February 5th issue of the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. Between December 17 and 23 in Los Angeles, California, a private business reported a similar incident, and three telephone threats alleged anthrax contamination of the ventilation systems of government and private buildings.
"Although all the threats alleging use of anthrax described in this report were hoaxes, they demonstrate settings where bioterrorism can occur and the potential public health impact," the authors of the report comment. "Coordination and communication across agencies are necessary to protect the public and first responders."
Anthrax is an infectious disease, the CDC experts note, that is spread through contact, inhalation, or ingestion of bacterial spores. "Inhalation causes the most serious form of human anthrax," according to the report, and "mortality may be high even with appropriate therapy."
The interim guidelines state that bioterrorism falls under the jurisdiction of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). The FBI will collect evidence, and, in the event of a threat alleging anthrax exposure, conduct tests that can identify Bacillus anthracis bacteria within 24 to 48 hours.
"Efforts are under way to assess and enhance the capabilities of state and local health department laboratories to fulfill the need for rapid analysis," CDC officials add.
The FBI recognizes the need to work with medical and public health personnel, according to the guidelines. Public health officials should work with emergency workers to determine the need for chemoprophylaxis, decontamination of personal belongings and postexposure vaccination; to collect contact information; and to inform potentially exposed individuals what to do if they become ill.
The CDC says that it is working with other organizations to develop locality-specific response plans.
"This is the first step towards turning America's teenagers into paid informants for the government," said Steve Dasbach, the party's national director. "Are these really the kinds of values and skills we want to teach our young people?"
Starting this month, students in three high school districts in Portland, Oregon, will be paid up to $1,000 for snitching on fellow students who use drugs or alcohol on school property.
Under the new Crime Stoppers program, students will be given a direct, anonymous hot line to school police.
But Libertarians say the program charts a direct line to a new McCarthyism, where teenagers will live in fear of being turned in -- rightly or wrongly -- to the authorities by anonymous informers eager for a cash reward.
"This turn-in-your-friends-for-cash scheme at Judas Iscariot High School is a stark example of how Drug Prohibition has warped the morals of this nation," said Dasbach. "Instead of treating drug abuse as a medical problem that requires concern and compassion, this program treats drug abuse as an opportunity to earn 30 pieces of silver by ratting on your schoolmates."
There are many reasons Libertarians oppose the $1,000 bounty program, said Dasbach, including...
* It's ripe for abuse. "How many high school grudges will be settled by calling 1-800-BE-A-SNITCH?" asked Dasbach. "How strong will the lure of a $1,000 reward be to a student who suffered from a broken romance -- and wants revenge? For every honest report of drug abuse, how many anonymous calls will be made to settle a score?"
* It will create a climate of fear and distrust. "Programs like this will cause every student to wonder: Who will be turned in next? Betrayal, snitching, and anonymous informants are not the proper recipe for creating school spirit, respect, and trust," he said.
* It will funnel teenagers with drug problems into the criminal justice system instead of the medical system. "Like all Americans, Libertarians are concerned about teenage drug abuse," said Dasbach. "But reporting and arresting a teenager for smoking marijuana isn't a solution -- it's a bigger problem. For a high school student struggling with the challenges of adolescence, putting him in a jail cell and burdening him with a criminal record takes a temporary medical problem and turns it into a lifelong disaster."
* It won't work. "Last week, the American Bar Association's Criminal Justice Section released a study reporting that illicit drug use in America had increased 7% from 1996 to 1997 -- while the number of people arrested on drug charges since 1992 has increased by 73%. If America could arrest its way out of the drug problem, it would have happened by now."
Ironically, reports of the $1,000 high school bounty surfaced at about the same time Vice President Al Gore unveiled the Clinton Administration's new anti-drug policy, and argued that drug abuse is partly a "spiritual problem."
"If Al Gore is correct, and drug abuse is a spiritual problem, we won't solve the problem by devilishly appealing to the worst in people -- and offering cash rewards to turn in your classmates," said Dasbach. "The solution to a spiritual problem is not to turn America into a nation of Soviet-style paid informants."
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