The Jaded Prole

The Corporate State Will Be Broken

2012-01-24T06:57:00.000-05:00

Article by Chris Hedges:

I spent Friday morning sitting on a wooden bench in a fourth-floor courtroom in the New York Criminal Court in Manhattan. I was waiting to be sentenced for “disturbing the peace” and “refusing to obey a lawful order” during an Occupy demonstration in front of Goldman Sachs in November.

Those sentenced before me constituted the usual fare of the court. They were poor people of color accused of mostly petty crimes—drug possession, thefts, shoplifting, trespassing because they were homeless and needed a place to sleep, inappropriate touching, grand larceny and violation of probation. They were escorted out of a backroom by a police officer, stood meekly before the judge with their hands cuffed behind them, were hastily defended by a lawyer clutching a few folders, and were sentenced. Ten days in jail. Sixty days in jail. Six months in jail. A steady stream of convictions. My sentence, by comparison, was slight. I was given an ACD, or “adjournment in contemplation of dismissal,” which means that if I am not arrested in the next six months my case is dismissed. If I am arrested during this period of informal probation the old charge will be added to the new one before I am sentenced.

The country’s most egregious criminals, the ones who had stripped some of those being sentenced of their homes, their right to a decent education and health care, their jobs, their dignity and their hope, those wallowing in tens and hundreds of millions of dollars, those who had gamed the system to enrich themselves at our expense, were doing the dirty business of speculation in the tall office towers a few blocks away. They were making money. A few of these wealthy plutocrats were with the president, who was in New York that day to attend four fundraisers that took in an estimated $3 million. For $15,000 you could have joined Barack Obama at Daniel, an exclusive Upper East Side restaurant. For $35,000 you could have been at a gathering hosted by movie director Spike Lee. Most of those sentenced in that courtroom do not make that much in a year. It was a good day in New York for Barack Obama. It was a bad day for us.

Our electoral system, already hostage to corporate money and corporate lobbyists, gasped its last two years ago. It died on Jan. 21, 2010, when the Supreme Court in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission granted to corporations the right to spend unlimited amounts on independent political campaigns. The ruling turned politicians into corporate employees. If any politician steps out of line, dares to defy corporate demands, this ruling hands to our corporate overlords the ability to pump massive amounts of anonymous money into campaigns to make sure the wayward are defeated and silenced. Politicians like Obama are hostages. They jump when corporations say jump. They beg when corporations say beg. They hand corporations exemptions, subsidies, trillions in taxpayer money, no-bid contracts and massive loans with virtually no interest, and they abolish any regulations that impede profits and protect the citizen. Corporations like Goldman Sachs, because they own the system, are bailed out by federal dollars and given essentially free government loans to gamble. I am not sure what to call our economic system, but it is not capitalism. And if any elected official so much as murmurs anything that sounds like dissent, the Supreme Court ruling permits corporations to destroy him or her. And they do.

Turn off your televisions. Ignore the Newt-Mitt-Rick-Barack reality show. It is as relevant to your life as the gossip on “Jersey Shore.” The real debate, the debate raised by the Occupy movement about inequality, corporate malfeasance, the destruction of the ecosystem, and the security and surveillance state, is the only debate that matters. You won’t hear it on the corporate-owned airwaves and cable networks, including MSNBC, which has become to the Democratic Party what Fox News is to the lunatic fringe of the Republican Party. You won’t hear it on NPR or PBS. You won’t read about it in our major newspapers. The issues that matter are being debated, however, on “Democracy Now!,” Link TV, The Real News, Occupy websites and Revolution Truth. They are being raised by journalists such as Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi. You can find genuine ideas in corners of the Internet or in books by political philosophers such as Sheldon Wolin. But you have to go looking for them.

Voting will not alter the corporate systems of power. Voting is an act of political theater. Voting in the United States is as futile and sterile as in the elections I covered as a reporter in dictatorships like Syria, Iran and Iraq. There were always opposition candidates offered up by these dictatorships. Give the people the illusion of choice. Throw up the pretense of debate. Let the power elite hold public celebrations to exalt the triumph of popular will. We can vote for Romney or Obama, but Goldman Sachs and ExxonMobil and Bank of America and the defense contractors always win. There is little difference between our electoral charade and the ones endured by the Syrians and Iranians. Do we really believe that Obama has, or ever had, any intention to change the culture in Washington?

In this year’s presidential election I will vote for a third-party candidate, either the Green Party candidate or Rocky Anderson, assuming one of them makes it onto the ballot in New Jersey, but voting is nothing more than a brief chance to register our disgust with the corporate state. It will not alter the configurations of power. The campaign is not worth our emotional, physical or intellectual energy.

Our efforts must be directed toward acts of civil disobedience, to chipping away, through nonviolent protest, at the pillars of established, corporate power. The corporate state is so unfair, so corrupt and so rotten that the institutions tasked with holding it up—the police, the press, the banking system, the civil service and the judiciary—have become vulnerable. It is becoming harder and harder for the corporations to convince its foot soldiers to hold the system in place.

I sat a few days ago in a small Middle Eastern restaurant in Washington, D.C., with Kevin Zeese, one of the activists who first called for the Occupy movements. Zeese and others, including public health care advocate Dr. Margaret Flowers, set up the Occupy encampment on Freedom Plaza in Washington, D.C. They got a four-day permit last fall and used the time to create an infrastructure—a medic tent, a kitchen, a legal station and a press center—that would be there if the permit was not extended. The National Park Service did grant them an extended permit, and Freedom Plaza is one of the encampments that has not been shut down.

“We do have a grand strategy,” he said. “Nonviolent movements shift power by attacking the columns that hold the power structure in place. Those columns are the military, police, media, business, workers, youth, faith groups, NGOs and civil servants. Every time we deal with the police, we have that in mind. The goal is not to hit them, hit them, hit them and weaken them. The goal is to pull people from those columns to our side. We want the police to know that we understand they’re not the 1 percent. The goal is not to get every police officer, but to get enough police so that you have a division.”

“We do this with civil servants,” he went on. “We do whistle-blower events. We go to different federal agencies with protesters blowing whistles and usually with an actual whistle-blower. We hand out literature to the civil servants about how to blow the whistle safely, where they can get help if they do, why they should do it. We also try to get civil servants by pulling them to our side.”

“One of the beautiful things about this security state is that they always know we’re coming,” he said. “It’s never a secret. We don’t do anything as a secret. The EPA, for example, sent out a security notice to all of its employees—advertising for us [by warning employees about a coming protest]. So you get the word out.”

“Individuals become the media,” he said. “An iPhone becomes a live-stream TV. The social network becomes a media outlet. If a hundred of us work together and use our social networks for the same message we can reach as many people as the second-largest newspapers in town, The Washington Examiner or The Washington Times. If a thousand of us do, we can meet the circulation of The Washington Post. We can certainly reach the circulation of most cable news TV shows. The key is to recognize this power and weaken the media structure.”

“We started an Occupy house in Mount Rainier in Maryland,” Zeese said. “Its focus is Occupy the Economy. This is the U.N.’s year of the co-op. We want to build on that. We want to start worker-owned co-ops and occupy our own co-ops. These co-ops will allow Occupiers to have resources so that they can continue occupying. It will allow them to get resources for the community. It will be an example to the public, a public where a high percentage of people are underemployed and unemployed although they have a lot of skills. People can band together in their community and solve a problem in the community. They can create a worker-owned collaborative of some kind. They can develop models of collective living.”

“We looked at polling on seven key issues and found supermajorities of Americans—60-plus percent—were with us on issues including health care, retirement, energy, money in politics,” he said. “We are more mainstream than Congress. We aren’t crazy radicals. We are trying to do what the people want. This is participatory democracy versus oligarchy. It’s the elites versus the people. We stand with the majority.”

The Washington encampment, like many Occupy encampments, has had to deal with those the wider society has discarded—the homeless, the mentally ill, the destitute and those whose lives have been devastated by substance abuse. This created a huge burden for the organizers, who decided that they were not equipped or able to deal with these wider, societal problems. The encampment in Washington’s Freedom Plaza enforces strict rules of behavior, including an insistence on sobriety, in order to endure through the winter and ensure its own survival. Other Occupy movements will have to do the same.

“We don’t want to become a soup kitchen or a homeless shelter,” Zeese said. “We’re a political movement. These are problems beyond our ability. How do we deal with this? Let’s feed the Occupiers first, and those who are just squatting here for free get food last, so if we have enough food, we feed them. If we don’t, we can’t. We always fed people, of course. We usually have enough peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for everyone. But as we debated this issue, we stated talking about things like ‘how about a Freedom Plaza badge, or a Freedom Plaza wristband, or a Freedom Plaza card.’ None of those ideas were passed. What we ended up developing was a set of principles. Those principles included in them participation. You can’t be there because you want a [tent] or free food. You have to be there to build the community and the movement. You have to participate in the general assemblies.”

“The first principles, of course, were nonviolence and non-property destruction,” he said. “We don’t accept violent language. When you’re violent you undermine everything. If the protesters in [Manhattan’s] Union Square, who were pepper-sprayed, had been throwing something at the police, you would not have had the movement. It was because they were nonviolent and didn’t react when they were being pepper-sprayed that the movement grew. At UC Davis, when those cops just walked down the line and sprayed, the nonviolent reaction by those kids was fantastic.”

“We constantly kept hearing in the beginning what are our demands, what are our demands, is our demand to meet with Obama?” Zeese said. “We said: ‘Oh no, that would just be a waste. If we meet with Obama he’ll just get a picture opportunity out of that. We won’t get anything.’ You don’t make demands until you have power. If you make demands too soon, you don’t demand enough and you can’t enforce the demand that you get. So if you get promised an election, you can’t enforce that the ballots are counted right, for example. We realized late into our discussions—we had six months of planning, so four months into it—‘we don’t have the power to make a demand.’ That was very hard for a lot of our people to accept.”

“Instead of making demands, we put up what we stood for, what principles we wanted to see,” he said. “The overarching demand was end corporate rule, shift power to the people. Once you make that as your demand, as your pinnacle, you can pick any issue—energy, health care, elections—and the solution becomes evident. For health care it’s get the insurance companies out from between doctors and patients; on finance it’s break up the big banks so that six banks don’t control 60 percent of the economy and break them up into community banks so that the money stays at home rather than going to Wall Street; energy is to diversify energy sources so people can build and have their own energy on their roof and become energy producers. The overarching goal was: End corporate rule, shift power to the people. We developed a slogan: ‘Human needs before corporate greed.’ After that, everything fell into place for us.”

When the congressional super committee was meeting, the Occupy Washington movement formed its own super committee. The Occupy Super Committee, which managed get its hearing aired on CSPAN, included experts on the wealth divide, fair taxation, the military budget, job creation, health care and democratizing the economy as well as giving voice to the 99 percent. “The 99%’s Deficit Proposal: How to create jobs, reduce the wealth divide and control spending” resulted from the Occupy hearing. The report made evidence-based recommendations Zeese knew would not be considered by the Congress, but he saw it as foundational for the movement.

“History shows the demands made by those in revolt are never initially considered by government,” he said. “Our job is to make the politically impossible the politically inevitable.”

I do not know how long it will take to dethrone the corporate state, but I do know it is a dead and terminal system of power. As the global economy deteriorates and climate change causes greater disruptions, these corporations will be increasingly discredited. I know the iron grip of corporations over our lives will, eventually, be broken. The corporate state will, like all wounded animals, lash out with a blind fury, which is why I suspect we have been given the National Defense Authorization Act, which permits the military to arrest and hold U.S. citizens without due process. It will increase pressure to become crueler and more callous at the base of the columns it depends on for survival. And eventually it will break. No one knows how long this will take. It could be months, years, maybe even a decade, although the massive assault by the fossil fuel industry on the ecosystem will probably force a popular response sooner than we expect. The only question is how much damage these corporations will be permitted to inflict.

I attended a rally Friday night in Foley Square, a few blocks from the criminal court where I had spent the morning. It was part of the Occupy the Courts event held across the nation to protest America’s corporate coup and the Supreme Court ruling in the Citizens United case. It was cold and blustery. Snow was on the way. Many in the crowd of a couple of hundred were visibly chilled. I spoke about the movement. I spoke about the lawsuit I have brought against Barack Obama and the secretary of defense to challenge the National Defense Authorization Act. I spoke about the inevitability of the Occupy movement.

I realized, afterward, I had forgotten to say what was most important. I forgot to say thank you. Thank you for standing up to corporate power on a cold winter’s night. Thank you for making hope visible. You must never underestimate your power. I was sentenced in the day. I was exonerated in the night.

The Bidding of the Many, Not the Few

2011-11-14T06:47:00.003-05:00

APEC, Gets Occupied and Serenaded

Performing at what was probably the most secure place on the planet - an APEC dinner attended by President Obama and about 20 world leaders - Hawaiian musician Makana opened his suit jacket to reveal an “Occupy with Aloha” T-shirt and then spent 45 minutes repeatedly singing his terrific, newly released protest song, "We Are the Many." Makana's action was assisted by the Yes Lab and Occupy the Boardroom.

“We'll occupy the streets, we'll occupy the courts, we'll occupy the offices of you, till you do the bidding of the many, not the few.”

No Turning Back!

2011-11-02T05:56:00.001-04:00

From Oakland to Richmond, from Austin to Denver, we're not going away.

Michael Moore Speaks at Occupy Oakland, October 28, 2011 from John Hamilton on Vimeo.

The Occupation Goes Global

2011-10-15T09:28:00.004-04:00

I've been on the street daily with the local Occupation but today it goes global. This burgeoning movement of the dispossessed majority is reaching critical mass. Though still in it's infancy, activists are learning from each other, the young from the old, the old from the young. This is an awakening to the reality of capitalism as a failing system and that awakening is reflected beyond the growing number of activists by a 53% public approval rating.

In support of this effort, Partisan Press T's, has a new T-shirt -- proceeds will support the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Who are the 99%?

2011-10-05T08:56:00.007-04:00

We are, we are beyond anger, and we're taking it to the streets!
Believe me, my story would echo the rest. Though I manage a not-for-profit-press it is truly non-profit. I lost my last job over three years ago and with it my insurance, I'm over 55 and have a hernia that limits what I can do. Meanwhile the economy is comatose, jobs are disappearing and increasingly degrading and low-wage and the richest are getting richer by the day. Our country has been taken over by a venal corporate oligarchy and is headed toward fascism. In short, capitalism is killing us. It's run it's bloody course and has nothing left to offer but distopian feudalism and death -- on a global scale. Join the occupations, the time has come to crush the beast!

Declaration of the Occupation of New York City

2011-10-05T08:30:00.003-04:00

What follows is the first official, collective statement of the protesters in Zuccotti Park:

As we gather together in solidarity to express a feeling of mass injustice, we must not lose sight of what brought us together. We write so that all people who feel wronged by the corporate forces of the world can know that we are your allies.

As one people, united, we acknowledge the reality: that the future of the human race requires the cooperation of its members; that our system must protect our rights, and upon corruption of that system, it is up to the individuals to protect their own rights, and those of their neighbors; that a democratic government derives its just power from the people, but corporations do not seek consent to extract wealth from the people and the Earth; and that no true democracy is attainable when the process is determined by economic power. We come to you at a time when corporations, which place profit over people, self-interest over justice, and oppression over equality, run our governments. We have peaceably assembled here, as is our right, to let these facts be known.

* They have taken our houses through an illegal foreclosure process, despite not having the original mortgage.
* They have taken bailouts from taxpayers with impunity, and continue to give Executives exorbitant bonuses.
* They have perpetuated inequality and discrimination in the workplace based on age, the color of one's skin, sex, gender identity and sexual orientation.
* They have poisoned the food supply through negligence, and undermined the farming system through monopolization.
* They have profited off of the torture, confinement, and cruel treatment of countless animals, and actively hide these practices.
* They have continuously sought to strip employees of the right to negotiate for better pay and safer working conditions.
* They have held students hostage with tens of thousands of dollars of debt on education, which is itself a human right.
* They have consistently outsourced labor and used that outsourcing as leverage to cut workers’ healthcare and pay.
* They have influenced the courts to achieve the same rights as people, with none of the culpability or responsibility.
* They have spent millions of dollars on legal teams that look for ways to get them out of contracts in regards to health insurance.
* They have sold our privacy as a commodity.
* They have used the military and police force to prevent freedom of the press.
* They have deliberately declined to recall faulty products endangering lives in pursuit of profit.
* They determine economic policy, despite the catastrophic failures their policies have produced and continue to produce.
* They have donated large sums of money to politicians, who are responsible for regulating them.
* They continue to block alternate forms of energy to keep us dependent on oil.
* They continue to block generic forms of medicine that could save people’s lives or provide relief in order to protect investments that have already turned a substantial profit.
* They have purposely covered up oil spills, accidents, faulty bookkeeping, and inactive ingredients in pursuit of profit.
* They purposefully keep people misinformed and fearful through their control of the media.
* They have accepted private contracts to murder prisoners even when presented with serious doubts about their guilt.
* They have perpetuated colonialism at home and abroad.
* They have participated in the torture and murder of innocent civilians overseas.
* They continue to create weapons of mass destruction in order to receive government contracts.*

To the people of the world, We, the New York City General Assembly occupying Wall Street in Liberty Square, urge you to assert your power.

Exercise your right to peaceably assemble; occupy public space; create a process to address the problems we face, and generate solutions accessible to everyone.

To all communities that take action and form groups in the spirit of direct democracy, we offer support, documentation, and all of the resources at our disposal.

Join us and make your voices heard!

NationofChange has been an unfiltered media resource for the Occupy Wall Street movement even while the mainstream media has ignored, censored, and undermined the progress of the people.

Rather than delivering consumers to advertisers NationofChange works tirelessly to deliver people to one another.

Make a secure, tax-deductible donation to NationofChange today, and help sustain this vital service to the community.

Other Ways to Give

Donate by Phone: Give us a call at 1-800-803-6045

Donate by Mail: Send a check to: 6319 Dante Ln NW, Albuquerque, NM 87114

Donate by PayPal:

Make a Legacy Donation: Click here to contact us regarding legacy gifts.

Occupations Spreading

2011-10-01T06:59:00.004-04:00

Organize an occupation in your area and link up. We are the 99%. We know we've been had by a corrupt economic system and its time to act in our own class interests. It's time to dis-empower the corporate oligarchy and to build a better world that puts the common good first.

News from the Front Lines

2011-09-30T08:56:00.001-04:00

Keep up with events posted by folks occupying Wall Street here.

Wall Street Uprising Continues

2011-09-29T06:21:00.007-04:00

This could be just the beginning as another occupation is scheduled for D.C.. Aside from a blackout by the bourgeois press, there has been violent police response, yet the movement is growing as people have had enough of the corporatist idiocy amidst the failure and continuing collapse of capitalism.

Watch live streaming video from globalrevolution at livestream.com

Below is Michael Moore's timely analysis.

The bottom line is that important as these actions are, they alone will not be enough. They must be the foundation of a newly organized movement to take our country back from the brink of collapse, stop the rise of fascist corporate feudalism and advance the struggle for working class democracy in a post-capitalist world.

Beyond Caveman Politics, where do we go from here?

2011-07-17T09:22:00.008-04:00

As Obama continues to cave, even preemptively, to the extreme right, threatening the old and infirm with cuts to Social Security benefits and Medicare we as progressive find ourselves at a juncture. In an article on Truthdig Fred Branfman writes:
McCain as president would clearly have produced a long string of catastrophes: He would probably have approved a failed troop surge in Afghanistan, engaged in worldwide extrajudicial assassination, destabilized nuclear-armed Pakistan, failed to bring Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu to the negotiating table, expanded prosecution of whistle-blowers, sought to expand executive branch power, failed to close Guantanamo, failed to act on climate change, pushed both nuclear energy and opened new areas to domestic oil drilling, failed to reform the financial sector enough to prevent another financial catastrophe, supported an extension of the Bush tax cuts for the rich, presided over a growing divide between rich and poor, and failed to lower the jobless rate.

Nothing reveals the true state of American politics today more, however, than the fact that Democratic President Barack Obama has undertaken all of these actions and, even more significantly, left the Democratic Party far weaker than it would have been had McCain been elected.

My own feeling is that had McCain been selected we would have a stronger, more united movement but apparently Wall Street felt their investments were safer with Obama.
So where do we, as anti-corporatist progressives go from here?

Some are trapped in the self-defeating, failed tactic of "fighting the ultra-right" by supporting the Dems no matter what, but experience shows that supporting the center right against the hard right gets us nowhere. The best way to defeat the ultra-right is to actively present a rational left alternative, to go to the root of issues from a class perspective and to build an anti-corporatist movement.

Some want to withdraw from the electoral process and from mainstream politics but that is a naive position. For all its flaws and class oppression, the government we have exists and its decisions affect our lives. We really have no choice but to be engaged, especially as state and local levels.

Some want to build alternative parties and run progressive alternatives for high office. Though this is rife with obstacles in the stacked shell game that passes for elections, it is of great value if for no other reasons than it enlarges the public conversation and it gives us a voice and some bargaining power. Without alternatives, we have absolutely no voice. The hardest part is building unified support for anybody (or anything for that matter) on the left -- especially candidates that are not Dems even while they cut our throats.

In the larger picture, we have to realize that the capitalist system has metastasized to an international dictatorship of multi-national corporate boards to which nations are subservient. As this system cannot address the pressing reality of climate change in any way that curbs or adapts to it, the system itself is terminally ill and has nothing left to offer humanity but destruction, war and death on a level not seen in millions of years. Though we must struggle to seize the reins from the big money interests that threaten our ability to survive, we must also continue to build self-sustaining communities with mutual ties which are the basis for the future of authentic civilization -- a more egalitarian bottom up, socialist order which places life and the common good above all else.

How Libby, Montana, Got Medicare for All

2011-06-24T08:58:00.001-04:00

In 2009 when the Washington beltway was tied up with the health care reform tussle, Montana Democratic Senator Max Baucus, chairman of the all-powerful Senate Finance Committee, said everything was on the table--except for single payer.

When doctors, nurses and others rose in his hearing to insist that single payer be included in the debate, Baucus had them arrested. As more stood up, Baucus could be heard on his open microphone saying, “We need more police.”

Yet when Senator Baucus needed a solution to a catastrophic health disaster in Libby, Montana, and surrounding Lincoln County, he turned to the nation’s single payer healthcare system, Medicare, to solve the problem.

Baucus’ problem was caused by a vermiculite mine that had spread deadly airborne asbestos killing hundreds and sickening thousands in Libby and northwest Montana. The W. R. Grace Company that owned the mine denied its connection to the massive levels of mesothelioma and asbestosis and dodged responsibility for this environmental and health disaster. When all law suits and legal avenues failed, Baucus turned to our country’s single payer plan, Medicare.

The single payer plan that Baucus kept off the table is now very much on the table in Libby. Unknown to most of the public, Baucus inserted a section into the health reform bill that covers the suffering people of Libby, Montana, not just the former miners but the whole community—all covered by Medicare.

They don’t have to be 65 years old or more.
They don’t have to wait until 2014 for the state exchanges.
No ten year roll out—it’s immediate.
They don’t have to purchase a plan—this is not a buy-in to Medicare—it’s free.
They don’t have to be disabled for two years before they apply.
They don’t have to go without care for three years until Medicaid expands.
They don’t have to meet income tests.
They don’t have to apply for a subsidy.
They don’t have to pay a fine for failure to buy insurance.
They don’t have to hope that the market will make a plan affordable.
They don’t have to hide their pre-existing conditions.
They don’t have to find a job that provides coverage.

Baucus inserted a clause in the Affordable Care Act to make special arrangements for them in Medicare, and he didn’t wait for any Congressional Budget Office scoring to do it.

Less than two months after the passage of the health reform bill on March 23, 2010, Nancy Berryhill of the Social Security Administration in Denver joined personally in setting up an office in Libby to sign up these newly eligible people. “This is a new thing,” Berryhill told the Missoulian. “No other group like this has ever been selected to receive Medicare.”

Berryhill issued a nationwide alert to inform anyone who had lived or stayed in Lincoln County of their eligibility. She opened a storefront in Libby at the old downtown city hall where she signed up 60 people on the first day. She plastered the towns of Whitefish and Eureka with pamphlets explaining the program and added three new staffers to the office in Kalispell.

Berryhill said she did not know how much the care would cost. That kind of analysis was beyond her directive to sign the people up. There have been no reports of competition from the private for-profit Medicare Advantage plans. The sick are not profitable.

No one should begrudge the people of Lincoln County. The mine wastes were used as soil additives, home insulation, and even spread on the running tracks at local schools. Miners brought the carcinogens home on their clothes. The W. R. Grace Company dumped much of the cleanup costs onto the federal government. A June 17, 2009, order by the Environmental Protection Agency, the first of its kind, declared Lincoln County a public health disaster. The Libby Medicare provision in the health reform law is based on the area covered by that EPA order.

Baucus gave his reasons to the New York Times for its only story on this unique benefit: “The People of Libby have been poisoned and have been dying for a decade. New residents continue to get sick all the time.Public health tragedies like this could happen in any town in America. We need this type of mechanism to help people when they need it most.”

Health tragedies are happening in every town. Over 51 million have no insurance. Over 45,000 uninsured people die needlessly each year.

Employers are cutting coverage and dropping plans. States in economic crisis are slashing both Medicaid and their employees’ plans. Nothing in last year’s reform law will mitigate the skyrocketing costs. Most insurance is threadbare and doesn’t cover. More than 50% of us now go without necessary care. As Baucus said of Medicare, “We need this mechanism to help people when they need it most.” We all need it now.

Bill Clinton recently stated that the U. S. could give coverage to all for one trillion dollars a year less than we now pay if we adopted the system of any other advanced nation. (Unfortunately, he did not say this when it would have mattered most during the 1993 and 2009 health care reform debates.)

Other industrialized countries have found that to cover everyone for less they must remove the profit-making insurance companies. Congressman John Conyers has reintroduced HR 676, the Expanded and Improved Medicare for All Act, which does exactly that. There are 60 cosponsors. It would cover all medically necessary care for everyone including dental and drugs by cutting out the 30% waste and profits caused by the private insurers.

So as the Ryan Republicans try to destroy Medicare and far too many Democrats use the deficit excuse to suggest cuts in its benefits, let us counter with the Libby prescription to clean up the whole mess. Only a single payer, improved Medicare for All, can save and protect Medicare, rein in the costs, and give us universal coverage.

Medicare will celebrate its 46th birthday on July 30, 2011, and all are invited to join in the festivities. Medicare was passed in 1965 and implemented within less than a year. When we pass HR 676, this single payer bill, we can all be enrolled in the twinkling of an eye.

Written by Kay Tillow

Israel Myths Exposed

2011-06-08T06:49:00.008-04:00

Miko Peled, author of "General's Son, and Israeli peace activist exposes the 3 myths of Israeli history. Peled represents and speaks for the best of the Jewish people in speaking the truth, calling for justice, and condemning the cancer that is Zionism.

Roadmap

For any Jew,
for any of us honest enough
to admit it
Israel is our dream
turned to nightmare

I remember as a child
the dream trees planted
in a desert made lush
That dreamland of the imagination
where all were Jews
in the absence of
the taunting hatreds
and stones thrown with
the stinging recriminations
I knew too well

A dreamland of traditions
where only wisdom and love
would fill the air
where justice walked with mercy
where we could all be
free to live
and heal

A beautiful dream that,
if somewhat misguided,
ran aground on the
stony shore of reality

For any Jew
honest enough to
see clearly
and admit it
Israel
has become our
ultimate nightmare

A place of hatreds
and thrown stones
of epithets and oppression
our own hands turning
to monsters
the poison of nationalism
and hubris that stalked us
for a millennium of bloody nights
we now claim as our own

Justice and mercy
discarded,
who have we become?

How many mikvahs
will cleanse us now?
Can we ever heal and become
who we were who

we should be?
How long must we
wander bent
in rent rags
and ashes How long
a shiva
for each vile act?
for each murder?

How can we begin
to heal what we have
injured lest
the seeds of hate planted
in that desert
bloom into a future
that will entangle us
for generations

Where do we begin
or is it
already
too late?

-- Al Markowitz

Revolution Awakens Spain

2011-06-03T07:15:00.003-04:00

By CONCHA MATEOS

Madrid.

Something that looked impossible is happening.

Not a miracle: there is no God acting, no divine intervention. Only human will and the crowd.

Thousands of people were there, with the same ideas, the same objectives, the same desire for change. They lived in different places and cities and countries, but they were in reality at the same Puerta del Sol, although none of them did know.

One day of May 2011 they happened to gather together driven by the same and only cause.

Have you ever taken a decision together with thousands of people in which each person’s opinion is heard and treated equally?

Thousands of people were there, in the same ideas, in the same objectives, in the same need of changes, in the same Puerta del Sol, but they didn´t know it. The unknowed companions have meet together. Have you ever taken a decision with thousands of people considering them all the same?

The square, whatever square, has become a school in democracy – pure, radical, real, and effective democracy. (Democracia real ya – real democracy now – is the name of one of the groups making up the movement.) While corporations try everyday to captivate audiences sat in front of the TV, swallowing garbage TV entertainments, the protest is in the form of an acampada (camp) in the squares. There you have people listening to each other sitting on the ground taking and sharing the floor. The sun assembly shines every night at Puerta del Sol.

We build agreement where politicians want rivalry. We look for solutions where politicians want oppression. We don’t fight: we resist, we protest creatively. Consent, participation, respect (for one another, for animals, for the environment), dialogue are our methodology. We raise our hands and shout: these are our weapons. And work hard and patiently to reach agreement.

After thousands of years of human civilization, one system of production has appeared in the last period and managed to oppress more people and destroy more resources than ever before.

Beyond its plastic face, capitalism has brought ruin to the way of life of millions of human beings, as well as those regarded as sub- human, the immigrants trying to survive within the sub-democracy, without rights, a place to live or the entitlement to vote, living on a pittance, a dishonor for them but a cause of shame for the rest of us.

The welfare state is being destroyed, huge areas of the planet are condemned never to become part of it.

Another system is possible. Stop lying with your corporate media.

This Spanish revolution is a revolution because people have been changed in the process. That is the first and the main step forward in any protest, the transformation it brings about within the individual.

We were angry at the beginning. Capitalism has wasted four centuries spreading out reasons for the protest, barriers we have climb over to get a job, to get a house, to get an education, to get healthcare, to win political, social and cultural rights, real rights, to defend our dignity.

Corruption, privilege, politicians paid by corporations to manipulate the economic system, putty in corporate hands, TV entertainment offered us instead of participation. Capitalism planted the seeds of the anger of the indignados. But outrage is not our goal. We are not doing this to remain angry.

The indignation we felt was identified a long time ago. But who were “we”? Nobody knew. But we do now. We discovered this “we” in Puerta del Sol on 15th May, 15th, we discovered that our indignation is wide spread, we are thousands of people, a booming process of collective conscience.

A new political subject has emerged. We are the first to be transformed. That is because this is a revolution.

We have rescued that word from TV and cultural theory. We are giving back its meaning to the people, ordinary people throughout Madrid’s various neighborhoods made their voices heard in meetings held last Saturday (May 28). Hundreds of local assemblies held throughout Spain, with women, men, mothers, grandfathers, students, professors, workers, immigrants, real people living a real democracy taking shape in their local areas for the first time in their lives.

Indignation became joy. And now that joy is seeing us through to organizing.

Anger plus joy produces strength. Strength plus organization is the start of structural change.

Yes, we camp. We have camped and we will camp into the future.

The Puerta del Sol camp is not going to fade away; it is going to explode, to set up camp deep in the thinking of people. No police force or government can remove it from the mind of the new political subject that has burst onto the stage shouting Democracia real ya.

Remove the current electoral system, get rid of the economic privileges the political class has allowed itself, make the corporations responsible for the crisis pay for the crisis, stop the economic reforms dictated by international economic power, and let our reason govern our world, not the capitalist reason. Claim, support and defend all this through democratic meetings, horizontally, and peacefully. It is happening, and it is not a miracle. It is something more powerful, a lot of people have experienced the pleasure of recovering the political sense of our lives. Debate and decide in assembly.

We held two general assemblies yesterday, May 29. The assembly of local committees in the morning and the general one at night, lasting more than four hours each. The need and the plan and the dream of restructuring the camp at Puerta del Sol, a camp that is a symbol and reference point for so many people. We connected live with companions in Athens and Paris. We condemned the police actions against them.

Have you ever taken a decision with thousands of people in a public square? Have you ever experienced the energy of that collective will and responsibility?

It is hard work. To turn anger into joy, and joy into agreement for action. Truly hard labor, but the only one that can give us back our dignity.

Concha Mateos has a Ph D. in Social Communication and is on the faculty at one public university in Madrid.

Gil Scott Heron

2011-05-28T09:43:00.001-04:00

Burgeoning Police State Exposed

2011-05-26T07:57:00.004-04:00

When the right bloviates about "big government" they mean the social safety net, education, business regulation, labor law and environmental protection. They continually attack Medicare and Social Security as wasteful and use the therm "nanny state" to describe everything they hate about civilization. But the fastest growing, most intrusive and expensive sector is never mentioned.

Since the tragedy of 2001, used cynically as a Reichstag Fire to implement preplanned campaigns of invasion and occupation and a police state we have seen the steady growth of domestic spying. Though the occupations show signs of winding down, albeit very slowly, the police state and its apparatus continues to grow into a Kafkaesque nightmare of wiretaps, renditions and secretive NSA organizations too numerous to list.

In a recent article, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) exposes the reality of a metastasizing "Patriot act" saying,"You may think you understand how the Patriot Act allows the government to spy on its citizens, it’s worse than you’ve heard. "
Congress is set to reauthorize three controversial provisions of the surveillance law as early as Thursday. But Wyden says that what Congress will renew is a mere fig leaf for a far broader legal interpretation of the Patriot Act that the government keeps to itself — entirely in secret. Worse, there are hints that the government uses this secret interpretation to gather what one Patriot-watcher calls a “dragnet” for massive amounts of information on private citizens; the government portrays its data-collection efforts much differently.
“We’re getting to a gap between what the public thinks the law says and what the American government secretly thinks the law says,” Wyden tells Danger Room in an interview in his Senate office. “When you’ve got that kind of a gap, you’re going to have a problem on your hands.”

Read more here.

Imperialism and the Murder of Bin Laden

2011-05-19T08:55:00.002-04:00

Chris Hedges breaks it down better than most. I think his final synopsis that we must build self sustaining communities for our own survival is on the mark.

More GRITtv

El Baradei: Bush Administration are War Criminals

2011-04-23T09:14:00.004-04:00

Though our present administration refuses to investigate or press charges against Cheney, Bush, Addington, Rumsfeld or others for crimes against humanity, war crimes or crimes against the state (lying to Congress . . . ) it seems Mohamed El Baradei is using his respected, knowledgeable and influential voice to do so. It is a step toward international condemnation and charges being brought. Hopefully the World Court in the Hague will charge and subpoena Bush and others for their crimes. The precedent must be set that premeditated mass murder is not an option for our elected leaders and that U.S. exceptionalism is not recognized or legitimate. That the U.S. is also bound by international law.

(AP)NEW YORK — Former chief U.N. nuclear inspector Mohamed ElBaradei suggests in a new memoir that Bush administration officials should face international criminal investigation for the "shame of a needless war" in Iraq.

Freer to speak now than he was as an international civil servant, the Nobel-winning Egyptian accuses U.S. leaders of "grotesque distortion" in the run-up to the 2003 Iraq invasion. Then-President George W. Bush and his lieutenants said Iraq possessed doomsday weapons despite contrary evidence collected by ElBaradei's and other arms inspectors inside the country.

The Iraq war taught him that "deliberate deception was not limited to small countries ruled by ruthless dictators," ElBaradei writes in "The Age of Deception," being published Tuesday by Henry Holt and Co.

The 68-year-old legal scholar, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency from 1997 to 2009, and recently a rallying figure in Egypt's revolution, concludes his 321-page account of two decades of "tedious, wrenching" nuclear diplomacy with a plea for more of it, particularly in the efforts to rein in North Korean and Iranian nuclear ambitions.

"All parties must come to the negotiating table," writes ElBaradei, who won the Nobel Peace Prize jointly with the IAEA in 2005. He chides Washington for reluctant or hardline approaches to negotiations with Tehran and Pyong yang.

He is harshest in addressing the Bush administration's 2002-03 drive for war with Iraq, when ElBaradei and Hans Blix led teams of U.N. inspectors looking for signs that Saddam Hussein's government had revived nuclear, chemical or biological weapons programs.

He tells of an October 2002 meeting he and Blix had with Secretary of State Colin Powell, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice and others, at which the Americans sought to convert the U.N. mission into a "cover for what would be, in essence, a United States-directed inspection process."

The U.N. officials resisted, and their teams went on to conduct about 700 inspections of scores of potential weapons sites in Iraq, finding no evidence to support the U.S. claims of weapons of mass destruction.

In his own memoir, published in November, Bush still insisted it was right to invade to remove a "homicidal dictator pursuing WMD."

The former president also wrote of a "sickening feeling" when no arms turned up after the invasion, and blamed an "intelligence failure" for the baseless claim, a reference to a 2002 U.S. intelligence assessment contending WMD were being built.

ElBaradei cites examples, including the conclusion by his inspectors inside Iraq that certain aluminum tubes were designed for artillery rockets, not for uranium enrichment equipment to build nuclear bombs, as Washington asserted.

"I was aghast at what I was witnessing," ElBaradei writes of the official U.S. attitude before the March 2003 invasion, which he calls "aggression where there was no imminent threat," a war in which he accepts estimates that hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians were killed.

Stiglitz - Economic Reality

2011-04-08T06:24:00.001-04:00

The Struggle Continues

2011-04-04T06:48:00.003-04:00

Today is the anniversary of the assassination of Dr. King who was supporting a strike and organizing an encampment of poor people in Washington to demand economic justice. In the spirit of honoring that continuing struggle Cornell West tells it like it unfortunately is on aljazeera. He speaks the truth about Obama and more importantly, explains to the world the nature and state of American capitalist imperialism in the present.

Enough!

2011-03-29T13:36:00.003-04:00

Our national religion of violence worshiping militarism is exposed in an article titled Kill Team in Rolling Stone. This is not an article for the weak stomached but it is important in illuminating what war is and who our heroes really are. This incident, like the Mai Lai massacre in Vietnam or many incidents in Iraq is far more the rule than the exception.

We must end the occupation of Afghanistan and significantly reduce our military. We can no longer afford imperialist aggression rife with atrocities morally of fiscally. We must demand than everyone from the President and joint Chiefs on down be held responsible for crimes against humanity.

Chris Hedges Gives us a Reality Check

2011-03-07T08:57:00.004-05:00

I don't always agree with writer Chris Hedges but unfortunately I think he has it right about the big picture in his latest missive regarding the collapsing of this cycle of civilization. Bleak though it is, he offers the slim glimmer of hope when he writes,

The unrest in the Middle East, the implosion of national economies such as those of Ireland and Greece, the increasing anger of a beleaguered working class at home and abroad, the growing desperate human migrations and the refusal to halt our relentless destruction of the ecosystem on which life depends are the harbingers of our own collapse and the consequences of the idiocy of our elite and the folly of globalization. Protests that are not built around a complete reconfiguration of American society, including a rapid dismantling of empire and the corporate state, can only forestall the inevitable. We will be saved only with the birth of a new and militant radicalism which seeks to dethrone our corrupt elite from power, not negotiate for better terms.

My emphasis on the nitty gritty. Capitalism must go and must be replaced by a global system of socialisms that can work together to address peoples needs in the context of repairing the environment and adapting to changes already inevitable or the game is over.

Michael Moore Tells It

2011-03-06T09:52:00.002-05:00

Teabagger Hate Rally

2011-03-05T07:11:00.006-05:00

Reminiscent of the German Anti-Semetic Hate Rallies of the '30s, Teabaggers hold a hate rally aimed as local Muslims with vocal support of Republicans.

As the economy drags neo-fascism is on the upsurge from attacks on labor to hate and scapegoating. Though the teabag front pretends independence it continues to be a front manipulated by Republicans and the most reactionary segments of the corporatocracy.

Libyans don't want U.S. military intervention

2011-03-02T07:35:00.003-05:00

We are hearing calls for us intervention to "protect" Libyans from a brutal and recalcitrant Ghadaffi. Libyans themselves like many others around the globe do not want their new government or their effort tainted by Western imperialism. They've see where that leads. "We welcome a no-fly zone, but the blood of Libya's dead will be wasted if the west curses our uprising with failed intervention" says Muhammad min Libya. Read the rest in the Guardian.

Cuban "Dissident Movement" Exposed

2011-03-01T10:10:00.003-05:00

International corporate imperialism continues to do everything it can to portray Cuba as an oppressive dictatorship abusive of human rights. In the following article from juventudrebelde, a Cuban undercover agent exposes the duplicity of the phony counter-revolutionary "dissident movement" in Cuba:

There will always be an Emilio.

Shortly before this interview was published he was considered the “spokesman of Ladies in White” as well as the “independent journalist” who had issued the highest number of reports for the anti-Cuban media. His statements reveal that the US subversive policy against Cuba is still in place.

“Greetings to the audience of Radio República. Broadcasting from Havana, this is Carlos Serpa Maceira, director of the Union of Free Journalists of Cuba...”

The surprise has been huge: Carlos Serpa Maceira, the “independent journalist who issued the highest number of reports for the anti-Cuban media in 2009 is simply ‘Emilio’, an agent of Cuba’s State Security.

The organs of the Ministry of the Interior decided to reveal his identity, which is an irrefutable evidence of the work carried out by the counterrevolutionary groupings in the country, disclosing their mentors and the sick pursuit by successive US administrations to overthrow the Cuban Revolution. To this end, they direct, finance, support, protect and encourage a kind of dissidence that has no legitimacy in the Island.

Where were you born?

I was born in Matanzas, in Cárdenas, the hometown of the students’ leader José Antonio Echeverría. I was born one October 10th, the same day when, back in 1868, the Father of our Homeland launched the cry “independence or death” at the ‘La Demajagua’ sugar mill. That is why I was named after him, Carlos Manuel.

But you are specially attached to the Isle Youth, aren’t you?

I live there and my daughter was born there. She is already 18 years old. The Isle of Youth is part of my history and is in my heart.

In what context ‘Emilio’ was born?

‘Emilio’ is my nom de guerre inside the State Security. That was the name of my uncle, who raised me. I thought that by taking his name I could best honor his memory and all what he always fought for. He fought during the Bay of Pigs invasion.

Emilio, the agent, started to accomplish missions since the year 2001.

Whom did you contact back then?

I contacted the so called Comité Pinero Pro Derechos Humanos, which was then presided over by Hubert Rodríguez Tudela, who is currently in the United States. Afterwards I joined the Fundación Isla de Pinos de Derechos Humanos y Fomento Territorial, another counterrevolutionary grouping that was based there, of which I became a sort of “spokesman”. It was then when I started to write my first reports for Radio Marti.

Afterwards I contacted the Unión de Periodistas y Escritores Cubanos Independientes, an alleged press agency whose profile was similar to that of the aforementioned groupings. This was headed by Fara Armenteros, who is currently residing in the United States too.

How did that contact take place?

I used to work as a state inspector. I was first approached by some counterrevolutionary individuals, which I immediately reported to the State Security. From that moment on a decision was made for me to engage in this mission.

How did you make it to Havana?

Given the very complexity of the missions I was carrying out, I was instructed to move to the capital of the country. Thus I was able to expand my contacts with the counterrevolution’s world.

Based on your experience, what is your opinion about this so called internal ‘opposition’ or dissidence?

The counterrevolution has sold its soul to the devil. They are mercenaries. They are no patriots, nor do they have any principles. Their minds are pinned on the dollars and on campaigning for profits. I will give you one example: Jorge Luis García Pérez (Antúnez), is a man who has become extremely famous abroad.

If he says he will convene a counterrevolutionary march anywhere in Cuba, he will automatically receive money for that.

From here they report that the “demonstration” was attended by 150 or 200 persons –which is not true, because whenever he has done things like that, the only ones in attendance have been himself plus two other provocateurs. But then, what does Antúnez do with that money? Well, he devotes himself to having an easy life.

You have such cases as Martha Beatriz Roque Cabello, who receives bundles of money –and we know who is Martha Beatriz-; Elizardo Sánchez, Juan Carlos González Leyva –the latter is the executive secretary of the self-proclaimed Consejo de Relatores de los Derechos Humanos en Cuba.

González Leyva has taken advantage of his hireling condition to obtain personal benefits. For example, by means of the Refugees Program of the US Interest Section, he has facilitated the departure from the country for some women with whom he had an affair. Likewise, under the pretense of recharging the phone cards of some inmates, he has asked the counterrevolutionary organizations based in Miami for money, which he then steals for himself.

It is obvious that none of these so called dissidents have any moral. They are only moved by the lust for money. Besides, many of those linked to these groups have even asked for the tightening of the blockade against our homeland.

They came to me once saying that they could run a blog for me and that they will name it ‘El Guayacán Cubano’. They said to me in very clear terms that they wanted this blog to be similar to the one ran by counterrevolutionary Yoani Sánchez, so that I could gain some money and make a living out of it.

And, how was this supposed to work?

I was explained that, through the blog, supporters will be requested to contribute some money, and they further emphasized this: “we are going to run the blog El Guayacán Cubano, and you ask supporters to contribute some money so that you could make a living out of it.”

The person who really runs this blog is Enrique Blanco, a counterrevolutionary based in Puerto Rico, who belongs to Operación Liborio, a project aimed at financing the so called opposition from abroad.

He has uploaded several reports in the blog as if he were me. If for any reason I was unable to attend any given activity, which would be usually associated with the Ladies in White, he would establish direct contact with them and draft the report.

Since you made reference to the information issue, how difficult it is to organize a media campaign against Cuba?

It is not difficult. In my case I only have to get in touch with Radio Marti and they immediately call me back. I could right now invent some piece of news and without further confirmation or verification they will air it.

Recently I fabricated a whole atmosphere around the trial against a counterrevolutionary lady. I said that on my way out from home, I had passed by the headquarters of Havana’s People’s Provincial Court and that I had seen a huge display of State Security agents. I added that I was also able to see some foreign journalists there, although they were not able to catch sight of me...

I also ‘embellished’ the report a little bit by adding the story that the Security agents had managed to recognize me and that I had been pushed into a car and that, under severy threats, I had been driven to a nearby police station.

When I called Radio Marti the person who answered the phone wanted to get the ideas straight: “When you say you have been threatened you must be specific as to the types of threats”. I told the person not to worry, that I would do it that way. Thus I fabricated my piece of news.

Radio Marti does not confirm anything. The point is to denigrate Cuba for whatever reason. After I conveyed that information, I was asked to broadcast the report in the news shows.

In all media campaigns against Cuba, the scripts always come from abroad. It is broadly built on lies, stories of false arrests, incidents that have never existed but are fabricated.

Which are the organizations that lend themselves to magnifying those campaigns abroad?

With absolute certainty the Inter-American Press Association (IAPA) and Reporters sans frontières (RSF). These are two organizations that round the clock, seven days a week, are ready to promote any disparagement campaign against our country.

How does the Refugee Program of the US Interest Section work?

The Refugee Program of the US Interest Section is aimed at providing evidence that there is an alleged group of persons that are leaving Cuba due to politically motivated persecutions. Most of the “internal work” carried out by the counterrevolutionary elements here is based on that.

When coming to the Refugee Section, these persons are required to provide evidence of the harassment they are subject to by the Cuban government; they invent “arguments” to be able to get a visa.

The manipulation of the refugee category is clearly evidenced by the number of visas granted for this concept every year. However, when many of those individuals get a resident status in the United States, they come back to Cuba as visitors without being bothered or arrested by the Police or the State Security, something that does not happen to those who are truly refugees in other countries.

In order to have a clear idea of this manipulation, intended to offer the world a distorted image of the Cuban reality, you may consider that only in the year 2009, the number of visas granted amounted to 4 646, and that in the year 2008, a total of 5 093 persons traveled to the United States.

During the provocations orchestrated by the Ladies in White in March 2010, one of those women who belonged to the Ladies in Support group told me the very first day: “Serpa, I need you to help me with some evidence, because I am scheduled for an interview at the Refugee Section next week”. She was looking for a political “recommendation”. They are very much after the pictures showing them in the marches, because the Refugee Program demands, among other things, that they are part of the news published by the Internet, so their work is based on that. Believe me, any of these women go there, carry some pictures...and that is considered a solid evidence by the US Interest Section.

The US Interest Section is not the only one that supports the internal counterrevolution. What about other embassies?

Here in Havana there is a select group of embassies of the European Union member countries that are openly supporting subversion, and I can mention some.

The diplomat Jacek Padee was attached to the embassy of Poland. He was in charge of Political Affairs and he was frequently present in these activities.

Before concluding his mission here, Mr. Padee was given the task of picking up the videos I had taken in several locations of Cuba to produce a documentary film about counterrevolutionary Orlando Zapata Tamayo. He sent those videos from his computer to Pedro Corso, a ringleader of the Institute of the Historical Memory against Totalitarianism based in Miami.

The Netherlands embassy usually supplies resources to the counterrevolution, particularly stationery. It also provides them with access to the Internet.

The embassy of the Czech Republic supplies medicines to these groupings; they summon the “dissidents” to its headquarters in order to document the human rights “violations”. Mr. Pete Brandel, an official of the Czech embassy, had an outstanding role in these activities. The Swedish embassy is also involved in these actions.

The Counselor of the German embassy, Volker Pellet, adopted a flagrant conspiratorial attitude in all these actions. He took to the streets to support the Ladies in White, as part of his provocative activity.

That is to say, in all these ill-intended plans against our people and its Revolution, some European embassies in Havana have lent themselves to this dirty game.

Regarding the way in which the US Interest Section works, I can refer to the behavior of two of their officials: Kathleen Duffy and Lowell Dale Lawton.

In one of the so called literary tea gatherings that were usually sponsored by the Ladies in White, Laura Pollán, the ringleader of the group, asked me to take a video of the moment when she is thanking the Cuban American National Foundation for the support given to the group.

I shot the video and talked to Mrs. Duffy, who told me: “I have already asked my superiors for permission”, and using her personal computer she saved the videos I shot in a thumb drive. She opened up a Youtube account on my behalf and uploaded the video.

During the events occurred in March, Laura Pollán instructed me to convey some messages to that official, because she was the one who monitored the alleged human rights violations.

So has been the case with Lowell Dale Lawton. He asked me to make an evaluation of the actions carried out by Ladies in White, especially after the rejection and criticisms he received from the media after his participation in those provocative actions.

Lawton has received through e-mails the photos and reports he himself has requested from me. Exactly the day after the counterrevolutionary march organized in Miami by Gloria Estefan I visited the US Interest Section, and Lawton came up to see me at one of the Internet centers they have, saying that he wanted to speak to me alone to ask me some information about what had occurred on March 25 during the provocation orchestrated that day. The issue of those women has been no doubt very much manipulated. They have a green light at the US Interest Section.

Furthermore, those women have so far orchestrated all of their provocations because they have felt the protection granted by the Cuban police force and the members of the Ministry of the Interior. They know these forces would never allow the occurrence of any tragic incident, which is what these people have been looking for.

The US Interest Section follows all these actions very closely. They not only support the subversive activities of the Ladies in White but those of all other groupings.

Right now, after the decision adopted by the Cuban government to release the counterrevolutionary inmates, I think they are lacking the proper grounds to carry out their provocative actions. Therefore, I have realized they are very much focused on exerting pressures on some Ladies in White, among them Laura, so that they abandon the idea of leaving the country. They are putting up a media campaign whereby they are telling the world that Cuba is resorting to forceful deportation.

Here you can see how contradictory their policy against the Island is. They first encourage people to emigrate in an attempt to show that the Revolution lacks support, and now they do not want the counterrevolutionaries they themselves fabricated and encouraged to leave the country because then they will be left without any actors to carry out their subversive plans.

Who is really Laura Pollán?

Laura Pollán was a teacher by profession. After she got involved with the Ladies in White she has given herself airs of prominence and lust for money. There have been some clashes between her and the other ladies of the group for that reason.

She is a close friend of Eulalia San Pedro, known as Laly, a member of the Cuban American National Foundation. Eulalia is the one who sends funds, on behalf of the CANF, for all the provocative actions.

By the way, when I started to work as the “journalist” of the Ladies in White, in my reports for Radio Marti and other media and Internet websites, I usually mentioned the very frequent calls made by Eulalia to Laura during every literary tea gathering, until one day, when Laura Pollán herself and Miriam Leyva, another lady who used to belong to the group, asked me (HE SMILES) not to mention any more Eulalia’s name or CANF in my reports, because that was a terrorist organization and they were afraid that any given day they could appear in the Round Table TV program.

Laura is a manipulative, very cunning person. She has been involved in illicit businesses. Her name appears in the VIP list of the US Interest Section, which is a guarantee that she will be received either in the morning or in the afternoon, no matter at what time she may arrive at that place.

Who provides the channel for the reception of the supplies sent to the counterrevolution?

The main channel is the US Interest Section, which has no qualms about violating the Vienna Convention. I would dare to assert that about 80 per cent of those supplies are conveyed through the diplomats of the US Interest Section.

A lot of boxes have been sent for the Ladies in White from Miami by counterrevolutionary Frank Hernández Trujillo, who belongs to the group in support to the “dissidence”.

The US Interest Section has distributed laptop computers and other stuff. Curiously enough, whenever they hand over something, they require the signature of the persons who receive it, as if it were an asset borrowed from any state-owned company. As far as I know they do that because in case these persons leave the country, they are required to give back what is not theirs.

Who are the terrorists with whom they keep the strongest links?

In addition to the CANF, they keep links with Horacio Salvador García Cordero, who belongs to the so called Consejo por la Libertad de Cuba. He works with Luis Zúñiga Rey.

They also keep links with Ángel Pablo Polanco Torrejón, who has been promoting here a counterrevolutionary project called Iniciativa Pro-Cambio, precisely under the instructions given by Horacio and Zúñiga.

Can you describe some of the facilities received by the members of the “opposition” who have access to the US Interest Section?

In my opinion, one of the most striking things is to see all what they do so that this counterrevolution has access to the Internet. They have put up three Internet navigation centers inside the US Interest Section. There is one upstairs in the Consulate, called Eleonor Centre, and there is also the Lincoln Centre and the Benjamin Franklin Centre. They call them Centros de Recursos Informativos (Information Resource Centres) of the US Interest Section, which are directed by the Press and Culture Bureau of the USIS.

There they distribute counterrevolutionary literature and, for example, they reproduce as many as 100 copies of The Miami Herald newspaper, so that it could be distributed among the counterrevolutionaries. They also make these materials available to any person who may go there for any migration procedure.

I continue to see the US Interest Section as the “General Headquarters” from which the tactics and the strategy of the counterrevolution are designed. The members of the counterrevolution are trained and instructed there. They are allowed to print leaflets, statements on any issue, reproduce the materials they afterwards distribute in that same place to their own officials.

What about you? How do you access the US Interest Section?

As they did with many others, I was allowed to go every Wednesday, but when they recognized me as the “journalist” of Ladies in White, they also authorized me to go there every Monday. Sometimes I have been allowed to enter the US Interest Section and work there.

Do you currently hold any special category given by the US Interest Section?

I got a US visa. The US government welcomed me through the Refugee Program, given my “counterrevolutionary” background. They decided I was being “persecuted” for my work as an “independent journalist”.

In what year was that?

On November 16, 2009. By the way, the visa was arranged by some European Union embassies here in Havana, specifically by Ingemar Cederberg, ex Minister Counselor of the Swedish embassy.

How is a “dissident” fabricated?

I am a fabricated dissident. My case is an example of the way in which it is possible to make people abroad believe there is a “huge” opposition and proliferation of “anti-Castro” groups, as they are usually called.

In this little world, you may find me as a member, executive, spokesman...of virtually phantom groups, which exist only in papers. However, internally, the people do not even know these groups exist because they are not rooted in society; much less do they have followers.

I’ll be more explicit: I am the national coordinator of the cultural and civic project Julio Tang Texier, financed from Miami by the terrorist Ángel de Fana Serrano, who belongs to the organization Plantados por la Democracia, who has already served a 20 years imprisonment sentence in Cuba for organizing terrorist activities. But right now, he likes to make out he is a pacifist, an alleged “human rights” advocate.

I am the director of the independent library Ernest Hemingway; the director of the Union of Free Journalists of Cuba –an “organization” that is made up by another five persons, all of them strongly interested in leaving the country. That “Union of Free Journalists” is also financed from Miami, in this case by the Directorio Democrático Cubano (DDC).

I was the representative of Brigada 2506 , through which I received a mobile phone and funds for the organization of provocative actions in our homeland and...well...I am the correspondent of the magazine Misceláneas de Cuba, which is printed in Sweden and is directed by counterrevolutionary Alexis Gaínza.

I have been appointed spokesman and member of the board of the so called Frente Nacional de Resistencia y Desobediencia Cívica in Cuba, whose economic support comes from the DDC, Mujeres Anti Represión (MAR) por Cuba and other groups based in Miami which are part of the self-proclaimed Asamblea de la Resistencia.

As if this were not enough, I was given the task of serving as the national liaison of presumptive Opposition Governments which are directed by Enrique Blanco from Puerto Rico, the one that runs my blog.

That is how a “dissident” or a member of an alleged opposition is fabricated. Today they hide under the guise of independent librarians, independent journalists, “human rights” advocates”...

What do you think is the main strength of the Cuban Revolution?

It is that unity that has existed between the people and its Revolution; that unity around our invincible Commander in Chief Fidel Castro and Raúl; the soundness of the ideas that we have historically defended.

At some point I thought that while it is true I could not be a combatant of the Rebel Army, or a member of the clandestine struggle against Batista, and I did not take up a weapon to fight the mercenaries who landed through Bay of Pigs, or was not a militia detached to his trench during the Missiles Crisis, nor I had the opportunity to fight in Angola of Ethiopia, life had given me the opportunity to accomplish this mission and being in the line of fire for the defense of our people.

No doubt, there are still those who continue underestimating us, but one thing is very clear: The Cuban State Security organs have been, are, and will continue to be present at the right time and place. The enemies of the Revolution, inside and outside our country, have not just learned the lesson, because always, when least expected, there will be an Emilio.

Recuadro: Tita, your father is not a traitor.

Since I started to do this work, I have lost many friends. Therefore, when I was told that my identity would be revealed I first felt very happy, because that was a gift for my daughter Tita. She would know that her father is not a traitor.

I remember once, when she was younger, Rolando Jiménez Posada, a counterrevolutionary who is in prison right now, came to see me at my home. My daughter came across the idea of taking a piece of chalk and writing on the floor of the car porch a phrase that read: “Freedom for the Five Heroes”; and Jiménez Posada told me: “Tell me something: Is that what you are teaching your daughter?”

My friends will know now that I never changed sides. But at the same time I am sorry that my identity is revealed because thanks to my work I was able to promote to important positions inside the counterrevolution and I could have continued to be of some use.

We are all Wisconsin

2011-02-21T12:57:00.002-05:00

As Corporate Repugs and their neofascist pea tardy goons wake up the hydra of working class unity.

Saying it

2011-01-18T06:59:00.002-05:00

Veterans for Peace and Chris Hedges Speak Out

2010-12-26T16:03:00.006-05:00

Assange Interview

2010-12-24T07:20:00.003-05:00

BP Poisons Killing Gulf and Affecting Elections as well

2010-10-28T07:53:00.002-04:00

Two acts of journalism apparently all but banned by the US corporate media connect here as the Guardian reports BP spending in US Congressional campaigns in support of corporate friendly candidates. The second, published by Al Jazeera is an expose of the horrific effects of BP's poisoning the Gulf and the Gulf Coast with toxic dispersants which has been allowed by our own government. What follows is real journalism:

Two-year-old Gavin Tillman of Pass Christian, Mississippi, has been diagnosed with severe upper respiratory, sinus, and viral infections. His temperature has reached more than 39 degrees since September 15, yet his sicknesses continue to worsen.

His parents, some doctors, and environmental consultants believe the child's ailments are linked to exposure to chemicals spilt by BP during its Gulf of Mexico oil disaster.

Gavin's father, mother, and cousin, Shayleigh, are also facing serious health problems. Their symptoms are being experienced by many others living along the coast of the Gulf of Mexico.

Widely banned toxic dispersants

Injected with at least 4.9 million barrels of oil during the BP oil disaster of last summer, the Gulf has suffered the largest accidental marine oil spill in history. Compounding the problem, BP has admitted to using at least 1.9 million gallons of widely banned toxic dispersants, which according to chemist Bob Naman, create an even more toxic substance when mixed with crude oil. And dispersed, weathered oil continues to flow ashore daily.

Naman, who works at the Analytical Chemical Testing Lab in Mobile, Alabama, has been carrying out studies to search for the chemical markers of the dispersants BP used to both sink and break up its oil.

According to Naman, poly-aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) from this toxic mix are making people sick. PAHs contain compounds that have been identified as carcinogenic, mutagenic, and teratogenic.

Fisherman across the four states most heavily affected by the oil disaster - Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida - have reported seeing BP spray dispersants from aircraft and boats offshore.

"The dispersants are being added to the water and are causing chemical compounds to become water soluble, which is then given off into the air, so it is coming down as rain, in addition to being in the water and beaches of these areas of the Gulf," Naman added.

"I’m scared of what I'm finding. These cyclic compounds intermingle with the Corexit [dispersants] and generate other cyclic compounds that aren’t good. Many have double bonds, and many are on the EPA's danger list. This is an unprecedented environmental catastrophe."

Commercial fisherman Donny Matsler also lives in Alabama.

"I was with my friend Albert, and we were both slammed with exposure," Matsler explained of his experience on August 5, referring to toxic chemicals he inhaled that he believes are associated with BP's dispersants. "We both saw the clumps of white bubbles on the surface that we know come from the dispersed oil."

Gruesome symptoms

"I started to vomit brown, and my pee was brown also," Matsler, a Vietnam veteran who lives in Dauphin Island, said. "I kept that up all day. Then I had a night of sweating and non-stop diarrhea unlike anything I’ve ever experienced."

He was also suffering from skin rashes, nausea, and a sore throat.

At roughly the same time Matsler was exposed, local television station WKRG News 5 took a water sample from his area to test for dispersants. The sample literally exploded when it was mixed with an organic solvent separating the oil from the water.

Naman, the chemist who analyzed the sample, said: "We think that it most likely happened due to the presence of either methanol or methane gas or the presence of the dispersant Corexit."

"I'm still feeling terrible," Matsler told Al Jazeera recently. "I'm about to go to the doctor again right now. I'm short of breath, the diarrhea has been real bad, I still have discoloration in my urine, and the day before yesterday, I was coughing up white foam with brown spots in it."

As for Matsler's physical reaction to his exposure, Hugh Kaufman, an EPA whistleblower and analyst, has reported this of the effects of the toxic dispersants:

"We have dolphins that are hemorrhaging. People who work near it are hemorrhaging internally. And that’s what dispersants are supposed to do..."

By the middle of last summer, the Alabama Department of Public Health said that 56 people in Mobile and Baldwin counties had sought treatment for what they believed were oil disaster-related illnesses.
"The dispersants used in BP's draconian experiment contain solvents such as petroleum distillates and 2-butoxyethanol," Dr. Riki Ott, a toxicologist, marine biologist, and Exxon Valdez survivor, told Al Jazeera.

"Solvents dissolve oil, grease, and rubber," she continued, "Spill responders have told me that the hard rubber impellors in their engines and the soft rubber bushings on their outboard motor pumps are falling apart and need frequent replacement."

"Given this evidence, it should be no surprise that solvents are also notoriously toxic to people, something the medical community has long known," Dr. Ott added.

"In 'Generations at Risk', medical doctor Ted Schettler and others warn that solvents can rapidly enter the human body. They evaporate in air and are easily inhaled, they penetrate skin easily, and they cross the placenta into fetuses. For example, 2- butoxyethanol (in Corexit) is a human health hazard substance; it is a fetal toxin and it breaks down blood cells, causing blood and kidney disorders."

Pathways of exposure to the dispersants are inhalation, ingestion, skin, and eye contact. Health impacts include headaches, vomiting, diarrhea, abdominal pains, chest pains, respiratory system damage, skin sensitization, hypertension, central nervous system depression, neurotoxic effects, genetic mutations, cardiac arrhythmia, and cardiovascular damage.

Even the federal government has taken precautions for its employees. US military officials decided to reroute training flights in the Gulf region in order to avoid oil and dispersant tainted-areas.

Growing number of cases

And Al Jazeera is finding a growing number of illnesses across the Gulf Coast.

Denise Rednour of Long Beach, Mississippi, has been taking walks on Long Beach nearly every day since the disaster began on April 20, and she is dealing with constant health issues.

"I've had health problems since the middle of July," she said. "At the end of August, I came home from walking on the beach and for four days had bloody, mucus-filled diarrhea, dry heaves, and blood running out of my ear."

Karen Hopkins, in Grand Isle, Louisiana, has been sick since the middle of May. "I started feeling exhausted, disoriented, dizzy, nauseous, and my chest was burning and I can’t breath well at times," she said.

Dean Blanchard, who runs a seafood distribution business in Grand Isle, is Hopkins' boss. He too is experiencing similar symptoms.

"They [BP] are using us like lab rats," he explained, "I'm thinking of moving to Costa Rica. When I leave here I feel better. When I come back I feel bad again. Feeling tired, coughing, sore throat, burning eyes, headaches, just like everyone around here feels."

Lorrie Williams of Ocean Springs says her son's asthma has "gotten exponentially worse since BP released all their oil and dispersants into the Gulf."

"A plane flew over our house recently and sprayed what I believe are dispersants. A fine mist covered everything, and it smelled like pool chemicals. Noah is waking up unable to breath, and my husband has head and chest congestion and burning eyes," Williams said.

Like others, when Lorrie's family left the area for a vacation, they immediately felt better. But upon coming home, their symptoms returned.

Wilma Subra, a chemist in New Iberia, Louisiana, recently tested the blood of eight BP cleanup workers and residents in Alabama and Florida. "Ethylbenzene, m,p-Xylene and Hexane are volatile organic chemicals that are present in the BP Crude Oil," Subra said,

"The blood of all three females and five males had chemicals that are found in the BP Crude Oil. The acute impacts of these chemicals include nose and throat irritation, coughing, wheezing, lung irritation, dizziness, light-headedness, nausea and vomiting."

Indications of exposure

Subra explained that there has been long enough exposure so as to create chronic impacts, that include "liver damage, kidney damage, and damage to the nervous system. So the presence of these chemicals in the blood indicates exposure."

Testing by Subra has also revealed PAHs present "in coastal soil sediment, wetlands, and in crab, oyster and mussel tissues."

Trisha Springstead, is a registered nurse of 36 years who lives and works in Brooksville, Florida.

"What I'm seeing are toxified people who have been chemically poisoned," she said, "They have sore throats, respiratory problems, neurological problems, lesions, sores, and ulcers. These people have been poisoned and they are dying. Drugs aren’t going to help these people. They need to be detoxed."

Chemist Bob Naman described the brownish, rubbery tar balls that are a product of BP's dispersed oil that continue to wash up on beaches across the Gulf:

"Those are the ones kids are picking up and playing with and breathing the fumes that come off them when you crush them in your hand. These will affect anyone who comes into contact with it. You could have an open wound and this goes straight in. Women have a lot more open mucus membranes and they are getting sicker than men. They are bleeding from their vagina and anus. Small kids are bleeding from their ears. This stuff is busting red blood cells."

Dr Ott said: "People are already dying from this… I’m dealing with three autopsy’s right now. I don’t think we’ll have to wait years to see the effects like we did in Alaska, people are dropping dead now. I know two people who are down to 4.75 per cent of their lung capacity, their heart has enlarged to make up for that, and their esophagus is disintegrating, and one of them is a 16-year-old boy who went swimming in the Gulf."

Emergency Actions to Support Anti-War and International Solidarity Activists

2010-09-25T18:38:00.001-04:00

The homes of AWC members Jess Sundin and Meredith Aby, as well as the offices of the Anti-War Committee, were among those raided yesterday.
A call for action at Federal Buildings and FBI Offices.
We denounce the Federal Bureau of Investigation harassment of anti-war and solidarity activists. The FBI raided seven houses and an office in Chicago and Minneapolis on Friday, September 24, 2010. The FBI handed subpoenas to testify before a federal grand jury to eleven activists in Illinois, Minnesota, and Michigan. The FBI also attempted to intimidate activists in California and North Carolina.

This suppression of civil rights is aimed at those who dedicate their time and energy to supporting the struggles of the Palestinian and Colombian peoples against U.S. funded occupation and war. The FBI has indicated that the grand jury is investigating the activists for possible material support of terrorism charges.

The activists involved have done nothing wrong and are refusing to be pulled into conversations with the FBI about their political views or organizing against war and occupation. The activists are involved with many groups, including: the Twin Cities Anti-War Committee, the Palestine Solidarity Group, the Colombia Action Network, Students for a Democratic Society, and Freedom Road Socialist Organization. These activists came together with many others to organize the 2008 anti-war marches on the Republican National Convention in St. Paul.
We ask people of conscience to join us in fighting this political repression, as we continue working to build the movements against US war and occupation.

Take Action:
Call the U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder at 202-353-1555 or write an email to: AskDOJ@usdoj.gov.

Demand:

**Stop the repression against anti-war and international solidarity activists.
**Immediately return all confiscated materials: computers, cell phones, papers, documents, etc.
**End the grand jury proceedings against anti-war activists.

Plan and Support national days of protest at FBI offices or Federal Buildings, September 27 and 28th. A demonstration has been called at the Minneapolis FBI Office Monday, 4:30, September 27th(111 Washington Ave. S.).

In Solidarity, the Anti-War Committee – www.antiwarcommittee.org

Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy?

2010-08-30T07:45:00.002-04:00

Vast in its reach yes but not in its origin. In the new New Yorker Jane Mayer exposes Koch Industries and David H. Koch as the backer of almost every right-wing "think-tank" as well as of corporate fronts like Americans for Prosperity, Freedomworks and their "tea party" movement designed to work along with FOX (which they also fund) to undermine progress in general and anything which might impede maximum profits for major industries; particularly Oil and insurance.

What is clearly demonstrated here is the completely corrupt nature or US politics warped by the unrestrained power of capital and the need at very least to impose restraints on the influence of wealth as well as its impossibility within this system.

A Solution for Increasing Jobs

2010-08-24T08:25:00.002-04:00

There is no lack of rhetoric expounded on the need to dramatically reduce unemployment. Using the most revealing government figures, nearly 17% of the US workforce is unemployed. That figure means that nearly one in five US citizens working before the economic crisis, or joining the workforce since, is, at this moment, idle or under-employed. Counting the involuntary part-time workers and discouraged workers, the total number of US workers seeking work totals nearly twenty million. Though the media and the governing cabal have shown little more than token interest in the staggering human tragedy facing these workers and their families, nearly everyone voices a determination to see unemployment reduced. And while it’s easy to procrastinate on a solution, it must be remembered that the economy needs to generate at least 150,000 jobs a month to keep up with population growth. And therein is the problem: while everyone may want full employment, few have an honest, real plan to achieve it.

Instead, we get lots of talk about “green” jobs, retraining, tax incentives, etc – the usual malarkey that constitutes a stump speech for Democratic Party candidates. Historically, most Democratic leaders and unimaginative, class-collaborationist labor leaders have sought to prompt – “incentivize,” to use the fashionable term – business to hire more workers. This thinking accepts the primacy of the corporate class and seeks to motivate that class by appealing to its selfish motive: profits. For decades, local, state and federal governments have poured billions of taxpayer dollars into the pockets of developers, contractors, service providers and factory owners to entice and cajole them into hiring more workers. Tax incentives to businesses and entrepreneurs have substantially absented the corporate world from its place as fellow taxpayers, leaving the burden on the rest of us.

Despite the persistent execution of this strategy, all economists agree that we have lived through a “jobless” decade. Since the dot.com recession, job creation has lagged far behind population growth and the demand for good-paying jobs. That is a fact. The crisis beginning in 2007/2008 only exacerbated this development by shedding millions of jobs. And since the false recovery, job growth has been non-existent, despite the dramatic rise in profits. That, too, is a fact. Only those ideologically wedded to capitalist dogma fail to see this. The strategy is completely bankrupt.

Responding to the crisis, the Obama administration crafted a hybrid plan that sought to both generate recovery and spur job creation with an $862 billion stimulus program. Commendably, the Administration devoted nearly $300 billion for aid to states, unemployment benefits, and food stamps. Offsetting this was a $336 billion financial incentive package of tax cuts, one-time payments, etc., meant as an expensive bone to those economic Neanderthals who still believed that the recovery would come when folks had a few extra bucks in their pockets. This was merely another example of Obama’s oft-repeated desire to appease the flesh-eaters of the right, a useless political gesture that will be paid for by future taxpayers.

Remaining in the package was a total of $230 billion, a not-insubstantial sum, despite the squawking of well-meaning liberal economists who thought the package inadequate. But simple arithmetic would show that this allocation would support over 5-6 million public sector jobs at $35,000 for a year, even with a modest factor for overhead costs. Moreover, including a conservative application of the economic multiplier effect would add thousands of additional jobs and growth in the private sector. Of course, that would amount to direct federal employment, an approach comparable to that adopted during the Roosevelt administration in response to the Great Depression. But from slavish worship of the supremacy of the private sector and the overpowering influence of that sector on the campaign accounts of our leaders, that solution was ruled out of hand by all but the fringes of government and the labor movement.

Instead, the Obama Administration chose to follow the same path that has proven bankrupt for so painfully long: dangle projects with risk-free public subsidies in front of private contractors. While there still are substantial funds unspent, the results have been disappointing by everyone’s account. At the time the program was initiated, few asked how the funds would be dispersed (I did, on my blog. See How Not to Create Jobs). Would the funds simply go into the pockets of contractors who would complete the work with an existing work force? Would much of the effective stimulus be absorbed by profits and not employment? Indeed, the results were disappointing, but only to those who naively believed that contractors or project managers were in the business of creating jobs. They were happy to rake in profits from infrastructure projects or accept subsidies for new enterprises outside the conventional market, provided the government guaranteed the funding and assumed the risk. In this regard, the Administration merely created a duplicate of the wasteful, profit-bloated defense industry --- no new ideas here, but an additional debt on the shoulders of the taxpayer.

Labor history offers us a different solution, an effective solution. After the Civil War, a movement stirred in the US to shorten the working day to eight hours. Eight-Hour Leagues sprang up throughout the country. Labor embraced the eight-hour day movement and the movement strengthened and helped to organize labor. This struggle reached across the oceans and spurred similar movements around the world.

Winning the eight-hour day became the galvanizing issue of all labor struggles for almost a century. Unions were built and contracts won around achieving a shorter working day. The political landscape – from labor’s point of view – was shaped by the eight-hour struggle.

Today, a shorter workweek would offer a victory for labor against the relentless offensive mounted against workers that has stagnated or reduced benefits over decades. Many, if not most, in labor have not known a major victory for working people in their lifetime. But more urgently, a shorter workweek would offer an answer to the persistent and damaging high unemployment brought on by the economic crisis. A mandatory shorter working day and working week, with strict overtime penalties for exceeding those limits, would force employers to hire more workers to maintain the same level of production or to increase it. A federally mandated shorter workweek – a seven-hour workday/thirty-five-hour workweek – would decrease the workweek by over 14% and potentially increase employment by the same amount. Of course, employers would fight such an increase in hiring as a threat to profitability, but the pressure of the market – the shortage of existing labor – would force new employment in order to even maintain existing levels of production or service activity.

Unlike the conventional answers that place the burden of employment recovery squarely on the backs of taxpayers, the shorter-workweek strategy attacks the profits of the employer. Enabling legislation should guarantee no reduction in pay, as well as reducing hours of work. Accordingly, it is from the surplus value of the capitalist enterprise that new employment would be funded. Only a solution that solves the unemployment problem with a shift in the economic balance sheet from capitalist to worker counts as an overdue offensive in the class struggle and a real advance for working people.

Where the bankrupt, ineffective “incentive” model of employment growth is shared by both political parties and acceded to by most of organized labor, the shorter-workweek model would mark an embrace of class militancy, as well as an effective measure with a noble historic precedent. Unemployment did not come from some inexplicable quirk of nature; it came from the ruthless, conscious profit seeking of the corporate class. In a just society, they should pay for its extinction.

The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 governs these matters. It has been amended many times since 1938 to improve the status of labor, but never to change the length of the working day. Maybe the time is now.

Zoltan Zigedy
zoltanzigedy@gmail.com

An Honor Bestowed

2010-07-08T09:57:00.003-04:00

I have found that I am listed on the "Shit List" for the fascist Masada 2oo group. Even more appropriate, I am listed along with the Blue Collar Review which not coincidentally is published by Partisan Press. The name of this press comes from the term, Partisan, used for the resistance to fascism during WWII. I am a life long anti-fascist and and yes, a Partisan. The Masada group represents and defends everything detestable about Jewish fascism, ie. zionism and their list of enemies is therefore a list of the best of the Jewish community and of the human race. It is indeed a humbling honor to be listed among them.

Abolishing The Right to Live

2010-07-08T09:28:00.002-04:00

LIFE BOATS FOR THE MASSES

In 1795, the justices of Berkshire established a scale of relief for the poor and underemployed in England. This revolutionary departure from the draconian, punitive English Poor laws established a base line of survival or minimum standard of living to be guaranteed to those whom circumstances placed below this level. Known as the Speenhamland system, this approach soon prevailed throughout England. As Karl Polanyi pointed out in his essential book, The Great Transformation, Speenhamland effectively established, for the first time, a “right to live.” It was abolished in 1834. Polanyi remarked, “Indeed, nothing could be more obvious than that the wage system imperatively demanded the withdrawal of the ‘right to live’ as proclaimed in Speenhamland – under the new regime of the economic man, nobody would work for a wage if he could make a living by doing nothing.” In other words, the logic of capitalism is inimical with a “right to live”.

This truth was borne out two centuries later when our elected officials under Bill Clinton again wrenched the “right to live” out of the welfare system and enforced the imperatives of the labor market. The timing was fortuitous. Decades of vulgar media accounts of welfare laziness and indolence had wormed its way into the popular imagination and employment was relatively high. Few saw this as a scheme to relieve a tight labor market and pressure wages downward – the same logic that drove the abolishment of Speenhamland.

Now, a decade and a half later, the labor market is non-existent and there is no “right to live”. Hopefully, history will settle the score with those responsible for the destruction of our welfare system, but, in the meantime, millions face a bleak future in the face of a teetering economy and mass unemployment.

Eighty years ago –July 4, 1930 – 1,320 delegates assembled to form the National Unemployed Council, an organization that grew to 800,000 members by 1938. This founding meeting came on the heels of demonstrations nationwide engaging nearly a million and a half unemployed in March of 1930. Both the demonstrations and the National Unemployed Councils were organized by the Communist Party and the Trade Union Unity League. These actions led to the later enactment of Social Security, Unemployment Insurance and other vital, life-affirming social programs.

No such organization exists today, though one is urgently needed to fight for the needs of the millions who have been thrown off the unemployment relief roles – the gutting of Unemployment Insurance. The size of the civilian labor force has shrunk dramatically from May to June, indicating unemployed workers losing their benefits or discouraged from looking for work. Their numbers will explode to at least three million by the end of July if unemployment benefits are not restored. To add perspective, one must count, in most cases, spouses, children and other dependents to fully appreciate the brutal effects of these lost benefits.

At the same time, those lucky enough to have jobs are experiencing greater hardships. In June, average hours of work dropped, as did average hourly wages. Jesse Rothstein, chief economist for the Labor Department, quoted in The Wall Street Journal, said: “It’s hard to overstate how deep the hole is….” Many “don’t seem to be appreciating the gravity of the situation.” That would include our politicians and the media. They seem to share more with Richard Hastings, macro and consumer strategist at Global Hunter Securities, who wrote about the unsuccessful vote on extending unemployment benefits: “The vote’s message was probably healthy: move in with your parents and learn to take care of something other than your next tweet.” Surely, there is a special place in hell for Hastings and his ilk.

Polling by the Pew Research Center gives a snap shot of the effects of the downturn on those still clinging to a job: 28% have had their work hours reduced, 23% have suffered cuts in pay, 12% were forced to take unpaid leave, and 11% were made part-time. These drastic changes in the work place have generated equally drastic changes in personal habits, from spending less on expensive items to deferring marriage and children. Mainstream economists will focus – correctly – upon the potential loss of buying power, while conveniently ignoring the accompanying intensification of the labor of those holding jobs and the resultant increase in the rate of exploitation for the sake of profits.

In this desperate accounting, a distinction is lost. All would agree that in one sense the devastation befalling working people is a result of the economic crisis. But, more importantly, the pain of unemployment, impoverishment and hyper-exploitation is the result of both corporate and political policy decisions; people in power have decreed with their decisions that most people will suffer. This understanding cuts through the fatalism and despair that grip so many. There are other policies that would not saddle the majority of us with such a bleak future.

This same understanding should awaken people to the cynical, dishonest offensive against Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid now being mounted by our political elites. Wildly exaggerated claims about the insolvency of these programs have circulated for decades, mostly as cover for the financial sector’s rapacious hunger for the assets held by or flowing through them. For a brief moment, attention turned away, thanks to the implosion of the financial sector and the embarrassing disappearance of massive wealth to banking irresponsibility. With the financial sector now alive and well, due to an obscenely generous transfusion of public funds, attention has returned to stripping these programs – this time under the ruse of “deficit reduction.” One can only marvel at the slavish creation by our corporate media of the new fear of “unsustainable” sovereign public debt. In a short time, opinion makers, politicians, and academic economists have joined hands to manufacture a fictitious monster threatening the very foundations of our way of life, a way of life that is merely a fleeting memory for most. With nearly two-thirds of the US population believing that this apparition is our greatest threat, the attack on the last remaining elements of a people’s economy is swiftly moving forward.

Whether one believes in apparitions or not, the debt-scare could be answered in many ways that would not disable these popular programs: taxes could be raised on corporations and the wealthy; revenues could be generated in myriad ways; from taxes on risky speculative ventures in the financial sector, foreign military aggression could be ended; the military budget could be dramatically slashed; the CIA could be eliminated; single-payer health care could be enacted; the costly criminal justice system could be dramatically reduced by replacing punitive judicial measures with treatment and rehabilitation; etc.

But it is abundantly clear that policy makers have their sights on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. They have drawn conclusions from the recent European experience of debt hysteria provoking austerity - austerity exacting the huge loss of jobs, income and benefits in the public sector, as well as radical surgery on the social safety net.

The Obama Administration sought to begin this process by encouraging the Congress to establish a committee to address “fiscal responsibility,” with entitlement programs clearly the target. With the forthcoming November elections in mind, Congress balked. Determined to move forward, the Administration established a National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform and extracted a promise from Congressional leaders that their findings would receive an up-or-down vote after the November elections, shielding the potential damage from a popular backlash against Congress as a result of the vote.

The Commission is loaded with debt-scolds sharing a history of advocacy of privatization, market friendliness, and public-sector austerity. President Obama has set a tone of cost cutting by declaring that “All of us should be worried about the fact that we have been running the credit card in the name of future generations. We’ve got to get our debt and our deficits under control…especially on big-ticket items… That’s going to be our project for the next couple of years.” He made no mention of extracting revenues from the multi-millionaires and billionaires who have profited hugely from generating and managing that debt.

The members of the Commission, most vocally its co-chairs, have been transparent about its goals of cost cutting and focusing on entitlement programs. Alan Simpson, one of the co-chairs of the Commission, “reassured” that no one over 58 needs to worry about Social Security benefits. The not-so-hidden implication is that everyone else should be worried!

Just as in 1834, we are now confronted with a massive, determined effort to destroy the “right to live” in the face of a deepening crisis of capitalism rapidly eroding jobs and benefits for the majority of US citizens. They are caught in a vise of collapsing living standards on one side and draconian policy decisions on the other. It is not a moment to contemplate electoral prospects or renew our vows with hope, but a time to act. Desperate times are not served well by pragmatism and maneuvers to subtly shift the balance of forces. Instead we need to project new and not-so-new, but bold policies that challenge the dominant trends in US politics. We can debate the political nuances of these dominant trends – whether they are spawned by the strength of the ultra-right, the spinelessness of Democrats, or the consensus obsessions of the President – but it is more important that we move on to organizing and leading a fight back.

We must organize and build movements to stop the aggressive wars of our military and our imperialist allies.

We must fight for a federal jobs program of the boldness of the New Deal that puts swift job creation above contractor profits. Such a program must have strong affirmative action constraints.

We must demand unlimited unemployment insurance until employment returns to historically stable levels.

We must demand a shorter workweek with the same pay for private sector jobs, a move that will stimulate new hiring in this sector.
We must demand the broadening and strengthening of welfare for those who have fallen away from the job market.

We must make every effort to derail the ruling class plans to eviscerate the popular entitlement programs of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

These are life-or-death immediate demands that cannot wait for the formalities of the November election.

Zoltan Zigedy

A Needed Bit of Catharsis

2010-06-09T06:29:00.000-04:00

The Colbert Report

Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

Oil's Well That Never Ends

www.colbertnation.com

Colbert Report Full Episodes

Political Humor

Fox News

Another False Flag

2010-06-07T06:52:00.000-04:00

Reflections of Fidel
The empire and lies

(Taken from CubaDebate)

I was left with no alternative other than to write two "Reflections" on Iran and Korea, which explain the imminent danger of war with the use of nuclear weapons. I have also expressed the opinion that one of them could be overcome if China decided to veto the resolution that the United States is promoting in the United Nations Security Council. The other is dependent on factors that escape any possibility of control, due to the fanatical conduct of the state of Israel, converted by the United States into its current condition as a strong nuclear power, which does not accept any control whatsoever on the part of the superpower.

In June 1953, when the first United States intervention to crush the Islamic Revolution in defense of its own interests and those of its close ally the United Kingdom took place, which resulted in Mohammed Reza Pahlevi assuming power, Israel was a small state that had not yet seized almost all of Palestinian territory, part of Syria and more than a small part of neighboring Jordan, defended up until then by the Arab Legion, of which not a trace remained.

Today the hundreds of rockets with nuclear warheads, supported by the most modern aircraft supplied by the United States, are threatening the security of all the states of the region, Arab and non-Arab, Muslim and non-Muslim, that are in the reach of the wide radius of action of Israeli missiles, which could fall within a few meters of their objectives.

Last Sunday, May 30, when I wrote the Reflection "The Empire and drugs," the brutal attack on the flotilla transporting provisions, medicines and other items for the one and a half million Palestinians besieged in a small fragment of what was their own homeland for thousands of years, had not yet taken place.

The vast majority of people invest their time in and struggle to confront the necessities that life imposes upon them, including food, the right to recreation and study, and other vital problems of their closest family members; they do not have time to search for information about what is happening on the planet. They can be found anywhere, with noble expressions on their face, trusting that others will take charge of finding solutions to the problems overwhelming them. They are capable of rejoicing and laughing. Thus, they bring happiness to those of us who have the privilege of observing with equanimity the realities threatening us all.

The extremely strange fabrication that North Korea had sunk the South Korean Cheonan corvette – designed with cutting-edge technology, endowed with a wide-ranging sonar system and underwater acoustic sensors – in waters opposite its coast, blamed North Korea for the appalling act that cost the lives of 40 South Korean marines and inflicted dozens of injuries.

It was not easy for me to unravel the problem. On the one hand, there was no explanation as to how it was possible for any government, however much authority it enjoys, to utilize command mechanisms to give orders to torpedo an ensign ship. On the other hand, I did not believe for one second the version that it was Kim Jong II who gave that order.

I lacked the elements needed to reach a conclusion, but I was sure that China would veto a draft resolution in the Security Council to sanction North Korea. On the other hand, I was in no doubt whatsoever that the United States is unable to avoid the use of nuclear weapons on the part of the incontrollable government of Israel.

Late in the evening of June 1 the veil over what really happened began to lift.

At 10:30 p.m. I listened to the content of an acute analysis by the journalist Walter Martínez, who produces the sterling "Dossier" program on Venezuelan television. He came to the conclusion that the United States had made each part of Korea believe what each side was affirming about the other, with the objective of solving the problem of the return of the territory occupied by the Okinawa base, as demanded by the new Japanese leader, reflecting the wishes of the country. His party gained enormous backing in the elections due to that promise of his to secure the [U.S.] withdrawal from the military base installed there which, for more than 65 years, has been a dagger thrust in the heart of Japan, now a developed and rich country.

Via Global Research the really amazing details of what happened have come out, thanks to an article by Wayne Madsen, an investigative journalist working in Washington DC, who circulated information from intelligence sources on the Wayne Madsen Report website.

Those sources, he affirmed, "…suspect that the March attack on the South Korean Navy anti-submarine warfare (ASW) corvette, the Cheonan, was a false flag attack designed to appear as coming from North Korea."

"One of the main purposes for increasing tensions on the Korean peninsula was to apply pressure on Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama to reverse course on moving the U.S. Marine Corps base off Okinawa. Hatoyama has admitted that the tensions over the sinking of the Cheonan played a large part in his decision to allow the U.S. Marines to remain on Okinawa. Hatoyama's decision has resulted in a split in the ruling center-left coalition government, a development welcome in Washington, with Mizuho Fukushima, the Social Democratic Party leader threatening to bolt the coalition over the Okinawa reversal.

"The Cheonan was sunk near Baengnyeong Island, a westernmost spot that is far from the South Korean coast, but opposite the North Korean coast. The island is heavily militarized and within artillery fire range of North Korean coastal defenses, which lie across a narrow channel.

"The Cheonan, an ASW corvette, was decked out with state-of-the-art sonar, plus it was operating in waters with extensive hydrophone sonar arrays and acoustic underwater sensors. There is no South Korean sonar or audio evidence of a torpedo, submarine or mini-sub in the area. Since there is next to no shipping in the channel, the sea was silent at the time of the sinking.

"However, Baengnyeong Island hosts a joint U.S-South Korea military intelligence base and the U.S. Navy SEALS operate out of the base. In addition, four U.S. Navy ships were in the area, part of the joint U.S-South Korean Exercise Foal Eagle, during the sinking of the Cheonan. An investigation of the suspect torpedo's metallic and chemical fingerprints show it to be of German manufacture. There are suspicions that the U.S. Navy SEALS maintains a sampling of European torpedoes for sake of plausible deniability for false flag attacks. Also, Berlin does not sell torpedoes to North Korea, however, Germany does maintain a close joint submarine and submarine weapons development program with Israel.

"The presence of the USNS Salvor, one of the participants in Foal Eagle, so close to Baengnyeong Island during the sinking of the South Korean corvette also raises questions.

"The Salvor, a civilian Navy salvage ship, which participated in mine laying activities for the Thai Marines in the Gulf of Thailand in 2006, was present near the time of the blast with a complement of 12 deep sea divers.

"Beijing, satisfied with North Korea's Kim Jong Il's claim of innocence after a hurried train trip from Pyongyang to Beijing, suspects the U.S. Navy's role in the Cheonan's sinking, with particular suspicion on the role of the Salvor. The suspicions are as follows:

"1. The Salvor engaged in a seabed mine-installation operation, in other words, attaching horizontally fired anti-submarine mines on the sea floor in the channel.

"2. The Salvor was doing routine inspection and maintenance on seabed mines, and put them into an electronic active mode (hair trigger release) as part of the inspection program.

"3. A SEALS diver attached a magnetic mine to the Cheonan, as part of a covert program aimed at influencing public opinion in South Korea, Japan and China.

"The Korean peninsula tensions have conveniently overshadowed all other agenda items on Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's visits to Beijing and Seoul."

Thus, in an amazingly easy way, the United States managed to solve an important problem: to liquidate the National Unity government of the Democratic Party of Yukio Hatoyama, but at an extremely high cost:

1- It deeply offended its South Korea allies.

2- It highlighted the skill and rapidity with which its adversary Kim Jong Il acted.

3- It emphasized the prestige of the Chinese power, whose president, with full moral authority, moved personally and sent China’s principal leaders to converse with Emperor Akihito, the Prime Minister and other eminent Japanese figures.

Political leaders and world opinion have proof of the cynicism and total lack of scruples that characterize the imperial policy of the United States.

Fidel Castro Ruz

June 3, 2010,

This Must Be Stopped!

2010-06-03T11:48:00.006-04:00

Chicxulub Redux

The oil
it is spewing
gallon after gallon
ton after ton gushing
into those clear aqua blue regions
as I write this
week after week
every second
for the last month and maybe
a few more --
I have seen the end
of life
billowing red-brown
the thick of it and I am
beyond anger beyond
grief
having only these powerless
words

This must be stopped and
those responsible can never
pay enough -- these greed driven
mega-criminals this
monstrous system of death
its corruption killing
everything

It must end
We must end it
Time is running out.

-- Al Markowitz

Capitalism's Failure & the Potential for Progress

2010-05-19T08:02:00.005-04:00

The failure of capitalism is becoming so unmistakeably apparent that a new poll shows it running neck, if not behind Socialism in popular support.

A year ago, a Rasmussen poll found similar reactions. Then, only 53% of Americans described capitalism as “superior” to socialism.

Meanwhile, 29% in the Pew poll describe “socialism” as positive. This positive percent soars much higher when you look at key sub-groups, as discussed shortly. A 2010 Gallup poll found 37% of all Americans preferring socialism as “superior” to capitalism.

Keep in mind these findings reflect an overview of the public mind when Right wing views seem at a high point – with the Tea Party often cast as a barometer of American public opinion. The polls in this era do not suggest a socialist country, but not a capitalist-loving one either. This is not a “Center-Right” America but a populace where almost 50% are deeply ambivalent or clearly opposed to capitalism. Republicans and the Tea Party would likely call that a Communist country.

The story gets more interesting when you look at two vital sub-groups. One is young people, the “millennial generation” currently between 18 and 30. In the Pew poll, just 43% of Americans under 30 describe “capitalism” as positive. Even more striking, the same percentage, 43%, describes “socialism” as positive. In other words, the new generation is equally divided between capitalism and socialism.

The Pew, Gallup and Rasmussen polls come to the same conclusion. Young people cannot be characterized as a capitalist generation. They are half capitalist and half socialist. Since the socialist leaning keeps rising among the young, it suggests—depending on how you interpret “socialism”—that we are moving toward an America that is either Center-Left or actually majoritarian socialist.

We need to take advantage of the moment to reach out and build a class-conscious perspective, expose the reality of corporate rule and organize and build a movement to defeat this deadly system once and for all. The people are increasingly looking for that leadership and we must provide it. I know that in my area there is more organization and struggle on a higher level than ever before as coalitions are built and a worker school is coming together and I live in a notoriously conservative area!

Howard Zinn Presente

2010-01-31T06:32:00.003-05:00

When asked how he wanted to be remembered, Zinn said; "I guess if I want to be remembered for anything, it’s for introducing a different way of thinking about the world, about war, about human rights, about equality, for getting more and more people to think that way.

Also, for getting more people to realize that the power which rests so far in the hands of people with wealth and guns, that the power ultimately rests in people themselves and that they can use it. At certain points in history, they have used it. Black people in the South used it. People in the women’s movement used it. People in the anti-war movement used it. People in other countries who have overthrown tyrannies have used it.

I want to be remembered as somebody who gave people a feeling of hope and power that they didn’t have before."

There are many of us who share Howard Zinn's vision as well as his philosophy of "Socialism without Jails" where "the motive for the economic system is not corporate profit, but the motive is the welfare of people, health care, jobs, child care, and so on. But that is dominant. Where there is a greater equalization of wealth and a society which is peaceful, which devotes its resources to helping people in the country and elsewhere.

I believe in a world where war is no longer the recourse for the settling of grievances and problems. I believe in the wiping out of national boundaries."

This is our credo as well and will live on with the many written words of Zinn and others. His death is a loss to all humanity but is vision and our struggle live on.

Moyers gets to the Nitty-Gritty

2010-01-09T06:52:00.003-05:00

Once again Bill Moyers gets explores the truth in examining how finance capital and a few Wall St. firms have taken over the government. This show is worth watching not only because Moyers and his guests lay out the problem but because he talks about organizing and guides viewers to real places to do it.
Aside from holding the country hostage while robbing us all blind these few humongous businesses (like Goldman Sachs) are also behind the creation and maintenance of the dissension and division that are the death knell of progress. They fund and organize the teabaggers, they buy Congress and write legislation and they create partisan fireworks on any issue than might affect their profits.

As Moyers points out, if there is one thing that can break the partisan deadlock, it is that both right and left KNOW that our nation has been robbed and resent the Wall St. fatcats being bailed out so they can rape us again instead of sent to prison.
It's time to organize around that.

Movies Anyone?

2009-12-28T08:28:00.002-05:00

Nicely done allegory of what happens to working people in our system:

What's Left?

2009-12-16T11:10:00.008-05:00

For those who pay any attention to this minuscule blog with its on and off postings, I am doing much better, having recovered from the toxic effects of what passes for medicine in the U.S.
This of course leads to the question of what happened to "health care reform" and where does it stand? We had all hoped that the US would join the rest of the planet in having a civilized health care system that provided access to all. It is not to be -- at least not anytime soon. Our country is too owned by corporate interests to even allow for the most basic of human needs. The cruel sham emerging from Congress sans any public option must be defeated. Period. That said, we must crank up the heat for a Single Payer system. The life and death struggle for national health care must continue.

From health care to peace to who gets bailed out, Obama repeatedly proves himself to be part of the elite corporatocracy in spite of his high flung rhetoric. This is not to say that he isn't still a big improvement over Cheney & Bush but then Nero was far better than Caligula. Big deal. As the mask falls from the beast, few are left with any illusion about this administration or, for that matter, anything the Dims or the corrupt corporatocracy can offer.
What do we have left? Nothing. Nothing but each other, but then that is all we ever really had and that is where real hope lies -- our only salvation is ourselves, united in real community for our common good. The good news is that we ARE the vast majority and without us nothing can happen. We make the world and we can remake it and we have no choice but to do so.

In speaking to the psychic and structural deflation of the moment, here is one of my new poems soon to appear in the Blue Collar Review along with many other strong poems.

Dissolution

The Ford assembly line a painful memory
of better times and now
the I.P. paper mill in Franklin closing --
slamming like a door on
so many lives
"Layoffs" the dreaded headline too often repeated
as industrial areas turn to ghost towns
shopping centers empty
dark windows
like missing teeth and
jobs harder to find than
Saddam's fabled weapons
Change even scarcer and
Hope deflating like a bad tire

On TV Warren Buffet voices optimism --
the recession is all but over!
On the streets, only
the homeless sector is growing
now officially 17% here in Norfolk
and no one is feeling
optimistic

Only the War Business is booming
as the President
his once hopeful visage becoming
a skull breathing death
promising jobs
30,000 more soldiers
to the endless front

There's the Rub

2009-10-30T16:23:00.003-04:00

I apologize to any who follow this blog for my absence. I'm sick. I'm hurting. I am without insurance but I did manage through the good graces of my old physician to be seen for a bacterial infection. Unfortunately he gave me Cipro and I had a bad reaction. In my case this mean a whole lot of agonizing pain in my arms legs, feet and hands. with breaks from the pain from hydrocodone which I fear will run out before the pain.

In the mean time (and I do mean MEAN), what I notice about both the lousy Health Care Bills in Congress is that the bastards still want to keep it tied to employment. Never mind that jobs are drying up faster than spilt whiskey in August, if you aren't employed, you are suplus population and can go ahead and die! Few of the bourgoise jackasses in either wing of Congress have ever worked for wages, or else they would know that to get insurance, having a job isn't even enough. It must be Full-Time to qualify for benefits and you know damn well that full-time work is even harder to find and keep for that very reason. Thierin lies the rub and the fatal flaw that makes anything short of a Medicare type single-payer plan absolute and useless bullshit. A cruel sham at best.

An Issue of Life & Death

2009-10-08T10:00:00.004-04:00

As a presently ill and uninsured American (from losing my job) a appreciate Kieth Olbermann breaking it down on Health Care Reform:

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

So What About ACORN?

2009-10-03T15:05:00.004-04:00

The chorus of voices on the right and in the media are continuing to libel ACORN, the grassroots activist group known for fighting for livable wages, affordable housing and, most notoriously, voter registration. It seems suspicious enough that Carl Rove, not to mention other Republican leaders would have the umittigated audacity to charge anyone with voter fraud given their own records. Many wonder what truth is. Rachel Maddow begins to address it here -- hard to believe, I know, but it looks like another right-wing attack led by phony corporate fronts . . .

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Breaking It Down

2009-09-28T10:30:00.008-04:00

Sometimes a piece of art or a picture is worth a thousand words, this piece, "Peasants for Plutocracy" by Michael Dal Cerro says it all.

Nader Tries to Organize the Richest

2009-09-26T09:13:00.003-04:00

A good interview with Ralph Nader on Democracy Now!. Nader talks about his new book which suggests a detailed strategy for real change by a small group of extremely wealthy dissatisfied progressives. It seems an unlikely scenario but given that he knows some of these folks, it's a good attempt to motivate. It's always good to hear from Nader as he is a man of rare integrity and dedication to the common good.

If Obama Can't Lead, We Must

2009-09-06T09:14:00.007-04:00

I would like to continue to believe, like Jarvis Tyner that Obama is doing a great job and that his leadership continues to provide progressives with real opportunities. Unfortunately, I find myself feeling more in agreement with David Michael Green's position that Obama is too weak to handle the job of President at best, and a continuation of Bush at worst.

So far his administration feels to me like a replay of Clinton and it's an unpleasant deja vu. Here we have a charismatic President with a mandate and a majority in Congress and he can't even stand up to a few bellowing Repugs or a corrupt insurance industry to create a national health care system with over 70% popular support?!

During the last election and afterwords I sent a message to Obama pointing out that climate change was an issue that made all the others irrelevant. That in order to insure that there even is a US at the end of this century he needed to rebuild and modernize our national infrastructure, power grid and transportation systems. It's called adaptation and as history shows, that is the key to survival. Doing so would also create actual productive jobs which are the basis for a real economy. I pointed out that if he did not do this, it doesn't really matter what else he does because this nation and civilization will be finished.

What is to be done! We can and must exert as much pressure on the White House as possible to represent our own vital interests demanding job creation and Single Payer health care. Obama has shown us that he either doesn't have the backbone or that he is just another corporate clone and can't be relied on to be anything else. Should he completely fail to deliver and the economic crisis continue to deepen, we could be facing a right-wing fascist backlash of historic barbarity. We must take leadership in our own hands. We have no choice.

The Israeli Connection; Global Organ Harvesting

2009-08-30T08:29:00.002-04:00

The following article by Alison Weir, executive director of If Americans Knew reveals a horrific story connecting those New Jersey Rabbi's in the kidney business with a larger criminal ring or organ theft by the State of Israel including the use of Palestinians as unwilling organ doners.

Israeli Organ Harvesting

By ALISON WEIR

Last week Sweden’s largest daily newspaper published an article containing shocking material: testimony and circumstantial evidence indicating that Israelis may have been harvesting internal organs from Palestinian prisoners without consent for many years.

Worse yet, some of the information reported in the article suggests that in some instances Palestinians may have been captured with this macabre purpose in mind.

In the article, “Our sons plundered for their organs,” veteran journalist Donald Bostrom writes that Palestinians “harbor strong suspicions against Israel for seizing young men and having them serve as the country’s organ reserve – a very serious accusation, with enough question marks to motivate the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to start an investigation about possible war crimes.”1/

An army of Israeli officials and apologists immediately went into high gear, calling both Bostrom and the newspaper’s editors “anti-Semitic.” The Israeli foreign minister was reportedly “aghast” and termed it “a demonizing piece of blood libel.” An Israeli official called it “hate porn.”

Commentary magazine wrote that the story was “merely the tip of the iceberg in terms of European funded and promoted anti-Israel hate.” Numerous people likened the article to the medieval “blood libel,” (widely refuted stories that Jews killed people to use their blood in religious rituals). Even some pro-Palestinian writers joined in the criticism, expressing skepticism.

The fact is, however, that substantiated evidence of public and private organ trafficking and theft, and allegations of worse, have been widely reported for many years. Given such context, the Swedish charges become far more plausible than might otherwise be the case and suggest that an investigation could well turn up significant information.

Below are a few examples of previous reports on this topic.

Israel’s first heart transplant

Israel’s very first, historic heart transplant used a heart removed from a living patient without consent or consulting his family.

In December 1968 a man named Avraham Sadegat (the New York Times seems to give his name as A Savgat) (2) died two days after a stroke, even though his family had been told he was “doing well.”

After initially refusing to release his body, the Israeli hospital where he was being treated finally turned the man’s body over to his family. They discovered that his upper body was wrapped in bandages; an odd situation, they felt, for someone who had suffered a stroke.

When they removed the bandages, they discovered that the chest cavity was stuffed with bandages, and the heart was missing.

During this time, the headline-making Israeli heart transplant had occurred. After their initial shock, the man’s wife and brother began to put the two events together and demanded answers.

The hospital at first denied that Sadegat’s heart had been used in the headline-making transplant, but the family raised a media storm and eventually applied to three cabinet ministers. Finally, weeks later and after the family had signed a document promising not to sue, the hospital admitted that Sadagat’s heart had been used.

The hospital explained that it had abided by Israeli law, which allowed organs to be harvested without the family's consent. (3) (The United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime includes the extraction of organs in its definition of human exploitation.)

Indications that the removal of Sadagat’s heart was the actual cause of death went unaddressed.

Director of forensic medicine on missing organs

A 1990 article in the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs entitled “Autopsies and Executions” by Mary Barrett reports on the grotesque killings of young Palestinians. It includes an interview with Dr. Hatem Abu Ghazalch, the former chief health official for the West Bank under Jordanian administration and director of forensic medicine and autopsies.

Barrett asks him about “the widespread anxiety over organ thefts which has gripped Gaza and the West Bank since the intifada began in December of 1987.”

He responded:

"There are indications that for one reason or another, organs, especially eyes and kidneys, were removed from the bodies during the first year or year and a half. There were just too many reports by credible people for there to be nothing happening. If someone is shot in the head and comes home in a plastic bag without internal organs, what will people assume?” (4)

Mysterious Scottish death

In 1998 a Scot named Alisdair Sinclair died under questionable circumstances while in Israeli custody at Ben Gurion airport.

His family was informed of the death and, according to a report in J Weekly, “…told they had three weeks to come up with about $4,900 to fly Sinclair's corpse home. [Alisdair’s brother] says the Israelis seemed to be pushing a different option: burying Sinclair in a Christian cemetery in Israel, at a cost of about $1,300.”

The family scraped up the money, brought the body home, and had an autopsy performed at the University of Glasgow. It turned out that Alisdair’s heart and a tiny throat bone were missing. At this point the British Embassy filed a complaint with Israel.

The J report states:

“A heart said to be Sinclair's was subsequently repatriated to Britain, free of charge. James wanted the [Israeli] Forensic Institute to pay for a DNA test to confirm that this heart was indeed their brother's, but the Institute's director, Professor Jehuda Hiss refused, citing the prohibitive cost, estimated by some sources at $1,500.”

Despite repeated requests from the British Embassy for the Israeli pathologist's and police reports, Israeli officials refused to release either. (5,6,7)

Israeli government officials raise questions

Palestinian journalist Khalid Amayreh reports in an article in CCUN:

“In January, 2002, an Israeli cabinet minister tacitly admitted that organs taken from the bodies of Palestinian victims might have been used for transplants in Jewish patients without the knowledge of the Palestinian victims’ families.

“The minister, Nessim Dahan, said in response to a question by an Arab Knesset member that he couldn’t deny or confirm that organs of Palestinian youths and children killed by the Israeli army were taken out for transplants or scientific research.

“‘I couldn’t say for sure that something like that didn’t happen.’”

Amayreh writes that the Knesset member who posed the question said that he “had received ‘credible evidence proving that Israeli doctors at the forensic institute of Abu Kabir extracted such vital organs as the heart, kidneys, and liver from the bodies of Palestinian youth and children killed by the Israeli army in Gaza and the West Bank.” (8)

Israel’s chief pathologist removed from post for stealing body parts

For a number of years there were allegations that Israel’s leading pathologist was stealing body parts. In 2001 the Israeli national news service reported:

“… the parents of soldier Ze’ev Buzgallo who was killed in a Golan Heights military training accident, are filing a petition with the High Court of Justice calling for the immediate suspension of Dr. Yehuda Hiss and that criminal charges be filed against him. Hiss serves as the director of the Abu Kabir Forensic Institute….According to the parents, the body of their son was used for medical experimentation without their consent, experiments authorized by Hiss. (9)

In 2002 the service reported:

“The revelation of illegally stored body parts in the Abu Kabir Forensic Institute has prompted MK Anat Maor, chairman of the Knesset Science Committee, to demand the immediate suspension of the director, Prof. Yehuda Hiss."

Alisdair Sinclair’s death had first alerted authorities to Hiss’s malfeasance in 1998, though nothing was done for years. The Forward reported:

“In 2001, an Israeli Health Ministry investigation found that Hiss had been involved for years in taking body parts, such as legs, ovaries and testicles, without family permission during autopsies, and selling them to medical schools for use in research and training. He was appointed chief pathologist in 1988. Hiss was never charged with any crime, but in 2004 he was forced to step down from running the state morgue, following years of complaints.” (10)

Harvesting kidneys from impoverished communities

According to the Economist, a kidney racket flourished in South Africa between 2001 and 2003. “Donors were recruited in Brazil, Israel and Romania with offers of $5,000-20,000 to visit Durban and forfeit a kidney. The 109 recipients, mainly Israelis, each paid up to $120,000 for a “transplant holiday”; they pretended they were relatives of the donors and that no cash changed hands.” (11)

In 2004 a legislative commission in Brazil reported, “At least 30 Brazilians have sold their kidneys to an international human organ trafficking ring for transplants performed in South Africa, with Israel providing most of the funding.”

According to an IPS report: “The recipients were mostly Israelis, who receive health insurance reimbursements of 70,000 to 80,000 dollars for life-saving medical procedures performed abroad.”

IPS reports:

The Brazilians were recruited in Brazil’s most impoverished neighbourhoods and were paid $10,000 per kidney, “but as ‘supply’ increased, the payments fell as low as 3,000 dollars.” The trafficking had been organized by a retired Israeli police officer, who said “he did not think he was committing a crime, given that the transaction is considered legal by his country's government.”

The Israeli embassy issued a statement denying any participation by the Israeli government in the illegal trade of human organs but said it did recognize that its citizens, in emergency cases, could undergo organ transplants in other countries, "in a legal manner, complying with international norms," and with the financial support of their medical insurance.

However, IPS reports that the commission chair termed the Israeli stance “at the very least ‘anti-ethical’, adding that trafficking can only take place on a major scale if there is a major source of financing, such as the Israeli health system.” He went on to state that the resources provided by the Israeli health system "were a determining factor" that allowed the network to function. (12)

Tel Aviv hospital head promotes organ trafficking

IPS goes on to report:

“Nancy Scheper-Hughes, who heads the Organs Watch project at the U.S. University of California, Berkeley, testified to the Pernambuco legislative commission that international trafficking of human organs began some 12 years ago, promoted by Zacki Shapira, former director of a hospital in Tel Aviv.

“Shapira performed more than 300 kidney transplants, sometimes accompanying his patients to other countries, such as Turkey. The recipients are very wealthy or have very good health insurance, and the ‘donors’ are very poor people from Eastern Europe, Philippines and other developing countries, said Scheper-Hughes, who specialises in medical anthropology.”

Israel prosecutes organ traffickers

In 2007 Israel’s Ha’aretz newspaper reported that two men confessed to persuading “Arabs from the Galilee and central Israel who were developmentally challenged or mentally ill to agree to have a kidney removed for payment.” They then would refuse to pay them.

The paper reported that the two were part of a criminal ring that included an Israeli surgeon. According to the indictment, the surgeon sold the kidneys he harvested for between $125,000 and $135,000. (13)

Earlier that year another Israeli newspaper, the Jerusalem Post, reported that ten members of an Israeli organ smuggling ring targeting Ukrainians had been arrested. (14)

In still another 2007 story, the Jerusalem Post reported that “Professor Zaki Shapira, one of Israel's leading transplant surgeons, was arrested in Turkey on Thursday on suspicion of involvement in an organ trafficking ring. According to the report, the transplants were arranged in Turkey and took place at private hospitals in Istanbul.”

Israeli organ trafficking comes to the U.S.?

In July of this year even US media reported on the arrest of Levy Izhak Rosenbaum, from Brooklyn, recently arrested by federal officials in a massive corruption sweep in New Jersey that netted mayors, government officials and a number of prominent rabbis. Bostrom opens his article with this incident.

According to the federal complaint, Rosenbaum, who has close ties to Israel, said that he had been involved in the illegal sale of kidneys for 10 years. A US Attorney explained: "His business was to entice vulnerable people to give up a kidney for $10,000 which he would turn around and sell for $160,000." (15)

This is reportedly the first case of international organ trafficking in the U.S.

University of California anthropologist and organ trade expert Nancy Scheper-Hughes, who informed the FBI about Rosenbaum seven years ago, says she heard reports that he had held donors at gunpoint to ensure they followed through on agreements to “donate” their organs. (16)

Israel’s organ donor problems

Israel has an extraordinarily small number of willing organ donors. According to the Israeli news service Ynet, “the percentage of organs donated among Jews is the lowest of all the ethnic groups… In western countries, some 30 per cent of the population have organ donor cards. In Israel, in contrast, four percent of the population holds such cards. (17)

“According to statistics from the Health Ministry’s website, in 2001, 88 Israelis died waiting for a transplant because of a lack of donor organs. In the same year, 180 Israelis were brain dead, and their organs could have been used for transplant, but only 80 of their relatives agreed to donate their organs.”

According to Ynet, the low incidence of donors is related to “religious reasons.” In 2006 there was an uproar when an Israeli hospital known for its compliance with Jewish law performed a transplant operation using an Israeli donor. The week before, “a similar incident occurred, but since the patient was not Jewish it passed silently.” (18, 19)

The Swedish article reports that ‘Israel has repeatedly been under fire for its unethical ways of dealing with organs and transplants. France was among the countries that ceased organ collaboration with Israel in the 1990s. Jerusalem Post wrote that “the rest of the European countries are expected to follow France’s example shortly.”

“Half of the kidneys transplanted to Israelis since the beginning of the 2000s have been bought illegally from Turkey, Eastern Europe or Latin America. Israeli health authorities have full knowledge of this business but do nothing to stop it. At a conference in 2003 it was shown that Israel is the only western country with a medical profession that doesn’t condemn the illegal organ trade. The country takes no legal measures against doctors participating in the illegal business – on the contrary, chief medical officers of Israel’s big hospitals are involved in most of the illegal transplants, according to Dagens Nyheter (December 5, 2003).”

To fill this need former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, then health minister of Israel, organized a big donor campaign in the summer of 1992, but while the number of donors skyrocketed, need still greatly surpassed supply.

Palestinian disappearances increase

Bostrom, who earlier wrote of all this in his 2001 book Inshallah, (20) reports in his recent article:

“While the campaign was running, young Palestinian men started to disappear from villages in the West Bank and Gaza. After five days Israeli soldiers would bring them back dead, with their bodies ripped open.

“Talk of the bodies terrified the population of the occupied territories. There were rumors of a dramatic increase of young men disappearing, with ensuing nightly funerals of autopsied bodies.”

“I was in the area at the time, working on a book. On several occasions I was approached by UN staff concerned about the developments. The persons contacting me said that organ theft definitely occurred but that they were prevented from doing anything about it. On an assignment from a broadcasting network I then travelled around interviewing a great number of Palestinian families in the West Bank and Gaza – meeting parents who told of how their sons had been deprived of organs before being killed.”

He describes the case of 19-year-old Bilal Achmed Ghanan, shot by Israeli forces invading his village.

“The first shot hit him in the chest. According to villagers who witnessed the incident he was subsequently shot with one bullet in each leg. Two soldiers then ran down from the carpentry workshop and shot Bilal once in the stomach. Finally, they grabbed him by his feet and dragged him up the twenty stone steps of the workshop stair… Israeli soldiers loading the badly wounded Bilal in a jeep and driving him to the outskirts of the village, where a military helicopter waited. The boy was flown to a destination unknown to his family.”

Five days later he was returned, “dead and wrapped up in green hospital fabric.” Bostrom reports that as the body was lowered into the grave, his chest was exposed and onlookers could see that he was stitched up from his stomach to his head. Bostrom writes that this was not the first time people had seen such a thing.

“The families in the West Bank and in Gaza felt that they knew exactly what had happened: “Our sons are used as involuntary organ donors,” relatives of Khaled from Nablus told me, as did the mother of Raed from Jenin and the uncles of Machmod and Nafes from Gaza, who had all disappeared for a number of days only to return at night, dead and autopsied.”

Why autopsies?

Bostrom describes the questions that families asked:

“Why are they keeping the bodies for up to five days before they let us bury them? What happened to the bodies during that time? Why are they performing autopsy, against our will, when the cause of death is obvious? Why are the bodies returned at night? Why is it done with a military escort? Why is the area closed off during the funeral? Why is the electricity interrupted?”

Israel’s answer was that all Palestinians who were killed were routinely autopsied. However, Bostrom points out that of the133 Palestinians who were killed that year, only 69 were autopsied.

He goes on to write:

“We know that Israel has a great need for organs, that there is a vast and illegal trade of organs which has been running for many years now, that the authorities are aware of it and that doctors in managing positions at the big hospitals participate, as well as civil servants at various levels. We also know that young Palestinian men disappeared, that they were brought back after five days, at night, under tremendous secrecy, stitched back together after having been cut from abdomen to chin.

It’s time to bring clarity to this macabre business, to shed light on what is going on and what has taken place in the territories occupied by Israel since the Intifada began.” (21)

The new “Blood Libel”?

In scanning through the reaction to Bostrom’s report, one is struck by the multitude of charges that his article is a new version of the old anti-Semitic “blood libel.” Given that fact, it is interesting to examine a 2007 book by Israel’s preeminent expert on medieval Jewish history, and what happened to him.

The author is Bar-Ilan professor (and rabbi) Ariel Toaff, son of the former chief rabbi of Rome, a religious leader so famous that an Israeli journalist writes that Toaff’s father “is to Italian Jewry as the Eiffel Tower is to Paris.” Ariel Toaff, himself, is considered “one of the greatest scholars in his field.” (22, 23)

In February 2007 the Israeli and Italian media were abuzz (though most of the U.S. media somehow missed it) with news that Professor Toaff had written a book entitled "Pasque di Sangue" (“Blood Passovers”) (24) containing evidence that there “was a factual basis for some of the medieval blood libels against the Jews.”

Based on 35 years of research, Toaff had concluded that there were at least a few, possibly many, real incidents.

In an interview with an Italian newspaper (the book was published in Italy), Toaff says:

“My research shows that in the Middle Ages, a group of fundamentalist Jews did not respect the biblical prohibition and used blood for healing. It is just one group of Jews, who belonged to the communities that suffered the severest persecution during the Crusades. From this trauma came a passion for revenge that in some cases led to responses, among them ritual murder of Christian children.” (25)

(Incidentally, an earlier book containing similar findings was published some years ago, also by an Israeli professor, Israel Shahak, of whom Noam Chomsky once wrote, “Shahak is an outstanding scholar, with remarkable insight and depth of knowledge. His work is informed and penetrating, a contribution of great value.” ) (26)

Professor Toaff was immediately attacked from all sides, including pressure orchestrated by Anti-Defamation League chairman Abe Foxman, but Toaff stood by his 35 years of research, announcing:

"I will not give up my devotion to the truth and academic freedom even if the world crucifies me… One shouldn't be afraid to tell the truth."

Before long, however, under relentless public and private pressure, Toaff had recanted, withdrawn his book, and promised to give all profits that had already accrued (the book had been flying off Italian bookshelves) to Foxman’s Anti-Defamation League. A year later he published a “revised version.”

Donald Bostrom’s experience seems to be a repeat of what Professor Toaff endured: calumny, vituperation, and defamation. Bostrom has received death threats as well, perhaps an experience that Professor Toaff also shared.

If Israel is innocent of organ plundering accusations, or if its culpability is considerably less than Bostrom and others suggest, it should welcome honest investigations that would clear it of wrongdoing. Instead, the government and its advocates are working to suppress all debate and crush those whose questions and conclusions they find threatening.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, rather than responding to calls for an investigation, is demanding that the Swedish government abandon its commitment to a free press and condemn the article. The Israeli press office, apparently in retaliation and to prevent additional investigation, is refusing to give press credentials to reporters from the offending newspaper.

Just as in the case of the rampage against Jenin, the attack on the USS liberty, the massacre of Gaza, the crushing of Rachel Corrie, the torture of American citizens, and a multitude of other examples, Israel is using its considerable, worldwide resources to interfere with the investigative process.

It is difficult to conclude that it has nothing to hide.

President Obama a Caveman?

2009-08-16T12:41:00.004-04:00

With a record of caving in to the pentagon on Guantanamo and Iraq, Obama is now caving in to the insurance industry and Republican goons squads in writing of any public health care option. Co-ops won't do it for those of us who are unemployed or too economically stretched. His constant repetition of the term "affordable" insurance is naive at best and cynical at worst. If he doesn't want to blow his base of support and be known as a caveman who caves to every corporate special interest; if he doesn't want to be seen as another Clintonite Republican mole who can't or won't stand up to the extreme right, he'd better rethink his position. Nothing less than a single payer public option, whether it be an extension of Medicare or an independent system is satisfactory. Is it any coincidence that the caveman has become an insurance industry icon? It's time we move beyond the stone age and join the civilized world in providing health care as a basic right.

Tempest in a Teabag

2009-08-13T11:19:00.005-04:00

Most of us want healthcare. Most, about 70% polled want public health care. Many of us demand a Single Payer System like that enjoyed by the rest of the civilized world.

Thus far, President Obama is offering much less than that. Still, townhall meeting organized to explain the paltry, sold out offering of insurance reform are drawing rabid goon squads like flies to carrion. What gives? Is this real citizen action or astroturf?

Who are the sponsors behind these protests?
Freedomworks founded by former U.S. House Majority Leader Dick Armey with support from Bristol Meyers.

Americans for Prosperity Also called the "Heathcare Freedom Coalition" funded by Big Oil interests or the "Health Benefits Coalition" led by the National Federation of Independent Business and included the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Health Benefits Coalition in reality got the lion’s share of its funding and guidance from the big insurance companies and their trade associations.

So once again, these proto-fascist teabaggers are being unleashed like hounds by thier corporate handlers.

We too need to be heard on this issue demanding Single Payer health care as at least an option. Flood your misrepresentatives with support for real health care and show up at local townhall meetings!

The Myth of Independece & the Reality of Interdependence

2009-07-05T12:07:00.005-04:00

There never really was an "American Revolution," only an assuming of power of our domestic elites. The rest is history and it may have been a mistake for most of us as the following poem suggests --

Undeclaration

It was a good idea once
inalienable rights and the abolition
of tyranny but
we've mucked it up, this great
American Experiment
our own inbred aristocracy madder
that noon-baked Englishmen with
crimes and usurpations running amok,
torn bodies and new hatreds in every
casbah tentacles
in every pocket and a
knife at every throat
and we wage slave
descendants of the free
sinking in the refuse of yesterday's bargains
punch clocked and jackbooting our way
to the fossil record at the speed of credit
with no payments 'till January --
a toxic spoor of ruined
places, broken lives and gulags.

We had a bad run but it's time
to come clean,
to admit our failure to
examine the bloody Manifest
of our imagined Destiny.

Time to Repent
for mass graves and wars of false premise,
for all those dictators, our murky turkeys lurking
in every hot satrapy with trained goons keeping
bloody order and a quota of disappeared.

Time to admit
it was all a mistake
made in the bravado of our youth and
rejoin the Commonwealth
Stop seeing stars and turn in our
bloody stripes
be British again
take tea and healthcare claim
our place lordless
in the house of commons where
Empire is only a memory
best forgotten.

-- Al Markowitz

If July 4th is the celebration of Independence for our American ruling class, then July 5th is a celebration of Interdependence for the rest of us, here and globally. The truth is that we ARE interdependent globally. It's all of us or none economically and ecologically. Our fates are inextricably bound. It's past time to recognize our interdependence and unite against the various competing sects of "government" that divide us and threaten our existence in the present and future.

A Little More Audacity Please!

2009-06-14T17:06:00.006-04:00

I haven't posted enough recently as the stress on unemployment and the work of putting out another Blue Collar Review have been taking up my time and limited energy. I agree with Bill Maher concerning our President though and appreciate his perspective and humor. Let's nope Obama is paying attention and lets let him know this is how we feel too.

Inconvenient Truths about "Real Existing’ Zionism"

2009-05-30T10:36:00.002-04:00

In a worthwhile article exposing the history and internal ideological contradictions of Zionism, Jacques Hersh makes some well thought observations about the end of the Zionist experiment -- or at least the process of its transformation. In Inconvenient Truths about ‘Real Existing’ Zionism he points out the seeds of fascist nationalism that were there all along and how they were manipulated as an alternative to the popular Marxism of 19th and early 20th century Judaism. If there is a weakness in his analysis, it is his assertion early in the article that support for Zionism and the Zionist state is waning among diaspora Jews. While there is some weakening in progressive circles, the vast majority, in my observation, still cling to and are poisoned by Zionist nationalism based partially on the fear-mongering of anti-semitism fed by the Islamaphobia of the imperialist "clash of cultures."

Still, this is an excellent article worth reading for the information and historical and contextual information it holds.

What Change?

2009-05-16T06:33:00.006-04:00

As the video below shows, we do not now have a government any more responsive or representative of us than we had under the Bush/Cheney administration. Don't expect health care from these contemptuous, corporate-beholden pigs. In other areas, Obama is continuing the Bush era policies of bailing out banks at home and of destabilization and outright murder of civilians around the world and especially in Pakistan. While it felt good to hear Obama assert that the US doesn't torture (just as Bush once did), it's still a lie as brutal torture in Guantanamo, Bagram, and elsewhere continues. As does censorship of abuse and so-called "military tribunals." So, where is the vaunted "change" we were sold? As the economy continues to slide into deeper depression many of us are desperately asking for change and as our desperation turns to anger, I expect the Obama administration will enforce order and strengthen the National Security State. Change inevitably will come from below but as the real nature of the new leadership unfolds, it is increasingly apparent that they are not the change we were hoping for and are, in fact, a continuation of the same rotten corporatocracy.

New Responsive Government

2009-05-12T11:36:00.001-04:00

Many who voted for "change" were hoping for a new, more responsive administration but this is the reality:

More at The Real News

The Virulent Cancer of Zionism

2009-05-07T08:32:00.006-04:00

As AIPAC meets in Washington, rampant human rights violations, expansion of Israeli settlements and housing demolitions continue in Israel. Activist Ezra Nawi is among the latest of resisters jailed by the Zionist apartheid regime. Medea Benjamin, beat up there for protesting and abused by hate-spewing Zionists rightly asks, Who Will Stop the AIPAC Jews Before it is Too Late? Zionism continues to be a cancer on the Jewish psyche. Having just returned from a stay with relatives I saw the continuing indoctrination of children and the incorporation of Zionism as a part of Judaism, as if it was inseparable from that tradition. It is a disease which is relatively recent and has grown over the last 40 years. The hatred spawned by Zionism and the blind support of it among many mainstream Jews poses, if anything, a danger to them. It may be Hitler's final legacy that Jews surviving his extermination adopt an ugly fascism that finishes them off culturally and possibly as a people. It's past time for American Jews to wake up and smell the rottenness for what it is. Time to take the responsibility to reclaim our traditional ethics and eschew the vicious aparthied state that tries to pass itself off as "Jewish" if it isn't already too late.

The Fix Is In

2009-04-24T07:24:00.004-04:00

The economic fraud and cover-ups continue under the Obama administration. The fraudulent basis of the present economic disaster and the continuing criminality are flushed out by William C. Black, a Wall Street Regulator on this Bill Moyers Segment. The obvious question is why Obama would choose Gaithner and others who are part of the scam to "fix" the problem instead of an honest operative without conflicts of interest like William Black or Joseph Stiglitz unless Obama himself is part of the cabal or made a deal with it upfront to insure his ascendancy to power. Meanwhile, we the taxpayers (those of us who still have jobs) will continue to bail out a sinking ship built on lies because no solution based on BS is viable.

Impending Change in US Cuba Relations

2009-04-19T09:10:00.003-04:00

The relationship between the US and Cuba seems to be warming as the obsolescence of the embargo becomes increasing apparent and costly to the US. Here is an insightful and informative look inside the process from the recent reflections of Fidel Castro:

It is not known how many people in the United States write to Obama and how many different issues they put to him. Obviously, he cannot read all the letters and tackle every issue, because neither the 24 hours of the day and the 365 days of the year would be enough. What is a fact is that advisors, backed up by computers, electronic equipment and cell phones, reply to all the letters. Their content is recorded and the replies, supported by many statements made by the new president during his nomination and election campaign, exist beforehand.
In any event, letters have their influence and weight in U.S. policy given that, in this case, it does not concern a corrupt, lying and ignorant politician like his predecessor, who despised the social advances of the New Deal.
That is why my attention was caught by a dispatch from Washington, published yesterday, April 14, by the DPA news agency.
"A group of retired high-ranking U.S. officers have urged President Barack Obama to support and sign a Congressional initiative to end the ban on travel to Cuba for all Americans, arguing that the embargo of the island does not serve Washington’s political and security aims.
"’The embargo has inspired a significant diplomatic movement against U.S. policy,’ note the 12 high-ranking retired officers, who include Barry McCaffrey, the ‘drug tsar’ during Bill Clinton’s presidency, and Colin Powell’s former chief of staff Lawrence B. Wilkerson, in a letter made public in Washington today.
"’As military professionals, we understand that America's interests are best served when the United States is able to attract the support of other nations to our cause,’ the officers state in the letter, sent to Obama on Monday, the day that the U.S. president announced the end of restrictions on travel and remittances to Cuban Americans, but not for all of the country’s citizens, as progressive sectors are demanding.
"In the view of these officers, the bill called the Freedom to Travel to Cuba Act, submitted to the House of Representatives by Democrat Bill Delahunt, is an important first step toward lifting the embargo.
"A type of policy, they add, ‘more likely to bring change to Cuba’ and also to change Washington’s international image.
"’Around the world, leaders are calling for a real policy shift that delivers on the hope you inspired in your campaign,’ the officers sustain.
"’Cuba offers the lowest-hanging fruit for such a shift and would be a move that would register deeply in the minds of our partners and competitors around the world,’ they add.
The news, located among 315 pages of cables seemed to be somewhat insignificant. However, it approaches the crux of the problem that promoted four Reflections in less than 24 hours related to the Americas Summit, which begins in 48 hours.
In the United States, politicians launch wars and the military has to make them.
Kennedy, inexperienced and young, decreed the blockade and the Bay of Pigs invasion, organized by Eisenhower and Nixon, who knew less about wars than he did. The unexpected setback led him to new and misguided decisions which culminated in the October Missile Crisis, from which, however, he emerged gracefully but traumatized by the risk of a thermonuclear war, which was very close, as the French journalist Jean Daniel told me. "He’s a thinking machine," he added, in praise of the president, who had deeply impressed him.
Later on, enthused with the Green Berets, he sent them to Vietnam, where the United States was supporting the restoration of the French colonial empire. Another politician, Lyndon Johnson, took that war to its final consequences. In that inglorious adventure, more than 50,000 soldiers lost their lives, the Union squandered no less than $500 billion when their value in gold fell 20 times, killed millions of Vietnamese and multiplied solidarity with that poor Third World country. Military service had to be replaced by professional soldiers, distancing the public from military training, which debilitated that nation.
A third politician, George W. Bush, protected by his father, executed the genocidal Iraq war that accelerated the economic crisis, making it more acute and profound. Its cost in economic figures rises to trillions of trillions of dollars, a public debt that will fall on new generations of U.S. citizens in a convulsed world full of risks.
Are those affirming that the embargo affects the security interests of the United States right or not?
The officers who wrote the letter are not appealing for the use of arms, but to the battle of ideas, something diametrically opposed to what the politicians have done.
In general, U.S. military personnel who defend the economic, political and social system of the United States, have privileges and are very well remunerated, but they are concerned at not becoming involved in the theft of public funds, which would result in discredit and a total lack of authority in terms of their military undertakings.
They do not believe that Cuba constitutes a threat to U.S. security, as others have attempted to portray us to U.S. public opinion. It was the governors of that country who converted Guantánamo base into a refuge of counterrevolutionaries or émigrés. Worse than that, they converted it into a torture center which they made famous as a symbol of the most brutal negation of human rights.
The military is also well aware that our country is a model in the war on drug trafficking and that no act of terrorism against the United States has ever been permitted from our territory.
As the Congressional Black Caucus was able to confirm, including Cuba on the list of terrorist countries is the most dishonest act ever made.
As well as Senators Lugar, Delahunt, the Caucus and other influential members of Congress, we thank those who wrote the letter to Obama.
We do not fear dialogue; we do not need to invent enemies; we do not fear a debate of ideas; we believe in our convictions and with them, we have learned to defend and will continue to defend our homeland.
With the fabulous advances in technology, war has turned into one of the most complex sciences.
That is something that U.S. soldiers understand. They know that it is not a matter of order and command in the style of the old wars. Today the adversaries quite probably never see each other’s faces; they can find each other at thousands of kilometers of distance; the most lethal weapons are fired by programs. Man barely participates. Decisions are calculated beforehand and lacking in emotion.
I have met a number of them, now retired, who have dedicated themselves to the study of military science and wars.
They do not express hatred or antipathy toward the little country that has fought and resisted confronting such a powerful enemy.
There currently exists in the United States a World Security Institute with which our country has contacts and academic exchanges. The one that existed 15 years ago was the Center for Defense Information (CDI). A CDI delegation made its first visit to Cuba at the end of June 1993. From that date to November 19, 2004, there have been nine visits to Cuba.
Up until 1999 the delegations were, in the main, made up of retired military officers.
In the October 1999 visit the composition of the delegations began to vary, reducing the presence of military personnel. From visit No. 5, all the delegations were led by the eminent researcher Bruce Blair, a security policy expert, specialized in control and command nuclear forces. A consultant professor at Yale and Princeton Universities. He has published countless books and hundreds of articles on the subject.
In that way, I came to know officers who assumed important roles in the U.S. armed forces. We didn’t always agree with their points of view, but they were always amiable. We had wide-ranging exchanges on historical events in which they had participated as soldiers.
The visits continued in 2006, but I had had the accident in Santa Clara and later fell gravely ill.
Of the 12 retired officers who signed the letter to Obama, one of them took part in those meetings.
I knew that in the last meeting that took place they said, in all frankness, that the military had no intention of attacking Cuba militarily; that there was a new political situation in the United States, derived from the weakness of the administration given its failure in Iraq.
It was clear to the compañeros who met with the U.S. delegation that they felt badly led and were ashamed at what was happening, although nobody could offer any guarantees on the political adventurism of the president of the United States, which he maintained up until the last day of his administration. That meeting took place at the beginning of March 2007, 14 months ago.
Bruce Blair must know much more than me on the thorny issue. His brave and transparent conduct always impressed me.
I did not want these data to remain in the archives awaiting the time when they would be of no interest to anybody.

2009-04-17T12:41:00.000-04:00

From increasing military actions in Afghanistan and Pakistan to refusing to prosecute those who tortured and ordered such crimes to not considering single payer health care, Obama has in many ways been a disappointment. This is not to say that he is all bad but that he falls far short of expectations and proimises. No surprise for those of us who realize that only a candidate with whom the corporate oligarchy was comfortable would have a chance at the Presidency. Still, for those less jaded, Naomic Klein writes:

Whatever the last straw, a growing number of Obama enthusiasts are starting to entertain the possibility that their man is not, in fact, going to save the world if we all just hope really hard.

This is a good thing. If the superfan culture that brought Obama to power is going to transform itself into an independent political movement, one fierce enough to produce programs capable of meeting the current crises, we are all going to have to stop hoping and start demanding.

The first stage, however, is to understand fully the awkward in-between space in which many US progressive movements find themselves. To do that, we need a new language, one specific to the Obama moment. Here is a start.

Hopeover. Like a hangover, a hopeover comes from having overindulged in something that felt good at the time but wasn't really all that healthy, leading to feelings of remorse, even shame. It's the political equivalent of the crash after a sugar high. Sample sentence: "When I listened to Obama's economic speech my heart soared. But then, when I tried to tell a friend about his plans for the millions of layoffs and foreclosures, I found myself saying nothing at all. I've got a serious hopeover."

Hoper coaster. Like a roller coaster, the hoper coaster describes the intense emotional peaks and valleys of the Obama era, the veering between joy at having a president who supports safe-sex education and despondency that single-payer healthcare is off the table at the very moment when it could actually become a reality. Sample sentence: "I was so psyched when Obama said he is closing Guantánamo. But now they are fighting like mad to make sure the prisoners in Bagram have no legal rights at all. Stop this hoper coaster-I want to get off!"

Hopesick. Like the homesick, hopesick individuals are intensely nostalgic. They miss the rush of optimism from the campaign trail and are forever trying to recapture that warm, hopey feeling-usually by exaggerating the significance of relatively minor acts of Obama decency. Sample sentences: "I was feeling really hopesick about the escalation in Afghanistan, but then I watched a YouTube video of Michelle in her organic garden and it felt like inauguration day all over again. A few hours later, when I heard that the Obama administration was boycotting a major UN racism conference, the hopesickness came back hard. So I watched slideshows of Michelle wearing clothes made by ethnically diverse independent fashion designers, and that sort of helped."

Hope fiend. With hope receding, the hope fiend, like the dope fiend, goes into serious withdrawal, willing to do anything to chase the buzz. (Closely related to hopesickness but more severe, usually affecting middle-aged males.) Sample sentence: "Joe told me he actually believes Obama deliberately brought in Summers so that he would blow the bailout, and then Obama would have the excuse he needs to do what he really wants: nationalize the banks and turn them into credit unions. What a hope fiend!"

Hopebreak. Like the heartbroken lover, the hopebroken Obama-ite is not mad but terribly sad. She projected messianic powers on to Obama and is now inconsolable in her disappointment. Sample sentence: "I really believed Obama would finally force us to confront the legacy of slavery in this country and start a serious national conversation about race. But now whenever he seems to mention race, he's using twisted legal arguments to keep us from even confronting the crimes of the Bush years. Every time I hear him say ‘move forward,' I'm hopebroken all over again."

Hopelash. Like a backlash, hopelash is a 180-degree reversal of everything Obama-related. Sufferers were once Obama's most passionate evangelists. Now they are his angriest critics. Sample sentence: "At least with Bush everyone knew he was an asshole. Now we've got the same wars, the same lawless prisons, the same Washington corruption, but everyone is cheering like Stepford wives. It's time for a full-on hopelash."

In trying to name these various hope-related ailments, I found myself wondering what the late Studs Terkel would have said about our collective hopeover. He surely would have urged us not to give in to despair. I reached for one of his last books, Hope Dies Last. I didn't have to read long. The book opens with the words: "Hope has never trickled down. It has always sprung up."

And that pretty much says it all. Hope was a fine slogan when rooting for a long-shot presidential candidate. But as a posture toward the president of the most powerful nation on earth, it is dangerously deferential. The task as we move forward (as Obama likes to say) is not to abandon hope but to find more appropriate homes for it-in the factories, neighborhoods and schools where tactics like sit-ins, squats and occupations are seeing a resurgence.

Political scientist Sam Gindin wrote recently that the labor movement can do more than protect the status quo. It can demand, for instance, that shuttered auto plants be converted into green-future factories, capable of producing mass-transit vehicles and technology for a renewable energy system. "Being realistic means taking hope out of speeches," he wrote, "and putting it in the hands of workers."

Which brings me to the final entry in the lexicon.

Hoperoots. Sample sentence: "It's time to stop waiting for hope to be handed down, and start pushing it up, from the hoperoots."

Teabagged at the Gates?

2009-04-16T07:27:00.009-04:00

Many cities, including my own, saw these large rallys yesterday. Angry folks "wanting their country back," decrying government spending and "socialism." Where did this army of uninformed stooges come from? We know the Libertarians aren't that organized. It seems the organization behind it is freedomworks a group founded by republican Dick Armey and funded by by tobacco, pharmaceutical and banking interests.

Joe Conason writes:
If conservative leaders no longer even try to offer serious solutions to national problems, nobody should underestimate their capacity or their will to mobilize angry Americans. Behind the April 15 “tea parties” rallying against President Barack Obama’s economic program—promoted as a new phenomenon by Fox News Channel and right-wing bloggers—stands a phalanx of Republicans whose ideology is all too familiar.

At the apex of the tea party movement, aside from such Fox revolutionaries as Rupert Murdoch, there is a well-funded organization known as FreedomWorks, headed by a former politician named Dick Armey. His past career should be instructive to any starry-eyed citizens who believe that they have at last found the true right-wing revolutionary path.

Back when the Republicans first gained control of Congress more than a decade ago, Armey, a former economics professor at a small Texas college, was hailed as the author of the Contract With America and led the Republicans as House majority leader until his retirement. He rose to power on the strength of a “tax revolt” against President Bill Clinton’s first budget, which raised rates on the wealthiest Americans to trim the enormous deficit he had inherited from the first Bush administration. That summer, Armey warned of an economic apocalypse—and his party won the midterm election before his predictions could be proved embarrassingly wrong.

As anyone with a functioning memory should know, the Republicans under the leadership of Armey and his cronies Newt Gingrich and Tom DeLay proceeded to rack up excesses in spending and boodling that made the old Democratic congressional leaders look quite stingy. When he was asked once why he and his GOP comrades were chomping so much more federal pork than the Democrats ever did, he replied bluntly: “To the victors go the spoils.”

Like so many self-styled populists of both parties in Washington, Armey packed his own golden parachute when he left Congress. At the same time that he took over the leadership of the “grass-roots” group that eventually became FreedomWorks, he also joined a major corporate lobbying firm. The Web site of DLA Piper, one of the capital’s biggest bipartisan law and lobbying outfits, boasts of Armey’s influence among his colleagues. As it happens, he specializes in homeland security, a major growth industry with billions wasted annually on corporate boondoggles. After all, his final legislative masterwork was to chair the House Select Committee on Homeland Security, and he was the prime sponsor of the legislation that created the Department of Homeland Security. Of course, he isn’t listed as a lobbyist, but instead is called a “senior policy advisor.”

As for FreedomWorks, which has claimed a national membership of some 700,000 conservative activists, its operations have long smelled of Astroturf, or artificial grass roots. Most of the money that funded Armey’s activism in the past was provided by tobacco, pharmaceutical and banking interests—and there is no reason to think that has changed.

Nor is the ideological bent of the tea party’s host in any sense new. When last heard from in 2005, Armey was busily conjuring phony grass-roots support for Social Security privatization. That effort led to a notorious episode involving a FreedomWorks employee who showed up at the Bush White House, where she was introduced as a “single mom from Iowa” endorsing the president’s private-accounts scheme.

Buzzing beneath the furious rants of the tea party protests, it is not hard to hear the same old right-wing rhetoric about taxes and deficits and the same old schemes to cut the taxes for the wealthiest citizens, deregulate the economy and despoil the environment. The difference between the heyday of Armey and now is that we have suffered the results of those policies in practice and reject them. The Republican Party’s appeal and conservatism as a movement are lower than ever.

Months of furious propaganda on talk radio and Fox News has achieved nothing so far, according to nearly every survey. Barack Obama’s approval ratings remain close to 66 percent, with most Americans trusting him and believing that the country is on the path to renewal. This president has long benefited from ineffectual and discredited adversaries—and Armey is no exception.

The danger is that these easily manipulated, knownothings of today may be the precursor for more dangerous armed mobs down the road. History shows that power concedes nothing without a fight and that the most ignorant sectors of the population can be rallied with nationalism and religion against progress.

How the US Became a Banana Republic

2009-03-27T08:02:00.004-04:00

Crony capitalism in its hubris got us here. Our economy, parodying the crises formerly seen in developing countries, remains in freefall largely because it has been all but taken over by the finance sector which continues to run things. Simon Johnson, former chief economist at the IMF, provides a good analysis of the crisis in The Quiet Coup. His solutions echo the austerity programs inflicted on developing countries and, from the point of view of saving capitalism, may be sound. What he fails to consider is the inevitable double whammy on already failing economies of impending climate change, and the results of citizen reaction - especially when manipulated by those in the ruling class who refuse to take the dictated bitter medicine, ie, a possible rise of dictatorial fascism much of which is already legally in place. In order to avoid a calamity of untold proportions resulting in a brutal police-sate distopia, Obama must break with the ruling economic elite, sever the influence of finance over policy, nationalize and re-regulate banking and build the foundations for an economy that can withstand and adapt to the very different scenario of the future. Even if he is willing to do that, he may not be powerful enough to overcome the entrenched power of these corrupt interests. Meanwhile the right is busy building its angry base of hate groups. The corporate media can be counted on to spread fear and reaction.

We must use the short time allotted us to push Obama in a realistic direction and build support for real progress. We must also do all we can to build our own mutually supportive communities around progressive principles. We too must prepare for the worst.

Addressing the Real Crisis

2009-02-26T15:57:00.002-05:00

It is good to see the large turnout of climate protesters at the Power Shift gathering in Washington. As important as the economy is at this moment, it is dwarfed in importance by the reality of the global ecological crises which looms. We will not be the first civilization to collapse due to climate change though on a global scale we will be the largest. Today's youth will have to deal with survival in the new and awful world we've created. Unless this administration takes on adapting our nation to the very different conditions we will soon be facing, there won't be a United States in another 70 years. No issue is more vital and it is intimately tied to the economy as well. Saving the system as it is may work in the very short term but it guarantees disaster down the line.

Obama's Address -- A Prole's Critique

2009-02-25T08:00:00.004-05:00

OK, so maybe Obama does "have a clue" at least about domestic issues. In his speech to the Congress and nation last night he addressed many of the issues that most concern us and I think he is on the right track. He also does well at putting the Repugs in a tight spot by preemptively countering their predictable criticism and setting the trap for their own self isolation.

A few critical questions -- I think it is great that he asks "every American to commit to at least one year or more of higher education or career training." but how can we afford to do that? An investment in funding job retraining programs for displaced workers would be a wise investment sure to pay off in taxes and economic growth but I didn't hear that and many of us won't qualify for traditional loans, especially if we are already unemployed. Let's "Leave No Adult Behind."

Healthcare -- I applaud his intent and await the possibilities but tax breaks on insurance policies and electronic records won't do it. We need a single payer program

Social Security -- He scares me on this one. We don't need a Repug lite approach of "creating tax-free universal savings accounts for all Americans." SSI is already a tax-free universal savings account for all Americans and it would take far less money to keep it solvent indefinitely than he is committing to bailing out the banks!

As for his foreign agenda -- he still may not have a clue. I'm glad he is still committed to getting us out of Iraq but his incursions into and bombing of Pakistan only strengthen Al Qaeda and further destabilize Pakistan strengthening militant Anti-Western Islamists. His escalation of our occupation in Afghanistan is unwise and unwanted there and while he is closing Guantanamo, the Bagram gulag in Afghanistan is far, far worse. And yes, we do torture though I hope he means we have stopped. His support of Israel as it moves to the racist right also shows a lack if insight that sets the stage for further US backed atrocities.

All in all, it was a pleasure to hear an intelligent and articulate leader and that does give me some hope but we will have to stay on his case. It was my pleasure to stumble into the opportunity to converse with my local Senator, Senator Mark Warner last week where I pointed out our need to retool for a different era with a new public power grid and rail system and how that would also create jobs. I also pushed the idea of publicly funded skill re-training for displaced workers and he seemed genuinely interested and responded positively to the idea. Of course he's a politician but he is one of the better ones. I hope I planted a bug that will have some results.

If He Only Had A Clue

2009-02-14T08:34:00.004-05:00

He could get it fixed on Wall St.
create real jobs on Main St.
and select a better crew,
He'd end blank checks to Israel
and bring some peace to that hell
-- if he only had a clue

He could make the Congress line up
if he pressed them all to sign on
but instead he tries to woo
the right-wing crooks who hate him
and will still block and berate him
-- if he only had a clue

He could deal with all the Repugs
imprisoning the worst thugs
and save the constitution too
but instead he will continue
their imperialist venue,
-- if he only had a clue

He could close down all our gulags
and end so-called "renditions"
but this he will not do--
He could bring the world together
and address the changing weather
-- if he only had a clue

Crimes Against Humanity

2009-01-15T13:13:00.002-05:00

As the deadly assault on Gaza continues, the crimes perpetrated by Israel mount. The latest is the bombing raid on the headquarters of the UN Relief and Works Agency as well as the al-Quds hospital. It is also beyond doubt that white phosphorous weapons are being used against the Gazan population -- a crime against humanity. By its silence, the incoming Obama administration is guilty of aiding and abetting those crimes.

Good Gaza Coverage from Link TV

2009-01-12T13:09:00.000-05:00

The Prole on the Street

2009-01-12T09:22:00.006-05:00

Here in Norfolk, I have been involved in protests against Israel's assault of Gaza, the last on December 30th and another to happen later today. This evenings vigil brings in the local Islamic community with other religious and community organizations in a show of solidarity with Palestinians.

Also in keeping with the times I have a New t-shirt available at Partisan T-Party:

Jews Speak Out Against Zionism

2009-01-11T12:35:00.002-05:00

Whether in Canada or the U.S., there are a growing number of Jews breaking with Zionism. While the majority may remain silent for fear of community alienation, groups like International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network, J Street, and Jews Untied for Peace and Justice are growing. Israel's monstrous intransigence is undermining its base of support. Articles like the following are vital in letting Jews know that it is OK to criticize Israel and in undermining the anti-Semitism which Zionism perpetuates.

by Haroon Siddiqui

Judith Weisman, 78, is a Toronto psychotherapist. She grew up in "a very Zionist family" in Baltimore but "began to change when Israel supported the Vietnam War."

She and her husband came to Canada in 1969. She worked at the Jewish Family and Children's Services.

Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon estranged her from the Jewish state. "It took me a while to grasp what was being done to the Palestinians." She was critical of Israel through the two intifadas and the 2006 invasion of Lebanon.

She helped found Jews for a Just Peace; Jewish Women to End the Occupation (since renamed Women in Solidarity with Palestine); Not in Our Name; and an umbrella group, Independent Jewish Voices.

She helped host a stream of visiting Israeli scholars and human rights activists. She's awaiting the arrival of Jeff Halper of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (7.30 p.m., Jan. 23, Trinity St. Paul's United Church).

Hers has been a long struggle, ignored by the media and shunned by "the organized Jewish community" that is solidly pro-Israel.

But in recent years, she and other dissidents have been garnering support. In recent days, they've had much company.

On Wednesday, a dozen Jewish women "occupied" the Israeli consulate on Bloor St., demanding an end to the Israeli siege of Gaza.

The group included Judy Rebick and Judith Deutsch, president of Science for Peace (whose former presidents include George Ignatieff, the late father of Liberal leader, Michael, who has just joined the Stephen Harper Tories in giving blanket immunity to Israel).

The women expressed "outrage at Ottawa's refusal to condemn the massacres," said spokesperson Miriam Garfinkle. They urged the media to report that "many Jewish-Canadians do not support Israel's violence and apartheid policies."

On Thursday, four prominent Jewish Canadians held a news conference.

Anton Kuerti, internationally acclaimed concert pianist, said:

"I am not an expert on what is a war crime but I can recognize one when I see one ...

"What if almost a thousand Israelis had been killed by F-16s and helicopters and 1,000-pound bombs? There'd be immense outrage throughout the world ...

"Israel's behaviour makes me ashamed of being a Jew, and Canada's servile support of the United States position – `it's all Hamas' fault' – makes me ashamed of being a Canadian."

Deutsch read from a prepared statement: "The words `never again,' so fraught with memories of the Holocaust, means `never again' for all peoples."

Others who spoke were Weisman; Michael Mandel, professor of international law at Osgoode Hall, once a visiting professor at Hebrew University of Jerusalem; and the venerable Ursula Franklin, retired U of T research physicist, Companion of the Order of Canada and a Pearson Medal of Peace recipient.

Later that evening, two dozen dissenting Jews turned up at a pro-Israel rally at Beth Tzedec Synagogue.

Smadar Carmon, a dual Israeli-Canadian citizen, said the group was harassed by another – "a mob of thugs, full of hate, shouting `IDF,' `We love Israel,' and `Terrorist supporters,' `Traitors,' `You are not real Jews.'"

On the other side of town, there was a candlelight vigil for Gaza at the Mississauga Civic Square, organized by Palestine House.

And yesterday, there was a demonstration in front of the Israeli consulate, organized by an array of groups, including the Canadian Arab Federation, Canadian Peace Alliance, Coalition to Stop the War, Canadian Union of Public Employees (Ontario), Canadian Union of Postal Workers, and all the groups that Weisman is associated with.
She had planned to be there, as she had been the Saturday before.

The Holocaust Continues

2009-01-09T08:21:00.002-05:00

OUR liquidation of the Gaza ghetto continues. Yes it is ours because we arm, fund and call the shots of our proxy state "Israel." Below, an article from the Palestine Chronicle describes the realities:

By Suzanne Baroud

Ironically, it was in Palestine, 20 years ago, that I concluded that there is no God. For how could a God, who claims to love all and treat all with impartiality, allow such horrors like those in Palestine to happen?

This unbelief grew stronger with each curfew, with each strike that mourned the death of yet one more martyr, with a decapitation induced by gunfire in the main square on a sunny Ramallah afternoon so many years ago. But it was cemented the day I had to tell one of my fifth grade students that his brother had just been taken away by the Israeli army. His expression, his body going limp, the shuddering of his shoulders as he wept with his classmates…that’s what finally did it.

Nearly 20 years have passed since that day, and I have now married into a Gazan family. I am a wife and mother, the sister and aunt of so many kids living the horror of what Gaza has become. As we watch the footage of Israel’s onslaught, I hear myself, whispering as I see one more martyred child, “Run to the angels….run.” After so many years, this living nightmare is fostering a burning desire to believe once again in the afterlife.

Caged, starved, sniped, suffocated. They are slaughtered like sheep, but the leaders of the free world just cannot seem to find a moment to comment. Golfing, vacationing, Obama, Bush, even the EU, they just aren’t important enough. My mutterings have become a like a canter. I call out to these stricken and shattered little bodies, who frankly never experienced life to lose it. The only consolation to offer is the respite found in death.

A crowd gathers, shrouded in gas, smoke and dust. In the front stand eight young fathers, each holding a white swaddled bundle of what used to be a son, a daughter. For a few moments there is no screaming, no chanting or crying, but a moment of quiet and stillness that presses one to wonder just whom has been granted the greater mercy, the toddler who caught the snipers bullet, or the young father, who will have to find some way to live beyond this moment?

A young boy sits on the sidewalk beside his mother. She is propped up against the wall of a collapsed building and her life is bleeding out all over the sidewalk. It is spattered on his face and smeared on his shirt. She uses the last of her strength to lift her arm and clutch his cheek in her palm and then she is gone. He rests his head in his hands and cries. He is all alone.

The camera zooms in on the scene of a freshly detonated building, a civilian home. A little girls brown curly hair covered in dust and eyes wide open is all that can be found of her. Her mother wails and pulls her hair while her father frantically searches among the rubble for the rest of his daughter, where could she be? I whisper again, “you will be made whole again in Paradise. Run to the angels”.

What amazing faith. What strong devotion that a father loses his mother, father, wife and eight children, that this man before anything can assert, “God is Great, Thank God for Everything”. He holds his child, now still and ashen, he smothers him with kisses and then gently pulls back the sheet to expose two bullet holes in his chest. He then tenderly places the child beside his brother and again, pulls the sheet back of his youngest son to reveal a single snipers bullet to the chest. He can barely compose himself and he moans to the sympathizing camera man, “God is Great, Thank God for Everything”.

An old and wrinkled Imam so lovingly cradles a little girl’s lifeless body, as if mishandling her now could inflict more pain, he mumbles a benediction and gently lies her beside her sisters and her brothers in the mass grave. I try to comfort her, saying, “Finally, a place of safety. Rest beside your sister. Your brother. Put your fears to rest and meet your beloved Prophet and the many of your little friends who have fallen before you.”

Hospitals, schools, mosques, civilian homes, UN shelters, all worthy targets. Doctors, medicines, food and water, truckloads of relief from all corners of the world line up for miles at the Egyptian border but they are refused entry. Security is high, food is scarce, water is completely gone.

Faith seems to spring forth in the strangest of moments. For me, it seems to be coming full circle out of desperation and in agony, for the sake of the snow-white souls of the many bloodied and dismembered innocents of Gaza.

UN workers coordinate with Israelis to get civilians to safety inside a UN school. Hundreds are tucked inside the mutually agreed safe haven. Soon after, the school comes under Israeli fire. Bruised and battered refugees stare Satan in the face, clad in his fatigues. Hundreds wounded, scores dead, many lost and unaccounted for.

Governments negotiate a cease-fire. Rumors buzz of conspiracies. The US President-elect is forever silent. Parents search beneath the collapsed walls for what remains of their children. Shattered concrete, random arms and legs, broken glass, tossed together in a bloody hodge-podge. But, in my mind, I see them whole, their little bodies swiftly being swept up into Paradise and I call out to them, “Run!”

On the Ground in Gaza

2008-12-28T14:51:00.003-05:00

The overcrowded prison called the Gaza Strip is being attacked by Israel. It is an act of mass murder and a part of an ongoing genocide. Here is an on the ground report
by Ewa Jasiewicz --

As I write this, Israeli jets are bombing the areas of Zeitoun and Rimal in central Gaza City. The family I am staying with has moved into the internal corridor of their home to shelter from the bombing. The windows nearly blew out just five minutes ago as a massive explosion rocked the house. Apache's are hovering above us, whilst F16s sear overhead.

UN radio reports say one blast was a target close to the main gate of Al Shifa hospital - Gaza and Palestine's largest medical facility. Another was a plastics factory. More bombs continue to pound the Strip.

Sirens are wailing on the streets outside. Regular power cuts that plunge the city into blackness every night and tonight is no exception. Only perhaps tonight it is the darkest night people have seen here in their lifetimes.

Over 220 people have been killed and over 400 injured through attacks that shocked the strip in the space 15 minutes. Hospitals are overloaded and unable to cope. These attacks come on top of existing conditions of humanitarian crisis: a lack of medicines, bread, flour, gas, electricity, fuel and freedom of movement.

Doctors at Shifaa had to scramble together 10 make shift operating theatres to deal with the wounded. The hospital's maternity ward had to transform their operating room into an emergency theatre. Shifaa only had 12 beds in their intensive care unit, they had to make space for 27 today.

There is a shortage of medicine - over 105 key items are not in stock, and blood and spare generator parts are desperately needed.

Shifaa's main generator is the life support machine of the entire hospital. It's the apparatus keeping the ventilators and monitors and lights turned on that keep people inside alive. And it doesn't have the spare parts it needs, despite the International Committee for the Red Cross urging Israel to allow it to transport them through Erez checkpoint.

Shifaa's Head of Casualty, Dr Maowiye Abu Hassanyeh explained, 'We had over 300 injured in over 30 minutes. There were people on the floor of the operating theatre, in the reception area, in the corridors; we were sending patients to other hospitals. Not even the most advanced hospital in the world could cope with this number of casualties in such a short space of time.'

And as IOF Chief of Staff Lieutenant-General Gabi Ashkenaz said this morning, 'This is only the beginning.'

But this isn't the beginning, this is an ongoing policy of collective punishment and killing with impunity practised by Israel for decades. It has seen its most intensified level today. But the weight of dread, revenge and isolation hangs thick over Gaza today. People are all asking: If this is only the beginning, what will the end look like?

11.30am

Myself and Alberto Acre, a Spanish journalist, had been on the border village of Sirej near Khan Younis in the south of the strip. We had driven there at 8am with the mobile clinic of the Union of Palestinian Relief Committees. The clinic regularly visits exposed, frequently raided villages far from medical facilities. We had been interviewing residents about conditions on the border. Stories of olive groves and orange groves, family farmland, bulldozed to make way for a clear line of sight for Israeli occupation force watch towers and border guards. Israeli attacks were frequent. Indiscriminate fire and shelling spraying homes and land on the front line of the south eastern border. One elderly farmer showed us the grave-size ditch he had dug to climb into when Israeli soldiers would shoot into his fields.

Alberto was interviewing a family that had survived an Israeli missile attack on their home last month. It had been a response to rocket fire from resistance fighters nearby. Four fighters were killed in a field by the border. Israel had rained rockets and M16 fire back. The family, caught in the crossfire, have never returned to their home.

I was waiting for Alberto to return when ground shaking thuds tilted us off our feet. This was the sound of surface to air fired missiles and F16 bombs slamming into the police stations, and army bases of the Hamas authority here. In Gaza City , in Diere Balah, Rafah, Khan Younis, Beit Hanoon.

We zoomed out of the village in our ambulance, and onto the main road to Gaza City , before jumping out to film the smouldering remains of a police station in Diere Balah, near Khan Younis. Its' name - meaning 'place of dates' - sounds like the easy semi-slang way of saying 'take care', Diere Bala, Diere Balak - take care.

Eyewitnesses said two Israeli missiles had destroyed the station. One had soared through a children's playground and a busy fruit and vegetable market before impacting on its target.

Civilians Dead

There was blood on a broken plastic yellow slide, and a crippled, dead donkey with an upturned vegetable cart beside it. Aubergines and splattered blood covered the ground. A man began to explain in broken English what had happened. 'It was full here, full, three people dead, many many injured'. An elderly man with a white kuffiyeh around his head threw his hands down to his blood drenched trousers. 'Look! Look at this! Shame on all governments, shame on Israel, look how they kills us, they are killing us and what does the world do? Where is the world, where are they, we are being killed here, hell upon them!' He was a market trader, present during the attack.

He began to pick up splattered tomatoes he had lost from his cart, picking them up jerkily, and putting them into plastic bags, quickly. Behind a small tile and brick building, a man was sitting against the wall, his legs were bloodied. He couldn't get up and was sitting, visibly in pain and shock, trying to adjust himself, to orientate himself.

The police station itself was a wreck, a mess of criss-crossed piles of concrete - broken floors upon floors. Smashed cars and a split palm tree split the road.

We walked on, hurriedly, with everyone else, eyes skyward at four apache helicopters - their trigger mechanisms supplied by the UK 's Brighton-Based EDM Technologies. They were dropping smoky bright flares - a defence against any attempt at Palestinian missile retaliation.

Turning down the road leading to the Diere Balah Civil Defence Force headquarters we suddenly saw a rush of people streaming across the road. 'They've been bombing twice, they've been bombing twice' shouted people.

We ran too, but towards the crowds and away from what could possibly be target number two, 'a ministry building' our friend shouted to us. The apaches rumbled above.

Arriving at the police station we saw the remains of a life at work smashed short. A prayer matt clotted with dust, a policeman's hat, the ubiquitous bright flower patterned mattresses, burst open. A crater around 20 feet in diameter was filled with pulverised walls and floors and a motorbike, tossed on its' side, toy-like in its' depths.

Policemen were frantically trying to get a fellow worker out from under the rubble. Everyone was trying to call him on his Jawwal. 'Stop it everyone, just one, one of you ring' shouted a man who looked like a captain. A fire licked the underside of an ex-room now crushed to just 3 feet high. Hands alongside hands rapidly grasped and threw back rocks, blocks and debris to reach the man.

We made our way to the Al Aqsa Hospital. Trucks and cars loaded with the men of entire families - uncles, nephews, brothers - piled high and speeding to the hospital to check on loved ones, horns blaring without interruption.

Hospitals on the brink

Entering Al Aqsa was overwhelming, pure pandemonium, charged with grief, horror, distress, and shock. Limp blood covered and burnt bodies streamed by us on rickety stretchers. Before the morgue was a scrum, tens of shouting relatives crammed up to its open double doors. 'They could not even identify who was who, whether it is their brother or cousin or who, because they are so burned' explained our friend. Many were transferred, in ambulances and the back of trucks and cars to Al Shifa Hospital.

The injured couldn't speak. Causality after casualty sat propped against the outside walls outside, being comforted by relatives, wounds temporarily dressed. Inside was perpetual motion and the more drastically injured. Relatives jostled with doctors to bring in their injured in scuffed blankets. Drips, blood streaming faces, scorched hair and shrapnel cuts to hands, chests, legs, arms and heads dominated the reception area, wards and operating theatres.

We saw a bearded man, on a stretcher on the floor of an intensive care unit, shaking and shaking, involuntarily, legs rigid and thrusting downwards. A spasm coherent with a spinal chord injury. Would he ever walk again or talk again? In another unit, a baby girl, no older than six months, had shrapnel wounds to her face. A relative lifted a blanket to show us her fragile bandaged leg. Her eyes were saucer-wide and she was making stilted, repetitive, squeaking sounds.

A first estimate at Al Aqsa hospital was 40 dead and 120 injured. The hospital was dealing with casualties from the bombed market, playground, Civil Defence Force station, civil police station and also the traffic police station. All leveled. A working day blasted flat with terrifying force.

At least two shaheed (martyrs) were carried out on stretchers out of the hospital. Lifted up by crowds of grief-stricken men to the graveyard to cries of 'La Illaha Illa Allah,' there is not god but Allah.

Who cares?

And according to many people here, there is nothing and nobody looking out for them apart from God. Back in Shifa Hospital tonight, we meet the brother of a security guard who had had the doorway he had been sitting in and the building - Abu Mazen's old HQ - fall down upon his head. He said to us, 'We don't have anyone but God. We feel alone. Where is the world? Where is the action to stop these attacks?'

Majid Salim, stood beside his comatosed mother, Fatima. Earlier today she had been sitting at her desk at work - at the Hadije Arafat Charity, near Meshtal, the Headquarters of the Security forces in Gaza City. Israel's attack had left her with multiple internal and head injuries, tube down her throat and a ventilator keeping her alive. Majid gestured to her, 'We didn't attack Israel, my mother didn't fire rockets at Israel. This is the biggest terrorism, to have our mother bombarded at work'.

The groups of men lining the corridors of the over-stretched Shifaa hospital are by turns stunned, agitated, patient and lost. We speak to one group. Their brother had both arms broken and has serious facial and head injuries. 'We couldn't recognise his face, it was so black from the weapons used' one explains. Another man turns to me and says. 'I am a teacher. I teach human rights - this is a course we have, 'human rights'. He pauses. 'How can I teach, my son, my children, about the meaning of human rights under these conditions, under this siege?'

It's true, UNRWA and local government schools have developed a Human Rights syllabus, teaching children about international law, the Geneva Conventions, the International Declaration on Human Rights, The Hague Regulations. To try to develop a culture of human rights here, to help generate more self confidence and security and more of a sense of dignity for the children. But the contradiction between what should be adhered to as a common code of conducted signed up to by most states, and the realities on the ground is stark. International law is not being applied or enforced with respect to Israeli policies towards the Gaza Strip, or on '48 Palestine, the West Bank, or the millions of refugees living in camps in Lebanon, Jordan and Syria.

How can a new consciousness and practice of human rights ever graduate from rhetoric to reality when everything points to the contrary - both here and in Israel ? The United Nations have been spurned and shut out by Israel , with Richard Falk the UN's Special Rapporteur on Human Rights held prisoner at Ben Gurion Airport before being unceremoniously deported this month - deliberately blinded to the abuses being carried out against Gaza by Israel . An international community which speaks empty phrases on Israeli attacks 'we urge restraint...minimise civilian casualties'.

The Gaza Strip is one of the most densely populated regions on the planet. In Jabbaliya camp alone, Gaza 's largest, 125,000 people are crowded into a space 2km square. Bombardment by F16s and Apaches at 11.30 in the morning, as children leave their schools for home reveals a contempt for civilian safety as does the 18 months of a siege that bans all imports and exports, and has resulted in the deaths of over 270 people as a result of a lack of access to essential medicines.

While the rest of the world condemns the bloody and illegal intransigence of the Israeli Apartheid state, the US chastises the victims of Israel for their resistance.

Give Bush the Boot!

2008-12-16T08:48:00.003-05:00

Following up on the brave example of Iraqi journalist Muntadhar al-Zeidi we should all send Bush a shoe or two. Messages can be attached (or stepped in) but it is the symbolic act of mass repudiation and disapproval that really matters. Shoes should be sent to:

George Bush
White House
1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW
Washington, DC 20500-0003

Return to the Real Economy

2008-12-15T08:38:00.004-05:00

I haven't posted in a while as we are in a period rife with mystery as well as terror of impending economic collapse. As I tend to be on the cusp of change, I was among those layed off (if not officially fired to avoid my taking unemployment comp) last March and have yet to be able to find work. Also, I am at present working on the next issue of the Blue Collar Review which takes a great deal of my attention.

There are many theories bantered about regarding the cause (and therefore who to blame) for our unfolding economic disaster. The most comprehensive explanation I've yet found is an article by John Bellamy Foster and Fred Magdoff; Financial Implosion and Stagnation, Back To The Real Economy in which they write:
Our argument in a nutshell is that both the financial explosion in recent decades and the financial implosion now taking place are to be explained mainly in reference to stagnation tendencies within the underlying economy. A number of other explanations for the current crisis (most of them focusing on the proximate causes) have been given by economists and media pundits. These include the lessening of regulations on the financial system; the very low interest rates introduced by the Fed to counter the effects of the 2000 crash of the “New Economy” stock bubble, leading to the housing bubble; and the selling of large amounts of “sub-prime” mortgages to many people that could not afford to purchase a house and/or did not fully understand the terms of the mortgages.

Much attention has rightly been paid to the techniques whereby mortgages were packaged together and then “sliced and diced” and sold to institutional investors around the world. Outright fraud may also have been involved in some of the financial shenanigans. The falling home values following the bursting of the housing bubble and the inability of many sub-prime mortgage holders to continue to make their monthly payments, together with the resulting foreclosures, was certainly the straw that broke the camel’s back, leading to this catastrophic system failure. And few would doubt today that it was all made worse by the deregulation fervor avidly promoted by the financial firms, which left them with fewer defenses when things went wrong.

Nevertheless, the root problem went much deeper, and was to be found in a real economy experiencing slower growth, giving rise to financial explosion as capital sought to “leverage” its way out of the problem by expanding debt and gaining speculative profits. The extent to which debt has shot up in relation to GDP over the last four decades can be seen in table 1. As these figures suggest, the most remarkable feature in the development of capitalism during this period has been the ballooning of debt.

In essence, much of the shift from a productive economy imbalanced by overproduction and stagnant wages to an economy based on debt-leveraging and speculation, as well as the basic flawed nature of capitalism are at the root of this disaster. They point out that the bailouts based on the theory of governments as the lender of last resort will only exacerbate the problem of debt and set the stage for even worse disasters. As they summeraize:
in contravention of Keynes’s dream of a more rational capitalism—without moving beyond the system itself. In this sense we are clearly at a global turning point, where the world will perhaps finally be ready to take the step, as Keynes also envisioned, of repudiating an alienated moral code of “fair is foul and foul is fair”—used to justify the greed and exploitation necessary for the accumulation of capital—turning it inside-out to create a more rational social order. 49 To do this, though, it is necessary for the population to seize control of their political economy, replacing the present system of capitalism with something amounting to a real political and economic democracy; what the present rulers of the world fear and decry most—as “socialism.”

This article is vital to an understanding of where we are. Admittedly, it is not for the lazy reader but it is well worth the effort.

Where To From Here?

2008-11-26T10:01:00.005-05:00

As the reality of economic disaster sets in, many are pointing fingers and looking for blame. Economist Joseph Stiglitz gets to the meat of it in his article Reversal of Fortune pointing to "special interest pressure, populist politics, bad economics, and sheer incompetence."

The bottom line is that the false ideology of the "free market" has failed miserably. It is corruption in practice and We the People are now beginning to pay the price for the unmitigated plunder of the country and the planet by the corporate ruling class. This has become so obvious that, as noted in an excellent article in Political Affairs Magazine, capitalism itself is being examined and it's future called into question in the mainstream press as Marx inevitably appears increasingly more relevant to our times than the delusional raving of the usual Wall Street sycophants.

While I continue to remain cautiously optimistic about the incoming Obama Administration, his choices of economic counsel are in fact some of the same folks who espoused the "free market" policies that are at the root of the present crisis. I continue to believe that Obama's intentions and agenda are good and that he feels he is tapping the most qualified expertise there is but he would do well to include some progressive minds from outside the inner sanctums of Capital. One of the good things about the Obama transition, though it may be more image that meat, is his interactive website in which he attempts to keep us informed as well as having the mechanism by which we can respond with our ideas and comments. It is important that we do that. We need to demand public works jobs to rebuild a non-fossil fuel national power grid and a national electric rail system because as George Monibot points out, if we don't radically alter our energy use nothing else will matter as the environment spins out of control. We need to push for a National Single-Payer Health system. We also need to demand a dismantling of the so-called "Homeland Security" apparatus and the return to a constitutional republic.

The Real Willam Ayers Speaks Out

2008-11-08T11:10:00.007-05:00

As the refuse of the election season is swept away like used confetti the Republicans left in the fuhrerbunker are in damage control mode. Moderate Repugs are spreading stories further discrediting Sarah Palin to prevent her return as the more reactionary base stews in their own hatred.

The Republicans are in tatters after running the worst campaign in history -- a campaign based on increasingly ridiculous accusations against Obama replete with racism and red-baiting. A big part of this involved every attempt to link Obama first to Black nationalism via the Rev. Wright, then to 60's radicalism via William Ayers, and finally to Palestinians (returning to anti-Muslim prejudices) via Rashid Khalidi. That all of their lies, bigotry and dirty politics failed adds to the victory and repudiation of the right. Still, the slander lives on and has victims so it is good to read what William Ayers has to say. The truth of his wise words again rips apart the lies of the radical right and their two-dimensional version of reality.

A Moment To Savor

2008-11-05T11:21:00.011-05:00

Savoring the Moment
11/04/2008

This is a moment
for the blare of horns in the night
for fireworks and guns
shooting the sky
in poor neighborhoods long ignored
by everyone but the police
time for hosannas
and poetry time
for tears and laughter
time to breathe a little easier
with a hope not felt for years.

Let the first glimmer
of a new dawn
illuminate the faces, the
memory of those who didn't
make it here
as the long night recedes
at least a little bit --

Let the nightmare of
Patriot acts and torture cells
of "rendition" and war
be broken
Let Justice roll down
an unstoppable deluge
washing away the
murderers and liars,
the cynical imperialists and
all the parasitic hucksters of misery
leaving in its wake
a new topography on which to build
that tomorrow
we have all dreamt of

It is a great moment to realize that after so long we have a President with intelligence, a visionary and even better, a visionary with the brown skin which has been a stigma in this country for so long. Let this historic sweep be seen as what it is, the repudiation of the fascist/neocon ideology of hate, racism and imperialism, of nationalism, Evangelical repression and fear. Yes We Did!

Before he has the chance to disappoint us let us savor the hope he embodies and the progress he symbolizes. However bad he may be, he will be a great improvement. There is hope for us yet. I drank myself sober last night expecting the worst in time to cry listening to his victory speech. One more time for all of us.

Selection Day

2008-11-04T08:19:00.004-05:00

Well, here it is, selection day. We know that the ruling class will choose whomever they feel their investments are safer with but we should pretend our votes really count (and are counted). The more of us that manage to traverse the obstacles the better. Lets show them a public repudiation. I personally expect another stolen election, or at least every attempt to do so. If that happens let's build on the anger and organize a more powerful resistance. If not -- if Obama wins by significant margins, lets remember to keep the pressure on him. As we have touchscreen machines where I live, I voted absentee and I can tall you the lines to do so were long a week ago. A record turnout and mostly pro Obama.

I'm going to do my best to ignore the spin until late tonight when the votes are mostly in. I may go and buy some poster board in preparation for protesting a stolen election tomorrow but otherwise, a good day to stay home and drink it out of my head or go up to a local bar and hang out. Whatever happens, tomorrow will be different. For you collectors of historical and hysterical memorabilia, buy up some of my anti-Bush T-shirts while they last and do your part to feed the presently jobless Prole!

John Dean, Former Nixon Counsel Speaks Out

2008-11-03T06:37:00.003-05:00

A once prominent Republican, John Dean speaks out about authoritarian Republicans and the continuing danger they pose to the US and world. He knows up close and through much experience how these slimy bastards operate and lays out their basic traits as well as the traits of their followers. This is an important article as well as an endorsement for Obama. He ends by saying:

"This election should be a slam dunk for Barack Obama, who has run a masterful campaign. It was no small undertaking winning the nomination from Hillary Clinton, and in doing so, he has shown without any doubt (in my mind anyway) that he is not only qualified to be president, but that he might be a once-in-a-lifetime leader who can forever change the nation and the world for the better.

If Obama is rejected on November 4th for another authoritarian conservative like McCain, I must ask if Americans are sufficiently intelligent to competently govern themselves. I can understand authoritarian conservatives voting for McCain, for they know no better. It is well-understood that most everyone votes with his or her heart, not his or her head. Polls show that 81 percent of Americans "feel" (in their hearts and their heads) that our country is going the wrong way. How could anyone with such thoughts and feelings vote for more authoritarian conservatism, which has done so much to take the nation in the wrong direction?

We will all find out on (or about) November 5th."

Election Scenarios -- What's Next?

2008-11-02T08:07:00.004-05:00

As we all wait with baited breath for the final outcome of another divisive election season its time to put it all in perspective.

The only "electable" candidates in our country are pre-chosen as "front-runners" by our elite and then, we get to vote for the electors that will cast the actual votes -- though they are not required to tie their votes to ours. Alternative candidates get very few if any electors and so can't win even if we all voted for them. In short, our electoral system is a joke, a sham, as is our democracy. The ruling elite will select the candidate with whom they feel their investment is safest.

While many comfort themselves with the illusion that Obama, undoubtedly the "lesser of evils" with herald change, how much change can we really expect from someone who has received more than $37 million from lawyers and lobbyists, $21.6 million from the communications and electronics industries, and $16 million from health care interests? He is part of and beholden to the same interests that have had influence all along. The support for "health care interests" all but guarantees we won't see real national health care on his watch.

As Michael Parenti has explained, the real power however lies with the state, those unelected, behind the scenes high level apparatchiks who decide what is possible for our elected officials to do and what isn't.

As this corrupt system implodes due to conflicts with economic, ecological and political reality, it will be up to all of us to build a real alternative on the ground. We can learn much for the Argentine experience. We must come together and build real community support systems that can give our neighbors some semblance of hope and security in the very hard time ahead no matter which corporate candidate is selected and we must do this in earnest ASAP. Thousands of us are already facing homelessness as foreclosures continue and work dries up. You can bet that the same hate-mongering employed by the Repugs in this selection will be used to divert public anger into scapegoating and fascist violence. Without real alternatives that provide material security they will draw support of many desperate people with nowhere to turn.

If this election is stolen like the last two, we should be out in the streets. We can tap that anger to build a stronger movement of resistance which must be the foundation for the on the ground alternatives we must build. If Obama is the next President, we must keep the heat on him to follow through with a break from the policies of the last eight years including an end to the so-called Patriot Act and stop the planned use of troops against US citizens.

ACORN is Not the Problem

2008-10-22T07:18:00.002-04:00

We know who is trying to steal another election and it isn't ACORN.

Republicans Are A Hate Group

2008-10-21T06:52:00.007-04:00

As Republican rhetoric continues to spew hatred, fear, and angry division it occurs to me they have crossed the line from merely being the repugnant political wing of the most reactionary segments of the corporate ruling class to being a hate group. From Republican hate rallies to the harrassing of voters at the polls they have set alight the flames of hatred, intolerance and xenophobia that are the basis for fascist violence and genocidal behavior. As many moderate Republicans flee what's become of their party,it can no longer be tolerated as a legal organization anymore than the Ku Klux Klan and should be prosecuted under the RICO laws for organized domestic fomenting of hate speech and violence.

Denial and the Electoral Circus

2008-10-18T08:43:00.004-04:00

Never mind that the economy has all but collapsed. Never mind that the election will be stolen like the last two. The The Fall Election Musical Comedy continues unaffected by reality as "faith-based" voters, bloodthirsty nationalists and rank and file liberals shout at each other across the unbridgeable chasm of American society.

Denial

By SAUL LANDAU

Historians will write of the 2008 election campaign as a bizarre comedy in which audiences watched the United States morph from the top of its imperial trajectory into the sick joke of the early 21st Century. It stars not just the cancerous -- in body, mind and soul – John McCain, the modern would-be emperor without clothes and Sarah “Pinup” Palin, who sings in “pompom palaver” (Maureen Dowd), but pious imperialist Democrats who play straight men in this televised farce.

Unlike typical Gilbert and Sullivan light opera singers, “Denial” actors croon their lines against a backdrop of world crises – wars, economic descent, hunger, disease and climate change – but studiously avoid these obvious and compelling themes.

The comely Alaska Governor threatens to wrest from President George W. Bush his title as prime public English language torturer. In the play, she epitomizes “dirty fighting” – wink, wink – the equivalent of what old gym rats said about talent challenged pugilists who repeatedly punched below the belt.

The October 4 song of the sex kitten cum Vice Presidential candidate charged that Obama “sees America as imperfect enough to pal around with terrorists who targeted their own country.” This dramatic scene refers to Obama once attending a fundraiser at William Ayres’ home. Ayres reportedly belonged to the Weather Underground some of whose members detonated bombs in the early 1970s -- including at the U.S. Capitol and Pentagon. Ayers – never convicted-- told the New York Times (Sept. 11, 2001) that “I don’t regret setting bombs.'”

“Palling around?” sing the Obamaites. “One Ayers fundraiser means palling around?” Tthe Carson, California Republican chorus cheered Sarah’s incitement. “Upatriotic,” she sings of Obama, “My saying it makes it so.” Her chorus sings: “You go girl, go.”

The program notes explain that in 2001, University of Illinois (Chicago) Education Professor Ayers donated $200 to Obama’s Illinois State Senate Campaign and, like Obama, belonged to an anti-poverty charity board (Woods Fund) from 1999 to 2002. Both had kids at the same school.

Even Karl Rove, master of dirty campaign organizers, appears in the comedy. The Prince of Darkness scene appears on Fox News (September 28). Some McCain ads had
“gone one step too far
sort of attributing to Obama things that are
beyond the ‘100 percent truth’ test.
There ought to be an adult who says
‘Do we really need to go that far in this ad?’”

“The notion that somehow as a consequence of knowing somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago when I was 8 years old, somehow reflects on me and my values, doesn’t make much sense,” hummed Obama in a monotone.

“Sense” makes no appearances in McCain’s or Palin’s script. The writers offer them light airs on minor subjects like the economy -- regulate and deregulate and always cut taxes while spending more on the military. Obama and Biden yodel typical imperialist campaign pap -- the “we fight for freedom everywhere with our allies” song – McCain and Palin rev up their base section as if to hint of both their ignorance and dangerous recklessness.

According to more than 2,768 doctors (Oct. 5 ad in NY Times) McCain faces a very possible melanoma relapse – and soon. An oncologist friend suggested McCain’s dotty remarks – implying the Prime Minister of Spain, a NATO ally, was a US enemy, confusing Shia and Sunni and Iran and Iraq-- could derive from an incipient brain tumor. In any case, one doesn’t have to invent the possibility in 2010, of President Palin addressing the nation. “Golly, ya know I had to deploy those nukes against Russia,” she pauses to smile and wink at someone in the audience, “because Alaska or Washington, I mean we’re so close I could feel, like all hockey Moms and dads too, the ya know vibrations from Putin, you betcha.”

In her vice presidential debate and in her two news interviews (Charles Gibson, ABC, and Katie Couric, CBS) Sarah Six Pack began to chant one-line cliché answers to questions she wasn’t asked and then aggressively defended her sing-song idiocy while flashing grins at members of the audience, a reincarnated Liberace mouthing lyrics instead of playing schmaltz on the piano. She excelled at self-promoting, a vice presidential candidate “speaking in tongues,” wrote Sam Smith. (The Progressive Review, Oct. 4) Smith described Palin’s behavior on TV as possibly a variety of Asperger’s Syndrome: “Meaningless or pointless repetition of words, phrases, ideas, or actions.”

McCain, a self-proclaimed responsible politician, has cast himself as elder statesman, maverick and self-sacrificing war hero. So, how could he then choose an empty-headed, flaming rod of ambition as his running partner? Perhaps, someone should remind McCain: he can enter Walter Reed’s Intensive Care Unit without passing through the White House!

Indeed, the McCain character offers his “recitativo” for those who opened their their 401 K retirement plans. “My friends,” he calls them. They groan in pain overt their financial losses. Not to worry, he assures them. Privatizing their social security – placing their pensions in the hands of those who just brought down Wall Street -- would make their lives better. “Ha Ha” laughs the chorus.

“Denial” tries to distract a grim world. In Europe, banks and stock markets have begun their own frightening downslide. In Iraq, the public remains engulfed in daily bloodshed. Listening to McCain promise longer US military presence must certainly make them smile – or is that a gas pain? Imagine how the Taliban propaganda apparatus reviews “Denial!” They emphasize the parts in which all the actors promise to dispatch more US military forces to Afghanistan! Well, the Obama and McCain campaign care little about non-voting audiences, no matter how they pretend to promise things to “those people.”

“Denial” runs every four years, but this year’s version has become downright slapstick. “Time to take the gloves off,” Palin sang, although many noticed she had worn them all along. The media chorus offers endless atonal chattering and nattering before, during and after campaign events, and we hear the steady percussion section of pollsters tapping their nervous rhythms to show anxiety in the public – referring to people off stage who lost homes and jobs. Cacophonous sounds also emerge to show white people conflicted about voting for a black as President.

The campaign show has an appropriate backdrop, as stocks slid in early October, falling below 10,000: A nation that has spent its treasure on war and militarism and whose candidates all vow to spend more. The political and media elite still hum tunes about the great republic, not dirges fit for a collapsing empire.

Obama and Biden sing lines about Bush raising US gross national debt rose from $5.7 trillion to $10 trillion (“under Clinton we had a surplus,” sings the chorus). In the face of this horrifying figure, McCain without smiling swears to continue cutting taxes on the rich as Bush did, to pursue endless war in Iraq as Bush has, and expand the war in Afghanistan and possibly take it to Pakistan. The Democrats also want more troops in Afghanistan, where they will build schools and hospitals while sending forces to find and kill Bin Laden in Pakistan. “Screw borders” is the tile of one of their songs. Someone cut the line that says “this will cost more than $600 billion.”

Democrats also intone about investing hugely in US education. One refrain that originally appeared in the script was cut: “A fairy from Heaven will deliver, bagfuls of money forever.”

The aging McCain character calls for more military action while advocates deregulating everything else. The flighty Palin agrees, but wants to also regulate while deregulating, “ya know what I mean!” (Hockey moms will all understand.) In another TV show, Katie Couric asked the ingenue about McCain supposedly advocating regulation of The Street. She couldn’t answer, but had she read in one of the many newspapers she always reads, but whose title she couldn’t recall -- the Wall Street Journal -- she would have seen McCain prominently denouncing regulation, as he always has. Oh Well! Another song!

In the original script, there appear a historical context for “Denial”: “The United States once possessed (1945) 55% of the world’s manufacturing capacity. It controlled the world’s banking system and established the dollar as world currency. As Europe, including the Soviet Union, licked war wounds and began massive rebuilding, financed in part by the Marshall Plan (not including the USSR), rearmament took place, including the buildup of tens of thousands of nuclear weapons and the stationing of troops around the world. When the “evil empire” collapsed, the “good empire” took no notice, and continued to maintain a super expensive and world-traveling military. Indeed, the nation has become so inured to this institutionalized massive waste that no major political or media figure even dares mention it.”

This section was cut from all scripts.

“Denial” plays on through early November amidst growing world ruin. Sarah and John sing: “Obama’s a Muslim
with terrorist allies,
John and Minnie Moose
As American as apple pies.”

The chorus chants: “Drill baby drill. USA USA USA.”

Saul Landau, a fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies, once wrote plays for the SF Mime Troupe.

What the Dr's Ordered

2008-10-08T12:53:00.002-04:00

5000 Physicians have signed an open letter calling for single-payer national health care. Let Obama know it. Anything less won't do!

Kucinch Weighs In

2008-09-29T18:42:00.003-04:00

Nader Lays It Out

2008-09-26T10:11:00.003-04:00

The ultimate consumer advocate lays out a rational agenda to address the Walls Street Debacle:

1. Congress should hold a series of hearings and invite broad public comment on any proposed bailout. Congress is supposed to be a co-equal branch of our federal government. It needs to stop the stampede to give Bush a $700 billion check. Public hearings should be held to determine what alternatives might exist to the four-page proposal advanced by Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson.

2. Whatever is ultimately done, the bailout plan should not be insulated from judicial review. Remember there is a third co-equal branch of government – the judiciary. The judiciary does not need to review each buy-and-sell decision by the Treasury Department, but there should be some boundaries established to the Treasury Department's discretion, and judicial review is needed to ensure that unbridled discretion is not abused.

3. Sunlight is a good disinfectant. The bailout that is ultimately approved must provide for full and timely disclosure of all bailout details. This will discourage conflicts of interest and limit the potential of sweetheart deals.

4. Firms that accept government bailout monies must agree to disclose their transactions and be more honest in their accounting. They should agree to end off-the-books accounting maneuvers, for example.
5. Taxpayers must be protected by having a stake in any recovery. The bailout plan should provide opportunities for taxpayers to recoup funds that are made available to problem financial institutions or to benefit from the financial institutions' rising stock price and increased profitability after being bailed out.

6. The current so-called “regulators” cannot be trusted. The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), "the investigative arm of Congress" and "the congressional watchdog,” must regularly review the bailout. We cannot trust the financial “regulators,” who allowed the slide into financial disaster, to manage the bailout without outside monitoring.

7. It is time to put the federal cop back on the financial services beat. Strong financial regulations and independent regulators are necessary to rebuild trust in our financial institutions and to prevent further squandering of our tax dollars. The Justice Department and the SEC also need to scrutinize the expanding mess with an eye to uncovering corporate crime and misdeeds. Major news outlets are reporting that the FBI is investigating American International Group, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and Lehman Brothers.

8. Cap executive compensation and stop giving the Wall Street gamblers golden parachutes. The CEOs who have created the financial disaster should not be allowed to leave with millions in hand when so many pensioners and small shareholders are seeing their investments evaporate. The taxpayers are bailing out Wall Street so that the financial system continues to function, not to further enrich the CEOs and executives who created this mess.

9. Congress should pass the Financial Consumers' Information and Representation Act, to permit citizens to form a federally-chartered nonprofit membership organization to strengthen consumer representation in government proceedings that concern the financial services industry. As the savings and loan disasters of the 1980s and the Wall Street debacles of the last few years have demonstrated, there is an overriding need for consumers and taxpayers to have the organized means to enhance their influence on financial issues.

10. The repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, separating traditional banks from investment banks, helped pave the way for the current disaster. It is time to re-regulate the financial sector. The current crisis is also leading to even further conglomeration and concentration in the financial sector. We must revive and apply antitrust principles, so that banking consumers can benefit from competition and taxpayers are less vulnerable to too-big-to-fail institutions, merging with each other to further concentration.

11. Congress should impose a securities and derivatives speculation tax. A tax on financial trading would slow down the churning of stocks and financial instruments, and could raise substantial monies to pay for the bailout.

12. Regulators should impose greater margin requirements, making speculators use more of their own money and diminishing reckless casino capitalism.

Ask your representative a few questions: "What should be done to limit banking institutions from investing in high-risk activities? What should be done to ensure banks are meeting proper capital standards given the financial quicksand that has spread as a result of the former Senator Phil Gramm’s deregulation efforts? And, “What is being done to protect small investors?”

Bringing the Troops Home

2008-09-25T19:59:00.003-04:00

You know the projections for our economy are bleak when the government decides to station the 1st Brigade Combat Team of the 3rd Infantry Division to our own country. As Army Times point out, "They may be called upon to help with civil unrest and crowd control or to deal with potentially horrific scenarios such as massive poisoning and chaos in response to a chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear or high-yield explosive, or CBRNE, attack."

I've said for many years that we could not as a nation act with violent impunity around the world and not do so at home. As our economy sinks into depression more of us will be unemployed. Many of us will lose our homes. Dissatisfaction and desperation will give way to anger -- organized anger at a dysfunctional criminal system of corruption. The criminals in charge are preparing for that. As Lenin pointed out many years ago, the state is a tool for the oppression of one class by another. That class has not felt the need to up the ante of oppression from economic to the brutality of force as long as wage slavery and economic terror could keep us in line. When it no longer can, they will not hesitate to use their army against us.
We must be prepared.

Public Subsidies for Whom?

2008-09-22T08:52:00.000-04:00

Thomas Riggins writes:

Most of the experts agree that that nationalization of AIG as well as Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae was carried out to prevent not only the collapse of financial capital in the US but to stave off a world wide economic crisis.

These nationalizations will cost over a trillion dollars to the US tax payers-- that is the US working class which pays the bulk of the taxes in this country. But this money is going to the capitalist class.

What the workers should demand is that the trillion dollars not be handed over to the capitalists to make up for the money they lost on the sub prime mortgage market. That still leaves the workers with mortgages and the potential loss of their houses.

The demand should be that the tax money be used to buy up and pay off the mortgages directly. People who were lied to and tricked into taking out loans that had they been fully informed of the consequences they would not have taken out are the people to look out for, not greedy capitalists who brought their own problems on themselves.

We are seeing, right now, an intensification of class warfare directed by the capitalist state against the working class in this country. The take over by the government of AIG, etc., is being done not to help the workers and their mortgage plight, but to give the capitalists the money they could not squeeze out of the workers and still leave the workers holding the bag. Again, I think the demand must be to make this money available to the workers themselves to pay off the mortgages-- at least that is a minimum demand. The capitalists however have no right to be paid off since they made these loans knowing that people couldn't sustain the debt.

Since Bush wants to play at socialism (for the rich) we should also propose as a more just measure than the minimum demand that the government cancel the debt entirely and nationalize the banking system and run it for the benefit of the people not the moguls of Wall Street.

Military Madness has Killed Our Country

2008-09-17T09:02:00.002-04:00

A perverted, inverted form of Socialism known as Military Keynesianism - a reliance on government investment in militarism and the arms industry to keep our economy afloat, has now reached it's inescapable conclusion. trying to maintain annual military budget of over a trillion dollars has required borrowing on a massive scale. We have become an unstable debtor nation whose national gross product is weaponry -- much of which is unusable. What has been neglected is the basic domestic infrastructure on which a functional nation depends.

In an excellent article Chalmers Johnson explains why we are in the economic mess we are in.

It's Capiatlism Stupid

2008-09-16T08:55:00.002-04:00

Ideologues of the so-called "free-market" are known to rave against any regulation as an intrusion on the free flow of business and the magic of those invisible hands, the ones most of us feel tightening on our necks. The vilest curses fly whenever government programs are involved with the constant accusation of "socialism" being the norm, How their tune changes when reality sets in! Apparently it is OK for the debts of the wealthiest, earned through theft and blunder, to be socialized at our expense. We weren't invited to the party (in fact it was at our expense) but we will be subsidizing the clean-up.

We can do better. It's time to replace the system of theft known as capitalism. If we are going to subsidize anything, let us subsidize each other. Instead of paying to keep a wealthy class temporarily afloat so they can exploit us further, lets put our money and efforts into building a sustainable, accountable, non-market based system based on a rational approach to serving the public.

We can start by using that money to create national projects to build a new national power-grid using alternative energy, restoring infrastructure, and rebuilding a nationalized rail system. This will also create good jobs. We can save a great deal of money by bringing our troops home and closing our bases overseas. We can enhance our security by nationalizing banks, healthcare, education, and big industries like pharmaceuticals, steel, agriculture and mining.

The options are clear -- an era of depression and decline or a time of rebuilding and ascension.

R.I.P. Richard Wright

2008-09-15T20:56:00.000-04:00

Lipstick on a (Fascist) Pig

2008-09-14T09:00:00.002-04:00

The Repug choice of Sarah Palin is more than telling as to the kind of administration we would see from McCain. As revealed in the New York Times, Palin is a secretive, vindictive, power-hungry and corrupt character. The more I see and hear of her, the more she seems like a cross between a right-wing Huey Long and another George W.

It should go without saying that the last thing we need is another Evangelically deluded ignoramus in the White House but her zeal and lust for power may be even too much for the dodering McCain.

Republic Police State

2008-09-02T07:01:00.005-04:00

The Republicans, true to their fascist nature, have organized police state repression in Minneapolis and St. Paul. The have raided houses of activists and anyone they suspect of anti-Republican sentiments kicking in doors, seizing computers and jailing many. Their focus has been on the RNC Welcoming Committee, an organizing center for protests around the convention but arrests have included journalists including Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! and progressives in general.

The National Lawyers Guild is actively engaged in fighting this unprecedented police abuse directed by the federal "Homeland Security" apparatus and is defending arrestees and trying to get seized property returned.

The unfolding pig-state nightmare seems to perfectly represent what the repugs are all about.

The Bottom Line

2008-08-25T10:19:00.003-04:00

Once the US economy was based on gold. Later it was based on silver. For the last few decades it has been based on debt and bullshit but it looks as if reality is catching up quickly. The borrowing and spending spree of the last eight years has led to a crisis that will bring the US Empire to a grinding halt. We have buried ourselves. Asia and especially our main lender, China however, is in good shape and will remain ascendant for some time. The only thing the US has left is a broken military in a world where militarism of the classic variety is increasingly irrelevant.

What does this mean for most of us working stiffs? Hard times. Jobs are harder to get and hold and salaries don't keep up with costs. Construction will grind to a halt as the overproduction of the last decades has left us with a glut of houses, condos, strip malls and big box stores based on delusional projections.

As popular desperation turns to anger, the already built and legislated police state will be used to keep us from doing what we have to and to protect private property even as many are forcibly removed from their foreclosed homes. This will happen no matter which corporate candidates win the present selection. We will have to unite as a class to take care of each other. We will have to rebuild a system that works for us. We will have no choice.

Telling It Like It Is!

2008-08-16T18:13:00.001-04:00

Thank you Linda Karpova and Pravda for publishing what the US press fears to print!

Dim Losing Strategy or Staying the Curse

2008-08-14T09:45:00.003-04:00

Michael Moore lays out the consistent losing strategy that the Dims are sticking to. Will they listen? No, but it's good that he's pointed it out. Strategy aside however, the platform the Dims are designing (which unlike the very real platform of the Repugs is a phony list of positions designed for a campaign and dumped afterwards) is list of weak positions and compromises created by poll-based electioneers and represents not "change" but the consistency of corporate influence and the continuation of the same imperialist agenda.

1. Keep saying nice things about McCain.
If you want to help elect McCain, keep blessing him as if he were the white knight who accidentally hopped on the wrong horse. Keep reminding a country at war that he, and he alone, is a war hero. That he's been "good on global warming" and campaign finance. Say that enough, and you know what happens? People start to believe it! You've sold them on the idea that McCain isn't a bad egg, and they do not hear the rest of what you have to say: "But John McCain is four more years of George W. Bush."

Don't remind people that McCain wants to help the oil companies even more than Bush did. Don't bring up that he wants to outlaw abortion. Back away from painting him as the guy who thinks it's a good idea to stay in Iraq until pigs fly. That way, if you keep praising him, you can send a mixed message to the less informed, who are simply not going to figure it out. When they walk into a voting booth, they will see two names on the ballot:

☐ BARACK OBAMA
☐ WAR HERO

Trust me, this ain't Sweden you're living in. War Hero wins every time.

2. Pick a running mate who is a conservative white guy or a general or a Republican.
Yes, it will seem like smart politics at first. Shore up Obama's lack of military experience with a hawk. Be true to Obama's message that he'll be a president for everybody by having him run with a Republican. Make a pitch to the purple states of Virginia and Indiana by putting one of their own on the ticket. Or make the red state of Ohio happy by handing the vice presidential slot to its governor. Just so long as Obama's running mate screams "same old, same old," making it harder for him to attract the new voters he needs to win.

There is nothing wrong with picking someone who can help him win a swing state or someone who has more experience than he does in certain areas. But when I hear pundits say things like, "He has to pick a Catholic," well, John Kerry was a total Catholic, and the Catholic vote went to Mr. W. I mean, here's one of the largest groups in the country — 66 million Catholics — and they/we have only allowed one Catholic to be president in 219 years. You would think they would have been flocking to Kerry in 2004. THAT IS NOT THE WAY PEOPLE THINK. IT IS THE WAY PUNDITS THINK. Keep listening to them and you can help elect John McCain the next President of the United States.

3. Keep writing speeches for Obama that make him sound like a hawk.
Here's what Obama said in front of the American-Israeli lobbying group the day after the final primaries:

"The danger from Iran is grave, it is real, and my goal will be to eliminate this threat."

And: "Let there be no doubt — I will always keep the threat of military action on the table to defend our security and our ally Israel. Sometimes there are no alternatives to confrontation."

Sounds like a speech McCain would give. Sounds like he's ready to invade Iran. Obama staked out an even worse position for the Palestinians vis-à-vis Jerusalem than the one held by George W. Bush. Keep that up, and more and more supporters will be less and less enthused. He also says he wants to send more troops to Afghanistan. The implied message of all of this is that the Republican plan is a good plan. So why would voters want to elect the candidate imitating the Republican when they can get the real thing?

4. Forget that this was a historic year for women.
Obama should be making a speech about gender like the brilliant one he gave on race back in March. Millions of people, especially women, had high hopes for the candidacy of Hillary Clinton. Attention must be paid. And you don't pay attention to it by having your advisers run your wife through the makeover machine, trying to soften her up and pipe her down. Michelle Obama has been one of the most refreshing things about this election year. But within weeks of the end of the primary season, the handlers stepped in to deal with the "Michelle problem."

What problem? She speaks her mind? She wears what she wants? Her biggest sin, according to the punditocracy, was to say that, as a black woman, this may be the first time in her adult life she's been really proud of her country. Shock! Surprise! Outrage! But not from any of the black women I know.

You have to be white and stupid to not know what she was really saying. If you don't understand, let me ask you this: Have you been proud of what this country has been doing in the past few years? Are you proud your neighbors had their house taken from them? Are you proud to be sending a good chunk of your paycheck to the oil companies so they can post record profits? Are you proud to know your vice president outed one of our spies and put her life and the lives of others at risk?

That's all she was saying — what we are all feeling.

Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton both lost the white-male vote but won the White House. They did so by winning the black, Hispanic and female vote. That HAS to be Obama's strategy to win. Otherwise, Cindy McCain will be our new First Lady.

5. Show up to a gunfight with a peashooter.
Convince yourself that the Republicans are just going to roll over and play dead because there is simply no life left in their party. Convince yourself this one is in the bag! Convince yourself that if you play by the rules, the Republicans will too.

And when McCain and his people roll out their nuclear arsenal on you, just go all sweet and sensitive and logical. Believe that the truth shall prevail, that good people will see what the Republicans are up to. As they smear you, your family, your religious beliefs — cower, back down, go on the defensive.

If they say you should quit your church, quit your church! If they explode over your speaking the truth about the anger and despair of the white working class, take it all back! If they ask you to stand on your head and do the hokeypokey, snap to it and do it with a smile on your face — and don't forget to apologize for not doing the hokeypokey earlier; you meant no disrespect, and please don't take it as any indication that you do not love your country, your flag and your Christian God.

Do all of that and then listen for that sound — the sound of your supporters shuffling away in silence. They'll stop showing up at campaign headquarters. They'll say they're too busy to go on another door-to-door literature drop. On Election Day, they'll do their duty and vote, but they will not be up at 6 a.m. driving around the city's neighborhoods, picking up strangers who need a ride to the polls.

And on the way to the polls, some of them might just come to a stoplight, turn around and go home. Maybe they'll pick up a six-pack on the way. Maybe there's a new episode of Deal or No Deal on tonight. That would be nice. The girls are pretty, especially the blonde in the third row. Wait, they're all blond. No, not that one — THAT one! Oh yes, I see her. She is pretty. But the Man in the Booth has picked up the phone! He's calling down to you. Deal? Or no deal? No deal! No deal! Don't do it! Hey, I'm outta beer! Why didn't I pick up a case? Now I gotta spend eight bucks on gas to go buy more beer! Aaaaarrrggggghhhhhh!!!! HOWIE MANDEL ISN'T WEARING A FLAG PIN!! U-S-A! U-S-A!

6. Denounce me!
Obama, at some point, might be asked this question: "Michael Moore has endorsed you. But he recently said (fill in the blank with some outrageously offensive line taken out of context). Will you still accept his endorsement, or do you denounce him?"

And he better denounce me, or they will tear him to shreds. He had better back away not only from me but from anyone and everyone who veers a bit too far to the left of where his advisers have told him is the sweet spot for all those red-state voters. I won't take it personally. After all, I'm not the guy who married him or baptized his kids. I'm just the idiot who went to the same terrorist, Muslim school of flag-pin desecrators he went to.

I remember poor John Kerry not even being able to admit, when asked by Larry King, if he had seen Fahrenheit 9/11. "No," he said, "I haven't. . . . I don't plan to, right now." But he had indeed seen it. I sat there watching him say this, and I just felt sorry for him and for the election he was about to lose.

We can't take four more years of this madness, Barack. We need you to be a candidate who will fight back every time they attack you. Actually, don't even wait till you have to fight back. Fight first! Show some vision and courage and smoke them out. Keep asking why these lobbyists are McCain's best friends. Let's finally have a Democrat who's got the balls to fire first.

So Barack, by denouncing me, you can help McCain get elected. Because when you denounce me, it's not really me you're distancing yourself from — it's the millions upon millions of people who feel the same way about things as I do. And many of them are the kind of crazy voters who have no problem voting for a Nader just to prove a point.

Elections have been lost by just 537 votes. I don't want that to happen to you.

American Hero Dies

2008-08-10T08:23:00.002-04:00

When we think about the Pentagon Papers and the revelations that led to Nixon's downfall and the end of the Vietnam war, many think of Daniel Ellsberg. What many forget or don't know is that the real instigating activist responsible for the publicizing of the Pentagon Papers was Tony Russo. It is our sad loss that Tony Russo died last week. His courage, principle and tenacity changed history and though he paid a price, he never regretted his actions. Evil doesn't thrive well in the clear light and it is the responsibility of those with access to knowledge of crimes against humanity to expose them. Tony didn't flinch in the face of real danger. He did what was right. He will be missed.

The Economics of Calamity

2008-07-27T10:00:00.002-04:00

Ever wondered why anyone would deny the reality of Global warming as vociferously as some do and why business interests in particular seem so intransigent on the issue? Could it be because any realistic approach to doing what is necessary to preserve the biosphere requires the end of capitalism? Are profits for the few really worth the destruction of civilization and maybe life on earth? Do capitalists really have a choice or is the system itself a juggernaut out of control? What should we do about it? What can we do? Here is an interesting article exploring the economic realities of our ecological crisis.

Green Party Candidates Speak

2008-07-24T19:38:00.002-04:00

Cynthia McKinney and Rosa Clemente are genuine progressive candidates worthy of support. If Progressives can't support an alternative to the corporatocracy than we won't have one and we won't be heard.