THOLOS OF ATHENA

Random Thoughts On Going Insane

2012-01-21T12:25:00.004-06:00

The Repug campaign has taken on all the aspects of a carnival nightmare, complete with gargoyles, spooky clowns, and a musical sound track by Saint Saens or Maurice Ravel. As I watch it unfold from day to day, the one thing about it that I look forward to is its shock and awe quality as a perversion of entertainment--its appeal to the baser instincts.

It's as if the entire American audience is massing nightly to witness a hideous traffic accident, to applaud and cheer at the sight of crunched metal, smoke and fire, severed limbs and decapitations. Thus, as one after another candidate breathes his or her last gasp and drops out, having spent millions for a brief star performance in what appears to be less a presidential campaign than a Jerry Springer reality show, I can't help but feel a little--how can I say it?--a little let down. A sinking feeling, like watching the air leak out of a cut tire. First Michele Bachman, now Rick Perry. Romney may be next. Gosh, I'm gonna miss all those crazy loons. But hey, Santorum's still in. And Ron (Let 'em die) Paul--God bless him! And look--is that Herman Cain peeking up from the swamp? Bless you, Stephen Colbert. There's hope for this thing, yet. But I do wish Trump would come back. At least Donald knew what it was really all about.

Meanwhile, it seems that Facebook is making people sad. Yes, it's true. According to some university studies--one from Stanford, for instance--people who spend a lot of time on Facebook tend on average to be unhappier with life and have a vague sense that life is not fair. Gee, I'm not on Facebook, and somehow I already knew that life wasn't fair. Well, I guess the Facebook people are not looking at life in quite the same way that I am.

At any rate, it seems that the more time one spends looking at hundreds of one's friends, near-friends, pseudo-friends, friends from the past, friends from the future, associates and pseudo-associates, one begins to get depressed. The reason for that is that finally, one can only take so much of: "Gee, look at me, look at my smiling face, look how happy and successful I am. See me playing, see me with my dog, see me on vacation, dining out, partying down with my friends, living it up. See me, see me, see me. . . ." The whole thing it turns out apparently gives off a false impression. So you begin to compare yourself. You begin to feel less happy and more like a miserable, pathetic excuse for a human being, compared with all those legions of leering grinning people. The same study showed that those who actually spend time with other real people out in the world, instead of vicariously sucking up pseudo-friendship on the web, tend to have a happier, or at least, a more realistic outlook on life.

william skink TRANSIENT

2012-01-07T18:04:00.000-06:00

he wasn’t dead yet
but he would die just a few hours later
after I left
after I sat there looking him over
feet gnarled from old frostbite
swollen ankles, those hobbled legs
and skin like wax paper colored by the quitting
of his liver—

and he quit that broken body broken by booze
on the seventh day of October
just a few days after the cold rain had finally begun to fall

Harley said he was there when Joe collapsed
so he waved down a cop
who brought the ambulance to take him along river Clark Fork
away from the streets he slept on
to at least have the dignity of departure
washed and laid out on soft fabric and plush drugs

his sea of blood leading slowly to that stillness—

the dark October clouds outside the window—
Joe knew he was drinking down death
but he honored certain codes
and though proud of hustling, insisted no cussing
during business hours because (he told me once)
there might be kids around

the local paper would call him transient and
be done with him

this local poet says fuck that, his name was Cock-Eyed Joe
and I hope he finds peace beyond
because there is none here

--William Skink

AN END OF THE IRAQ WAR IS ANNOUNCED AMID STRANGE ACCOLADES

2011-12-22T06:13:00.000-06:00

There is no proper farewell that can be said to the people of Iraq that would not announce reparations, that would not include expressions of remorse, along with an admission of crimes committed and wrongs done by the US military. President Obama's official ceremonies marking the end of the war were occasions for broad smiles and declarations of unqualified success.

What was begun with bravado and a disregard for the deaths and suffering of Iraqi civilians, has ended with the same superficial rhetoric, the same military preening, the same myths, the same contrived proofs to justify the war and its horrible toll of torture, grief, maiming and killing. Perhaps a permanent war economy is what Obama and the US Generals meant by using the word, success.

This kind of war spreads beyond Iraq, with constant adaptations and a fluid concept of enemy; with its battlefield declared to exist almost anywhere, including our own country; and this is what has made possible the militarization of our whole society. The legacies of our presidents are intrinsically arranged by making war and have their origins in violence. Neither George W. Bush nor the current president, Obama, is to be satisfied with the destruction of one foreign country only, or the deaths of thousands upon thousand of innocents, or the bombing into rubble of works built by the labor of generations. And governments are their targets: some of these are changed, others erased. And the societies are ordered to conform, or else face chaos and disintegration.

The horror of Fallujah doesn't bother "no shock" Obama, as it didn't bother Bush; not the dogs howling during the attack, nor the smell of death saturating the city, a place described after the siege as "a city of ghosts". Bedridden invalids, white-haired husbands and wives, were shot to death in their beds. Families were machine gunned while trying to swim to safety. Boys were denied the opportunity to flee the city with their parents because, for the sake of revenge, the Americans had marked them for death; and one of the young ones was photographed dead, lying face up on the sidewalk, still clutching in his right hand the white handkerchief, with which he tried to surrender.

These wrongs to which we are all answerable cannot be evaded, they cannot be covered over with bluster or national piety; and we remain responsible for holding our leaders responsible.

Chris Floyd is eloquent as he writes about this, and comes directly to the point:

[President Obama] spoke of suffering, he spoke of sacrifice, he spoke of loss and enduring pain -- but only for the Americans involved in the unprovoked war of aggression, and their families. He did not say a single word -- not one -- about the thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of Iraqis killed by this "fulfilled mission," this "extraordinary achievement," this" success." These human beings -- these sons and daughters, fathers, mothers, kinfolk, lovers, friends -- cannot be acknowledged. They cannot be perceived. It must be as if they had never existed. It must be as if they are not dead now.

The divorce from reality here is beyond description. It is only the all-pervasiveness of the disassociation that obscures its utter and obvious insanity. There is something intensely primitive and infantile in the reductive, navel-gazing, self-blinding monomania of the American psyche today. Think of the ancient Greeks, who constructed their psyches and their worldview around an epic poem, the Iliad, that depicted their enemies, the Trojans, with remarkable sympathy, understanding and insight -- while depicting their own leaders as a band of shallow, squabbling, murderous fools. Here was a moral sophistication, a cold-eyed grasp of reality -- and a level of empathy for one's fellow human beings -- far beyond the capacity of modern American society, and infinitely beyond the reach of the murderous fools who seek to lead it.

Democracy and empire cannot coexist. By the time the plutocrats took control of Ancient Rome, they too had stopped paying taxes, and destroyed the republic in pursuit of their selfish aims. They too were intoxicated with the plunder, the profits of military exploits, the pure rapine, the sights of destruction and submission in the Colosseum , the lust of the eye. In the 21st Century, the financial terrorism we are seeing is about constructing obedient and submissive subjects; and it, too, is war waged by other means. This financial malevolence is not only tolerated by our political class but also facilitated by them, because they are willing to sell their services and betray the people. They and their masters have no moral compunctions; and will not hesitate to use war, state terrorism, and financial anarchy, to make slaves of the rest of us.

Our country failed in Iraq. Our leaders told lies about the reasons for going to war. And we were defeated in Iraq because we fell into depravity in that country. And to not be clear in our minds about that war's depravity, is both unacceptable and dangerous, because it invites a deeper defeat.

Rep. Dennis Kucinich sounded alarms last week, concerning the National Defense Authorization Act that passed through Congress, and was handed to President Obama, to sign into law:

This bill authorizes permanent warfare anywhere in the world. It gives the president unchecked power to pursue war. It diminishes the role of this Congress. The founders saw Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution, which places in the hands of Congress the war power, as essential to a check and balance against the executive abuse of power. This legislation diminishes Congress’ role in that regard.

This legislation authorizes the military to indefinitely detain individuals without charge or trial, including the detention of U.S. citizens on U.S. soil. In short, what this bill does is it takes a wrecking ball to the United States Constitution and gives enormous power to the government or the state. I want friends on both sides of the aisle to understand this; we are giving the state more power over individuals with this bill. It’s the wrong direction.

Our children deserve a world without end, not war without end.

A TRIBUTE IN MUSIC TO BRADLEY MANNING

2011-12-19T20:35:00.000-06:00

Almost Gone by Graham Nash and James Raymond

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS HAS DIED

2011-12-16T17:06:00.001-06:00

"The evil men do lives after them; the good is oftinterred with their bones." --Julius Caesar

Hitchens could, even near the end of his life, write anessay about Lincoln, that did not bear any of the affectation of his publicperformances. After 9/11 he went nuts and lost his bearings, in a kind ofanti-fundamentalist fundamentalism; but in his time he spoke with someeloquence and wit against Reagan and all his works, against the murderous reignof the death squads, against Kissinger. This does not mitigate the sense ofloss about his deterioration in the public square; yet it seems to me that hewas once a comrade against authoritarian madness, and fought against injusticein his own fashion. How Hitchens fell into justifying the Iraq War and theIslamophobic worldview, is perhaps explained in terms of a nervous breakdown. Idon't know; but it seems such an incomprehensible departure from what once issued asreason from him.

What has been said about his vanity and ego is probablytrue, along with the dogfight-like debates, which were by no means the best ofhim. I remember reading his essays many years ago, and thinking that he was agood man to have in our corner.

His personal friend, Robert Scheer, writes of Christopher Hitchens:

Despite the vehemence of our debates, both publicand personal, he and his saving grace and wife, Carol Blue, held a gathering attheir home to discuss a book I wrote on the subject. This was a man unafraid ofintellectual challenge and committed to pursuing the heart of the matter.

That was his driving force, a seeker of truth to the end,and a deservedly legendary witness against the hypocrisy of theever-sanctimonious establishment. What zeal this man had to eviscerate theconceits of the powerful, whether their authority derived from wealth, thestate or a claim to the ear of the divine.

Hitch was the opposite of the opportunistic pundits whocompeted with him for public space. He took immense risks, not the least inoffering himself for waterboarding before concluding it was unmistakablytorture, or challenging the greatness of God, knowing full well that he wasexposing himself as an object of wildly irrational hate.

To watch the kind of dissipation Hitchens went through ispainful, with his former self blurring in the process. There was too much drinking, too muchgrandstanding, too much desire to play the enfant terrible of the Left. Who can occupy such a personal space of ego while our historyevery day grows sicker? But it is my instinct to feel sad for him, for the fallany human being may suffer, to remember his acts of personal courage, and histalent which once counted for something.

WE HAVE TO STOP MAKING THE SAME MISTAKES

2011-10-22T14:24:00.000-05:00

Some disappointed supporters of President Obama have come right up to the edge of disowning the president; but have pulled back from the brink to reconstruct support for him, because they think the alternative is worse.There are other ways I could express this dilemma; but it will probably be for the best, insofar as the best is also appalling, when the Obama team is out of the White House.

Chris Hedges has expressed our problem more elegantly; but the political system is so compromised, especially at the national level of presidential elections, that the candidates of either party are pre-screened and vetted by the corporate powers that run this country. Obama is pliable alright and almost perfectly malleable; but not by us, the people.

The republican suits, Mitt Romney and Herman Cain, will fit the bill in their own way, and express the same malleability if they are nominated and elected. But our improvement as a nation lies elsewhere. Our dooms, the ones that are threatening us, are multi-headed to be sure; but there is more people power or constructive energy on the streets of New York, in the Occupy Movement. Our answers and the torch of activism is firmly placed in the hands of the young generation and those who can lend a hand to them.

The re-election of Obama--if possible-- is a muddle, a waste of time, and a complete political train wreck.

For the Democratic Party (if it can be salvaged) it is far more important for it to survive President Obama, than to become entangled in his re-election. This Obama administration's corruption, its failure to prosecute criminals, and its coziness with the corrupt elements of this society, are all things that will bury us deeper in the muddle we are already in.

Mitt gave a scary speech a couple of weeks ago, in front of some kids in uniform. It was all about our American religion of being the biggest hombre among nations, strutting our stuff forever, as we have every right to do, adopting as our holy writ, the notion that no nation or group of nations, should ever be allowed to grow so powerful as to even balance us. And this, of course, is the death head's dogma that leads directly to Apocalypse.

But Obama, whose administration now has its tarry fingerprints all over the Keystone Pipeline, has shown with equal and dreadful portent where our dooms gather and how they grow. The president withdraws from Iraq, since it is a dead loss, and squares off toward bloodier patches in Pakistan, flailing away in Afghanistan, menacing Iran, pacifying Libya into a failed state or a broiling civil war.

The US foreign policy is the same, the underlying belief system is the same, no matter the party in the White House. And if we as citizens keep churning up the same hopeless Faustian bargain, we are lost. The forces in our country of environmental destruction, economic war waged against us, and runaway militarism and aggression are sure to destroy us; if we don't help change this country in a fundamental way.

It's time that we join hands and go on to organize.

OBAMA AND THE SUPER-DUPER CONGRESS OF 12

2011-08-03T12:52:00.012-05:00

"This deal trades peoples' livelihoods for the votes of a few unappeasable right-wing radicals, and I will not support it". -- Rep. Raul Grajalva of Arizona

The sideshow of panic and hysteria is over now. The ratcheting up of high drama over a US Government debt default, that was never going to happen, has achieved its intended effect. Wall Street has what it wants. Obama has broken with the Franklin Roosevelt legacy; he is the first Democratic president to offer up the sacrifice, a chipping away at Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. The country's owners are smiling now, as its lickspittles in Congress cobble together a consolidated committee, composed of 6 Republicans and 6 Democrats drawn from the House and Senate, to be a kind of political ramrod that will authorize draconian budget cuts, one way or another. The rigged process of this commissar committee, which represents both political parties, will present Congress with decisions which cannot be debated or amended in the normal way before becoming law.

The new commissar committee will also contain a novelty called "a trigger". This substitutes severe pre-configured budget cuts, in the event that the committee can't reach compromise; and the effect is to keep a sword dangling over the special interests of each party; theoretically these would be armaments or defense funds for the Republicans, and social programs dear to the Democrats.

And the Pentagon got $50 billion up front, as a door prize.

As emotions kept on building, Paul Craig Roberts, Reagan's former Assistant Treasury Secretary, warned that the crisis was an artificial one:

The US government will never default on its bonds, because the bonds, unlike those of Greece, Spain, and Ireland, are payable in its own currency. Regardless of whether the debt ceiling is raised, the Federal Reserve will continue to purchase the Treasury’s debt. If Goldman Sachs is too big to fail, then so is the US government.

There is no budget focus on the illegal wars and military occupations that the US government has underway in at least six countries or the 66-year old US occupations of Japan and Germany and the ring of military bases being constructed around Russia. [...]

In contrast, Social Security is solvent. Medicare expenditures are coming close to exceeding the 2.3 per cent payroll tax that funds Medicare, but it is dishonest for politicians and pundits to blame the US budget deficit on “entitlement programs.”

There was also the little matter of Section 4, Article XIV of the Constitution:

The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law [...] shall not be questioned.

Last December, a reporter asked President Obama whether he wasn't concerned that House Speaker Boehner would use the debt ceiling issue as leverage to get the spending cuts the Republicans were talking up and demanding. Obama's response was that he trusted Boehner to do the right thing. This is the rhetoric of the president's trademark bipartisanship. It has become the record of his presidency, and concerns a big part of his pitiful legacy. The repetition of this pattern is of course absurd; and when the president offered cuts to Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare, he did so because these cuts were his objective; and he put them on the table without the Republicans even asking for them.

Barack Obama's marketing campaign was so brilliant that we voted for him in the primaries and General Election with no real insight into him, without clear understanding; some of us without a second thought continued to make excuses for him, until his fakery and favoritism to Wall Street and his pernicious fancy for George W. Bush's global style of war became too obvious to ignore. We are all punished for electing this man.

Usually a crisis is needed to create a vacuum into which these toxic details are fed. Wall Street does not like real crises, of course – except to make quick computer-driven speculative gains on the usual fibrillation of today’s zigzagging markets. But when it comes to serious money, the illusion of a crisis is preferred, staged melodramatically to wring the greatest degree of emotion out of the audience much like a good film editor edits a montage sequence. [...] --Michael Hudson

A country that has fallen on hard times, as ours has, must face the grim political realities that exist now. The right-wing is exulting, and it is being seen in the arena of politics, taking what it wants by intimidation. But this is mostly for show because too many elected Democrats are playing along. The Labour Party in Britain and the Socialist Government in Greece have been playing this same double-crossing game. The United States, and other countries as well, are now at the mercy of the central banks, at the mercy of Wall Street; and the warning that issued long ago from FDR's great voice, was about the threat of the moneyed powers, of the few, who if left unchecked, would come to consider the government itself as a mere appendage to their own affairs.

A person of integrity, like Raul Grijalva, reminds us of the stakes and the risks. But there must be others like him, ready to act with integrity, who have concern for justice, who are involved, who hear the bell that is tolling for each of us, calling all of us to save ourselves and our loved ones, and our country. This responsibility cannot be left to the parties, except on condition that these can be freed from the domination of the few, and learn to serve the people again.

It was certainly by design, and not by crisis, that we ended up with the super-duper committee of 12. But from whom did these spring to life? Who wants to claim any of them? The Tea Party may have played the midwife to this unlucky birth; but the Senate, controlled by Democrats, was nonetheless their mother. And their daddy is none other than Barack Obama.

TEAM OBAMA MENACES NYT REPORTER, JAMES RISEN, WITH SUBPOENA

2011-07-06T16:02:00.094-05:00

Persons who would otherwise be willing to speak to me would surely refuse to do so if they perceived me to be not a journalist who keeps his word when he promises confidentiality but one who would break it in the interest of government prosecutors.
--James Risen

Besides the news about James Risen, there are a couple of other items that point to what governments, especially repressive ones, will do to maintain or restore their precious narratives. For instance, it was reported that on her arrival, actress Michelle Yeoh was met by officials in Myanmar (Burma) and was informed that she was blacklisted and was being immediately deported. This was simply because she had played the part in a movie, of the country's number one dissident, Aung San Suu Kyi, the tireless and ever-arrested champion of a return to democracy. The Junta must keep up appearances.

Another example is Mirza Shahzad Akbar, a Pakistani attorney whose once warm relationship with US officials went cold after he agreed to represent claimants whose relatives were killed by US drone bombers. They are filing suit against the CIA. Suddenly his application for a visa to attend a Columbia University human rights conference in New York has run into a problem; although after several inquiries, the State Department won't disclose what the problem is.

"...[M]y relationship with the US government changed dramatically in 2010, when I decided to take on the case of Karim Khan. Karim Khan was away from home on New Year's Eve 2009 when two missiles fired from what we believe was a CIA-operated drone struck his family home in North Waziristan and killed his son, aged 18, and his brother, aged 35. Informed over the phone of their deaths, he rushed back to find his home destroyed and his brother's family--now a widow and two-year-old son--devastated.

Khan believes his son and brother were innocent victims. His brother, who had taken the surname Iqbal in honour of the famous Pakistani poet, was a schoolteacher who had returned to their ancestral village, shortly after finishing his master's degree in English literature, because he believed education was vital for his countrymen's improvement. Khan's teenage son helped out at another government school in the area. [...]

So, why would the US government want to prevent me from discussing these cases at Columbia law school? Perhaps, it is because our legal challenge disrupts the narrative of "precision strikes" against "high value targets" as an unqualified success against terrorism, at minimal cost to civilian life.

There are some narratives in the Washington establishment that bang around the corridors after office hours like Marley's Ghost-- oblivious to the shuffling and re-shuffling of cabinet officers-- as well as the peculiar personalities of presidents, who are only transient beings. These narratives have become institutional. And if you are able to effectively contradict or damage the state narrative; then you are bound to be in trouble, serious trouble, with this government.

James Risen, who broke stories about Bush's illegal warrantless wiretapping, and wrote about the SWIFT program of data mining of financial records, is presently trying to fight off a subpoena that would bring him before a grand jury. Team Obama wants Risen to help them convict Jeffery Sterling, a former CIA person, who they accuse of leaking intelligence about a bungled Agency operation against Iran, that happened 11 years ago during the Clinton Administration. Risen wrote a book, State of War, released in 2006, that contained a description of "Operation Merlin". In the minds of the CIA, this was a plot to deliver blueprints clandestinely into the hands of Iranian scientists; the idea was to hand them a design, which if it was pursued to construction, would result in a flawed, unusable weapon. The CIA pushed ahead with Merlin, even after a cooperating scientist told them that the flaws in the blueprint were too obvious, and it would be quickly spotted as worthless by the Iranians who would be receiving it.

Glenn Greenwald, who writes with precision about the Risen case and the climate of fear that the DOJ wishes to instill among us, also notes the odd history of the subpoena, which, for a long while, has had Risen's name on it:

The subpoena to Risen was originally issued but then abandoned by the Bush administration, and then revitalized by Obama lawyers.

The objective once pursued by the Bush team is now in the hands of Obama's prosecutors:

The DOJ wants Risen to testify under oath about whether Sterling was his source.

The orthodoxy of information is expressed in the way this government controls the narrative about Iran, and other issues, and the way it seeks to punish those who challenge its tightly-wrapped propaganda.

It didn't matter to the Bush administration that there was no precedent for prosecuting a member of the press under any statute that covered leaking classified information. But that didn't stop the threats that were made against James Risen. In 2006, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales reacted to the publication of Risen's new book, State of War, making it clear that the Justice Department was raising the issue of prosecution of reporters.

In his affidavit to US District Court, Eastern District of Virginia, Risen wants the court to quash the Obama administration subpoena that seeks to force his testimony. In Risen's own words:

On January 13, 2006, the week after my book hit the shelves, then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales held a press conference at which he publicly announced that the department of Justice was actively considering the prosecution of journalists under the Espionage Act for publishing truthful, classified information.

In mid-March, after Attorney General Gonzales raised publicly the possibility of prosecuting journalists, the director of the CIA, Porter Goss, suggested that it was his "hope" and "aim" that the leak investigations would lead to subpoenas requiring me to reveal my confidential source[s]. Only two months into the investigation, Goss explained:"It is my aim and it is my hope that we will witness a grand jury investigation with reporters present being asked to reveal who is leaking this information.

Does the ghost of J. Edgar Hoover still rattle around the FBI's office in Washington? Maybe like Old Marley in Dickens' story, "A Christmas Carol", he rattles his chains late at night? It was Old J. Edgar who said "Justice is incidental to law and order". This seems to have become the unspoken motto of the Obama administration. The new Attorney General has finally put the high officials of the Bush years off limits for prosecution. The crimes done in the White House stay in the White House; that's another way of looking at it.

Obama gave a speech honoring whistleblowers and the service they do for the country; but when Thomas Drake blew the whistle, reporting fiscal irregularities in his government department, the Administration started prosecuting him under the Espionage Act.

Does the Junta need to keep up appearances?

WHITE HOUSE LIES ABOUT IRAN'S NUKES, SAYS HERSH

2011-06-12T11:08:00.002-05:00

CORNEL WEST IS SNUBBED BY THE WHITE HOUSE AND REBUKED BY SOME LIBERALS

2011-05-30T21:08:00.014-05:00

Cornel West, a prominent African-American professor and man of letters, has recently ruffled feathers in parts of the liberal class, by calling President Barack Obama "a black mascot" in the service of Wall Street. The president was already stung by accusations from West that he is not much of a progressive. Such criticisms were not well received by some of the president's admirers either. West played a prominent role in Obama's 2008 campaign.

Chris Hedges has argued for a long time that liberal institutions, which were operating as a political safety valve for justice in American history, have largely failed now, because they have basically become derelict. The universities, the liberal church, the labor unions, the national press, have been made complicit in the country's rush to war, or were bought off, cowed into silence, driven further away from responsibilities they once took seriously; meanwhile, democracy and the law are hauled down, bit by bit.

There is pressure to control the conversation: pressure on teachers who answer to an increasing corporate structure in universities; and there is never-ending pressure on working people to surrender more of their dignity and security in the workplace. There is so much tragic pressure put on our jobless youth, to turn themselves over to the military and its wars of occupation, the madness that destroys minds and bodies.

Bernie Sanders, in his famous Marathon Speech on the floor of the Senate, said "...more tax breaks for the very rich is only one symptom of an economic and political system that is grotesquely failing the average American. The simple reality is that the middle class of America is collapsing, poverty is increasing, and the gap between the very wealthiest people and everyone else is getting wider. How did this happen?"

I saw the other day a story about the protests in Madrid. These are real protests that shake up the establishment. When Hedges writes that liberals have become pragmatists about the choice of lesser evils, that they fancy themselves as a respectable liberal class, it is on condition that they comply with the narrow parameters of political discourse, as it is permitted. The morally courageous are viewed with alarm as soon as they reveal too much. This is the sense I take from what he suggests is prophetic. This is painful in a personal sense because our commitment to justice does not compare favorably with that of protesters on the streets in Tahrir Square or in Madrid.

Nader was vilified in an irrational welter of emotion where it is endlessly claimed that he cost Gore and the country the election in 2000; this is the default position because either this is true or there was coup d’etat that was the beginning of the end of the rule of law in this country. It is too dangerous from a psychological viewpoint to accept responsibility for what happened. Much safer and more comfortable by far to shift the blame.

Reverend Wright was demonized of course for denigrating the idea that God reflexively blesses America. Every US president ends an oration with the words “May God Bless the United States of America”. Many in this country go all clammy and dread the uncomfortable topics whenever conversation turns to our own imperial slaughters abroad, the CIA’s political assassinations, torture, and other of America’s chronic crimes against peace.

Cornel West is revealing the betrayal. And he is attacked as hysterical and trivialized and is accused of petty spite. One would think from the moralizing language of some of his detractors that they suggest that he is like a rejected, wounded suitor. Is it too much to confront the implications of betrayal that is at once personal and political? No we have to go on believing in Obama’s good intentions. In the end the servants and courtiers in the liberal class will rally to his support and will recommend this course of action; moreover they will be crying that the system can still represent the people.

In Madrid, the masses have figured out that the Spanish government doesn’t represent the people. Winner-take-all parties want to bar smaller parties from representation. Voices of the people have been pushed into a place of obscurity, where no elected official hears or responds to them. And the representatives are seen now as wholly owned by corporate powers.

Liberals as a political class have participated in their own moral uprooting, as Chris Hedges has consistently warned us. This is the prophetic part and the sounding of an alarm. All this fiddling with designer politics and “boutique activism of political correctness” distracts us. Those who are committed to the primacy of justice can often be vilified, and have been vilified. We have to be clear about the warning signs in this country; just as a people can civilize themselves and defend what is just, they can also lose sight of justice, and can even debase themselves in the long run, and effectively censor the subjects which are considered unsafe to discuss. They can walk carelessly over virtues they once possessed and be uncivilized.

On Sunday, a couple was arrested for slow dancing in DC inside the Jefferson Memorial. And in other news this past week, the president has shrugged off the legal requirements of the War Powers Act of 1973. He doesn't know what all the fuss is about; after all, Libya is just a little war. The law demands one of these three conditions to be met: "...a declaration of war, specific statutory authorization, or a national emergency created by attack upon the United States, its territories or possessions, or its armed forces."

copeland morris APRIL ARRIVES BY NIGHT

2011-04-09T16:21:00.001-05:00

Tohoku in snow
The daffodils collapse
Lying flat one upon the other.
From the fingernail moon you stole
A kiss, April, as you arrived
By night. Haven’t you revealed
The secret of a fox
To whom you are partial, or what
Favor the rain brings?
You laugh, thinking you can get
Away with no orientation, claiming
No dependents, like a ghost who can be
Unburdened. So where, in this deserted
Teahouse, are those who serve and gather?

Here you are, April, in the plowed furrow,
Having stolen away to the fields,
Your brow heavy with grief for Tarukawa,
Who killed himself over his row of cabbages.

LIBYA AND THE CURIOUS CASE OF HUMANITARIAN WAR

2011-03-28T00:02:00.011-05:00

Secrecy is the religion of the political class, and the prime enabler of its corruption. --Glenn Greenwald

After a period of official uneasiness about intervening in Libya's civil strife, the White House did a sudden about face, then ran with a propaganda blitz coordinated between the US, Britain, and France. A rebel uprising that was within days of being quelled in its stronghold in Benghazi, was to have its fortunes reversed, was to receive a flow of arms with perfect coordination, and begin chasing Gadhafi's forces back across the sands of Libya. President Obama celebrates clean hands in all of this, claiming that, at last, here is a chance to "align our interests with our values".

But something odd happened to this policy of humanitarian intervention. It was sold to the western public and to the Arab League as a policy of "defending civilians" with a No-Fly Zone. But the intention all along was to draft an "all measures necessary" provision into UN Resolution 1973. The aim was not impartial defense of people, but regime change. Once the votes were in, Britain and France made no bones about wanting Colonel Gadhafi's scalp. And US military spokesmen were careful to say that the violence was not directed at the Colonel himself, even while his compound, and the grand tent that served for his official receptions, went up in smoke. According to US Top Brass, if Gadhafi happened to get killed, it would be an accident, or the result of his own carelessness or imprudence.

Even though President Obama was ordering up a war, he presented no case to Congress; and in point of fact, he bypassed Congress. And the decision to enter hostilities was announced on March 19th, the anniversary of the war announcement made by George W. Bush, on March 19, 2003.

We all should be concerned if there is some common political ground for neocons and liberal interventionists. But one reason I object to the new war, is that it was advertised as one thing: defense of civilians. It is obvious now that the war is about regime change. It really goes after more than defanging the Gadhafi air force; for this is about arming the rebels (by way of Saudi and Egyptian channels) and making sure they can prevail at every step of their advance. Going from no-fly zone to no-drive zone. When French night-attack aircraft bomb sleeping soldiers on the outskirts of Benghazi, this war is revealed for what it is.

There is a reason why Obama (insert any other US administration) favors toppling someone like Gadhafi but not a Mubarak, someone like Syria's Assad but not Yemen's Saleh; and there is no point in the calculations that touches upon democracy or is concerned about defending civilians.

No African country has so far allowed the US military to base AFRICOM anywhere on its national territories. This will probably change; because for an empire, what cannot be obtained by diplomacy, is had by force. When Libya becomes a protectorate/puppet, the US military command's new AFRICOM will have a home. As in the past, empire uses conquest as its last resort.

The oil is an added goodie alright plus globalism's penetration into Libya. This war came on the heels of meticulous planning and propaganda. Gadhafi is not compliant enough, and would under no circumstances allow American basing in his country.

There is a cold cost analysis that is behind this foreign-armed and assisted coup d'etat. Egypt will end up with a troubling military pressure, on its western flank, the US basing in Libya, as a not so subtle nudge to keep people power under control in Egypt. A Libyan puppet who will take the collar will be a lot less worrisome than the Colonel, and more profitable to the powers that be.

Congressman Dennis Kucinich left a comment on the Guardian website, that references what is, perhaps, the suspect planning behind this war.

On November 2, 2010 France and Great Britain signed a mutual defence treaty , which included joint participation in "Southern Mistral" (www.southern-mistral.cdaoa.fr), a series of war games outlined in the bilateral agreement. Southern Mistral involved a long-range conventional air attack, called Southern Storm, against a dictatorship in a fictitious southern country called Southland. The joint military air strike was authorised by a pretend United Nations Security Council Resolution. The "Composite Air Operations" were planned for the period of 21-25 March, 2011. On 20 March, 2011, the United States joined France and Great Britain in an air attack against Gaddafi's Libya, pursuant to UN Security Council resolution 1973.

Have the scheduled war games simply been postponed, or are they actually under way after months of planning, under the name of Operation Odyssey Dawn? Were opposition forces in Libya informed by the US, the UK or France about the existence of Southern Mistral/Southern Storm, which may have encouraged them to violence leading to greater repression and a humanitarian crisis? In short was this war against Gaddafi's Libya planned or a spontaneous response to the great suffering which Gaddafi was visiting upon his opposition?

UPDATE: It looks like all the wolves will be making a meal of Libya.

Wow That Was Fast! Libyan Rebels Have Already Established A New Central Bank Of Libya

IN OTHER NEWS: Grayson Harper sends us this comment by email:

Biden stuck a reporter in a closet during a posh Orlando fundraiser to keep him from talking to the guests--had him in there an hour-and-a-half. Gave him bottled water and posted a staffer outside the door to stand guard. Sounds like something you'd expect to see on an episode of The Simpsons. We live in an absolute cartoon of a country. We have cartoon liberals and cartoon conservatives.

A Simple Twist of Fate

2011-02-06T11:27:00.010-06:00

Grayson Harper

Well, here we are in the greatest country in the world. The snow has melted off and the mobs are massing to watch the gladiators have a go at each other. Tickets (in case you're interested) are going for between $3,500 and $20.000. If you don't mind watching it on a big screen outside the Coliseum--er--stadium, last I heard, the price was $200. Probably much higher today. On Super-Bowl Sunday, a thirty-second TV ad is running somewhere in the neighborhood of $3-million.

Meanwhile, half-way around the world, in Cairo, in Alexandria, a different hoard of folks are gathered together. Not just in Egypt, but other places, as well--in Jordan, Tunesia, Syria, Yemen, Sudan. Throngs of people lifting their voices for democracy, crying out to be treated with simple human dignity. The notion of shelling out $3,000 to watch a football game, or even $200 to watch it on a screen, probably would not occur to most of them as an option, not only because probably not one of them has anything close to that kind of money to waste, and perhaps never will, and not only because their reason for coming together could mean life or death, but because of the sheer absurdity of it.

So far, the football fanatics have had to endure snow and icy weather. Pat-downs at the airport. A slab of ice slid off the domed roof of the stadium yesterday and sent someone to the hospital.

And still they come.

Over eleven days, the Egyptians in Tahrir Square have fought off Mubarak's thugs, they've had rocks thrown at them, they've been gunned down in the streets. They've stood up to the lies told about them, by those labeling them as Islamic extremists, by those who say they're being influenced by "outside agitators," by those like Senator John McCain, who brands what's happening in Egypt as a "virus that must be contained." The police have attacked them, the army has threatened them, has made every attempt to shut down the flow of information, including removing news journalists from the streets, taking them who knows where. The army has cut off their food and water supplies.

And still they come.

I wonder how many of them, along with their children, could be fed on all that Super-Bowl money--ad money, football money, money spent on bets on the game, money spent on airline tickets, gasoline, hotels, parties, fine dining, booze, and whores.

How many in my home town could be fed on that money? In my county alone, a fifth of children under the age of 18 live in extreme poverty. In my state, Texas, a quarter of them suffer from food insecurity or outright hunger.

The U.S. President, Barack Obama, and Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, have told the Egyptians they support them in their cause. Of course, they believe in democracy and human rights. They said they want a peaceful, orderly transition from Hosni Mubarak to the newly selected--not elected--Vice President--Omar Suleiman. Suleiman, the former head of Egyptian Intelligence, the C.I.A.'s point-man in Egypt for renditions and torture.

The President said he would journey to Texas if his beloved team, the Bears, were in the running. But they didn't make it. So today he will be hunkered down in the White House watching the Super Bowl. His guests include entertainers--Jennifer Lopez and Marc Anthony. He did not say he would journey to Cairo to stand in solidarity with a people who have endured thirty years of life under a brutal dictator.

MUBARAK SOMEHOW MISTAKES HIMSELF FOR THE HOMELAND

2011-02-02T02:41:00.006-06:00

"When a regime withdraws the police entirely from the streets of Cairo, when thugs are part of the secret police, trying to give the impression that without Mubarak the country will go into chaos, this is a criminal act. Somebody has to be accountable. And now, as you can hear in the streets, people are not saying Mubarak should go, they are now saying he should be put on trial. If he wants to save his skin, he better leave." –-Mohamad ElBaradei

Hosni Mubarak's ominous comment "...the Homeland goes on but the people do not...", in the midst of a speech where ordinary Egyptians were expecting (at least hoping) for him to announce his resignation, served as quite an eye-opener. The immense crowd in Cairo, roared back as they listened to him explain why he is still indispensable until September; and while they massed in the early morning darkness, their shout was for him to just "Leave".

Mubarak's hated police and his more hated Ministry of Interior, have made people recoil in fear for a long time; but the people began shouting back in unison that they would no longer be objects of abuse. When it becomes customary for police to beat or torture people taken into custody, when the face of a policeman on the street becomes that of a snarling bully who manhandles citizens at his whim, it means that civil society is broken.

What is terrifying is that a nation of over 80 million was placed for so long at the mercy of 1.2 million goons, their hirelings, and accomplices. Bernhard, who hosts at Moon of Alabama, describes this problem:

What to do about the 1.2 million people who work for the Interior Ministery and suppressed the people and protected the regime? Leaving them without income is dangerous, keeping them impossible. The economy is in bad shape - a social-democratic middle ground needs to be found to heal it while also lifting the poor from their mess. It will take years.

The US administration, as Hosni Mubarak's not-so-secret benefactor, embarrassed and contradicted itself at every turn. Vice-President Biden, like a stooge in an expensive suit, maintained that Mubarak is not a dictator. Old Hosni was a dear and reliable ally, serving at the pleasure of officials in Washington, as reputable as the derelict American press could arrange for him to be, lionizing him as a stabilizing presence in the region. Mubarak's counterfeit democracy and brutal repression were skimmed over in US newsrooms; and with press releases in their sweaty hands, the scribes hunched over the sacred writ from today's White House salespeople, acting submissively, just as they had done during Bush's years.

In the United States and Israel, the usual suspects persist in adding disinformation to the news; accusing protesters, labeling them, pointing at them, as looters and rioters. The protesters have been militant and defended themselves, but their behavior has been remarkably good in their large numbers, in these circumstances. Their anger at the Mubarak regime is justified. The real looters have been professional; sometimes shot by soldiers, and sent to hospitals, where they were found with police identity cards. This is the practice used by corrupt governments; they foment chaos themselves; they order it done to bring discredit to those who are protesting in the streets, and to prey on the fears of society at large, with the idea that the authorities alone can fend off social collapse.

President Obama and Secretary Clinton have been tangled up for days in the hypocrisy of their country's insipid diplomatic language. But the real heroism and social responsibility applies to masses of Egyptian people, who have taken steps to heal an abused nation; it is a profound contrast to the world of make-believe, which our president tried to sell to us, in his latest State of the Union speech. The contrivance and junk rhetoric has just worn out its welcome: the stupid recycling of the "Sputnik moment" from a Cold War mentality, morphing into an economic vision of green energy renewal; but for an empire in decline, which can't manage infrastructure or maintain decent wages at home, the US Empire can still build schools and pulverize villages in Afghanistan. And Obama capped all this off by wearing out the phrase, "winning the future".

Winning the future.

Isn't the cry about winning the future just a handy strategy to keep an old exhausted mule tugging at its harness? Winning the future, as rhetoric, is like the long pole with a carrot at the end of it; just enough incentive for a mule.

While Obama points to a worthy citizen in the gallery, and bathes in that person's reflected glory, while he gesticulates and prattles about winning the future, ordinary Egyptians have done something that should humble him, and all the rest of us. Unlike Americans, Egyptians seem to be mastering their fears; and if they can continue this way they will be thinking more clearly. But there is no going back; and it's best to wish them well. They refuse to be coerced any longer by Mubarak's brutality or ever bow down before his brutality again. Once the people take a step like that, they have proven how great they are.

Image: Cairo's Tahrir Square (via Moon Of Alabama)

IN REMEMBRANCE OF MARTIN LUTHER KING

2011-01-17T18:40:00.007-06:00

Now power properly understood is nothing but the ability to achieve purpose. It is the strength required to bring about social, political, and economic change.

What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love.

Our country's leaders can no longer define the conditions that would bring peace; and they won't allow us to disengage from our foreign wars. At home, there is a reckless and persistent drumming up of violence by a right-wing that speaks in a way that suggests a right to nullify elections with guns. Death threats and vandalism at political headquarters, the brandishing of guns at public meetings, and rhetoric that assumes the elimination of political adversaries, is all a grim reminder of the sacrifices which were made in the past for a better world, when we mourned the assassination of our leaders.

"Power without love is reckless and abusive."

The assault of power, in the absence of love, can be seen in the manhandling and dehumanization of passengers boarding airplanes in this country. It can be seen in Afghanistan, as US Special Ops kidnap civilians in the middle of the night; and where occupation troops supervise the cutting down of orchards. It is the hellscape where robot drones appear out of the night to kill sleeping children. Because love lies abandoned, because this kind of power is reckless and abusive, the concept of peace and the blessings of peace are not even acknowledged by our politicians. And our silence, too, in the face of this kind of power, can rob us of our humanity.

"And love without power is sentimental and anemic."

Martin Luther King fell out of favor, after he spoke out against the War in Vietnam. People, even in his own civil rights organization, the NAACP, criticized him; this was because they could accept only the Reverend King of "The Dream" speech; and the Reverend King who rightly described his country as "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world" was out of step in their view; and suddenly he became an outcast in Washington, an object of suspicion to the Great Society democrats who once praised him. And how can we, or our president, bind up the nation's wounds, when love lacks power?--when political speech is composed of sentimental and anemic words?

Without justice and without laws in which we have confidence, we are lost. Bertolt Brecht, the poet and playwright, once wrote, "What times are these when a conversation about a tree is almost a crime because it contains so many silences about so many crimes?" When will the president urge us to humility, as he gives his eulogy for American soldiers who commit suicide? Where are the words to bathe and anoint the body of the next Afghan child, killed by our bombs?

Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love.

"DON'T FIGHT ANOTHER FOR A RICH MAN'S WAR"

2010-12-16T19:35:00.002-06:00

In London, it was announced that Julian Assange will be freed on bail. And today in the cold, in front of the White House, there was a demonstration, and more, an act of peaceful resistance against the war in Afghanistan.

People can see that acts of resistance like this really matter. Among those in Washington DC who chained or tied themselves to the fence in front of the White House were Daniel Ellberg of Pentagon Papers fame, and Chris Hedges, former NYT correspondent, who has covered wars as a reporter and won a Pulitzer Prize. Colleen Rowley, a whistleblower who has been in the news, and Ray McGovern, a former CIA analyst, were among 135 protesters who were arrested late this afternoon.

Raw Story was able to confirm the arrests of Ellsberg, McGovern, Rowley and Hedges, along with Veterans for Peace members Elliott Adams, Mike Ferner, Mike Hearington

copeland morris SHELTER

2010-12-12T20:15:00.000-06:00

I smell the cold and my shoulders straighten.
Winter raps at the door, no longer a stranger
To flights of leaves, rearranged.
For all to whom my greeting comes
Each letter steadies my hand
Like shelter to comfort me in bitter weather.

CHRIS HEDGES ON THE DEATH OF AMERICA'S LIBERAL CLASS

2010-12-02T18:50:00.000-06:00

CIVILIZATIONS EXIST ON BORROWED TIME (AND MONEY)

2010-11-21T00:12:00.005-06:00

The timeless Mark Twain wrote this in a letter to Danish writer, Carl Thalbitzer:

My wife does not allow this manuscript to be published, and as ninety-nine parts of me forbid me to make myself comprehensively and uncompromisingly odious, it has not been difficult to persuade me to restrict the reading of it to myself! But you shall read it when you come to see me; then perhaps you will believe with me that civilizations are not realities, but only dreams; dreams of the mind, not of the heart, and therefore fictitious, and perishable; that they have never affected the heart and therefore have made no valuable progress; that the heart remains today what it always was, as intimacy with any existing savage tribe will show. Indeed the average of the human brain is not a shade higher today than it was in Egyptian times ten thousand years ago.

The empire dream is, without doubt, one of the most brittle dreams of the mind; and the fall of an empire, the point of slipping away, is the moment when corruption gains the upper hand; and the permanent values have to be gathered from the wreckage of broken, impermanent things.

Technological progress has not made human beings better; and with the waging of class warfare, it is the wealthy sector of society that has purchased government outright, and has created a bicameral apparatus for implementing political and military policy, controlling how people live and the kinds of things they think about. This control is not yet absolute; but it is effective enough, in that it permits the looting of the wealth that people at several levels of society have accumulated. The new corporate power is also invested in converting the middle class into an underclass, and ultimately turning the underclass into a slave class; where slaves, of course, are the most invisible, ignored, and expendable class.

Thomas Frank, in the December issue of Harper's Magazine, has described the peculiar deterioration of academia in this country; a market glutted with historians, for instance, where he describes the complaints of colleagues and friends who "...all told the same story of low-wage toil, of lecturing and handing out A's while going themselves without health insurance or enough money for necessities."

His article concentrates on failing standards of professional journalism and the further exploitation of workers there, that he traces to the creation of what he calls "content-mills", in which professional people are tethered to the same economic models that are degrading academia. There is a reliance on the input of focus groups. Newspapers are less and less interested in describing the world as it really is, and more inclined to tailor content to fit things the audience has been polled about, what people seem to want.

What people want, and what they are told they want, must bear a closer examination. When Walmart trumpets "ALWAYS LOWER PRICES!" it means that somewhere, sometime, someone must work for less. A world market is a collection of national markets; and societies that are brimming over with the unemployed are surely those where people are willing to scratch for life, and are left at the mercy of new robber barons, who are flush with loot and plunder.

As far as American empire-building goes, look no further than the 19th Century's Gilded Age, for the blueprint, the words of Samuel Insul:

My experience is that the greatest aid to the efficiency of labor is a long line of men waiting at the gate. (ibid)

It looks as though Americans must be shaken by realizing that they are owned by a financial empire that has been on a looting spree, one which has not been hampered with criminal prosecutions. The criminal class in capitalism can cause a meltdown and profit from the new situation. The racketeers in the financial and banking institutions have discovered that waterboarding the Golden Goose will provide a few more eggs.

The free ride, the impunity to act without fear of punishment, is accorded to those who have the pluck to bring down the world's economy; and these lively entrepreneurs are bringing misery to hundreds of millions of people. As Mark Twain has reminded us, people need to focus on the crucial difference between permanent and impermanent things. Technology remains an enchantment to the progressive crowd; but it is a two-edged sword.

So powerful is our desire to believe in the benevolent divinity of technology that it cancels out our caution, forces us to dismiss doubt as so much simple-minded Luddism. We have trouble grasping that the Internet might not bring only good; that an unparalleled tool for enlightenment and research and transparency might also bring unprecedented down-dumbing; that something that empowers the individual might also wreck the structures that have protected the individual for decades. (Frank)

The word on the street is that evil is ascendant; therefore take precaution as you must. The republicans keep telling their damned lies about Obama; but America's first black president reacts mildly to republican nihilism, and its bubbling cauldron of lies, believing that it is more important to work with such people, despite their ugly motives, and put up with them for the alleged good of the country. The candle snuffer of hope has disillusioned many who voted for him in 2008. American energy corporations keep blowing the tops off mountains, come what may. They pollute the rivers to get at the coal. Big natural gas producers, like Chesapeake, use millions of gallons of fresh water in fracking operations, and have turned it all into a toxic soup, which is either dumped somewhere or injected back into the earth.

If we aren't willing to give up the empire; then we can't save the country. The empire cannot be saved because it costs much more than the money spent to keep it on its feet. The empire is an impediment to our progress as human beings. It is the impermanent, but callous machine that destroys democracy. The empire maintains itself with hideous violence. The empire needs psychological war, and an immense network of outlets, for all its lies. The empire now rests on the military as its ultimate enforcer, and counts on it in a deteriorating society, to employ our jobless youth. And the empire is a financial empire at its root, feeding on debt, on compound interest, on crooked financial instruments, on drug cartels, on rigged accounting agencies; and it is only satiated when it can drink a substantial quantity of blood.

The whole process that has been dubbed, "Disaster Capitalism", cannot be allowed to go on; for the economy, like the body, can only take so many shocks before it collapses. In India, another wounded democracy, the more comfortable people are also mesmerized by the shiny bauble of corporatism, the new wave of development that is called "India Shining", where life will get better for the better-off, just as soon as some tiresome tribal people, the truly dirt-poor, are dispossessed and driven off their land.

Cue Barack Obama, a truly graceful American actor in the land of India, coming onstage with an entourage of 250 corporate representatives, and among them, men who have practical experience in securing mineral rights and opening the mines, in drilling and blasting. "India Shining", like "Change You Can Believe In", is advertised to the skies, and is described by all present as wonderful.

"WHERE BOOKS ARE BURNED IN THE END PEOPLE WILL BURN TOO"

2010-09-11T00:01:00.002-05:00

(Editor's Note: the words of the poet, Heinrich Heine, evoking horrors in the past and their prophetic repetition in the world right now, seems a fitting way to introduce this commentary by our friend, Doug Hyden.)

THOLOS SPECIAL FEATURE
by DOUG HYDEN

The question should not be, “Why is burning a few a copies of the Koran in a barrel outside a church in Gainesville wrong?” The question should be, “Why is burning copies of the Koran one-by-one in surgical missile strikes and firefights all right?”

Well, here we are all upset because a few knuckleheads in middle Florida are planning to burn a few copies of the Koran. Liberals like nothing better than to work themselves into high dudgeon over a meaningless charade and make useless feel-good gestures that do…not…change…a… thing.

The proposed Koran burning is another fake story ginned up by the mainstream media’s puppet masters to fill us full of phony outrage and take our minds off the very real issues that we should be paying attention to. It is a phony issue. It is manipulated by the fascists in the Middle East to divert the peoples’ thoughts away from their murderous totalitarian agenda. It is manipulated by the “liberal media” so that we don’t have to ask the really hard questions. Questions like, “Well, if burning a few Korans will hurt our troops, why are our troops in a place where they can be hurt in the first place?” (Remember that old Vietnam poster: “We are the unwilling, led by the incompetent, to do the impossible, for the ungrateful”?)

Let ‘em burn the book, I say, and pay ‘em all the attention they deserve. This is America . This is a free country. They have a right to express their opinions. If I can say I hate phony Christians, they can say they hate Islam. This is what freedom of speech looks like, and it ain’t pretty.

Okay, most Christians don’t express their hatred as straightforwardly as the losers in Gainesville, but if you’ll examine the various creedal statements of just about every mainstream (and most non-mainstream) Christian denomination—from the Roman Catholics to the Presbyterians to the Lutherans to the Methodists to the followers of Brother Billy Bob’s Bible Church to, yes, the United Church of Christ—you’ll find a common theme. Mankind is in need of salvation, and the only road to salvation leads through belief in certain doctrines about Jesus Christ. In other words: Muslims are going to hell. It’s in our creed—the one most of recite every Sunday morning that we spend in church. We’re sticking to the same bottom line as Rev. Jones and his friends; we’re just more polite about it.

But, believe me, while we may be more polite than the Gainesville crowd, the United States hates Islam. What is it but hatred when we give a platform megaphone to a malignant cancer like Sarah Palin or a black-hearted Lilliputian like Glen Beck and their tea party cronies to trumpet some phony anger over a “mosque at ground zero?” What is it but hatred when a mealy-mouthed President Obama and every other cowardly liberal says, “Well, they have the right to build their mosque, but it surely is a stupid idea. Yes, indeed!” The Islamic world doesn’t need us burning a few Korans to know we hate Islam.

When even Republicans like Hailey Barber and John McCain come out against burning the Koran in Gainesville, you realize how easy it is to feign horror and shock—the very idea!—of an American congregation burning the holy books of another religion. What is difficult for us to swallow is the fact that official American policy is to burn the Koran every single day. We do it with tanks. We do it with flame throwers. We do it with “smart bombs,” cruise missiles, and drone airplanes day in and day out. A book is just as badly burned if it is incinerated by a missile strike directed from hundreds of miles away as it is if it is placed in a barrel, doused with Kerosene, and incinerated with a Zippo. That is where we should direct our outrage instead of letting our attention be diverted by a few attention-grabbing fools in Gainesville .

copeland morris DEADBEATS CONJURE THE BIG EVENT

2010-08-30T23:37:00.000-05:00

November outruns its own shadow,
A map that reveals the future;
"It's better to possess it," they think.
A single word can destroy the world
Opened as wide as the mouth of Shiva:
The winter stripped of consequence
Like Kennedy without angles
At the end of the beginning
When every moment is illuminated
And silence lingers long after
The breakfast that couldn't stay down.
It's so like Camelot where we saddle up
The true Lincoln Convertible,
The nation's jumpseat where Jack
Lies bleeding.

copeland morris THE RAIDING PARTY

2010-07-12T21:57:00.005-05:00

(for Christopher)

They will come for us, too.
There will be no place left to stand;
Darkness over the water...
Moonless water that became our highway.
Furkan Dogan killed.
Moonless water our highway.
His small frame, a ship dismantled
In which we remain. The melancholy
Surface that clings to the night.
Thoughts that are choreography
As the raiders boarded. The ocean
That was timed to coincide before the sun
Shows its face. A time when men
Come out on deck to say prayers. This
Coincides with hours: after the propwash
Of helicopters swept the deck. The women who are
Keening in grief can already be heard.
The Mavi Marmara is not just any ship; nor is
Gaza just any destination; nor are the Israelis
Just any raiders; nor was Basho just any composer
Of haiku. Nor was the willow under which he wrote
Just any willow. It had been planted with care
By Saigyo, a master of philosophy.
Hear me, Furkan Dogan: we have not forgotten you.

THE BEST POLICE STATE MONEY CAN BUY

2010-07-07T15:40:00.000-05:00

Police State Canada from bill johnson on Vimeo.

THE GLOBAL CONVERSATION TAKES A BEATING IN TORONTO

2010-06-30T15:08:00.007-05:00

The cargo of globalization was roughly steered for a crackup in Toronto--like the hull of an old ship that is drawn to wreckage on the tides--it heaved and groaned to its doom. The very bottoms of those lackeys who run the US, are owned down to the last dime, by the speculators and the Federal Reserve and the criminal investment banks. Indeed, those who routinely gamble with our lives, the ones who legislate, have dismantled the remaining lighthouses, the laws and regulations that could have guided the captains and crews away from the rocks.

Canadian authorities spent well over a billion dollars; and it was the most stupendous sum ever paid out for security at such an event, according to Naomi Klein. And downtown Toronto was transformed into a paramilitary scene. At one official entrance to the conference, a cop announced, "the media is under arrest", when frustration boiled over, as they attempted to separate journalists with government approved lanyard ID, from others with freelance passes.

Reporter Jesse Rosenfeld was suddenly arrested and slammed to the ground by police. He had filed by the deadline for accreditation, but had not yet been issued his official lanyard. Just before this, he had been explaining that he worked for The Guardian, and showed them other credentials issued by the Alternative Media Center.

The police told me, "Oh, we don’t recognize these credentials." I explained to them that I was a journalist also with The Guardian, that I was writing for "Comment Is Free." I told them about my editors. I told them about my stories. And they said, "Well, we’ll check your credentials, and then, if it’s fine, we’ll let you go."

At that point, I was sort of taken to the side, after a bunch of media had gotten through the police line, and an officer walked up to me, looked at my ID and said—my Alternative Media Center press pass, that is—and said, "This isn’t legitimate. You’re under arrest," at which point I was immediately jumped by two police officers. I had my notepads in my hands. Grabbed my arms, they yanked back. My notepad went flying. I was hit in the stomach by one officer as I was held by two others. As I was going over, I was then hit in the back and went down. After I went down and as I went down, I smacked my leg. I had officers jump on top of me. I was being hit in the back. My face was being pushed to the concrete. All the time I’m saying, "I’m not resisting arrest. I’m a journalist. Why are you beating me?" My leg was lifted up, and my ankle was twisted, from while I was on the ground not resisting. And at that point, after I started saying these things, the police then started saying, "Stop resisting arrest," as if to try and provide cover for themselves.

Seattle and those startling demonstrations against globalization seem strangely far off in time. And now it's getting harder to ignore that a corporate police apparatus is slowly spreading its tentacles over a colonized planet. Civilians on the ground are no match for hulks in body armor. This mismatch was emphasized in Toronto, at the G-8/G-20 economic summit, where the money spigot was opened wide in 2010, and all the medieval force was in full swing.

Stefan Christoff explained the meaning of the terrible scene in Toronto to Amy Goodman:

Well, it's meant that downtown Toronto has become a fortress, literally. We could just hear now aircrafts that are hovering around the downtown core. Dissent has been erased. So, when we hear all these speeches and languages coming out of the G8 and G20 about transparency, globalization, sharing of ideas, the reality on the ground is that these meetings are happening in a militarized fortress. And the fence itself was constructed by a company that has been directly involved in contracts that are linked to the NATO-led military occupation of Afghanistan. They’re building all sorts of public work projects in cooperation with the Canadian military and the US military—this is SNC-Lavalin, based in Montreal—and also, as I mentioned, the contract with the US Army just after the 2003 invasion of Iraq. So the security fence, I mean, speaks to the whole reality today, I think, of walls around the world. We’re talking about walls going up—the US-Mexico border wall, the wall—the apartheid wall in Palestine. And at the same time, the leaders at the G8 and G20 are talking about walls coming down and free trade. But for people, walls are just going up, even in the largest city of Canada.

It's important to realize that this globalized police apparatus is a junior partner to the military nowadays; this should be evident; and it can't be said enough that the military, in this partnership, massacres civilians from the safety of helicopters. Stefan Christoff alludes to this relationship when he describes the role of a Montreal-based corporation, SNC-Lavalin, in putting together the fortifications that surround the G-8/G-20.

It’s an engineering giant. They actually produced millions of bullets between 2003 and 2005 for the US Army at the same time of the invasion of Iraq. So this is a corporation that’s inherently tied to the military-industrial complex internationally and also has been tied to the clampdown on dissent here in Toronto. It’s really incredible when you see the fence and also just see the almost 20,000 police and law enforcement officials that are patrolling the city.

And what gets put on TV? It was reported that police had arrested over 600 people; and the number might run to 1,000. A small clique of anarchists, wearing masks, destroy storefronts, break glass and burn a few cop cars. Endless close-ups of the burning cars and the shattered store displays are shown endlessly, but not so much imagery of police abusing everyday people. Those are very fleeting images, if they are seen at all. But many at the protests had video phone and cameras that can reveal more to us, in time.

Canadian academic, David Ker Thomson, filed a report in Counterpunch that describes a Toronto police action that has left his family with emotional scars. His is an old and distinguished family in the city; and these are excerpts from his report:

We are experiencing in our neighborhoods what brown people around the world have experienced at our hands. It has come home to roost. I woke this morning from a dream of Kanada, and I was weeping uncontrollably. Our children are attacked by troops openly in the street, openly in so-called "free speech zones"...

My ten-year-old was almost fucking killed when he was attacked by police in a free-speech zone. My fourteen-year-old and I were chased for two hours. [...] My friends are being dragged off to left and right, and the world watches football. I began the weekend juggling for the troops, holding out flowers, but I end hunted and in tears, paranoid and sad. It feels like the end. We are still free, but barely holding on...

Toronto, June 26, Saturday: We've done family protests in Washington and London, amongst other places, and even mingled with some serious ruckus in Buenos Aires. Never have we experienced anything as terrible as in Toronto today, Saturday, a mile from the G-20 perimeter walls. The Canadians--if these police/soldiers are even Canadian--are far and away the most vicious of any military we've ever experienced...[I]t was Eva-Lynn's idea that we would take the children to the protests [on Saturday] to experience the peaceful strong energy we always get at peace rallies. [...] By the time we got to Queen's park and walked between my wife's two offices at the university, everything appeared to be over. People were walking away. It was very peaceful, with the sun coming out after a day's rain. Like so many places downtown, there was a long line of police in riot gear here.

They were eerily quiet always. For two weeks before this, police had been moving through the city making lots of military noises with voice commands and whistles to intimidate protestants before they even thought of protesting. But during everything I'm about to relate, these police remained absolutely silent. Very spooky. A skinny little man in front of us had a small sign that said "Free Hugs." I asked Eva-Lynn if it would be okay if I went over and gave the man a hug. What happened in the next three seconds was like something out of a horror movie. I dropped Liam's hand and took one step toward the free-hug man. There was a confused pounding sound like elephants running, and it took me a moment to figure out where it was coming from. I caught a quick glimpse of the hug man being struck and dragged., then in the next micro-second realized that the police had exploded at us without warning. [...]

Luckily Liam is fast, and we just made it--I mean, just made it without being run over. With their huge exoskeletons, the men couldn't run far. They paused for a moment, and then came at us again. But this time a cluster of cavalry broke in from our left. Have you ever been hunted by horsemen? Pretty primal, I'll tell you. There are women on the beasts, too, like trussed valkyries. The policemen in the front had clearly seen that they were attacking a small child and they came on at full speed anyway without the slightest warning. I just couldn't get this out of my head. They had looked right at my little boy and attacked him.

The feckless President Obama should feel right at home amid this repression, since his country has a long history of brutalizing protesters. He came to the board meeting waving the bright banner of Keynesian stimulus spending, in the name a country strung out on a borrowing binge and toting a huge trade deficit. And our president has to sign, and agree like the others: pledging not to spend ever so madly or print a boatload of new dollars. But it's a concession without meaning. The austerity alternative is the strong-arm method, the iron glove of the IMF style of economic reform, slashing social services while servicing debt. Under this kind of debt peonage a nation can be stripped of all its movable assets by foreign financiers.

Obama may sign on the dotted line; but if he takes the nation into austerity, jobs will tank and tax revenues will wither. And there is no predicting what the people will do in a deflationary spiral. What was done to Greece by global banks, and their political stooges, can be done to us now.

ANNE DE JONG IS ASKING US TO HELP THE PEOPLE OF GAZA

2010-06-02T09:44:00.007-05:00

Anthropologist Anne De Jong

ISRAEL OPENS FIRE ON PEACE FLOTILLA, IN NIGHT ASSAULT AT SEA

2010-05-31T22:11:00.009-05:00

Attacking in international waters, under cover of darkness, Israeli commandos boarded and seized the six ships of the Peace Flotilla, that were bound for Gaza. It is being called a massacre on the high seas, as Israel's men came aboard shooting and firing teargas. Ten people are reported dead; but judging by the first reports, the count may go higher, with dozens injured.

Go read Stephen Lendman's Slaughter at Sea:

Video footage on board the Turkish passenger ship Mavi Marmara showed Israeli commandos opened fire during the assault, activists saying it began immediately after storming on board.

Al Zazeera's Jamal Elshayyal, on the ship, said "a white surrender flag was raised (and) there was no live fire coming from the passengers."

The Free Gaza Movement reported that "Under darkness of night, Israeli commandos dropped from a helicopter onto the Turkish passenger ship, Mavi Marmara, and began to shoot the moment their feet hit the deck." No action on board provoked it. It was premeditated, willful slaughter.

This is a barbarous attack. It is also diplomatically self-defeating for Israel, to an extent that's almost beyond calculation. This is going to set off a firestorm of protest all over the world, and is occurring at the same time that Israel's submarines, armed with nukes, are near the shores of Iran.

Israel and Turkey used to be allies; but their souring relationship is likely to come to a stark end, as Turkish citizens were killed in this fiasco at sea. It's also been reported, in the Guardian, that the Greek captain of one of the small ships was shot; and officials in Athens are reported to be angry.

Over a year ago our country was in a transition period; and while Barack Obama celebrated being President-Elect, Israel was invading Gaza in what was certainly a massacre, killing way over 1,400 people. Israel used up, consumed in fact, all of the moral reputation it had left. And in the United States especially, a cone of silence was carefully adjusted over international new reports which, from time to time, detailed the story of torture of non-Jews in Israeli custody.

There is a kind of emotional deadening that surrounds Americans, like a protective layer, when it comes to the crimes of Israel's right-wing government.

Yet the paranoid pathology has become a part of Israel now. Its policy is against its own interests. And the policy of the US follows Israel, wherever Israel goes diplomatically, and will defend Israel (apparently to the death) no matter what Israel does.

Well you don't need a Book of Revelation, or a dowsing rod, or the Farmer's Almanac, to see where that leads. Plant by the full moon and dig deeply into the Earth.

Returning to this latest horror, the Palestinians in Gaza are still living in the rubble, and no relief so far is coming to relieve them. The right-wing Israeli government used its military to turn this place into a desperate ghetto, one that hangs onto life with the trickle of humanitarian goods that Israel allows in by road.

THE FIFTH HORSEMAN OF THE APOCALYPSE

2010-05-16T17:51:00.008-05:00

And fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul; but rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell.

Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? and one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father.

--St. Matthew, Chapter 10, verses 28-29

When British Petroleum's Deepwater Horizon oil rig blew sky high, and sank in the Gulf of Mexico, we all became implicated in a disaster that continues to gush out oil, some 5,000 feet underwater.

We are, most of us, conscious of the augeries, that is to say, the omens and shadows that are crossing our path. We go on working even as work slips away or has less effect in sustaining us. If we are writers; we keep writing even when we are tired. If we are parents worried about our children; we send them to school, and remain worried about their future.

...we defy augery: there's a special
providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now,
'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be
now; if it be not now, yet it will come. The
readiness is all. Since no man of aught he leaves knows
what is't to leave betimes, let be.

--Hamlet, Act 5, scene 2

The Deepgulf Gusher exceeds being a metaphor for self-destruction, or a sign of the Gilded Age, a corporate heyday of looting and plunder. Right before our eyes, our own government is presenting a hands-off attitude to it; and every four days becomes a tick-tock, tick-tock of the Doomsday Clock, as another load of pollution is disgorged into the Gulf, a size that matches the Exxon Valdez dump every four days.

And BP is thinking of injecting golf balls and other debris into the rupture to jam it up. What a joke. The company's liability is being capped; and that is the chief priority of our so-called civilization. How should we expect recovery of damages once a precious ecological resource is destroyed?--once the food resource, the livelihood of fishermen is destroyed in that entire region?

We look in vain to our public institutions, our president, for accountability. Civic values have been twisted in recent years into the shape of a monstrosity. We can blame ourselves, I guess, for our sins of omission, and our failure to persuade. But there is also the intellectual laziness of this society to consider, and for what Matt Taibbi has called "...middle Americans' moronic fantasies about themselves" and their willingness to have their egos massaged by the likes of rogue politician, Sarah Palin; for these reasons, we have come to this absurd fork in the road.

The nation has been so propagandized by the well-heeled experts in that art; and over time the people themselves have become comfortable or trapped in a militarized society. It's true that millions of Americans--people we recognize every day-- have embraced "the cult of the warrior"; and they measure themselves against the cult status of the rich--those who must never on any occasion--be taxed.

The political reach of corporate power is out of control, a menace that has yet to be curbed under our present system. Big Oil and the financial sector are all that represents freedom in the halls of Congress--they are citizens of a government now. And we are out in the cruel wasteland of what was once a republic.

*************************

FROM RAW STORY: OTHER NEWS OF HUMAN FOLLY

An upcoming UN report says that providing safe zones for fish stocks to recover, and cutting back drastically on commercial fishing fleets, is the only hope to avoid a worldwide disaster.

Oceans’ fish could disappear in 40 years: UN

(Source: Agence France-Presse)

The Green Economy report estimates there are 35 million people fishing around the world on 20 million boats. About 170 million jobs depend directly or indirectly on the sector, bringing the total web of people financially linked to 520 million.

According to the UN, 30 percent of fish stocks have already collapsed, meaning they yield less than 10 percent of their former potential, while virtually all fisheries risk running out of commercially viable catches by 2050.

The main scourge, the UNEP report says, are government subsidies encouraging ever bigger fishing fleets chasing ever fewer fish -- with little attempt to allow the fish populations to recover.

IS THAT YOU THERE IN THE RUINS?

2010-04-30T03:05:00.010-05:00

From Harper's Index, Harper's Magazine, May 2010:

Number of reported US drone attacks in Pakistan since Obama's inauguration: 78

Number during George W. Bush's entire presidency: 45

One criticism of President Obama and his team, that will stick, is that they allow the regressive political trends of the late past to grow worse and worse. A smattering of conservatives and libertarians, and all those hopeful liberals, leftists, progressives, who were holding their breath in anticipation of change, can now exhale. The exhilaration has escaped...and the body politic becomes torpid. As a result, the president himself expresses regret, and finds it no simple matter to undo the mistrust.

How incredible it is to consider the president's repeated use of the past tense: his claim that he "closed" the infamous Guantanamo camp, a routine phrase used in several speeches, after he moved into the White House. No such closing has happened.

The ACLU recently reprimanded Obama's administration for treating the whole world, the planet itself, as a battlefield; as Obama imitates the war powers of George W. Bush, who preceded him in office.

What is flawed goes well beyond one particular policy or another, because the real concern is the whole philosophy of American power.

In March, Ambassador Chas W. Freeman, Jr. spoke to an audience of foreign affairs specialists in Arlington, Virginia:

Altogether, we spend more on military power than the rest of the world--friend or foe--combined. (This way we can defeat everyone in the world if they all gang up on us. Don't laugh! If we are sufficiently obnoxious, we might just drive them to it.) No one questions this level of spending or asks what it is for. Politicians just tell us it is short of what we require. We have embraced the cult of the warrior. The defense budget is its totem.

[...] Liberal interventionists often join the neocons in their eagerness to remake the world in our image. Hence, the war to secure Afghanistan for feminism and other undeniably worthy causes not normally associated with that country. Americans are learning the hard way that armed evangelism and the diplomacy-free foreign policy associated with it give birth to more enemies than they kill. But what's done is done. We're addicted to military surges and the substitution of campaign plans for strategies. We just can't seem to quit.

[...] Amazingly, as an example, we retain a touching faith in sanctions as an instrument of coercive influence. Our diplomacy follows a predictable pattern. It begins with bluster, experiments with covert action, then proceeds to demands that others join us in sanctions, which become a diplomatic end in themselves. When sanctions fail--as they always do, we put the bombers in the air and the tanks on the dirt...

The language that Freeman sees us reduced to, is commanded by firepower, because appeals to reason would brand us as wimps, and the folks on the receiving end of the violence are really "not like us" at all. That is sadly the guiding philosophy of American power.

And what is happening on the stage of our domestic politics sometimes seems inhuman. About 400,000 people have been deported from the country in a year's time. The ICE paramilitary, the new immigration enforcers, began in the Bush years, rounding up people by the thousands, incarcerating whole families. Now this force has been disappearing those it nabs, denying those in custody access to lawyers, warehousing prisoners in nondescript unmarked facilities, shuffling them around without providing lists or the exact location of prisoners, making these inmates invisible.

Professor Jaqueline Stevens is credited with breaking this story of the "unmarked holding areas" and stockrooms that doubled as cells.

Adios, muchachos.

No more stooping to pick our cheap veggies for shit wages. No more losing hands and fingers in our slaughterhouses. NAFTA and our monsters of patented seeds and genetically altered crops, big shits like Monsanto, Frankenstein corporations, drove a million farmers in Mexico to ruin.

But who has to pay the pound of flesh? Who has to be uprooted? Who is held without legal counsel? Who is disappeared without a paper trail? Who is rounded up in Arizona?--America's first fascist state? If it can be done to these scapegoats; it can be done to you in good time. Despite the official disclaimers of Arizona's statehouse, it's become a crime to be brown, to look Hispanic. Only those who are targets are expected to carry birth certificates in that state. People can be arrested, stopped and questioned, because they reflect a particular heritage.

Yet on some level it's remarkable that Barack Obama, the country's chief executive, our first African-American president, can be blandly criticizing Arizona's new power; but at the same time, a department of his own federal police apparatus, The ICE, is running amok.

There's a connection between the violence this government inflicts on the unfortunate people in foreign lands, who stand in its way, and the violence it inflicts on the most powerless people in its own neighborhoods.

JOHNNY SAVES THE DAY ON THE PLANET PANDORA

2010-03-10T13:04:00.005-06:00

I saw "Avatar" a few days ago; and I guess you have to take James Cameron's anti-war film as an allegory. That's what Michael Moore has said about it: that it's "an allegory about what's happening now, set in the future".

The film is simply beautiful in its own right, also, and should be seen before it leaves the big screen.

Formula arises out of the action figure who saves the day, which we have seen a gazillion times in pop culture. Much that is of comic book appeal does not undermine the reversal of identification-- like magnetic poles switching-- in terms of who the audience identifies with in the movie. Cameron deserves credit, some credit; since species identification is otherwise a primordial reflex; and it turns out that we wonder early in the film, along with the Navian shaman, whether the insanity of human beings (the sky people) is correctable at all.

Any film maker who can turn sympathy in this way deserves credit. There's a lot in the film which shows our imperial culture being itself, and the evidence of what we have become is a stark feature of this film. There is a replication of all the ways in which technology in the West has crushed the spiritualism of every nature-centered culture it ever encountered.

The land is polluted by those who come to take from the people, using the familiar "might makes right" mandate, to steal resources from those who can be intimidated. The "sky people", who killed what remained of the green on their own world, are completely unreformed in any moral sense; and they come plundering across the reaches of interstellar space to extract minerals from Pandora, and of course are threatening to make yet another world sterile.

Quite apart from projecting the mythical world of the Navians, with all the mythologies of our ancient people superimposed upon them, the formulas of adulation for heroes included, and the triumph of the spiritual over the meanness of acquisitiveness and conquest; this film is more importantly about the grim fate that awaits a civilization that feeds on invasive violence and exploitation.

Cameron's achievement is to show what history has in store for us, the destroyers of worlds. The human race is scouring the universe for an element, a rare mineral called "Unobtainium"; the human race has left its own sterile rock, after killing the green goddess Gaia, its own mother; and matricide is not enough for it, and it can't be satisfied until the mother is killed everywhere, in every form known to sentient beings. Human beings have at last found ultimate gratification in becoming one with their killing machines, in worshiping at their own godhead, which is Mammon. Human beings are not to be satisfied until all lesser creatures kneel before them, until they have subdued and fucked all their prey.

Cameron, with some genius, has artfully identified homo sapiens here, as the alien army of occupation, an army in defeat, a disarmed bunch of mercenaries, being marched back to their transport vessels, for repatriation back to their own dead world.

This article is cross-posted at le speakeasy.

"WE HAVE COME TO LOVE OUR FEARS MORE THAN WE LOVE OUR FREEDOMS"

2010-02-27T18:36:00.006-06:00

A society that tortures and kills those placed entirely in it's power and passes this fact by as a matter of indifference truly is plunging into the dark side of the world.

--Scott Horton

Anyone who expects better of the Obama administration should not look for any fresh glimmer of leadership or any bending of the arc of history towards justice. The results are in. This administration is closing its eyes to some of the foulest crimes to have been committed by government and military personnel during the Bush/Cheney years. The murder by torture of three prisoners at Guantanamo prison on the 9th of June, 2006, and the cover-up of that killing, is one example.

A Yemeni man, Salah Ahmed Al-Salami, and two Saudi men, Mani Shaman Al-Utaybi and Yasser Talal Al-Zahrani, seem to have upset their captors by staging a hunger strike over the conditions of their captivity. Yet these men posed no danger to the United States; they were young men in their twenties and thirties; and they were not advised that, in fact, the authorities were working towards releasing them.

It's important to note that when the prisoners' bodies were returned to their next of kin, their throats had been removed.

In 2006, the use of a gagging restraint had already been connected to the death on January 9, 2004, of an Iraqi prisoner, Lieutenant Colonel Abdul Jameel, in the custody of the Army Special Forces. And the bodies of the three men who died at Guantanamo showed signs of torture, including hemorrhages, needle marks, and significant bruising. The removal of their throats made it difficult to determine whether they were already dead when their bodies were suspended by a noose. (Horton, Harper's Magazine, March 2010)

From Scott Horton's investigation in Harper's Magazine, the horrific sequence of events is reconstructed. Sometime during the evening of June 9th, Guantanamo guards observed these men being transferred after dark from Camp Delta, along a route to a clandestine camp they knew only as a landmark, and by reputation, that was dubbed "Camp No", a name that implied that one was not supposed to talk about it.

According to Horton's article, The U.S. Naval Criminal Investigation Service issued a report two years after the deaths at Guantanamo.

[...] The Pentagon declined to make the NCIS report public, and only when pressed with Freedom of Information Act demands did it disclose parts of the report, some 1,700 pages of documents so heavily redacted as to be nearly incomprehensible. The NCIS documents were carefully cross-referenced and deciphered by students and faculty at the law school of Seaton Hall University in New Jersey, and their findings, released in November 2009, made clear why the Pentagon had been unwilling to make its conclusions public. The official story of the prisoners' deaths was full of unacknowledged contradictions, and the centerpiece of the report--a reconstruction of events--was simply unbelievable.

According to the NCIS documents, each prisoner had fashioned a noose from torn sheets and T-shirts and tied it to the top of his cell's eight-foot-high steel-mesh wall. Each prisoner was able somehow to bind his own hands, and, in at least one case, his own feet, then stuff more rags deep down his own throat. We are then asked to believe that each prisoner, even as he was choking on those rags, climbed up on his washbasin, slipped his head through the noose, tightened it, and leapt from the washbasin to hang until he asphyxiated.

And going back to 2006, it should be remembered that as these deaths were being announced to the world by Rear Admiral Harry Harris, commander of Guantanamo, that he added mockery of the dead and "affliction to their families", to the crime that had been committed in secret, which he was busy describing as suicide. And it should never be forgotten that Harris, the camp commander, lividly refused any interpretation by the press, that the three prisoners acted from desperation, taking their own lives in despair, because of their treatment in the hands of the US military, or because they resolved to give up their lives rather than face endless detention.

No, the story for public consumption was as bizarre as it was politically expedient. According to the official line, the dead men had synchronized their suicides as a potent kind political theater, and what Harris described as "an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us". Coleen Graffy threw in her two cents, representing the State Department, as diplomatic Deputy Assistant Secretary: "Taking their own lives was not necessary, but it certainly is a good PR move".

On the day of these deaths in 2006, the American commander in Guantanamo violated the Homeric rules of decorum by taunting the dead and afflicting their families. The deceased prisoners "have no regard for human life," he said. But in the end we must ask to whom these words more appropriately attach--the prisoners or those who have orchestrated the tragedy at Guantanamo?

(Horton, Auden--The Shield of Achilles, from Harper's Magazine)

The Obama Administration is trying to close the book on this and other investigations of torture. These Bush Administration crimes are off limits to prosecution; and if we are to judge by Horton's instinct that the Justice Department has its own secrets to hide, the continuing cover-up and obstruction of justice is still the policy, even if the joint is under new management.

Other news this week can serve as a reminder of where this country is heading: the vote in the House to approve renewal of the PATRIOT Act, unmodified. The bill was passed in the Senate by a voice vote, without debate. The offending measures, the most odious of which were hotly debated during the Bush years, are still around. The Thursday vote in the House was 315-97. The bill is now slinking to the Oval Office, where the President is expected to sign it on Sunday.

Raw Story reported that a few of our stalwarts, like Dennis Kucinich, were irate on our behalf:

The title of his press release pleaded for congress to "repeal" the Patriot Act and "restore Constitutional rights to Americans."

On this occasion, Congressman Kucinich recalled the words of Shane Harris, National Journal correspondent, on how we were witnessing the rise of an "American Surveillance State". And Kucinich added, "We have come to love our fears more than we love our freedoms".

HOPE SLEEPS WITH THE FISHES

2010-01-11T02:50:00.007-06:00

Practically no one shouted "Long live France!" but everyone called out "Long live de Gaulle!" In moments of great distress or great joy, the crowd has a natural tendency to turn to one man and make him the symbol of their need to admire or be protected.
--Alistair Horne, A Savage War of Peace/Algeria 1954-1962

The culture of illusion, the Empire of Illusion, is failing to recognize the inevitable decline. It's not just that we can't pay for the lifestyles that we are maintaining internally, we can't pay for empire. [...] And if you look in the twilight period of any empire [...] people fall into this collective state of self-delusion, where they are utterly unable to see the walls literally collapsing around them. [...]

Things are so grim that there becomes this retreat into illusion. And what is illusion? It's really a state of eternal childishness. It's a kind of infantilizing of a society. But the danger is that, as that gap or chasm opens up between the illusion and reality--eventually it becomes impossible--when you're being foreclosed from your home, when your unemployment insurance runs out, when you are bankrupt because of medical bills.

It becomes impossible to ignore the reality. But if you're not prepared for it, then you react as children, which is to look for a savior or a demagogue, to save you from these inexplicable forces that you have not been prepared for, emotionally, intellectually, or psychologically. And that's the danger.
--Chris Hedges, from a lecture at The New School in New York.

They don't call it asymmetric war for nothing. On one side you have the most stupendous empire of the modern era, fit out with GPS electronics, satellite, video and laser-guided munitions, remote-controlled assassin drones, cluster bomblets that look like brightly-colored Christmas ornaments, pimped-out helicopters, tanks, fighter jets, killer mercenaries and CIA/Special Ops who answer to no one, boosted by torturers, buggerers, wiretappers, secret police and media whores.

And against this, what? A Nigerian kid who straps explosives to his nutsack.

Too many Americans avoid the crucial question,--how did this happen? And I don't mean how the kid got on an international flight to Detroit. Although that, too, is a good question. How did we, as a nation, get ourselves into an absurd military adventure that is guaranteed to bankrupt our government? Why is the president pressing ahead with a policy that will drive the country off a cliff? Every American who flies will now get a pat-down, in the region of the crotch, per the new security directive. Before long, boarding an aircraft will involve a rectal exam. I wonder if we will be able to cross the borders, then?

The Algerian War was a grave test of the survival of French democracy; their public was confronted with the reality of torture, used by French descendants in Algeria, Pieds-Noirs, who applied state sponsored violence against insurgent violence, to put down political struggle and armed movement for Algerian independence, that many in the Arab population were fighting for, or strongly supported. There was an attempted military coup, led by French generals in Algeria, to overthrow the government in France, and depose Charles de Gaulle. French people finally understood that justifying any means to put down the revolution in Algeria, abandoning any moral constraint, just to keep Algeria, was far too high a price to pay.

But President Obama doesn't seem troubled by the price, however high, of maintaining our culture of illusion. Obama's war is an endlessly proliferating war, and increasingly, a war against civilians, even a war against the stability of societies. And Obama is giving up his base, and has disillusioned even the progressives who once argued on his behalf, the people who saw in his candidacy a glimmer of hope, that this nation might get out of its militarism under his leadership, might cease to occupy countries and kill children.

But Obama is just another hollow president with his hollow words proclaiming what a great people we are.

And the unsuccessful Christmas Day bomber, Umar, with his charbroiled balls, becomes the subject of pious magazine articles; articles which do not mull over our vicious foreign policy, but instead speculate about "the mind of a terrorist". Meanwhile, somewhere on an Air Force base in the American West, a pilot is guiding a Reaper drone to the kill zone. He is sitting on the other side of the world as he pulls the trigger on his victims. He watches the video and moves the joystick, like some kid would, in an arcade. He sees a little puff of smoke where the house was. And on the other side of the earth, somewhere in the mountains a whole family perishes: father, mother, children. They are burned to death, blown to pieces, crushed under tons of rubble.

Chris Hedges reveals how war ravages everyone it touches:

War's effects are what the state and the press, the handmaiden of the war makers, work hard to keep hidden. If we really saw war, what war does to young minds and bodies, it would be harder to embrace the myth of war.

Stand-Up Robbers

2010-01-07T14:04:00.004-06:00

by Grayson

Bullets fired by Bonnie and Clyde
in Platte City, 1933. Slugs found
in a bank in Grand Haven, sprayed
into plaster by Baby Face Nelson, 1934.

Banks in South Bend, Sioux Falls,
Bluffton, Indianapolis, East Chicago, Racine,
hit by John Dillinger and various
associates, Nelson, Makley, Pierpont,

Homer Van Meter; as well as armories
in Auburn and Greencastle, where they
helped themselves to shotguns, .45's,
and Thompson submachine guns.

John D. got away with $300,000,
a king's ransom in those days,
before he was sold out and gunned down
by the perverted Hoover's craven cowards.

Nowadays, the bankers are stealing
more than all the Dillingers, Nelsons,
and Van Meters since the invention of
money; the Wall Street boys have misplaced

more than Johnny ever dreamed of; yet,
not one cud-chewing pig-bellied sheriff
or sharp-dressed agent has been
dispatched to look for clues,

to follow leads, to track them,
to seek out snitches; no warrants issued
to search their hotel rooms or their homes,
to take fingerprints, collect evidence;

no order given to pick up
their wives, their girlfriends,
or their whores, for questioning;
no mayors or governors have offered

rewards for their capture,
dead or alive; not one G-Man has
pursued them across state lines;
no rangers nor deputies

have formed posses,
no deals have been cut with their pals
to rat them out, so as to lay for them
outside movie theaters, or hide

in leafy shrubbery at lonely roadsides
to massacre them in their cars
without warning, without so much as a
“Hands up, Johnny!”

But gee-willikers, wouldn't it be swell
to see some real stand-up robbers again,
with John D.'s crooked smile
and that spit-in-your eye wise-cracking

while he cleans out the tellers'
cages and hustles everyone
into the vault,
who aren't pretending to be anything

but what they are;
and wouldn't it be something
to see some good solid rounds
found in some banks again?

Diary Of A Rag And Bone Man

2009-12-20T09:13:00.015-06:00

The Continuing Saga of a Homeless Man and his Dog

by Jack Rafter

"He's not right in the head," Gordon said. About Obama.

We were sitting in the library to escape the cold. I had on dark glasses, doing my blind act so I could get Vincent in. Gordon shook his head as he stared at the newspaper spread in front of him--all about the war in Afghanistan, the President sending in 30,000 troops.

Gordon lives in a boxcar. Spends most of his time in the library. Used to be a stock analyst. Now, he can't help it, his mind craves a bone to chew and wants to furnish theories on everything.

"So you're saying he's crazy," I said.

"Crazy in a special way," Gordon said, tapping his pencil on his forehead. "Very special."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, he looks and sounds normal. He has this beautiful shiny wife and these darling little girls. The whole family shines, I don't know how else to put it. They sparkle. If you could make dolls out of them and mass market them, I guarantee you'd be a billionaire inside a month. It'd be the biggest thing since Ken and Barbie. Maybe bigger. It's Ken and Barbie with kids. And they have lots of nice clothes."

"What's that got to do with his being crazy?" I said.

Gordon held his pencil up and poked the air. "I said crazy in a special way. Specialized craziness. There's nothing you can do about it. You can't fix that. You can't give him anything for it. The people closest to him probably can't see it. Although I'm startin' to wonder if his wife has noticed anything unusual. Maybe she has, but, like most devoted wives, she just covers it good, maybe even hides it from herself.

"But the rest of the world, especially all the ones that voted for him, are startin' to wonder what the hell's goin' on. There's this huge gap between what he says and what he does, and there's almost no place where the two items line up, where they converge. So, everyone's goin' around lookin' dumbfounded, like a bunch of tourists left stranded by their tour guide. They're all scratchin' their heads, sayin' things like, 'What's the matter with this guy? Is he crazy? Doesn't he know he's totally wrecking his credibility?'

"And the answer is yes, he's crazy. And no, he doesn't know he's wrecking his credibility. Or if he does, he doesn't know why. And that's because there's actually two people there. There's BARACK OBAMA!! --The savior of mankind, the incarnation of Jesus Christ. That's the one who gives the speeches. And then, there's this other guy, the one we see the rest of the time, whose name might as well be Joe Blow, Rufus Smith or Dick Cheney. Say, you wouldn't have a spare dollar on you, would you?"

"Are you kidding?" I said.
"I just thought if we pooled our money we might make out better for lunch."
"Maybe so," I said.

During the lull, Vincent got up, stretched, and lay down again. I could feel him panting against my leg. Gordon tapped his pencil some more, biting his lower lip. You could hear the springs and wheels clinking in his mind. "It's the speeches, you see. That's where I first noticed it."

"The speeches?"

"Yeah. There's this drama, this explosion that happens. He's a Shakespearean actor. He goes from being Rufus Smith to BARACK OBAMA!! In his speech, he becomes Captain Ahab. Says he's gonna hunt down the great white whale. No, I don't mean something racist. I just mean he's Ahab! He's goin' after this great shiny thing, maybe the greatest thing you ever heard of. Willing to go to the ends of the earth to get it. And we're right with him, boy. We're the crew of the Pequod, and we want him to succeed, we want him to get this thing, too, whatever it is. Why? Because of his speech--his words are so lofty, they soar, they fly clear up to the mastheads, there's religious fervor in his voice, his eyes shine and gleam--they roll back when he cuts loose. He says great things and he believes them. And that's how he gets you and me to believe them. See what I mean? He lifts us up with his words. He charms us, makes us fall in love with him. It's the same thing actors do--exactly the same damn thing. Laurence Olivier wouldn't let people watch him rehearse. You know why?"

I shook my head.

"'Cause he didn't want anyone to see him fumble. Because then all they'd see was this little guy, this mere mortal named Larry. No, first, he had to get it right, you see, had to get to where he believed it himself. Then, when the curtain went up and the lights hit him in the face, he could take off. He could fly in the air. And he became. . .Laurence Olivier. Sir Laurence! And it's the same thing with Obama."

"So you're saying he's like Olivier. . .or Ahab?"

"I'm saying he's whatever in the hell he wants to be when he's makin' a damn speech, 'cause he actually believes it. He says he's goin' after that elusive whale, then that's what he's gonna do. Shoot, in that moment, he probably thinks he can steer the bloody boat all by himself. And throw the harpoon right into the whale's gizzard. Problem is, once the speech is over, once the applause dies down, the lights fade out, and the cheering hysterical mob goes home, he just becomes plain old Rufus again. This little guy in a suit. And you can bet there ain't gonna be no whale huntin' goin' on after that. Man, I'm thirsty. You thirsty? Wish I had a little somethin' to drink."

At that moment, Oscar, another refugee from the trainyard, passed our table clutching a National Geographic. He leaned close on the pass and mumbled, "Better look like you're readin' Braille, Jack. Yonder comes the librarian."

* * *

Well, we went out and scrounged something to eat. When we got back, Gordon was still going on about Obama's alleged craziness. He shoved a book over to me: The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst. That's Gordon, for you, always reading weird things.

I glanced at the book. It seems that back in 1968, the Sunday Times of London sponsored a single-handed round-the-world yacht race. First prize--L5,000. Naturally, the best sailors in the world entered it. And then there was this unknown, this outsider, a failed businessman from Bridgwater, Somerset, named Donald Crowhurst.

"He was heavily in debt," said Gordon, "and he was after the prize money. Somehow, he thought he could win this thing."

"So what happened?" I said, "And what's this got to do with your theory about Obama?"

"All right," said Gordon, "Just bear with me. Okay, here's this guy, Crowhurst--well, first off, he's married, got a pretty wife, nice children, guy's a real charmer. He's smart, been to school, he reads, he knows all the sailor's jargon. He doesn't have a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out, but he manages to get a financial backer to pay for the boat. Everybody takes him for a pro, but he's not really much more than a weekend sailor. What he is--he's delusional. He's acting out the part of an adventurer. He probably pictures himself sailing home to cheering crowds, knighted by the Queen, like Chichester. He's charmed everybody, including himself. But the story mushrooms. Even before he sets sail, it's a big story. People all over England are rooting for him. He's the underdog and they all want him to succeed."

"Then, he takes off. And right away, he runs into problems. His boat's not as good as he thought it was. He's not making good time. He knows if he drops out of the race he'll have to pay off his backer--the full price of the boat. That would mean selling his house, everything he owns. He'll be ruined. So he makes one of those fateful decisions. He decides to abandon the race. But he doesn't tell anyone. Instead, he more or less stays in one place, sailing around in circles off the coast of Brazil. At the same time, he begins altering his logs, reporting false positions to make it look like he's still in the running. In fact, he makes his reports sound so good that, for awhile, toward the end, he's being cheered worldwide as the likely winner of the race."

And that causes a whole new set of problems. Now Crowhurst realizes that if he actually comes in first, his logbooks are sure to be scrutinized by experienced sailors. And he'll be exposed to the world as a fraud. . . .

In June, '69, Crowhurst's boat was found adrift and abandoned in the Sargasso Sea.

Found in the boat were two sets of logs. One contained the poetic ravings of someone who had become completely unhinged.

Gordon picked up the book, opened it to the first page and handed it back. At the top of the page was this inscription:

PARANOID GRANDIOSITY

"Paranoid grandiosity tends to be well organized, relatively stable and persistent. The complexity of delusional conviction varies from rather simple beliefs in one's alleged talent, attractiveness or inspiration to highly complex, systematized beliefs that one is a great prophet, author, poet, inventor or scientist. The latter extreme belongs to classical paranoia."
Prof. Norman Cameron, Yale
(Ency. Brit.)

copeland morris A DREAM

2009-12-16T00:12:00.002-06:00

Wrap-around sunglasses
Ear to ear you wore
In mourning after
The sermon.
The strangeness of a willow
Embraced me once more.

You worried about my dreams;
Addressed me as "sir"
As curtly as you could
In the sedan where I seemed to live.

A man who rolled down the windows,
What must you do for him? Not even God
Can change the past.

Paul Valéry wrote his poems
When he was pulling on socks and shoes:

"God made everything out of nothing,
But the nothingness shows through."

Diary Of A Rag And Bone Man

2009-12-02T10:32:00.009-06:00

The Continuing Saga of a Homeless Man and his Dog

by Jack Rafter

Woke up to snow this morning. Damn near froze my ass off last night in my little tent by the train yard. Nights like that make you feel grateful for a dog. Good ol Vincent snuggled up close, kept at least part of me from freezing to death. Problem is the sleeping bag. She's all gone to rot and the feathers are falling out. Gonna have to scrounge another somewhere. We boiled some water over the cookstove, had some oats and coffee. Then broke camp and hightailed it downtown. Straight for the library.

I carry a blind man's fold-up stick in my shoulder bag--got it for a dollar at the Mexican flea-market. So if we go in somewhere, I just get out the stick and put on a pair of dark glasses. Vincent always pulls a little ahead of me on the leash, so with the sunglasses and the stick in play, people think he's a guide dog. That's how I smuggle him in on cold mornings. Some may wonder why he doesn't have the leather harness gizmo with the handle on it, or how come a guide dog looks like it hangs out in junkyards, but they never say anything. Nobody messes with blind people nowadays. They're all scared of lawsuits, and they don't want to look like assholes.

I thought about using the blind act as a panhandling gimmick, but you want to be careful with a thing like that. I figure if it gets you and your dog in out of the rain or cold, that's one thing. But if you use it to enrich yourself, it could turn on you. You don't want to mess with your Kharma. So we walked in.

Well, everybody was there. All the folks from the train yard--there was Billy and Frank and Lena, Oskar and Clarice. All sitting at different tables or hunkered down in comfy chairs. Trying to appear nonchalant in their filthy clothes with unkempt hair and scruffy beards. They all had books in their hands or a magazine, and looked almost studious, like the bedraggled pupils of a hobo cooking class. I nodded to them, subtly, as I walked by. Had to keep looking straight ahead, of course, like I couldn't see them. They knew who I was, so they nodded or winked on the sly. There were others besides them I didn't recognize. I tell you, cold days like this, the library starts looking more and more like a day-shelter for the homeless. The librarians spend half their time being a cop, making sure nobody's asleep. If they are, then out they go. You have to sit there with a book and try to look like you're reading or studying, when all you're really there for is to get warm and think about how you'll score your next meal.

Maybe that's why the city keeps cutting the library hours. God forbid the place should become a haven for outcasts trying to get out of the cold. I read somewhere that Mayor LaGuardia kept the libraries of New York City open clear through the Depression era. The last one, I mean. He knew the homeless were bunching up in those places, but he wasn't gonna shut em out because he had a heart. He also knew it was the one thing people could still do for free--read books. Well, there you go--one more example of the demon socialism.

I spied a friend seated at a table in the history section, so I took a seat across from him. Vincent plopped down on my foot and leaned against my leg. Big smile on his face. I knew he was happy to be out of the cold. So was I.

My friend Gordon was sitting there bent over a newspaper, looking at it real close. Squinting his eyes. That's how you know it's Gordon. You can spot him a mile away. He spends a lot of time in the library even on warm days cause he actually likes to read. He'll spend upwards of eight hours at a stretch reading. Today it was the newspaper. But it could be anything. Novels, poetry, plays, history, music, art, travel journals, you name it. Definitely a sick man. He needs glasses, but he won't buy them cause he doesn't have the money.

He's a strange dude. Used to be a stock-broker. Had him a wife and kids, cell phone, SUV, the whole nine yards. Then the crash came. He lost a lot of money--his own, and other peoples' too. He almost jumped out the window of his twenty-second floor office, but something changed his mind.

He went through his savings. Lost his home. His wife divorced him. He was a little crazy for awhile. Maybe still is. Hard to tell. He's on some meds, I believe, but he forgets to take them. He moves around a lot. He started out staying in a friend's garage. After the friend kicked him out, he showed up with a tent and lived in the freight train camp. That's where I met him. From there, he went to a salvage yard where he took up residence in the back of a wrecked Volvo station wagon. He was there almost a month. Then it was a condemned house for two months, a dilapidated barn for a week, followed by a tool shed behind a machine shop.

The tool shed was interesting. He figured out how to pick the lock. He only stayed there at night after the machinists went home, and he was always careful to put the lock back on the door in the morning. He said he really liked the tool shed cause it had a portable electric heater nobody was using and a grimy old radio that still worked. Also, the machinists kept regular hours and they were predictable. So he stayed there six months and nobody had a clue someone was living there.

Then one night a workman showed up needing some tool or other from the shed. He heard music playing softly--Gordon had the radio tuned to a classical station to lull him to sleep--Debussy's Prelude To The Afternoon Of A Fawn. The machinist turned him over to the cops. He spent three months in jail for breaking and entering, trespass, and vagrancy.

He now lives in a boxcar at the freight yards.

When I sat down, he said, "Hi, Jack," without looking up from his paper. I said hello, Gordon. Then, he held up a hand and said, "I'll be with you in a minute." I looked at the paper. He appeared to be reading about the president's latest machinations--sending more troops to Afghanistan. Added to the ones already there it would make a total of a hundred-thousand troops. Gordon made little groaning sounds and shook his head. He squinted his eyes.

"You oughta get yourself some glasses," I said after awhile.
"I know," he muttered. Then held up his hand again, so I shut up. He kept reading, squinting, groaning. Finally, he shook his head and mumbled something.
"What's that?" I said.
"I said there's something wrong with him."
"Wrong with who?"
"With the O-man. Obama."
"What do you mean?"
"I mean there's something not right about him."
"You mean he's crazy?"
"No, not crazy. Not exactly."
"Well, what do you mean, then?" I said.

Gordon picked up a pencil and stared at it for a moment, his eyes almost crossed. "I mean he's not right in the head."

EMPIRE IN TWILIGHT

2009-11-28T23:55:00.012-06:00

Arthur Silber writes of Obama's recent extensive deliberation over what to do in Afghanistan, and the protracted appearance of seriousness over the decision, and the writer believes that "The mountains have appeared to labour mightily--with strong emphasis on "appear," for image and PR is not the main thing at this stage of the disintegration of the American Empire, it's the only thing..."

Obama wants to appear careful, prudent; and in a couple of days he will enlighten the public about "the job" that he will be careful to get done there. There will be an increase in US combat troops of something like 35,000. On a recent Bill Moyer's Journal, the actual recorded conversations between President Lyndon Johnson and Defense Secretary McNamara and conversation between House Speaker Mansfield and the President shows beneath LBJ's surface the age old fear of being out-hawked by the right-wing. The President understood, or seemed to understand, that it was a mistake to give in to military escalation; but he did so anyway, knowing on some level the wrongness of it.

Obama is a smart man and is always projecting some kind of cool rationality; but he would seem to be doing the same thing LBJ did. Our new president however doesn't reveal that much in the way of the agony of such a decision.

It is a bloody absurdity for Obama to speak so eloquently and proclaim political principles so lucidly, only to backtrack on those principles and then proceed in the opposite direction. Weakness or dancing to the strings of puppet masters? We don't know. Today's President Karzai, while perhaps not as murderous as President Diem once was, is saturated in the same kind of corruption. Obama falls, as Lyndon Johnson did, into the same kind of political snare; and it seems perhaps reasonable to question his powers of reason.

Every remaining illusion will be stripped away and deconstructed; and after Obama comes a kind of deluge; but meanwhile during his tenure of office is this eerie twilight when things seem very surreal here in the belly of the beast.

I like the way Arthur Silber opens his essay, with the words of Horace:

The mountains will be in labour; an absurd mouse will be born.

This article is cross-posted at le speakeasy

Why Americans Don't Have Decent Health Care And Probably Never Will

2009-11-09T12:16:00.005-06:00

by Grayson

After the movie one night,
I went into one of those
big chain ice cream parlors,
the kind of place where they mix your
cool fluff on a marble slab,
carefully weigh it,
top it off if necessary
(or take some away)
then hand it to you
and
take your money.

So when the girl handed me my
chocolate amaretto with sprinkles on top
I noticed at least half a dip left on the slab.
“What are you gonna do with that?” I said.

“Throw it away,” she said
and started to scrape it off the counter.
“Wait a minute, why don't you
give it to me, I'll eat it.”

“If I do that I'll have to charge you for it.”

“But you're throwing it out, so it's
lost anyway.”
“Either I have to charge for it
or I have to throw it away.”

“Who says?”
“My boss says.”
“What'll he do if you give it to me?”
“He'll fire me.”
“But he's not here.”

“They watch us through a camera.”

“You're kidding. Who watches you?”
“Somebody. I don't know who.”
“Where's the camera?”
“Up there behind me.”

“So they watch you through a camera?”
“Yeah.”

“How much do they pay the person
to watch you throw ice cream away?”
“I don't know.” She looked at me.
“Do you want this?”

“I guess not.”

And she scraped it in the trash.

OBAMA IS HANDED THE MALTESE FALCON IN A CONTINUING SERIES OF AWARDS

2009-11-01T00:09:00.005-05:00

The coveted Maltese Falcon has been awarded to President Obama, in anticipation of some unfortunate policies he inherited from either Bush or Cheney; whose dirty business he plans to continue. Such would be Our Falcon of Perpetual War and Secrecy: the surveillance state, indefinite detention, unnatural rendition, banker's ejaculations, and the cover-up of the CIA/Pentagon torture affairs, to name but a few.

In order therefore to balance the positive encouragement which Norway has lately invested in him, with the Nobel Peace Prize; he has been awarded The Bird, as a countermeasure that signifies the public's unrealized hopes out of his own grandiose inertia. If Obama can accept the Nobel for the better choices he could make in the future, as president; then he is equally obliged to graciously accept a dousing with cold water.

He must clutch the Maltese Falcon; for what other choice has he allowed himself?

The president encourages the same activists who helped elect him, to make him do real things (as opposed to simply humping the bully pulpit). I say that before the President is swayed by advisers who tell him that the lefty folks and assorted progressive bloggers are "unreliable", that we should prove those sourpusses wrong, by jumping on the President's Awards Train. Like good sports, we should get up a Lifetime Achievement award for him, and sign endorsements in the spirit that moved the good people of Norway, for the day when the US Air Force will quit rubbing out Afghan kids. Perhaps the Academy of Arts and Sciences can present Obama a preemptive Oscar, trusting that his lifetime of achievement is inevitable, in the category of "Best Performance by a Leading Man".

And from the graveyard of empires comes a new trophy for the president's desk: the Gilded Poppy, soon to be announced by the Karzai Brothers of Afghanistan.

The rhetoric of hope, and revival of inspiration that Obama has perfected, with its resonance in the future, must require a real proliferation of awards. The President will have to give himself the Medal of Freedom to top it all off.

The journalist, Naomi Klein, has said this about the Peace Prize, "I think the moment of just rewarding Obama for awakening hope and optimism has clearly passed."

Klein goes into the depressing developments following the UN-sponsored investigation of Israel's recent military crackdown in Gaza. The overwhelming force that invaded the ghetto included bombardment with white phosphorous and the casual shooting of civilians, a few of whom were held at gunpoint before being shot. The South African jurist, Richard Goldstone, completed an exhaustive investigation which was widely acknowledged as fair, as being unbiased.

But what we see, as in the context of the climate negotiations, is the US is reengaging, but in an extremely destructive way, using their status, their seat at the table, to undermine international law. That’s happening in the context of the climate negotiations, and now it’s happened in the context of the Goldstone report, where, rather than strengthening international law, the US pressure on Abbas and also their own words and actions undermine a crucial report, which should have been a breakthrough.

And the Obama administration wasted absolutely no time in selling out Judge Richard Goldstone with no basis of fact whatsoever. The report was extremely balanced. The Obama administration could have stepped back and allowed it to work its way through the UN system, really kind of hid behind the UN on this one. Here you have a judge with an extraordinary international reputation for his belief in international law and his commitment to the reality of the—of “never again,” whether in the context of Rwanda or the former Yugoslavia. And this is somebody who’s really, really been committed to that idea. And the US has allowed his reputation to be destroyed, and contributed to it in many ways. So this is a moment where Palestinians more and more are saying, “OK, you raised our hopes, and now you’re dashing them.”

Obama disappoints some in the gay community because of his delay in repealing the "Don' Ask, Don't Tell" policy, which has allowed gays to serve in the military, but still holds them behind a wall of silence, confined by stigma and ostracism.

And NOW's Illinois Chapter can recall that Barack Obama used his strong oratory to condemn George W. Bush for leaving the 4th Amendment in tatters, with a call to restore Americans' rights of privacy and freedom from being spied on.

Barack Obama in 2003:

Yes, I would vote to repeal the U.S. Patriot Act, although I would consider replacing that shoddy and dangerous law with a new, carefully crafted proposal that addressed in a much more limited fashion the legitimate needs of law enforcement in combating terrorism (for example, permitting a warrant for the interception of cell phone calls, and not just land-based phones to accommodate changes in technology).

Fast-forward through the 2008 election campaign, when Obama shocked progressives and liberals by letting the telecoms off the hook, for aiding and abetting the Bush surveillance crimes. Let's see what happened earlier this month, when the Senate dealt with the odious provisions of the Patriot Act. No, they could have let the "sunset provisions" take effect in December, as scheduled. But they didn't.

Instead, the [Senate Judiciary] Committee just passed a bill to renew all of the PATRIOT powers that were set to expire at the end of the year, with only a handful of the original reforms that were first proposed by Senators Feingold and Durbin's JUSTICE Act and Committee Chairman Leahy's original PATRIOT renewal bill.

Instead of adding more protections to the bill, as EFF and the Times have been urging (along with many other Americans who have been organizing Facebook and Twitter activism around PATRIOT reform), the Committee this morning voted to accept seven Republican amendments to the USA PATRIOT Act Sunset Extension Act to remove the few civil liberties protections left in the bill after it was already watered down at last Thursday's Committee meeting. Surprisingly and disappointingly, most of those amendments were recommended to their Republican sponsors by the Obama Administration.
(EFF)

What kind of FBI do we have? What kind of country is this, where librarians can still be gagged, after receiving a National Security Letter, that compels them to remain silent, after turning over the reading lists of people who use the library? Perhaps The Sir Talks-A-Lot Prize will be awarded to our new president for repeatedly reminding us that there need not be a conflict between liberty and security.

Barack Obama was elected because he inspired trust and talked about justice; and he seemed organized for diplomacy rather than force when he was running for president. His manner was disarming; he had principles that were well received. And people were insisting on change and were anxious to oust the republicans.

But lately, folks who support Obama want his leadership to improve; they want him to do better at moving and articulating his policies. Where, for example, is his political argument being used to influence his own party? Obama's standoffish style of leadership and his courtesy to republicans who are obstructing everything just looks like weakness, and it hasn't resembled a cool strategy, or a strategy of any kind.

It's the stuff that dreams are made of.

LET'S MAKE HAPPY (& HAVE HEALTH CARE, TOO!)

2009-10-15T16:10:00.003-05:00

Okay, I'm going out on a limb, here. My good liberal friends tell me you can't reason with people who treat facts like the plague, who rank our President alongside the anti-Christ. But. . .gosh darn it, somehow, I just feel a grudging respect for those brave souls who have planted their sabers for a principle: to stand as one against government-funded health care.

Yes, you heard me correctly. I believe the raging minions have a right to be heard. They're Americans, too, God bless 'em. Including the ones with guns strapped to their legs. Why, they don't mean any harm. They're just marching to a different drummer, that's all.

So, this goes out to you, all you townhall protesters—you ”teabaggers,” “Birthers,” and “Glenn Beckers,” whoever you are. Wherever you came from. Listen, I'm not half the man you are. If I were lying in bed in pain and somebody offered me free cancer treatments or an open-heart surgery, why I'd chuck my pride and take the charity so fast it'd make your head fly. That's how lily-livered I am!

But not you, not the Birthers and Beckers. You've taken a stand, by golly, even if it's to your own detriment. Don't we usually equate that with heroism? Most of you are just an illness away from utter ruin. Half the foreclosures are the result of sky-rocketing medical bills. Yet, you Patriots (even some who are on Medicare!) are willing to stand up and say, “No! I will not take one thin dime of your filthy government money! Not even to save my own children if they should fall ill!” Now, that, my friends, is bravery!

Show me one banker, one measly CEO, who would have done that during the bailout!

So, in the interest of fair play, in the spirit of Obama, who seems to want nothing more than for everyone to just make nice and try to get along (he did win the Nobel Prize, after all), I offer this modest compromise. Please, hear me out:

First. I agree with my friends on the right: no one should be forced to carry health insurance. I call this the “Survival of the Fittest” Option. If you get sick and die, well, that's the breaks. Like Grampa used to say: “Some days it's chicken, and some days it's feathers.”

Second. The Public Option should be available. After all, a clear majority supports it, don't they? Around 72%. Assuming we're still a democracy, assuming Congress and the President haven't been bought off by the insurance corporations, the majority should win, right? At least that's what I was taught in fifth grade Civics class. Well, we'll see.

Third. Now, get this: Those fine Americans who still believe in free and unfettered private enterprise will be allowed to sign a waiver, stating their intention to refuse all government assistance. That's right—with a stroke of the pen, you can kick those stinking government boys out of your lives forever!

And it will be business as usual for the health insurance companies! Their doors will remain open! You teabaggers, Beckers, and others, will be allowed to purchase all the insurance you can afford.

Now, let's be clear on this. Let's be fair. Signing this waiver would be a one-time option. You can't come back later and change your mind. Make no mistake—the Devil will tempt you. When you see all those crazed liberals getting free checkups and free colonoscopies, you may be tempted to back-slide on some of your hard-won principles. Don't succumb! Think how unfair that would be to the insurance companies for whom you fought the good fight—not just the CEO's struggling to maintain a minimum level of prosperity in these hard times, but--dear God!--think of your hard-working agent, the one who looked out for you through thick and thin, through all the price increases and rising deductibles; the times you may have been justly denied coverage; the good—dare I say it?--family friend, who sent you all those birthday and Christmas cards through the years. You owe him something.

(And, of course, by signing the waiver, you also agree that you will no longer require the services of public schools or libraries, you'll haul your own trash to the dump, and should any emergency calls issue from your home, they will not be answered by police or fire departments.)

There, you see? Everyone wins! I believe this plan is workable and fair to all parties concerned. A few may sicken and die, but at least, it will be their choice!

POLICE HIT STUDENTS WITH BATONS AND TEAR GAS ON PITTSBURGH CAMPUS

2009-09-26T15:08:00.011-05:00

Yesterday numerous cops in heavy riot gear entered the University of Pittsburgh campus, after dark. RAW STORY, among others, has offered early reports on the heavy-handed dispersal of a peaceful protest at the university. What is clear from a host of video coverage is that the five-hundred students who were voicing their opposition, as well as passers-by and spectators, were dispersed by police in riot gear. Some were arrested, some tear gassed; and a few policemen pursued students into the foyers of their dorms.

The outdoor assembly was called to express solidarity with G-20 protesters in the city who were suffering rough treatment at the hands of police. Students reacted with disbelief to the police invasion, but did not panic, even while in a state of shock and dismay.

Accusations of anarchism were sometimes sent flying here and yonder, through the city of Pittsburgh and in mainstream media; but it is a stretch to call the G-20 protests themselves an example of anarchy. The massive looting of the US Treasury by engineered chaos of credit default swaps, overseen by the Federal Reserve, facilitated by lawmakers who abolished financial regulations, is most like anarchy; and the demonstrators who have had to wear protective clothing and helmets to lessen their chance of being seriously hurt by police, are not so much the anarchists. Besides, it is an ugly example of American journalism when pundits take the low road and describe these demonstrations in Pittsburgh as riots.

The police did proceed methodically on campus. Officers weren't out of control, for the most part; but to the astonishment of the students, the rough treatment, which resulted in bloodied heads and arrests, was completely uncalled for. The Pittsburgh Chief of Police issued a declaration that called the gathering an "unlawful assembly". Since when are peaceful demonstrations monitored by campus security overruled by city authorities?

But the atmosphere has changed during the past few years, over the rules regarding citizen rights to have peaceful demonstrations. So-called non-lethal riot projectiles, beanbags and rubber bullets are being used by cops; and hits to soft tissue, or the neck and head, sometimes result in death. It was recently revealed that the FBI wants to quadruple its electronic surveillance capacities; moreover, federalized police and a multitude of new police entities are infiltrating the most innocuous peace groups and fielding provocateurs to incite or even commit violent acts at demonstrations.

A fundamental danger to our liberties is growing in the enhanced police powers we are seeing; and these are especially visible in the increasingly harsh policing which arises more frequently, at a lower threshold of provocation. A more brutal array of crowd control weapons is also being readied to deal with unrest. The ear-splitting sonic weapon is already in use against crowds at the G-20 protests in Pittsburgh; meanwhile, some version of this device is being used by the Micheletti Junta in the Honduran capitol, targeting the Brazilian Embassy, where the ousted President Zelaya is staying under diplomatic protection, as the Golpistas with their armed goons are savaging the president's supporters on the other side of the gates.

It should be noted that right-wing "teabaggers" and the nitwits who travel (some with sidearms) to US Town Hall meetings on the insurance companies' dime--and others among them, who muscle their way into overcrowded venues and beat on the windows--miraculously don't get tear gassed or have police batons batter their skulls. You'll never see one of those ultra-conservatives taking a rubber bullet in the neck for the cause.

One of the Pittsburgh students is overheard asking a policeman about the rough stuff and the cop invasion of campus. Amid other public objections to the G-20's economic cabal, the bankers' bonanza, and the globalization agenda with its worst foot forward in Pittsburgh, students wanted to voice their objections, on their own campus, and let it be known that they didn't like the way police have been abusing demonstrators in the city. Well, on Friday night they had one hell of an object lesson, to the effect that if you protest against some things (and not others) the police in their heavy riot uniforms will give naysayers something to think about. A student is heard to ask why. He asks why and why again. But no answer was offered Friday night.

Οι Δικοι Μου Χενοι

2009-09-22T00:01:00.003-05:00

The beautiful Haris Alexiou

WILDFIRES BURN THEIR WAY TOWARD THE CITY

2009-09-01T00:52:00.004-05:00

Photograph: Milos Bicanski/Getty Images

The scene is of wildfires burning at night, of smoke and flames on the outskirts of Athens, making a ring in the distance around the Acropolis. In an account by Guardian reporter, Helena Smith, there's a sense of the scale of destruction:

Environmentalists said that the blazes had caused "biblical damage" to an estimated 120,000 hectares of virgin fir and prime forest.

This is enough to awaken prophetic vision, or at least it should call to mind something of the Ancient Greeks' interpretation of "the cycle of history", at the very least. Climate change is making this part of the Mediterranean world drier; and there are periodical reports and suspicions that developers set some fires during this dry season, in the countryside and along the coasts, to make tracts of land available for more hotels and resorts.

The piecemeal burning of civilization is what we notice more and more on this side of the ocean: the undermining of civilized conduct, the ubiquitous propaganda that spreads paranoia and delusion, and the busy corporate takeover of government, and the normalizing of endless war. And each of these is like a shower of sparks and embers, its own hand of arson, of social damage and upheaval, which has set wildfires that spread across the land. We are engulfed gradually as the smaller and larger fires converge.

The fires are at the gates of the city. Governments that do the bidding of corporations have the arsonist's hand, helping along the inferno. Like those who sold junk mortgages on Wall Street, they are piling wealth into the hands of the few; and if disaster capitalism is not separated from the organs of government, and cannot be closely regulated, it will surely push this world backwards into slavery, where children are once more in the workhouse, forced to stand on treadles all day.

Bush and Cheney's torture chamber is finally being opened for public inspection. They took the United States to the late stage of empire, represented by sadism and circumvention of law, and corruption of office holders. The mistreatment of people held in custody is one measure by which a country is condemned as uncivilized.

CIA and military interrogators threatened prisoners with imminent death, and made horrors of drowning on waterboards; stripping men and boys and leaving them in freezing cold, beating them and threatening their mothers and children with harm. However, the new president is not sure we should dwell on the past.

There must be a line between advertising and indoctrination that has blurred. Corporations are now backing charter schools in the US, where they can control the curriculum. The civic institution of public school will be all that the poor have left; and rundown schools and rundown neighborhoods will go together. The corporate charter school idea uses gentrification by real estate development to push out the unsightly poor.

And it will be an uncivilized state of affairs; if fires such as these make their way to the city. It is also sad to say; but the very last thing this government will give up is its expeditionary army, and its fortified bases overseas, and its military adventures. And these things are unsustainable. They cannot or will not see that the tether will break; for those who rule us cannot imagine what peace is. Their civilization might outlast them; but they insist on their delusion of power, and govern according to that.

Members of the US Congress who have sold out to insurance companies have flung the most incredible fantasies into the public debate over health care. A bland paragraph in the bill that concerns having a doctor reimbursed for an elective discussion with families, about living wills and end-of-life decisions, is distorted into some template for euthanasia. It's hard to relate to this level of dishonesty.

In Canada, people cannot be denied medical help because they have "pre-existing conditions" and they use their health card in any part of the country without worrying about paying out of their own pocket. In Canada, the government can cover every individual, without exception, on 7 percent of GNP. In the USA, the HMO system eats up 9 percent GNP; and fifty million people are still uninsured. The delusion is rampant that the status quo system is not in the business of rationing care and denying certain medical procedures to those who have the insurance.

There is a difference between living in error and living in delusion. A person living in error can get new information, grab an olive branch if one is handy, and beat out a fire before it spreads; but a person in delusion is putting a match to a wildfire.

Homer is clear about the delicacy of Ate, goddess of delusion, when he says,

"her feet are delicate; for she steps not

on the ground, but walks upon the heads of men."

--The Symposium, Dialogues of Plato, (trans., R.E. Allen)

copeland morris THE RACHEL AND THE PEQUOD

2009-08-07T16:14:00.002-05:00

For Ahab it counts. The monumental water conceals
Moby Dick, the tempo of nightfall, and the drowned.
Leave us to our melancholy as we sail onward.

We find the Pequod and we pursue it; and that speck
On the forecastle is him. The sea stabs at us; and a cry
Is heard, "Have you seen the white whale?" The others
Become men, our discovered country, as the Rachel leans
In their direction. We have also run hard on the whale,
Upon the plundered ocean. Ahab, help us.

Do not hurry us to the end of time, going to seed
In rooms full of rag dolls without our lost children,
Or escaped to some such tattooed island, weeping
Beside the stumps of trees in a burned orchard,
Unrecognizable. We are not unreasonable.
But it is not in Ahab's nature to help us.

How can we leave our lost children? You who rage,
You won't help us? You with your elbows on the maps?
Whereas we have only your Ishmael now, who alone
Survives; let his charmed life be enough.

Leave us to our melancholy as we sail onward.

Our seaworthy Rachel means what to us? She resembles
The good ship the Argonauts took up on their shoulders
When Jason reminded them that they must carry the mother,
She, who once carried them. A wave, an inscrutable sea,
Almost a dream, lays us out on dry land.

grayson harper CHENEY

2009-07-25T00:13:00.004-05:00

Cheney comes on the talk shows
and talks about the good old days
when he and his buds were the big
kahunas who ran the show
and told everyone to kiss their ass.
Sometimes they'd drop
firecrackers in a cocktail glass

and watch the wait staff lose their wits.
And they were always hiding the gardener's tools;
they'd make him climb the roof
to retrieve a shovel or a rake.
The maid opened her thermos one morning
and found a snake.

Warm nights
they threw off their clothes
and ran naked through the sprinklers.
George pounced on a frog
as it hopped through the grass.
Cheney pinned it to a wall and called it fate.
They sat around throwing darts
while it twitched and scraped.

Now and then a cat would appear
in the library or the Lincoln bedroom.
Someone—he can't remember who—
tied an orange tabby to a curtain rod
then poured water down its throat
just to see what it would do.

They dumped a keg of gin in the goldfish pond one time.
They blindfolded a goose, then hung it from a clothesline.

Cheney says they had a thing for dogs.
Someone would bring them over in a van
and drop them off at night,
dogs of every shape and color:
poodles, retrievers, borzois, beagles,
foxhounds, otter hounds, red-bone
coonhounds, border collies, beaucerons,
old english sheepdogs,
welsh corgis, tibetan spaniels,
pekingese, chihuahuas, great danes,
dobermans and pugs.

They hung them from a pipe
and beat them with clubs.

Cheney's voice is quiet and bland
like a clerk or a sexton.
The reporters nod and smile
and ask him gentle questions.

When he's finished with the scene
he's carried off in a limousine.

WE HAVE SEEN THE DARK PATH AHEAD

2009-07-23T14:03:00.003-05:00

Artwork: The Sower, oil paint on wood by anna missed

BLIND POWER

2009-07-11T12:45:00.002-05:00

Our President in Africa: "No country is going to create wealth if its leaders exploit the economy to enrich themselves, or if police can be bought off by drug traffickers."

Really? Is he talking about their country? Or ours? Isn't he describing what happened on Wall Street? Where's the investigation for all that? Why are bankers being rewarded for thievery instead of punished? Why are the folks who were in on the fix now entrusted with the repair work? And we certainly know that our entire government, from the President on down are bought by the corporations, the banks, the health industry, the whole works.

Obama: "No business wants to invest in a place where the government skims 20 percent off the top. . . No person wants to live in a society where the rule of law gives way to the rule of brutality and bribery."

And even as he utters these words, Mr. Obama's Justice Department has sought to throw out Habeas Corpus at Bagram Air Base, and is arguing for the right to detain individuals without the benefit of lawyers or trials--even if they have been acquitted of all crimes! And, despite what this president may say, torture continues.

Yet, without even a hint of irony, Mr. Obama winds up saying, "That is not democracy, that is tyranny, even if occasionally you sprinkle an election in there. Now is the time for that style of governance to end."

Oh, Really? So I can't help but wonder: is hypocracy now simply a part of the equipment of being President of the United States? How is it possible for us to be parading around the globe telling everyone else how to live, how to make a "democracy" when the mote in our own eye is as big as a battleship?

What makes us think that we're not laughing stocks when we do that?

The world is watching us. The world is watching Mr. Obama. I hope he doesn't blow it.

BULLWINKLE R.I.P. (ALASKA GOV. PALIN TO RESIGN OFFICE)

2009-07-04T01:47:00.021-05:00

Gov. Sarah Palin, channeling Gen. Douglas MacArthur, spun her fabulous fable in front of cameras, for her true believers. Resigning from the office of governor, with the blood of the world's most beloved moose on her hands, she behaved as if nothing had happened. Alaska would take care of itself; and in her view the sky was the limit, and she could free up her schedule to pursue the most powerful access to killing machines that presently exists, in Washington DC.

The bootheels of our civilizing force and the stamp of America on everything, is what Sarah is about; and the rest of the world is just a fresh kill, dressed out like poor Bullwinkle. Palin is worse than Boris Badenov and his sidekick Natasha, put together. Palin is the ammo queen, the absurd pinup for our shoot 'em up, militarized culture: a demon-banishing, burn-them-at-the-stake alternative; if President Obama should prove inadequate in his increasingly deceptive and secretive mission of "change you can believe in".

A dishonest leader will be exposed in good time. Before long the witnesses will strip him of his mask. Look at the struggle in Iran, where Iranians find themselves transfixed by the martyrs' blood; it's obvious that the spellbinding effect of their solidarity remains with us, as we are moved deeply; and these images stay with us long after the screen has gone dark. To witness the bravery of protesters in the streets, recalls the indignation that brings such strong resolve to the young. And when Iranians of all ages march in profound silence in their millions--even without words--they inspire us to understand something deeper in their history.

Bush, our former president, continually waged low level, covert war against that country; and his legacy builds on past interference in Iran's history, continuing the hope some have, of sowing social discord there. In America, those who take to the streets have been neatly blacked-out in the mass media; the parent corporations and their boards of directors, and their masters, control television and have drawn down a curtain, effectively screening off dissident behavior. We are so saturated as a nation with disinformation and propaganda, so dulled by a deadened, phony political life, that the minute we see something halfway real, it's not surprising that we feel somewhat more alive, as we watch these events unfold.

As a child, it was fun to watch The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show. At the end of their comic escapades the two friends managed to frustrate the cranked-up scheming of the fumbling and somehow funny villains, Boris and Natasha. Usually at the end of the show the friends ("moose and squirrel") would reflect on what had happened, and sometimes would come up with an unexpectedly touching lesson, or moral of the story. So we're on our own. It just gets harder to explain the moral now that Bullwinkle is dead, so to speak. If you know what I mean.

I've been searching for what to say to Iranians for whom I feel great respect. I suspect there was foul play in Iran's election; others contest that I am naive. But repression is a language unto itself, and the exaggeration of violence, which is then added to the wearing down, the erosion of what sovereignty the people have, is expressed in the people's sense of loss and injustice. This is an indictment of any government that takes advantage of its people. Along with the issue of fraud is the politics of a cosmetic democracy.

The moral of the story is not just that a veneer of respectability covers some religious people, and a few of them are not worthy of that respect. Palin in our country represents people whose religious and ideological convictions confer rights to do the meanest things to those who are not like them, for as long as the believers can feel no remorse. This has been going on since the beginning of our country. They believe God blesses them when they look down on others, when they take without asking. The underlings are reduced to slavery and the slavemasters feel entitled to the forced labor.

No, my Iranian friends, the real moral is that we are fighting for the same things, under the eyes of those leaders who scowl at us, in our cosmetic democracies.

Happy 4th of July! I wish there were more ways to make Sarah Palin look funny.

AFFAIRS OF STATE

2009-07-01T15:43:00.003-05:00

Maybe some day this country will grow up and realize that sex is a fairly routine activity, and what people choose to do in private behind closed doors, whether inside or outside their marriage, should have no bearing on one's ability to govern. At that point, maybe we will be able to get over it and laugh it off when the Bill Clintons and Governor Mark Sanfords of the world go out and screw around. Big f'n deal. Who the hell cares? And maybe, just maybe, we can skip the charade of the philanderer making these overtly tearful public displays of mea culpas; here it is going on, what?--two weeks?--and Sanford is still blathering on about it, while insisting that God wants him to stay on as governor of South Carolina. (It truly becomes a gut-ache when the God card is played.) Wisely (for once) Sanford's wife has chosen to stay in the background rather than expose herself to the usual public disgrace and humiliation of the "good" wife doing the "we-will-weather-this-together-I-will-stand-by-this-schmuck-no-matter-what" routine. John Edwards' wife has written a book about his affair, for Godsake, and is now making the talk-show circuit! The whole thing is so ridiculous and absurd and sickening, and it's long past time that we threw it overboard as a cultural event, as we have mostly already done with public hangings and lynchings. I keep waiting for the one guy among all these idiots who will actually stand up to the press for once and say the very thing that may put an end to this childishness once and for all. I would have thought Clinton was smart enough to say it, but no, he fell in the same trap as all the others, and tried to lie his way out of it. At which point, everyone on the planet who wasn't born yesterday knew what the sonofabitch was up to. So what should the answer be when asked that deadly question by the press?, i.e., "What were you doing with that girl?"

Simple. "It's none of your damn business." Now, what's so difficult about that?

copeland morris THE HERON

2009-05-25T12:10:00.003-05:00

The heron stands where the lily was.
He makes himself visible with a slight
Movement, where his feathers were drawn
On undisturbed water, pond and marsh by
Shadow, canals connecting rows of houses.
Unreal before he was real; it was as if
Vertical lines could cast no shadow.

Just as harvest is the moon's omen
And the sun whispers when it's time to die;
The art of magic expresses something else.
Even ones and zeros can break the handcuffs
Of sheriffs. The heron places his stillness
In each of us; and he in his beauty is greater
In tall grass and still water where he disappears.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF TORTURE

2009-04-23T16:33:00.004-05:00

Back in the days of the Spanish Inquisition, the infamous Torquemada didn't have to bother producing the "metrics" or data that would prove the productiveness of torture. This is because the confessions of so-called heretics had no intrinsic significance. Nearly everyone confesses under torture, regardless of whether they have anything important to confess. Torture, after all, is an instrument of terror. Former Vice-President Cheney was an advocate of torturing prisoners in US military custody. He still crows about it; he is still quoted on cable news, saying that we need more waterboarding, more criminal mistreatment of our prisoners, more and more of the inhumanity--and only then will we be safe as a nation.

Whatever it is that makes civilization so civilized went missing during the Bush and Cheney administration. Admittedly, there have been crimes tucked away from sight by this National Security State, since the Vietnam War ended; but the vulgarisms and the crimes committed wantonly by the past administration have represented such a break with traditions and law, as to leave most of us dumbfounded or in a state of shock. With torture policy released through the chain of command, these leaders severed all ties with decency, soiling themselves and their country.

It was frankly disconcerting to see how wildly the staff at Langley, CIA Headquarters, cheered President Obama, when he paid them a visit recently, and gave assurance that none of their interrogators would be brought up on charges for "following orders". On the other hand, our new president, to his credit, has signaled his willingness to let justice take its course, if evidence points toward the architects, major figures in the former administration. Those who manipulated and subverted the law, and the decision makers who threw in their lot with the torturers, will need lawyers if they hope to make a defense in court.

The Bush White House was at war with law, against both US law and international legal norms, which were the law of the land under treaty obligations the US government had supported and signed.

Sam Stark's 2007 February essay in Harper's, Flaming Bitumen, Romancing the Algerian War, builds upon Alistair Horne's historical account of the Algerian war of independence in the 1950s.

[Historian Alistair Horne] shows the psychological trauma [torture] imposes on those ordered to commit it, as well as the corrosion of military discipline and morale that spreads as exceptions to the laws of war become the norm. Donald Rumsfeld, it is reassuring to know, received a personal copy of A Savage War of Peace, alerting him to such relevant passages as the chilling words of Paul Teitgen, a former hero of the Resistance, who, as secretary-general of Algiers, recognized in Algerian prisoners "profound traces of the cruelties and tortures that I personally suffered fourteen years ago in the Gestapo cellars." "Once you get into the torture business,' Teitgen told Horne in an interview, "you're lost...All our so-called civilization is covered with a varnish. Scratch it, and underneath you find fear." " (my bold)

Fear, wearing a mask of bravado and daring, could be seen on the faces of those French colons who were proud to have their pictures taken for the bloody news stories, standing in front of heaps of Arab corpses, men whom they had tortured and executed. French men and women reading the stories, absorbed in the photos, were horrified at the cost of "victory" in Algiers. How could they live in a world with their Arab brothers, those who presumably belonged to the same culture, the same language, after such crimes had been committed? The conclusion, the consensus in metropolitan France, was that such a victory could never be worth the cost.

Americans still have to live in the same world with populations its military is regularly mutilating and killing. This is a war in which no end is predicted. A war that has included torture of captives: waterboarding, beatings, extreme sensory deprivation for men in solitary confinement, sleep deprivation, stress positions, terrorizing with dogs, sexual humiliation, anal rape with broomsticks and other objects;...and the list goes on.

America's leaders have yet to explain how a war waged at such a cost, a war that is never contained, but always expanding, can either be won, or end.

PIRATE IMBROGLIOS AND MEDIA SALIVATIONS

2009-04-14T02:08:00.008-05:00

CNN simplifies it for you: civilized nations si, pirates no. The human interest story of an American merchant captain tossed into the lifeboat and his voyage through dread in the hands of three Somalian pirates, in waters off the Horn of Africa, is one of those stirring soap operas you won't forget until a few days have passed. Watching CNN and Fox News, it becomes more and more evident that the public is being constantly doped up on yellow journalism, fear, and sentimentality. And news anchor, Wolf Blitzer, is titillated by the suggestion that news broadcasts are not so much about informing the viewers, as in making sure they take a timely delivery on all the things they would be pleased to learn. For instance, the saga of the Portugese Waterdog that the Obama children have named, Bo.

The orchestra sat on its hands; there was no crescendo of Victory at Sea when three pirates were shot dead, in a combined operation of Navy Seals and the US ships and aircraft that supported the operation. One is breathless, nonetheless. And who isn't impressed at such a daunting rescue? And all snark and sarcasm aside, who is unmoved by a beaming, bearded American sea captain, who is relieved that his ordeal is over?-- not to mention the sight of his wife in tears, in the grips of laryngitis, barely able to speak, to stammer out her thankfulness to the heroes who saved her husband?-- and flanked by older children, a daughter and a son, with stunned expressions on their faces? And then the mood of grandeur, the pièce de resistance: to make it an affair of state, to ennoble it, the report cuts to the president of the USA, Barack Obama.

But what have we not been told? What is the backstory? What events preceded this week's episode of Heroes? Well it's only been a short while since the Bush administration basically hired the Ethiopian army to invade Somalia, and topple its Islamic government. The Ethiopians have withdrawn, leaving the nation prostrate and in the grip of political anarchy. Then there is the consideration of what so-called civilized nations have been doing in the waters off the coast of Somalia.

London Independent Columnist, Johann Hari, writes in Huffington Post that European nations have abused the fishing grounds off the coast of Somalia; and since an earlier collapse of government in that nation, have polluted its sea lanes and coast.

In 1991, the government of Somalia - in the Horn of Africa - collapsed. Its nine million people have been teetering on starvation ever since - and many of the ugliest forces in the Western world have seen this as a great opportunity to steal the country's food supply and dump our nuclear waste in their seas.

Yes: nuclear waste. As soon as the government was gone, mysterious European ships started appearing off the coast of Somalia, dumping vast barrels into the ocean. The coastal population began to sicken. At first they suffered strange rashes, nausea and malformed babies. Then, after the 2005 tsunami, hundreds of the dumped and leaking barrels washed up on shore. People began to suffer from radiation sickness, and more than 300 died. Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, the UN envoy to Somalia, tells me: "Somebody is dumping nuclear material here. There is also lead, and heavy metals such as cadmium and mercury - you name it." Much of it can be traced back to European hospitals and factories, who seem to be passing it on to the Italian mafia to "dispose" of cheaply. When I asked Ould-Abdallah what European governments were doing about it, he said with a sigh: "Nothing. There has been no clean-up, no compensation, and no prevention."

At the same time, other European ships have been looting Somalia's seas of their greatest resource: seafood. We have destroyed our own fish-stocks by over-exploitation - and now we have moved on to theirs. More than $300m worth of tuna, shrimp, lobster and other sea-life is being stolen every year by vast trawlers illegally sailing into Somalia's unprotected seas. The local fishermen have suddenly lost their livelihoods, and they are starving. Mohammed Hussein, a fisherman in the town of Marka 100km south of Mogadishu, told Reuters: "If nothing is done, there soon won't be much fish left in our coastal waters."

This is the context in which the men we are calling "pirates" have emerged.

To summarize this little pocket of history, it seems that at the very moment that the Islamic Courts government had brought some stability to Somalia, in the belly of the beast that was Bush/Cheney, was brought forth the cunning plan to push the people of that country back into chaos, using a little Ethiopian muscle. Most Americans are sadly unaware of the chain of events; and cable news and the big network establishments are nothing if not scrupulous at keeping them dumbed down and barefoot, as they stare vacantly at the latest action thriller, while Wolf Blitzer holds the simple script for simple minds. The power and majesty of the United States of America.

copeland morris DRAWING WATER

2009-04-09T00:10:00.002-05:00

A belief in words is like water captured,
What you drew from the well, whatever
The sketch became under your hand. It was
Dressed up like a raincloud. It lay in the swells
Of the ocean. It had as many moods
As the seasons reveal, shifting as I longed
To be near you. There is a rhythm in what
I would say; though when I heard your voice
My own words were paralyzed. Years become
Reservoirs into which thoughts have pooled.
There is a Hausa saying--"It is with the body's
Water that one draws water from the well."

CHOMSKY THINKS GEITHNER BANK PLAN IS MUCH LIKE BUSH/PAULSON POLICY

2009-03-28T14:42:00.002-05:00

ONE DAY THE BOTTOM WILL FALL OUT

2009-02-22T23:55:00.003-06:00

This week the doomsaying over the world financial crisis became hard to ignore. In a Reuters report, Paul Volcher was quoted as saying, "I don't remember any time, maybe even in the Great Depression, when things went down quite so fast, quite so uniformly around the world". George Soros likened the current tailspin to the financial collapse of the Soviet Union, a turbulence more severe than the Great Depression. (Pedro Nicolaci da Casta/Juan Logoria reporting)

According to Soros, the financial system worldwide has "effectively disintegrated".

Topping the list of radical measures to meet this crisis, we have the idea of nationalizing the banks, and the less discussed notion of abolishing the Federal Reserve altogether, and printing "greenback" dollars, as Lincoln did during the Civil War. This was money not borrowed nor beholden to interest payments, but created from whole cloth, so to speak, on the full faith and credit of the USA.

The world today has stepped into a hole, and no one yet knows how deep it is. The terrible danger is in not being able to put a reliable number on the numerous debts and defaults that the banks are holding.

The best argument for nationalization of the banks is that it would make all the "toxic" papers visible. This would act like a formal bankruptcy proceeding; by audit and evaluation of all holdings, examiners could be able to advise as to invalidating the credit swaps or making the necessary markdown of assets. Some debt would be written off in this process.

Without such examination and consolidation, it seems futile to try piecemeal bailouts for banks, on the order of a $trillion or a $trillion-and-a-half, against an occult debt, that may run to the tens of trillions of dollars. But this is the avowed policy of the new administration, plus a supplement of around $800 billion to stimulate the economy.

Abraham Lincoln believed a government had the power to issue its own currency, and was not bound or obligated to borrow it from private sector sources. The Federal Reserve is a collection of powerful banking interests, which have insinuated their way into the status of a "semi-governmental agency", by the power of compound interest. We might want to change that at some point.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton travelled to China this week, with hat in hand, it has been said. And under the circumstances, the Chinese are not altogether happy with the posturing of certain American politicians, who accuse China of manipulating its currency, the yuan. And the Obama administration includes some of those trying to scapegoat China; but the light has not yet gone on in American heads to acknowledge that US lifestyles are to some degree negotiable, contrary to longstanding belief, since all other nations are beset by this calamity. There is undoubtedly a lot Americans can learn from the collapse of the late Soviet Union. Dmitry Orlov recently gave a speech to a small audience in San Francisco, where he outlined what he calls Social Collapse Best Practices, a concise guide to coping with the kind of meltdown the Russians experienced; and he describes how they were able to survive that ordeal. Orlov has long predicted that the US was headed for the kind of breakdown that befell the Soviets.

Thanks is owed to blogger, badger, for catching a translation of this excellent report by Frederico Rampini, from Italy's La Reppublica:

The palpable tension on the upper floors of China's leadership structure is proportionate to the wealth that Beijing has entrusted to its great overseas debtor. Fang Shangpu, the head of China's foreign exchange bureau, makes this very clear: "America must protect the interests of foreign investors. Its currency is China's number one foreign investment". With 2,000 billion dollars in official foreign currency reserves, Beijing's central bank is the richest on the planet. But that war-chest is subject to de facto sterilization. Its destination is obligatory: US Treasury Bonds, yet again, as always. In 2008 China bought a further 700 billion of them. Every US treasuries auction would fail if the Chinese central bankers did not turn up to play the role of kind-hearted creditor. And this situation continues despite the exchange-rate losses they have already suffered : since China's renminbi abandoned its fixed parity to the dollar (in July 2005) it has risen by 21%, thereby decreasing the value of China's dollar investments to an equal extent.

Meanwhile, the social costs of the US locomotive's crash are extremely severe. In the third quarter of 2008, as a result of the fall in exports, China's growth rate was brutally halved: 6.8% in GDP growth as compared to 13% in 2007. Following the mass layoffs in the textile, toys and electronics industries, the unemployed workers forced back into the rural economy now officially number around 27 million. Over a million and a half young college graduates too are unemployed: an even more politically explosive army of discontents. Now that Beijing needs to mobilize all available resource to relaunch its domestic growth, it is frustrating to remember those 2,000 billion dollars "frozen" to finance America.

The straw that has broken the camel's back is the revival of protectionism in Washington. First Treasury secretary Tim Geithner accused Beijing of "manipulating" its currency. Then came the Buy American clause in the 787 billion dollar public expenditure package launched by Congress, with Chinese steel as its number-one target. Xi Jinping, China's vice president and designated heir to the supreme leadership position, is furious. He too briefly abandons the language of diplomacy: "Even in this crisis", says Xi, "certain westerners seem to have nothing better to do than pick on us. I would like to remind them of some of our merits. Firstly, China does not export revolutions or hostile ideologies. Secondly, we do not export poverty or hunger. Thirdly, we do not export armed conflicts".

The seething resentment in these words does not yet mark the end of Chimerica. With Mrs Clinton the regime's leaders will rehearse the continuation of a constructive dialogue, convinced as they are that aggravating the global recession would benefit no-one. But in the light of mainstreet America's increasing hostility towards them, the leadership of the People's Republic is studying a "Plan B". Its most audacious moves include using the country's massive currency reserves for new purposes: to finance buy-ups of deposits of raw materials in other countries, ranging from Australia to Africa to Latin America. A reconversion that would have heavy consequences: a blow to the stability of the dollar, a worrying shortfall in treasury funding for Washington. However, the decision to step over this fatal threshold has not yet been reached: "We hate you but we can't do without you" is still the key sentiment in the present phase. But even Confucian patience has its limits.

What should we make of the power relationship between China and the US? One is the ascendant power, the other a power in decline. The world's manufactured goods are being made by the lender, while the borrower is the world's most strung out consumer and debt addict. Grab those dollars till they scream, for one day the bottom will fall out.

grayson harper TERRORISTS

2009-02-06T09:48:00.005-06:00

Those red devils that whipped
Custer at Little Big Horn
rode into battle spangled and costumed
or stripped naked painted
red yellow charcoal black the color of death
Some decorated their faces with dragonflies
they put handprints on their horses' flanks
drew rings around their horses' eyes
dangled human scalps from spears.
They were terrorists. They flew
screaming through the blue coat troops
unhinging them so they could scarce think
how to work their carbines
scared so bad they shit themselves
then shooting, stabbing,
bashing out their brains with stone clubs.
So there's nothing new about our folk
feeling entitled to invade and murder
darker skinned people in their homes
or slaughter their women and children
while they sleep in their beds,
only these particular ones apparently
weren't interested in our brand of
democracy
but instead decided
maybe they should give the stupid
fuckers something to think about.

ISRAEL MASSACRES CIVILIANS IN GAZA

2009-01-14T01:04:00.004-06:00

The carnage Israel is committing in Gaza is entering its third week. This is more of a mass murder than a war, with Palestinian deaths now numbering over 900. Israeli deaths will add up to only 15 or so as things stand now. What is happening is a disproportionate destruction of the weak by the strong. The Israeli Air Force is bombing what is essentially a vast ghetto of one-and-a-half million people. This ghetto is cut off from most outside aid, and has been under economic siege by Israel long before the present hostilities broke out.

American congressmen and US media giants are endlessly versatile when it comes to marketing a case for the Israelis, no matter what cruelty is visited on women and children in Gaza by the IDF. It appears as a novelty whenever any instance provides the Palestinian side of the story.

The Israeli blockade of the necessities of life, supplies they have held up and limited to an insufficient trickle of humanitarian goods, has choked life in Gaza, and made it impossible for the local generators to run, which provide water for a great many families. How often has it been reported that such a strangulation of humanitarian goods is itself an act of war against Gaza and its people?

And what is the sin that the Palestinians committed? Not the unguided rockets which one can say are insignificant compared to the US armaments that the Israelis are using on schools and ambulances, and on neighborhoods where they have wiped out whole families. No this is not a very credible pretext for Israel. The real offence for which the Palestinians are so harshly condemned to death, is that they refuse to renounce the Hamas government they themselves elected. This is what the Israeli leaders will not tolerate.

And then there is the cynical timing of this slaughter to consider. And the veto by the US ambassador to the UN, blocking a cease fire resolution. Here we are at a moment in the US where presidential power is about to be transferred to a new administration. The Bush administration in its last days in office is rushing sophisticated weapons to the leaders of Israel, bunker busting bombs supposedly meant to target Hamas fighters.

And very little light is shed in America upon the tactics Israel pursued against the lawful Hamas government, the habitual use of extrajudicial murder, in what are called its "targeted assassinations", orchestrated as a political front of war against Hamas leaders, the arrest and incarceration of parliamentarians and holders of executive office, or the real campaign of terror against municipal government, the murder of policemen and police cadets.

How should responsible people outside this tragedy react when they learn that half the population of Gaza are only children?

Under international law Israel bears the responsibility, enumerated in that body of law, since it is acknowledged to be an occupying power, with respect to the Palestinians. Under these laws occupiers are expected to behave as if they were the responsible grownups. This ongoing massacre in Gaza exposes the lie of all of Israel's professed humanitarian language and talk of self-defense. There is no self-defense that can be claimed by a powerful oppressing nation over subject peoples.

An article by Nir Rosen, Gaza: the logic of colonial power, exposes the hypocrisy under which the powerful get to name terrorists and define what constitutes terror:

I have often been asked by policy analysts, policy-makers and those stuck with implementing those policies for my advice on what I think America should do to promote peace or win hearts and minds in the Muslim world. It too often feels futile, because such a revolution in American policy would be required that only a true revolution in the American government could bring about the needed changes. An American journal once asked me to contribute an essay to a discussion on whether terrorism or attacks against civilians could ever be justified. My answer was that an American journal should not be asking whether attacks on civilians can ever be justified. This is a question for the weak, for the Native Americans in the past, for the Jews in Nazi Germany, for the Palestinians today, to ask themselves.

Terrorism is a normative term and not a descriptive concept. An empty word that means everything and nothing, it is used to describe what the Other does, not what we do. The powerful – whether Israel, America, Russia or China – will always describe their victims' struggle as terrorism, but the destruction of Chechnya, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, the slow slaughter of the remaining Palestinians, the American occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan – with the tens of thousands of civilians it has killed … these will never earn the title of terrorism, though civilians were the target and terrorising them was the purpose. [...]

Normative rules are determined by power relations. Those with power determine what is legal and illegal. They besiege the weak in legal prohibitions to prevent the weak from resisting. For the weak to resist is illegal by definition. Concepts like terrorism are invented and used normatively as if a neutral court had produced them, instead of the oppressors. The danger in this excessive use of legality actually undermines legality, diminishing the credibility of international institutions such as the United Nations. It becomes apparent that the powerful, those who make the rules, insist on legality merely to preserve the power relations that serve them or to maintain their occupation and colonialism.

2009: A NEW YEAR LIKE THIS CALLS FOR DYLAN THOMAS

2009-01-01T00:00:00.001-06:00

"DON'T BEND YOUR HEAD DOWN...THE ONLY WAY IS RESISTANCE"

2008-12-22T04:23:00.002-06:00

Woman in front of Greek Parliament, in protest, shouts at riot police.

The killing of a 15 year old boy, Andreas Alexis Grigoropolous, by an auxiliary policeman, put the match to a fire of uprising that has spread all across Greece. We don't know whether these unleashed furies will lead to a full insurrection that changes the political landscape fundamentally, or if there will be a repressive backlash, or if the right-center government of Prime Minister Karamanlis will fall, or resign, prompting new elections. But a poll taken in the shadow of this violence shows that the vast majority of Greeks believe this revolt has broad support and is not merely a rebellion of a fringe element. There is a long standing animosity not only against police brutality, but against the collusion of the two major political parties, where crimes committed by those in uniform ultimately go unpunished.

The revolt also seems to address the ruinous impact of privatization upon education, and a dearth of employment for 25% of young people, after they leave school and try to find jobs in their own country. There is also the situation, familiar to us in America, of a government whose agencies have so withered from corruption, that there is little evidence of governing at all, while the enrichment of the rich drives the middle class to a state of desperation. The ravages of class war can no longer be ignored as these kids watch the lives of their parents reduced by debts and overwork. "Graft, of course, goes hand in hand with incompetence," as Maria Margaronis writes, in The Guardian. The uprising has been identified as a burden carried mostly by the very young, who have occupied hundreds of schools in protest throughout the country, and come out bravely into the streets.

It is a revolt of schoolchildren and students, most on the street for the first time. There are reports of children as young as 12 battling riot police, shouting "Cops! Pigs! Murderers!"

The teenagers and twenty-somethings who have come close to toppling the Greek government are not the marginalized; this is no replay of the riots that convulsed Paris in 2005. Many are the sons and daughters of the middle classes, shocked at the killing of one of their own, disgusted with the government's incompetence and corruption, enraged by the broken promises of the education system, scared at the prospect of having to work harder than their exhausted parents. [...]

Police violence is not new, it is just that previous victims have been immigrants or Roma and so do not make the media. As usual when there is social dislocation, the far right has gained strength: the populist Orthodox Rally won 10 seats in parliament for the first time last year, and the neo-fascist Golden Dawn organization is known to have supporters inside the police. Now that the lid has blown off the pressure cooker, repression may take more blatant and more violent forms.

Andreas Alexis Grigoropoulos, 15 years old.

On the walls in front of the Greek Parliament, there is graffiti that reads "Alexis, these nights are for you." Throughout the country there is a revolt against the very alienation that the corruption of government has made possible. There is revulsion not merely at police excesses, but at the toleration of those excesses, that reach the highest offices. What the world witnesses in Greece is cause for wonderment, just as Greeks have been a cause of wonderment in times past; and today the coming together of people in the streets, both young and old, reveals much about human solidarity, and a democracy that is still capable of vitality and honesty at the grassroots. People from all walks of life are willing to meet face to face, students and teachers, trade unionists and ordinary laborers, professionals, artisans, and even some from the privileged class. And like Greeks from all times, they have a built-in suspicion of authority.

For example, Indymedia has reported a statement of protesting citizens, who briefly took control at a TV station:

Our action is a response to the accumulated pressures that ravage our lives, and not simply an emotional outburst in the wake of the murder of Alexandros Grigoropoulos by the Greek police.

We are yet another spontaneous collective that forms part of the social uprising in progress.

In a symbolic move to prevent the media from subduing us, citizens & civilians, we interrupt the newscast of the Hellenic Broadcasting Corporation (NET). We believe that the media systematically cultivates a climate of fear, promoting misinformation as information, and portraying a multi-faceted uprising as an outburst of reckless violence.

The explosion of civil unrest is explained in criminal rather than political terms. Crucial events are selectively brushed under the carpet. The uprising is served up as entertainment, something to watch until the next soap opera comes on. The media are being used as a means of suppressing free and original thought on a daily basis.

Let us organise ourselves. No authority can provide solutions to our problems. We must rally together and turn our public spaces – streets, squares, parks, and schools – into areas of unhindered expression and communication. Let us come together, face to face, side by side, to formulate our cause and our course of action as one.

Let us overcome the fear, switch off our television sets, come out of our houses, continue to assert our rights, and take our lives into our own hands.

We condemn police violence and call for the immediate release of all protesters held in custody.

We stand for emancipation, human dignity, and freedom.

GAS DRILLING NOT A GAS

2008-12-08T11:34:00.003-06:00

by Barron Harper

When I was growing up in Odessa, Texas in the 1950s, I remember with no particular fondness the considerable oil and gas drilling going on in the Permian Basin. Big oil literally transformed the economies and populations of my town and neighboring Midland 20 miles to the east. Business catered to it. Drillers and suppliers reeked of the smell of it. And the locals tolerated the changes it produced.

But some of us remember that where oil was being drilled gas was being burned off. For years in fact gas burning in West Texas sent up pinnacles of smoke and fire that nightly lit up the landscape of those high plains. Seen from long distances, onlookers over time grew somewhat accustomed to these fiery spectacles among scores of unsightly wells. But to astute observers in the ‘50s and ‘60s, closer inspections of these towering infernos would have portended catastrophic reckonings for peoples caught up in the explosive growth of intractable global societies.

Some 30 years later in the heart of Guadalajara, Mexico’s downtown district, ten massive gas explosions occurred over a two hour period due to gas leaking in the sewer system. Measuring 7.0 on the Richter scale, the explosive quakes damaged and destroyed over 1,000 buildings and created an enormous nine mile ditch down the middle of a major thoroughfare that measured 80 feet wide and 25 feet deep. The blast killed 200 people, injured 2,000 local inhabitants and left 20,000 homeless. Buildings suffered over $300 million in damages. The suffering of the people could not be measured.

Gas is volatile, inflammable, explosive. The production, transport and storage of this diminishing resource in spite of due diligence destroy property and lives due to inevitable accidents. In the drilling process, hazardous chemicals are injected into the ground. Radioactive materials, arsenic and hydrogen sulfide in the ground are disturbed. These and other toxic substances contaminate the ground and the air, gradually poisoning the environment and the people. But should any gaseous substances be ignited as demonstrated in Guadalajara, the consequences will be felt in less than a heartbeat.

While my childhood was giving way to adolescence in West Texas, my grandparents, Joe and Mary Clarke, were leading lives as prominent citizens in Fort Worth. He was the executive vice-president of the Fort Worth National Bank and she was a noted historian and author. The two of them cared about the welfare of the city, belonged to influential organizations, received favorable publicity, and in general supported causes that were fair and open-handed. They resided near Texas Christian University in an unpretentious home made beautiful by their patient and loving care.

Joe and Mary possessed an integrity that tolerated no deception or manipulation. Generous with their time and resources, they were blessed by their inherent goodness. Rather than being somehow compromised for their generosity, they prospered. They appeared to understand that deprivation in the end is the consequence of coveting.

Exceptionally well-liked and respected in the community, they would have been horrified to learn that gas drilling was being contemplated in some 15 neighborhoods in their beloved city. They would have unhesitatingly considered the consequences to public health and safety as eclipsing any benefits to the city from the discovery of gas or the enrichment of coffers. So like me they would never have compromised human security for a fickle prosperity.

-Barron Harper is a U.S. international tax advisor residing in France.

copeland morris NEW LIGHT

2008-11-20T00:47:00.001-06:00

The roof and wall subsided with storm
For a miracle in your grasp, still being alive.
Prepare then a way for me by cloud
And by rain. The new light. It enters
The broken half of a house. You won't
Give up on me too soon, I hope,
By way of Jordan, you pale jasmine.

This is how you enter a sacred place
On brittle stalks, the soothsayer's white
Miniatures. This is how you have prolonged
Your embrace, beckoning to me: absorbed
In the perfumed letter that took so long
To catch my attention. The crease in the envelope
Turning my eye to the long curve of your fingers.

Artwork by anna missed, New Light (oil on wood)

CONGRATULATIONS TO OUR NEW PRESIDENT-ELECT, BARACK OBAMA

2008-11-05T14:51:00.003-06:00

It should not be forgotten that the US has elected the first African-American to be president. Virginia voted for Obama, the flagship state of the Old Confederacy. The new electorate could be seen dancing and getting rowdy on Pennsylvania Avenue. The million American faces who were cheering in Grant Park in Chicago must indeed offer a new testimony about the core character of our nation.

It was transcendent to hear Obama evoke the words of Lincoln.

“As Lincoln said to a nation far more divided than ours, we are not enemies but friends. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection.”

My friends and I felt the inspiration of election night. There were tears around the television. Grayson Harper, my friend of some twenty years, exclaimed "Now we won't have to flee [the country]".

We are not the same nation we were. Democracy is not static, as President-Elect Obama said in his acceptance speech. It's no mystery to me why he stood alone on that stage to give that speech, or why Jesse Jackson was weeping. It would not occur to me that these last years of national humiliation and crime in high places would not in some crucial sense transform the way Americans think.

We are walking on Cloud Nine right now, and understand that the world as it would have been under McCain & Palin's control has passed away. Our friends across the world should be encouraged that a more responsible, and civic-minded administration is coming to Washington.

The nightmare world is crumbling. Bush and Cheney will soon be out of office.

We have won a victory over a certain kind of tribalism, and a we have seen the groundswell of democracy. This democracy is about accepting American life with all its diversity. And our newly elected president made a point of touching on that , as he acknowledged the will of the people.

McCAIN AND OBAMA ARE SIMPLY AWFUL IN FIRST DEBATE

2008-09-27T00:50:00.008-05:00

I watched the presidential debate last night with dear friends; and in no time we were screaming at the television. The debate was a great outing for many of the nation's delusions, and its twisted priorities, in the never-ending war, to which the leaders in both parties sadly subscribe. We felt at times enraged by the agreed upon myths, with which both candidates bind us to the weapons makers, the imperial plunderers, and the whole sick notion of the Pentagon's Long War. For this reason the debate around foreign policy was difficult to listen to.

A few days before the debate, McCain announced that he was "suspending his campaign", and flying off to Washington to fight a rear-guard action against the Wall Street bailout. In the newsrooms there began some speculation about him fleeing the scene of the debate, pundits wondered if he was goofing about, or showboating, pulling some stunt; and drama was built up around the idea that McCain's behavior was unsteady. Obama might be expected to show up in Mississippi, and perhaps John McCain would be AWOL.

This was a set-up; and the McCain who has been consistently ridiculed for his senior moments, and the gaffes that have undeniably marred his campaign, showed up in full possession of his faculties. And while Obama handled him with kid gloves, McCain smirked throughout his opponent's comments, and almost continuously avoided looking at Obama.

McCain was well coached, it seems to me, and had made intensive preparation for the debate; while a diversion was presented to the Democratic side of an old man who was coming unglued and would arrive, less than prepared, to meet a statesmanlike Obama.

But this was not the worst of the debacle. Obama studiously avoided challenging the emotional appeals to those popular US myths surrounding our supposed enemies and the widening of the war. Our myth that portrays Iran as an existential threat was touched upon: this narrative that is agreed to by leaders of both parties. The lies about Iran. And the lie about the Russian-Georgian war,--just who the aggressor was,--got tossed like a softball by Obama, and McCain hit it out of the park.

McCain took over where Obama left off, and commanded the debate with a politically resonant (if wrongheaded) appeal to American fears about big, bad, resurgent Russia. McCain did more than appeal to the gut; he smirked dismissively at Obama, dissed him smartly, treated him like some pathetic well-meaning novice, untested by life, and too green to be president.

And it's true that Obama, like McCain, also lures us into the dangerous misconception that Georgia's president, the war criminal, Saakashvili, is a great guy and a paragon of the West's democratic values. So it goes that the republican lion shall lie down with the democratic lamb, declaring that Iran, a nation whose GDP is equivalent to Finland, is an existential threat to Europe, the United States, and nuclear-armed Israel.

There were news reports yesterday that the regular Pakistan army and American forces had exchanged small arms fire, along Pakistan's border.

Of 9/11, THE ELECTION, AND THE COMING FASCIST STATE

2008-09-13T11:45:00.010-05:00

Been having some dark thoughts, lately, which is generally the kind I tend to have when I allow my mind to wander at will. I see no reason not to share them and spread a little cheer.

The attack of 9/11 struck me at the time as the logical result of a whole series of hubristic behaviors of the U.S. around the world. A week before the attack--I swear this is true--I was having a discussion with a guy in which I argued that it would not surprise me if we found ourselves attacked within our borders at some point. He dismissed the idea almost laughingly, saying our air and naval security were far too sophisticated and strong for that to happen. I said the attack would not be by traditional means, that it would be easy as pie for someone to simply slip into the country and blow up one of our cities with a nuclear device or sabotage a nuclear facility or a train hauling toxic chemicals--that we were vulnerable to a thousand different scenarios. Thus, a week later, when I was watching the events in New York in real time, I was sweating bullets because I was certain that the two planes flying into the Trade Center were just diversionary attacks in advance of the real thing.

I agree with Scott Ritter that If we continue our present course--and I see little reason to think that we won't--that we can expect to lose a city. The Bush Doctrine (that Sarah Palin blanked on in her interview with Charles Gibson) has opened the door for the same to be done to us. Thus, the day McCain takes office, Putin, Iran, others, will have this to think about: that the U.S. is no longer playing by the old rules, that they (Russia, Iran, whoever) are subject to attack by us in advance of any perceived threat. I'm sure they've already considered it, given that Bush and Cheney are still running loose, but once McCain and Palin--two certified lunatics--are installed, the countries we have been threatening so recklessly will have to carefully weigh how long they think they can afford to wait to hit us before we hit them.

Can Obama win? Somehow, I think not. The day before Sarah Palin appeared on the scene, everyone was holding their nose at John McCain. The day after, when I saw the mob's eyes roll back in their heads and foam issue from their mouths, I remembered again what country I'm living in, a country so simple minded and childish that it will get in the car with almost any strange man (or woman) offering goodies with a winning smile. And I find little comfort in the fact that the very things that are drawing so many to Sarah Palin are not all that different from the ones that have been drawing those on our side to Barack Obama--i.e., less issues than charisma and magical thinking. Even now, I know that Americans, having grown weary of the current war (but not tired of war), would gleefully march off to another one on the mere suggestion of a McCain, an Obama, a Hillary, or a gun-toting Sarah Palin. Makes no difference. Hell, we're already in Pakistan and nobody's squawking.

In other words, something is fundamentally broken here--always has been--and I doubt seriously that it can be repaired. One way or another the Neocons are going to win the election. If they don't win it outright, they'll steal it; the voting machines are still broken and easily hacked into. Or they'll kill our candidate. They'll do whatever they have to do.

By the end of McCain's first term in office, the U.S. will have completed its fascist mission and we will be living in a police state. The terrorist watch list--already bloated with over a million names--will have swelled to several million, and by then, no doubt, some mechanism will have been triggered allowing for more aggressive action against all those perceived enemies beyond merely detaining them at airports or relieving them of their laptops and cell phones. For a list of possibilities, I refer you to the Pinochet regime.

Am I discouraged? You're damn right I am. I hope I'm wrong. I hope, come November, I will be looking back on what I've written here and I'll be laughing. I sure as hell hope so.

But in the meantime, anyone who is still somewhat enamored of the idea of democracy might want to get their passports in order.

McCAIN & PALIN: GOD, GUNS, AND COUNTRY

2008-09-05T17:27:00.011-05:00

The Republicans in Minneapolis were sending up a shout of "George Won!...George Won!" to greet the most craven president to ever hold office in this country; and this was only the beginning. The characters seen at the 2008 GOP convention hark back to those who nominated Spiro Agnew and Richard Nixon. The same breed cheered, this week, for the fascist tour de force that was Mitt Romney's speech. They knew what was really important: that feeling of safety which trumps having legal rights. Mitt wasn't worried about habeas corpus or how prisoners in custody are treated.

Republicans are tragically inattentive when it comes to history; and they take this tragic incomprehension as far as it can go, obliterating events that took place a few months, or a few weeks ago. The party's base has put its distaste for John McCain aside, as a man who was not considered one of them; and now they embrace him like a long-lost father. And it's a legitimate concern that Sarah Palin, as McCain's Vice President, might be a projection of the power of this base, the religious right. She might consider it her duty to make us see our War on Terror as a War for Christianity.

It looks like Election 2000 was too long ago, and people can't remember that presidential candidate McCain staunchly spoke out against the class of religious extremists that would include Rev. Dobson. He counts on the support of this base now; and the profoundly crazy Rev. Dobson, who looked upon McCain with a jaundiced eye a few weeks ago, is now one-hundred-percent behind him. And the criteria of McCain's success is that culture warrior, that "pistol-packing" Hockey Mom, Sarah Palin.

The biggest cheers were saved for McCain, as he accepted the nomination for president. But he went too far after accusing opponent, Barack Obama, of seeking the high office as a narcissistic "journey of personal discovery". McCain used the emotional appeal himself, to argue through humility that he, and not Obama, was the selfless public servant that the nation ought to have. In a figurative way, McCain showed us his wounds. But we have to put aside the idea that he was shot down as he was bombing Vietnamese civilians. We have to forget the immoral and unjust reality of the US war against Vietnam, in order to consider him a hero within the narrow framework he provides. McCain's journey of personal discovery, as a POW, as touching as may be, could have been told by a veteran of almost any army in history.

"I Once Had A Comrade", goes the lyric of a poignant German war tune.

Republican delegates were, as always, an ugly and brainwashed collective, shouting "USA...USA...USA" to blot out brief moments of protest, and crying "Drill, Baby, Drill" on cue, whenever their Real Overlords pulled their chain. They are ready of course for the militarist agenda. They have forgotten the million Iraqis killed outright or purged by ethnic cleansing. They have performed their own absolution, disconnecting their personalities from the unjust, criminal pursuit of world hegemony and absolute power. They don't care if they tend to be corrupted or not, or if it is revealed that the greatest corruption is to raise a cheer when someone has humiliated the helpless or plotted a crime against peace.

Responding to America's televised 2008 Republicans, my friend r'giap writes:

it was & remains so macabre. so macabre that it gives you chills with all the old lines returning out of the mouths of madmen & madwomen. you know they have no connection to reality nor want one. i work here with asylums - & there is a kind of patient who prefers the irreality of the institution. healing is beside the point for these people because in a way they cultivate madness as a metier but it is a madness not borne of suffering nor is it ecstatic. it is if you will a mediocre madness

& what i witnessed at the conventions is a microcosm of that mediocre madness - where other people have to suffer because these people are unable to change, to take risks or even to be responsible

From this vantage point, the whole Palin fiasco is like some bizarre work of science fiction, that incorporates speaking in tongues, Pentecostal glossolalia, safaris to shoot wolves from helicopters, lending pristine wilderness to oil men, all personified by an annoying, almost intolerable speaking voice. The republicans themselves are caught playing with the Book of Revelation, like strung-out meth heads cooking up more product in a trailer in back of the RNC:

Robocops. Teen pregnancy and fundie hypocrisy. Fascism with undercurrents of oddball religion. Historical amnesia slouching toward Bethlehem, and the New American Century inventing Big Brother anew, probably as a hybrid of Elmer Gantry and Augusto Pinochet.

We would have to be a mad country, slipping into some narrative introduced by Rod Serling; but maybe this strategy (so damaging to our inner defenses) will yet unravel before the horrified eyes of the nation, and all this will backfire on the authoritarians, and send McCain and his handlers down to defeat.

AMY GOODMAN AND TWO FROM DEMOCRACY NOW! ARE ARRESTED AT RNC

2008-09-01T23:48:00.006-05:00

It has already started, the expected repression at demonstrations around the Republican Convention. Amy Goodman and her two colleagues, Sharif Abdel Kouddous and Nicole Salazar, were taken into custody while the police deployed excessive measures against demonstrators.

Goodman was arrested while attempting to free two Democracy Now! producers who were being unlawfully detained...

Ramsey County Sheriff Bob Fletcher told Democracy Now! that Kouddous and Salazar were being arrested on suspicion of rioting. They are currently being held at the Ramsey County jail in St. Paul. [...]

Democracy Now! stands by Goodman, Kouddous and Salazar and condemns this action by Twin Cities law enforcement as a clear violation of the freedom of the press and the First Amendment rights of these journalists.

During the demonstration in which they were arrested law enforcement officers used pepper spray, rubber bullets, concussion grenades and excessive force. Several dozen others were also arrested during this action.

--Democracy Now!

Even before the first demonstrations got underway, police in St. Paul have been conducting pre-emptive raids and making arrests at houses where those planning marches or civil disobedience were discussing details of the protests and assembling leaflets and signs.

Democracy Now! is asking people to call the Ramsey County Jail at 651-266-9350 (press extension 0), and Chris Rider from Mayor Coleman’s office at 651-266-8535. Let them know that Goodman, Kouddous, and Salazar were acting in their capacity as journalists, and should be released immediately.

UPDATE: Raw Story reports the release of Amy Goodman and her two colleagues. Goodman was released after a charge of "obstruction" was filed against her. Kouddous and Salazar may face "felony riot charges", but they have also been released, while charges are pending.

EXTRA: Amy Goodman and Democracy Now! Producers talk about their arrest.

LOOK WHO IS BEING VIOLENT

2008-08-28T15:56:00.009-05:00

A deep chasm now separates what happens in this world and what gets transmitted to the public by major US news media. The drones apparently pass along as gospel whatever is received from government sources, with little or no challenge. So corporate management advises individual reporters, through the affiliates, as to how information is to be edited or blacked out altogether. Street protest and the behavior of police is invisible; it is not happening on television.

There is then, a sinister cone of silence that has been drawn over the superficiality of our political language; a blindfold is fitted over our collective eyes, while the cancer of paramilitary operations moves freely in our streets. News like this is not pursued as an object of curiosity or concern.

It's a world of weird parallel realities; and at the recent Olympics the Chinese authorities were seen as horrible, in the eyes of indignant Americans watching TV. Look at those Chinese cops tearing down placards and banners, almost as soon as they get raised! Look at them arresting the demonstrators and leading them off! What kind of respect for human rights do you call this?

Earlier this month, the Georgians made war on civilians and killed those who were asleep in their beds, in a sneak attack on South Ossetia. Georgian peacekeepers working side by side with Russian colleagues, turned their guns on them and killed the unsuspecting men. "You shot your Russian brothers and finished them off with the bayonet."

Americans largely believe the black-is-white story of Russian aggression because they live in a protective bubble of disinformation and lies. And the lies are still being pushed by our corporate press.

Protesters in Denver have been sitting down passively in front of a sea of stormtroopers' uniforms, under the blows of truncheons and volley of pepper spray. "Look who is being violent", protesters chant. But what good does it do, considering what little gets out in the alternative press?

Even an ABC producer has been roughed up and arrested, for trying to get video of the wining and dining of Senators, at a posh hotel, by those who might be influencing them. Is anyone told about this on the floor of the Convention? No. Of course not.

Most of the rest of the world is watching our pols invent wonderfulness on a stage at the Denver Convention. And the same will hold true at the Republican Confab, to be held next week. But the bubble being created around the two parties and their ceremonies is intended to block any intrusion of harsh or disconcerting realities.

In the September/08 issue of Harper's Magazine, Lewis H.Lapham writes:

On television the voices of dissent can't be counted upon to match the studio drapes or serve as tasteful lead-ins to advertisements for Pantene Pro-V and the U.S. Marine Corps. What we now know as the "news media" serve at the pleasure of the corporate sponsor, their purpose not to tell truth to the powerful but to transmit lies to the powerless.

Imagine the whole world watching our pols inventing wonderful magic onstage at the Denver Convention. And the powerful, though stranger passions of the Republican congregation, will be on view the following week in Minneapolis. A bubble of unreality can be lethal to democracy and we will be damned lucky if we can break free from it.

TERRORISTS

2008-08-25T18:41:00.002-05:00

Those red devils that whipped
Custer
at Little Bighorn
rode into battle spangled and costumed;
or stripped naked, painted in wild primary colors
red, yellow, charcoal black the color of death
some decorated their faces with dragonflies,
they put handprints on their horses' flanks
drew rings around their horses' eyes,
dangled human scalps from spears.
They were terrorists. They flew
screaming through the blue coat troops
unhinging them so they could scarce think
how to work their carbines
scared so bad they shit themselves;
then shooting, stabbing,
bashing out their brains with stone clubs.
So there's nothing new about our folk
feeling entitled to invade and murder
darker skinned foreigners in their homes
or slaughter their women and children
while they sleep in their beds, only these
particular foreigners apparently weren't
interested in our brand of Democracy
and instead decided
maybe they would give the stupid
fuckers something to think about.

9 YEAR OLD WITH TEENS IN AMERICAN PRISON CAMP

2008-08-25T14:14:00.002-05:00

THE GREAT GAME

2008-08-23T00:39:00.004-05:00

AMERICA IS LED NEARER TO DESTRUCTION BY ITS LYING MEDIA

2008-08-15T14:43:00.021-05:00

Americans may be losing any chance of learning the truth from their mass media. Huge portions of national television and print news are apparently corrupt and lying about what has occurred in the Georgian-Russian war. The damned lie is the lie of omitting that Georgian leader Saakashvili ordered a sneak attack, that slammed down with a massed artillery and rocket barrage, on civilians late at night, as they slept. The opening salvo fell on people whom the legal Russian peacekeeping force had an obligation to protect, there at Tskhinvali, the provincial town in sparsely populated South Ossetia.

The region's Russian majority leans toward a separation from Georgia; but final decisions about the political status of South Ossetia have been sent haywire by an aggression that may have been orchestrated by the Bush administration.

Many hundreds of South Ossetians were killed and injured; and an estimated 30,000 fled in confusion and panic, as the explosions and fires began, shortly after midnight. Those who could get out made their way north, through the Roki Tunnel into Russia. Some estimates of the dead at Tskhinvali run to 1500 and more.

The fact that this surprise attack took place, that it was a war crime against a civilian population, simply cannot be disputed. And the fact that American print and television media are hiding the fact with every propaganda trick and diversion in the book, is quite impossible to excuse. After repulsing the attack over a few days in August, the Russians have now halted their mechanized units, after crossing some miles into Georgia proper. They have captured the Port of Poti, where Georgia's shoreline is, on the eastern end of the Black Sea. They are disposing of stores of Georgian weapons and ammo. One senior Russian officer, a general, described his army's capability and readiness, "If the Americans can go to Baghdad; we can go to Tblisi". But despite the boast, this officer's units are halted as he awaits orders and defends South Ossetia from any advance by the now scattered, demoralized Georgian army.

The Russian government has declared an end of hostilities.

Russia will not advance to the capital of Tblisi (unless unforeseen provocation comes from a foreign power), nor will they roam or control large swaths of Georgia. They earn some respect for their restraint as they await a diplomatic settlement of the crisis. The Russians have said they prefer not to have to deal with Saakashvili, but are not intending strong arm tactics to change the regime there.

Don't reporters with integrity do more for democracy than elected officials? But if you're an American, it only renews your sense of shame to see the willful, and at times treacherous efforts in the US Press Corps: the troubling example of their duplicity, their dishonesty and obscuring of fact. Here again in a time of government secrecy and domestic spying, and police power in secretive agencies, a concerted effort is underway to bury the truth and pull the wool over people's eyes. In the sad style of a totalitarian news organ, CNN was exposed as it tried to manipulate images, using the scene of devastation in Tskhinvali, while labeling it as the work of the Russian army in Georgia.

This dispersal of government propaganda with its willing servants in the US media is disgusting beyond words. How is it possible to forgive the fakery and immoral subservience to liars that has risen in the United States of America? This is our country after all. And we must hang our heads.

I could have made the lede to this story announce that we live under the rule of outright criminals; but this is quite an old story now. American news media no longer shows us the world as it is. That is the tragic story. You had better look to the BBC, for one, or to trusted blogs. The increasing recklessness of the White House and its willingness to make up any claims, no matter how outlandish, has now come to a truly dangerous extreme. Bush and his team can stand the truth on its head; and the lies get repeated on cable news, and across the networks and newspapers with but a few exceptions.

ADDENDUM: (Click on #28 comment at Moon of Alabama that reads warpics) album of photos taken as the Russian army makes its way through the scene of devastation that was caused by the Georgian attack. Remember that images show what Bush Family ally, Saakashvili, has brought about. These are photos taken around Tskhinvali, in South Ossetia, not from any further advance into Georgian territory. Some images are horrible; so be advised that these are hard to look at.

EXTRA: A transcript from Larry King Live. (broadcast August 14th)

Former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev replies to Saakashvili's version of events.

KING: [...]

The president of Georgia told CNN yesterday that we've been witnessing the past few days "the brutal, calculated, cold-blooded, premeditated murder by Russia of a small democracy."

How do you respond?

GORBACHEV (THROUGH TRANSLATOR): Well, this is all lies from beginning to end. And I am -- really, I really think this is really beyond comprehension. I have heard the opinion of Eduard Shevardnadze. He knows what the situation is on their side.

So it was all at night, a little past midnight, when the city was asleep. Then from all sides, it was shelled with shells of enormous power. They used artillery. They used aircraft. They used all weapons of killing. And this is really amazing.

Tskhinvali, in fact, was devastated by fire from multiple rocket launchers against people, against housing, against hospitals, against water and sanitation, against the energy and communication infrastructure. All of that was destroyed. The old monuments were destroyed. And they were among the oldest in the Caucasus. The ancestral graves were ruined -- were then trampled by tanks.

KING: Mr. President, excuse me, you are saying that Georgia started this?

GORBACHEV (THROUGH TRANSLATOR): Yes, indeed. There is no doubt about it.

What is more, the response required the movement of additional forces into South Ossetia because Tskhinvali was attacked by a powerful force, by an armada. And I remember the Second World War. I remember the front. I remember the occupation. I saw terrible weapons used. But this was the use of sophisticated weapons against a small town, against sleeping people. This was a barbaric assault.

KING: One of our candidates, John McCain, the senator, I'm sure you know, he calls this regime change. He said Russia's true objective is to change regimes.

How do you respond to that charge?

GORBACHEV (THROUGH TRANSLATOR): No. Russia was responding to what happened in Tskhinvali. Russia needed to address this. Russia could not avoid addressing this assault and this devastation and the killings of people, the devastation of the city. The peacekeepers had been there for some time. There were all kinds of things happening. But there were still possibilities for dialogue. And there was some dialogue going on and they were considering certain options and possibilities.

So Russia was ready to continue to fulfill its functions. There is just no doubt about it. And I don't know why it's happened that it has been presented that Russia invaded Georgia. This is really disinformation. This is all lies. It means that this plan -- there was a plan to attack Ossetia...and also to misinform people. It's a kind of information war. I think now that they are showing the city, it is becoming clearer what happened.

A Video that addresses US Media's propaganda.

24th ADDRESS TO CITY COUNCIL (Re: A Resolution To Impeach)

2008-08-09T14:34:00.004-05:00

August 5th

Mayor, Council members, good evening. I am appearing again in behalf of a resolution calling for the impeachment of the President and Vice President of the United States.
Well, last week I was surprised to learn that speaking up in defense of the Constitution is a partisan enterprise. This contradicts what I learned in my high school civics class as well as the political science course I took as a freshman in college.
As we have said many times, this impeachment resolution is not partisan. The next president, who could easily be a Democrat, will inherit all the expanded powers of the current regime: the right to invade other countries at his whim; the right to arrest anyone—citizen or non-citizen—merely by calling them “enemy combatants”; the right to hold them indefinitely without trial and the right to torture them; the right to listen in on our phone conversations and read our emails.
He will also inherit something even more profound and dangerous: the knowledge that he can tell any lie or commit virtually any act without fear of accountability to Congress, to the law, or the Constitution.
Again, Barack Obama would inherit these broad new powers, as would John McCain. The Constitution and the rule of law, are not partisan principles. Speaking up in their defense is not a partisan act.
It is merely an act of conscience, an act of principle, an act of patriotism, pure and simple.
I would be the first to agree that City Councils should be non-partisan. Again, I see nothing partisan in your oath of office, which obligates you to defend the Constitution and the rule of law.
But you continue to insist that our assessment of the current crisis is strictly a matter of opinion, therefore, no call for action. Well, what can I say? At this point, arguing that the overwhelming body of evidence of wrong doing by the Bush Administration is little more than someone's opinion is right up there with attempts by magical thinkers to discredit the science of evolution along with the almost universally accepted belief that the grass is green and the sky is blue.
But if you really do think that there have been no lies told, no breaches of law or the Constitution by the Bush Administration, if you really think detaining people for years without trials has a place in a free democracy, if you really believe torture is consistent with the Geneva Conventions and with the flag of our fathers, then these truly are your beliefs, and I won't try to refute them.
But I do think some people know what is true. The real problem, as I see it, is finding the courage to speak out and risk being out of step with the crowd. It's a risk that must have been well understood by Voltaire, who said, “Our wretched species is so made that those who walk on the well-trodden path always throw stones at those who are showing a new road.”
Thank you.

BETRAYAL OF JUSTICE IN THE ANTHRAX CASE

2008-08-08T19:42:00.005-05:00

[T]he danger of violence, even if it moves consciously within a nonextremist framework of short-term goals, will always be that the means overwhelm the end. If goals are not achieved rapidly, the result will be not merely defeat but the introduction of the practice of violence into the whole body politic. Action is irreversible, and a return to the status quo in case of defeat is always unlikely. The practice of violence, like all action, changes the world, but the most probable change is to a more violent world.

--Hannah Arendt

The White House was not happy with the direction that FBI investigators were pursuing after the Anthrax Letters attack of 2001. FBI Director Mueller was harshly reprimanded in private for not finding a connection to Iraq or al-Qaeda operatives, that would solve the case of the biological attack that had struck such panic into official Washington. But the DNA markers on the strain of anthrax which was recovered could only have come from a source in an American military laboratory. The results were conclusive.

But in the aftermath of the 9/11 attack, the lie, and the opposing truth of what happened during the anthrax panic, began to wage a desperate contest for the minds of Americans and their Representatives. There was certainly a climate of fear and enough political leverage to compel Congress to pass the Patriot Act.

Almost seven years later we look back to that panic of October, 2001. It was like a cry of FIRE in a crowded theater; and after the false information was given out, a scramble toward war ensued, a veritable stampede for the exits. And we are still living the tragedy of the Big Lie and the Bigger Cover-up, because the antidote to truth was passed along to ABC news reporter, Brian Ross, and others in his department, who put out the awe inspiring story that tests at the Army's Fort Detrick lab, in Maryland, had found traces of bentonite, a clay-derived additive ( used as a binder in some toothpaste and processed food) which they said was a component unique to the production of Iraq's biological weapons. Respected journalist, Glenn Greenwald, reports that there was never any such test at Fort Detrick or anywhere else. And the strain of anthrax used in the attacks, a modified virus, was absolutely identified as the product of American ingenuity, and traced back to the Fort Detrick facility.

“It's extremely possible--one could say highly likely--that the same people responsible for perpetrating the attacks were the ones who fed the false reports to the public, through ABC News, that Saddam was behind them. What we know for certain--as a result of the letters accompanying the anthrax--is that whoever perpetrated the attacks wanted the public to believe they were sent by foreign Muslims.

Seven years later, it's difficult for many people to recall, but, as I've amply documented, those ABC News reports linking Saddam and anthrax penetrated very deeply--by design--into our public discourse and into the public consciousness. Those reports were absolutely vital in creating the impression during that very volatile time that Islamic terrorists generally, and Iraq and Saddam Hussein specifically, were grave, existential threats to this country.”

And ABC News, under persistent pressure from Greenwald, admitted only last year that no bentonite was ever detected in anthrax which was mailed to the victims in 2001. The “four well-placed and separate sources” the news organ cited in its report are at present a closely held secret. ABC refuses to give up the identity of its sources, even though this could be evidence in criminal proceedings against those who are most likely accomplices in murder. The same people who submitted the false story to ABC News also made an abridgment of our basic liberties possible, and led the nation to a completely needless war that has killed thousands of our soldiers and well over a million Iraqis.

Dr. Bruce E. Ivins, a microbiologist and specialist in vaccines, had worked 36 years, the greater part of his adult life, at the Army's Fort Detrick lab in Maryland. The FBI had harassed and tailed him, even harassing his grownup step-children in the the course of an 18 month investigation. Attention focused on Ivins after the FBI dropped its fruitless investigation of Steven Hatfill. They quickly forgot Hatfill, who had turned the tables on them and won a lawsuit; and the Bureau then consolidated its efforts. And with another mass of circumstantial evidence it moved against Ivins. The government case seemed to hinge on Ivins' increasingly erratic behavior, which could be seen as the result of stepped-up pressure that they were placing on a nervous, and somewhat vulnerable man.

Dr. Byrne [a former colleague] said he believed Dr. Ivins was singled out partly because of his personal weaknesses. “They figured he was the weakest link,” Dr. Byrne said. “If they had real evidence on him, why did they not just arrest him?”

Another former co-worker, Dr. Kenneth W. Hedlund, who collaborated on anthrax research with Dr. Ivins in the 1980s, had a similar theory.

“The investigators looked around, they decided they had to find somebody. They went after all of them but he looked the most susceptible to pressure,” Dr. Hedlund said. “It is like prisoners of war: if they are harassed enough, they will be driven to do anything. But I don’t believe he would have done what they say he did.” --Scott Shane and Nicholas Wade

The last month of Bruce Ivins' life was misery; he was lashing out and making threats; he was committed to the hospital for depression. He was 62. But Bruce Ivin's suicide put an end to the FBI's process of intimidation and may have had the effect of curtailing what we can learn.

Dr. Meryl Nass, another scientist in this field, who met Ivins at a University of Maryland biowarfare conference in 1991, was recently interviewed by Amy Goodman, and made this comment:

...There has been a tremendous amount of innuendo and information put forward that has never been backed up and never been attributed to anybody.

And I fear that because a variety of the information that may be used to convict Bruce Ivins after his death is going to be classified, or perhaps we will be given false information, that it will become impossible to defend him and impossible to really make sense of the entire letters case...

The forensic part of the government's case leads to the Fort Detrick lab, but it can't conclusively point to any one person. Scientists working there, as well as occasional visitors, would have access to the area to which the anthrax was traced.

Even though most people who knew Ivins saw him as a rather selfless fellow, the government seriously intends to portray him as a man who had some rational, selfish motives, in that he desired to stimulate production of vaccine he developed, in order to profit from it. The FBI is here accusing a man of notable scientific accomplishment. Dr. Ivins had received official recognition for his prominent role in developing the anthrax vaccine that was later given to US troops on their way to Iraq. It is suggested that he hoped to profit, as the letters of deadly anthrax would certainly have caused government contracts to be awarded, and would have spurred the production of Ivin's vaccine.

But Dr. Nass counters that argument this way:

Bruce wasn't the anthrax perpetrator. First off, he had no motive. He didn't need to direct money toward the bioterrorism effort, or increase interest in it. He had a very solid job, since he was the army's top expert on anthrax vaccines. He didn't move on to a better job in industry, unlike many of his colleagues at Fort Detrick, after the anthrax letters made bioterrorism a profitable industry.

The sad thing is, we won't know whether Ivins was the loner, according to the government's scenario, who acted without help and put together the anthrax attacks--or if on the other hand--he was only another in the long line of American patsies and sacrificial goats.

Image via THE BRAD BLOG

23rd SPEECH TO CITY COUNCIL (Re: A Resolution To Impeach)

2008-07-31T02:12:00.002-05:00

July 29

Mayor, Council members, good morning. I am here speaking again for a resolution calling for the impeachment of the President and Vice President of the United States.

Mayor, if the City Council disagrees with us on this issue, then why not put it on the agenda and vote on it? Why not take a position one way or the other? Show us who is for it and who is against it. Come out from behind a bush—so to speak—and show us where you stand.

Who here is for the rule of law? Who here is for the Constitution?

There must be someone on this council willing to go out on a limb and put this very important resolution on the agenda. I'm told that all I need is two people. Just two willing to say “I not only swear to protect and defend the Constitution and the rule of law, but I will do so, now, even if it means going against the crowd.”

Two people willing to stand on principle. Just two.

I believe we are at a cross-roads where we are going to have to decide whether we will continue, in the words of John Adams, as “a Republic, not of men, but of laws”; whether we will continue as a living, viable democracy with all ten amendments of the Bill of Rights firmly intact; or if we will simply shred that document and with it the true meaning of our beloved flag. At which point, I suppose we will be living a lie.

Already in the eyes of much of the rest of the world, our country of virtuous heroes is beginning to wither. When they see us killing over a million Iraqi men, women and children, in order to bring them the “gift” of democracy; when they see the oil companies lining up to take control of the Iraqi oil fields, then the rest of the world can clearly see, even if we can't, that we are living a lie.

So much of this is not really the fault of a few hollow men acting as our leaders, but it's largely due to what our Congress and the rest of us have failed to do.

It's the failure of Congress, both Democrats and Republicans, to rein in an out of control president and vice president. And it's the failure of the rest of us, especially those in positions of legal authority who could speak out against what is clearly wrong, but have chosen instead to look the other way.

This resolution may seem like nothing, so why vote on it? But an expression of no interest is still a decision that will hide itself quite comfortably among the crowd who have decided to throw out the Constitution and join hands with those who advocate the savagery of torture and wars of plunder.

Admittedly, there's no profit in this resolution. Voting for it I'm afraid would not be quite the same as voting to drill another hole in the ground in order to suck out more gold and silver. But this tarnished little resolution may hold more value than all the profit the gas drillers can pull up.

Thank you.

21st & 22nd SPEECHES TO CITY COUNCIL (Re: A Resolution To Impeach)

2008-07-24T13:42:00.002-05:00

Well, I fell behind posting my speeches for the last two weeks, so here they are.

For July 15th:

Mayor, council members, good evening. I am here speaking in behalf of a resolution calling for the impeachment of the President and Vice President of the U.S.
Well, last week, we learned that members of the Vice President's staff censored congressional testimony by top federal officials about health threats posed by global warming.
Meanwhile, Karl Rove continues to ignore Congressional subpoenas compelling him to testify about partisan interference at the Department of Justice.
On Thursday, we saw John Yoo and David Addington testify before a House Sub- committee. Yoo is a former deputy assistant attorney-general. Addington is Cheney's Chief of Staff. The two men are said to be instrumental in developing the administration's torture policy.
It was clear that both men are experts at how to answer questions without answering them at all. It was also clear how little regard either of them seemed to have not just for the House members themselves, but even for the right of the members to question them.
Addington, especially appeared at times almost to seethe with contempt for the whole process.
During the questioning, Representative John Conyers asked John Yoo about a statement Yoo had made in which he seemed to suggest that it was okay for the President to order the torture of a suspect's child “in gruesome fashion.”
Yoo never gave Conyers a direct answer. Later, asked if he thought it was okay for the President to order a suspect buried alive, Yoo again would not give a direct answer. Conyers finally gave up in frustration.
That such men have been allowed anywhere near our government, that those who lead us have granted them access to their offices and allowed them to speak into their ears, I should think, ought to be an affront to plain decent people.
Honorable Mayor, I can only think it must be at least a tad difficult for law-makers to continue to ignore the illegalities and usurpations of the Bush regime that are surfacing almost weekly, if not daily.
For those who sit on city councils, who swear an oath to protect and defend the Constitution and the rule of law; for them, it must be especially awkward to simply look on and do nothing while laws are broken, the Constitution violated and shamed.
Thus far, 93 cities and towns could not do it. They could not justify looking the other way. They simply could not ignore their oath of office. Neither could the legislatures of ten states, who have found the courage to pass similar resolutions.
Sometimes moral questions arise that are so important as to transcend the daily operations of a town. At such times, we are forced to rise above our differences, above partisanship, above our own ambitions, to examine what we really believe in our hearts.
I think everyone in this room knows what is right and true.
Thank you.

For June 22nd:

Mayor, council members, good morning. I am here speaking again for a resolution calling for the impeachment of the President and Vice President of the United States.
Last week, a federal appeals court ruled that President Bush can order the indefinite jailing of civilians in the U.S.
The ruling came in the case of the only person still held as an enemy combatant on U.S. Soil. Ali al-Marri was arrested 6 years ago at his home in Peoria, Illinois, where he lived with his wife and children. He was initially charged with credit card fraud and lying to federal agents.
In June, 2003, President Bush declared him an enemy combatant and ordered him into military custody. He has spent the last 4 years in solitary confinement at a Navy brig in Charleston, South Carolina.
Al-Marri's attorney said, “This decision means the President can pick up any person in the country—citizen or non-citizen—and lock them up for years without the most basic safeguard in the Constitution—the right to a criminal trial.”
With the failure of Congress to act to restrain an out-of-control administration, along with the failure of good people—here and around the country—to rise in vocal defense of the rule of law—and, in essence, defend their own democracy—we're now witnessing the results in bold relief.
We have administration officials defying Congressional subpoenas. We have literally thousands of detainees held in secret sites around the world for no more reason than being labeled by somebody as “enemy combatants.” Many have been tortured or driven insane. At least twenty-five that we know of have been murdered by military guards.
We have Air Force Colonel Morris Davis, the former chief prosecutor at Guantanamo resigning his position because his former boss, DOD General Council, Jim Haynes,told him: “We can't have acquittals. We've been holding these guys for years. How are we going to explain that? We've got to have convictions.”
We have two of the architects of torture, David Addington and John Yoo, arrogantly snubbing the questions of John Conyers and others of the House subcommittee.
And how do those in positions of power in a democracy come by such arrogance? Perhaps from the cynical belief that the people have become so lemming-like that they will silently accept anything, now, any imaginable cruelty, for the sake of their own comfort and safety, however deluded that may be.
And it is an illusion. As one Marine sergeant at Forwarding Base Mercury in Iraq said, “. . .half of these guys get released because they didn't do nothing. But if he's a good guy. . . now he's a bad guy because of the way we treated him.”
The evidence is clear. As good people remain silent, our democracy becomes more imperiled.
Thank you.

A REPUBLIC OF DIMINISHING RETURNS

2008-07-23T13:45:00.017-05:00

While John McCain drones on about our noble Surge of occupying force in Iraq; it appears at the same time that Obama, his opponent, has all but won the beauty contest, as far as the rest of the world is concerned. McCain looks more and more like a political hack, as he accuses Obama of being responsible for the high gas prices, and accuses the senator of being willing to "lose a war in order to win an election", which is possibly the lamest and most unsubstantiated charge McCain could make. McCain barks his accusations as he stands in front of what looks like the rump stage in a high school cafeteria.

At the same time, in Germany, Obama is being called Der Schwarze JFK...The Black JFK. But while McCain spit shines the War Machine and praises military solutions and our national staying power, Obama rises eloquently to convince Europeans (and many Americans) that he brings an inspiring age of renewal. Yet the problem today is that we have two candidates who are clearly militant when it comes to pursuing war as the chief instrument of the presidency.

If McCain is hopeless as a status quo figure, if he appears rhetorically limited and bumbles through his stump speeches, it's not your imagination. He is remarkably unqualified to be president. He displays a hot button personality; and even the casual observer can see the volatility that lies not far beneath his surface. McCain's got the kind of uptightness that doesn't wash out.

Barak Obama, on the other hand, is what Marshall McLuhan would have described as a "cool medium".

But don't be surprised if America's 160,000 kids in combat can be jacked up to 365,000 by the end of his first term in office. We will vote for Obama in November because we can't think or wiggle our way out of this dilemma. It's the chaos of muddle with the McCain empire, or the better managed empire of the handsome Barak Obama. Which would you choose?

A Republic of Diminishing Returns? Why do I think that? Because I believe the outward show of democracy will take precedent over the repair of democracy. There are disturbing signals being sent by Obama's team and the Democrats. The first was the surrender on the FISA bill. The Surveillance State will remain just as it is, thank you. The military position in Iraq will be consolidated in the first 16 months of the Obama presidency. Combat forces are to be reduced in Iraq and increased in Afghanistan. It's a shell game. The war goes on. The new killing fields are adjusted around new policy. Pakistan and Iran are next.

Both republicans and democrats are determined that the empire will not die on their watch.

But a compelling clue that President Obama intends a seamless transition into the resource wars, comes with the disclosure from one of his campaign advisers, from a story in The Nation by Ari Melber. He quotes Cass Sunstein, Obama's adviser:

Prosecuting government officials risks a "cycle" of criminalizing public service, [Sunstein] argued, and Democrats should avoid replicating retributive efforts like the impeachment of President Clinton--or even the "slight appearance" of it.

Whenever the phrase, "criminalizing public service", is used to describe the political hazard of bringing US war criminals to justice, be aware that what you're hearing is debased authoritarian language. The criminals who have savaged humanity, broken laws and undermined our Constitution should not have their unspeakable acts of barbarity and crime described as "public service".

Why would the new president let the Bush criminals off the hook? For a smooth transition, he will tell you. To turn the page and never dwell on partisan battles; you get the picture. But mostly because he will have to work with the very SOBs in Congress who have blood on their hands.

TWENTIETH ADDRESS TO CITY COUNCIL (Re: A Resolution To Impeach)

2008-07-14T10:48:00.003-05:00

July 8th, 2008
Mayor, council members, good evening. Here's a quote from a CIA report to Congress in January, 2003: “The Intelligence Community has no credible information that Baghdad had foreknowledge of the 11 September attacks or any other al-Qaeda strike.”
Here's former CIA Director George Tenet responding to a question on 60 Minutes: “We could never verify that there was any Iraqi authority, direction and control, complicity with al-Qaeda for 9/11 or any operational act against America, period.”
Here's former Federal Reserve Chairman, Alan Greenspan: “I'm saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq War is largely about oil.”
And here's Vice President Cheney responding to White House correspondent Martha Raddatz: when she pointed out to him that two-thirds of Americans no longer believe the Iraq War is worth fighting, Cheney's response was, “So?”
Meanwhile, largely on account of the war, the cost of a barrel of oil has gone from $25 in 2003 to its current price of around $146.
Question: Are you comfortable sending Fort Worth's sons and daughters to fight and die for oil? Are you comfortable sending them to fight for Dick Cheney whose response to the idea of some 4,000 Americans dying for nothing would seem to be a bland, “So?”
Meanwhile, it appears that Bush and Cheney are determined to invade another country—Iran. They've certainly been talking it up in much the same way they did before we invaded Iraq.
As Pulitzer prize winning journalist Seymour Hersh recently reported in The New Yorker, our submarines are there, they have their targets, our destroyers are there, the cruise missiles are loaded on them. Our air force and navy and ground troops are in place. This has been practiced and exercised.
Admiral Fallon was against bombing Iran and he's been forced out. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs has stated his opposition along with at least ten junior members. As it did with Iraq, our intelligence has informed Bush and Cheney that there is no nuclear weapons program in Iran. They don't care.
The fact that Iran has not attacked anyone outside their borders for some 280 years doesn't seem to matter in the least.
As Hersh pointed out, this is the most radical president our country has ever seen and he's completely ineducable. “I don't know about you,” Hersh said, “but that scares me to death.”
I've already pointed out that Fort Worth's share of money spent on Iraq is approaching a billion dollars. Any idea what it will be if we tack on Iran? With our economy already plummeting, I daresay cities and towns across this country will be turning out their pockets just to keep up with decaying roads and schools, let alone have anything left for such pie-in-the sky items as homelessness initiatives.
Too late to call for impeachment? Maybe. But surely it is not too late for good people to remember the oath they swore to defend the Constitution and the rule of law.
Thank you.

"THE CANDIDATES ARE THE SCIENCE FICTION"

2008-07-09T13:31:00.007-05:00

The other day, I was reading online at Raw Story the account of the $100 million that Congress has allocated to the two political parties for security at their conventions, and about stories being circulated of new "science fiction weapons" that Denver and Minneapolis might be tempted to use against hapless protesters, foreshadowing an American police state. It is becoming a deplorable American tradition to humiliate, cage, injure and sometimes kill street protesters, in those cities that host presidential conventions.

Just who is the enemy now in the hurly-burly of American politics? As one commenter observed, "The candidates are the science fiction." There is a kind of risky business in these grim post-9/11 festivals because the mask of civility may drop to reveal a nation under military occupation.

The ACLU is suing both cities to disclose how security money is being spent, with hopes as to determine what specific weapons may be deployed against Americans. However, officials say it is important they be secretive about the technologies employed by their security forces, lest the crowds which will inevitably surround the conventions gain the upper hand.
(David Edwards/Stephen C. Webster)

Can Americans be fearmongered to the point where they welcome the totalitarian hand? Shall our children receive institutions which are worse than those we inherited? Is the America we are willing to settle for, a nation that will turn to paramilitary death squads and mercenary cadres?--or accept the shell game for oil that covers up genocide? Wouldn't we feel contempt for a society where the walls have ears?--where we can imagine the whole planet shrunk until it seems that the cries of the tortured are coming from the next room?

"It's called the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it," said George Carlin.

For close to 8 years we haven't really been mesmerized with the oratory of a Pericles, who advised the citizens of Athens not to throw away their Empire, "which some say we ought not to have sought, or desire at all."

No, in our case, the country was fed the most stupid, vapid, degenerate rhetoric ever heard on these shores. And the object was war and mind control; and these are indeed the dark days of this struggle.

"Problems cannot be solved by the level of thinking that created them," said Einstein. And it's clear that we need some kind of renewal and revelation in our thinking process. We don't need hero worship or the idolatry of the Leader; we don't need that infantilism that is the product of corporate media; and we don't need self-indulgent self-pity.

I suspect that we need to find a central, still point, in our national character, the self respect that will make it possible to stand before the world on our own merits, without the resort to violence to steal from weaker countries and exploit the poor.

IN CONSIDERATION OF OUR WRONGS

2008-07-04T08:48:00.004-05:00

This seems especially appropriate to our current situation.

". . .I don't believe sins can be washed away by anything, not by the Blood of the Lamb, not by Christ on or off the Cross, not by love of God or God's love, not by a billion Hail Marys or a Milky Way of candles or a thousand ages of penance or a million miles of contrition on broken glass and burning coals and leprous bodies.

In fact, I indignantly reject, with horror and with loathing, the dark, ancient, vile and filthy lie that another man or God-Man can redeem us of our sins by his own suffering, or that we can purify ourselves and start over again by compounding our sins with more suffering, more ugliness, more filth and gibbering faith.

What an utterly horrible doctrine! What a contemptible and nightmarish horror-story to preach to grave, thoughtful children. It's time we stood up like men and faced our responsibilities, admitted and lived with our past sins, and cleared our hearts, in so far as we can, not by atonement or by condemning someone else to die for us, but by refusing to cooperate with evil and insisting upon doing good."
--from: Confessions Of A Barbarian by Edward Abbey

NINETEENTH ADDRESS TO CITY COUNCIL (Re: A Resolution To Impeach)

2008-06-17T19:55:00.002-05:00

June 17th.

Mayor, council members, good morning.

Here's some information you might not hear from the mainstream media:

More Americans have died in Iraq than in all US conflicts put together since Vietnam.
Following a long tradition in America's wars, most of those who have given their lives came from poor, rural areas.
More than 15,500 US Soldiers have been wounded.
The number of Iraq Veterans diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome is 300,000. Many veterans complaining of battlefield stress are now being given antidepressants, such as prosac and zoloft by army doctors and thrown back to the battlefield.
The number of troops stop-lossed: 58,000.
The number of troops deployed after being declared medically unfit: 43,000.
The Iraq War is costing about $4,500 per second. Per second.
The direct cost of US military operations, not including long-term costs such as taking care of wounded veterans, already exceeds the cost of the 12-year war in Vietnam and is more than double the cost of the Korean War.
The projected total bill for the Iraq war is estimated at 3 trillion dollars. This is just the cost for the US. It does not include the cost to Iraq or the rest of the world. This figure comes from Joseph Stiglitz, the chief economist at the World Bank, winner of the Nobel Prize for economics.
Of the total Iraq War spending approved to date, our share, Fort Worth's share, is about 1 billion dollars. For that amount of money we could have built 12,210 affordable housing units.
So as we think about helping the homeless in this community, perhaps we should consider the fortune we've thrown away on a war based on lies. And how much more we stand to lose every day, every second, that it continues.
The percentage of U.S. Combat troops who are Latino: 17.5.
The percentage of the US population that is Latino: 14.8.
The pay per day for a US Army sergeant in Iraq: $71.53.
The pay per day for General Petraeus: $493.15.
The pay per day for a Blackwater “Protective security specialist”: $1,221.62. Taxpayer's money for mercenaries.
As of January 1, of this year, George W. Bush, during a time of war, spent all or part of 908 days—36% of his time—on vacation or at retreat places. That's two-and-a-half years of his presidency spent kicking back.
Can anyone imagine Franklin Roosevelt spending two-and-a-half years of his presidency vacationing during World War II?
The question is why is it so unthinkable to send a simple request to Congress asking for the impeachment of George W. Bush and Richard B. Cheney?
Thank you.

HOUSE VOTES TO SEND ARTICLES OF IMPEACHMENT TO JUDICIARY COMMITTEE

2008-06-12T01:07:00.002-05:00

Notwithstanding a news blackout by corporate media, the House voted to send the impeachment document on to the Judiciary Committee on Wednesday, June 11th. Rep. Dennis Kucinich, who read out the Articles before the House on Tuesday, pledged that he would not let the issue rest, and would continue to press forward, and would soon meet with Judiciary Chairman, John Conyers.

Kucinich continued in the statement. “President Bush was principally responsible for directing the United States Armed Forces to attack Iraq.

“I believe that there is sufficient evidence in the articles to support the charge that President Bush allowed, authorized and sanctioned the manipulation of intelligence by those acting under his direction and control, misleading Congress to approve a resolution authorizing the use of force against Iraq.

“As a result over 4,000 United States soldiers have died in combat in Iraq, with tens of thousands injured, many of them permanently impaired,” explained Kucinich. “Over a million innocent Iraqis have perished in a war which was based on lies, a war which will cost the American taxpayers as much as three trillion dollars.

The Ohio lawmaker said that it is now “incumbent” for the Judiciary Committee to review evidence he presented. He promised that if the committee failed to hold any hearings on the resolution within thirty days, he would repeat his efforts. He told one reporter Wednesday, “Leadership wants to bury it, but this is one resolution that will be coming back from the dead. … I will be bringing the resolution up again, and I won’t be the only one reading it.”

(Mike Sheehan/Raw Story)

EIGHTEENTH ADDRESS TO CITY COUNCIL (Re: A Resolution To Impeach)

2008-06-11T08:13:00.002-05:00

June 10th.

Mayor, council members, good evening.

We have a major insider, now, Scott McClellan, revealing what he knew and witnessed first-hand as the President's press secretary.

Most of what he has to say in his new book basically confirms what we already know—that there was a “political propaganda machine” that misled the public on the reasons for war with Iraq.

On the outing of a CIA agent, he reveals that not only did Bush and Cheney know that Rove and Libby were involved in the scheme, but they were actively engaged in preventing the truth from coming out. Acts which are themselves felonies.

Of course, the smear machine is now turned up high in an attempt to discredit McClellan and drown out what he's trying to say. So far, the attacks are mostly personal; hardly anyone disputes him on the facts.

So we continue to bring before you what we know, still hoping to persuade you to pass this impeachment resolution. Hoping that you will finally allow Congress to hear our city's voice alongside 96 other cities and towns who have courageously lifted their voices in defense of the rule of law and the Constitution.

By asking you to pass this resolution, we're not asking you to attack the President and Vice President. We're asking you to condemn illegal wiretapping; to condemn the use of lies and propaganda to launch wars that cause the needless destruction of human life. We're asking you to uphold the U.N. Charter that makes it a war crime to launch unprovoked attacks on other countries.

We're asking you to stand by the Geneva Conventions and the U.S. Army Field Manual that brands the use of torture as illegal and immoral.

We're asking you to stand for the law that makes the casual exposure of our government agents an act of treason.

We're asking you to stand for the time-honored right of due-process, the principle that no one should be locked up for years without legal council, or a fair trial in a court of law.

We simply ask you to make a principled stand for the traditions and values of our
country.

In recent news, we learn that the Pentagon urged interrogators at Guantanamo to destroy handwritten notes in case they were called to testify about potentially harsh treatment of detainees.

We further learn that the U.S. deliberately thwarted evidence that could help terror suspects defend themselves at trial.

So? I hear you say. Why should we care what happens to them? Because we're better than that, aren't we? Because we believe in the rule of law which says that a person is innocent until proven guilty?

And if we don't believe in that. . . if—as the President says—the Constitution does not apply at Guantanamo, then what have we become?

Einstein said, “The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing.”

Thank you.

A RESOLUTION TO IMPEACH

2008-06-10T16:51:00.001-05:00

Dennis Kucinich submitted 35 Articles of Impeachment on the floor of the House last night. A news blackout among corporate media has kept this off major news outlets, so far. Standing for almost five hours, Kucinich read out the detailed charges, which refer back, again and again, to the President's failure to follow his oath of office, as well as his failure to faithfully execute the laws of the United States.

"Resolved," Kucinich then began, "that President George W. Bush be impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors, and that the following articles of impeachment be exhibited to the United States Senate. ...

"In his conduct while President of the United States, George W. Bush, in violation of his constitutional oath to faithfully execute the office of president of the United States, and to the best of his ability preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, and in violation of his constitutional duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed, has committed the following abuses of power..." (Raw Story, which links to CSPAN video)

Raw Story also reports that Florida's Democratic Rep. Robert Wexler has become the first to co-sponsor the Articles. Wexler offered these comments:

"President Bush deliberately created a massive propaganda campaign to sell the war in Iraq to the American people and the charges detailed in this impeachment resolution indicate an unprecedented abuse of executive power," Wexler said in a news release. "A decision by Congress to pursue impeachment is not an option, it is a sworn duty. It is time for Congress to stand up and defend the Constitution against the blatant violations and illegalities of this Administration. Our Founding Fathers bestowed upon Congress the power of impeachment, and it is now time that we use it to defend the rule of law from this corrupt Administration."

Here in Fort Worth, our friend Grayson Harper has been speaking regularly before the City Council and urging them to adopt a resolution for Impeachment of George W. Bush and Richard Cheney, a resolution that has passed in several cities and towns across this country. "Thinking globally and acting locally," our friend Grayson offers this poster for a peaceful, July 8th assembly of concerned citizens in this city.

carolyn forché IN THE PLACE DES MARTYRS

2008-06-08T23:43:00.005-05:00

That morning they lifted above their heads
what appeared to be a doll in a christening gown
and we stood in the blasted haze waiting for long white
plumes to stanch the fires quickening through
carpets and bedclothes, a tea service, a tender curtain,
and we did not turn away, nor did we photograph the child,
—except at the moment of its being raised—
but later we walked to the Place des Martyrs
where a stillness had been created entirely
by small arms-fire that had blistered walls, blackened shops
and taken from the movie-house all but its blank screen,
where once all manner of figures had shone,
wavering, composed of light through what was
now nothing: a country. Or such was the hope.

American poet, Carolyn Forché

SEVENTEENTH ADDRESS TO CITY COUNCIL (Re: A Resolution To Impeach)

2008-06-04T13:53:00.004-05:00

June 3.

Diane and I spoke, without incident. The Mayor basically ignored us and blathered most of the time with his cohorts.

Mayor, council members, good evening. This is my seventeenth appearance here in behalf of this resolution.
There are those who try to portray what we say here as mostly opinions, rather than matters of fact. I can only respond by saying that simply isn't true.
I will tell you that if I can write one of these little talks in under three hours, I've done amazingly well. One reason for that is due to the time I take reading and researching the facts. I've always believed that facts would hold more sway here than mere opinions.
So, it is not simply my opinion that the Bush Administration lied to get us into a war. That is a fact.
Nor is it my opinion that then Secretary of State Colin Powell presented an array of lies to the U.N. to justify the invasion, complete with fraudulently interpreted satellite photos. That, too, is a fact.
It is not mere opinion that we invaded a sovereign country. Nor that under the U.N. and the Nuremburg Charters, such an invasion constitutes a war of aggression and is therefore defined as a war crime.
Nor is it my opinion, but a fact, that these charters are treaties to which our country is a signatory, and that according to Article VI of the U.S. Constitution, all treaties made by us “shall be the supreme Law of the Land.”
That the U.S. has suspended the law of habeas corpus, that it has held people captive for years without due process, that people held by us have been brutalized, driven insane, and even murdered by the use of torture—these are facts, not my opinion.
It is not my opinion that in a memo of March 14, 2003, former Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo dismissed the Geneva Conventions, the Convention Against Torture, the Fourth, Fifth and Eighth Amendments, and the federal statutes against war crimes and torture. That is a fact.
The Bush Administration has flatly said that at Guantanamo, the Constitution does not apply. That, too, is a fact. And now, here comes an opinion, or maybe just a question.
If the Constitution does not apply at Guantanamo, then why on earth is our flag still flying over that place? If the Constitution has been effectively shredded and neutralized, what possible meaning could still exist in the flag of our country?
Just wondering.
It was opinions that put thirty-three innocent men behind bars in Texas. It was facts that recently got them out. And it was opinions that got us into war in Iraq rather than the intelligence, which was ignored.
I understand the need some people have to portray what we say here as mere opinions. It's so much easier to say, “We don't share your opinion,” than it is to say, “We disagree with the facts.”
If all we have here is a difference of opinion, then it becomes easy for those in positions of power to ignore the elephant in the room and do nothing.
Thank you.

SIXTEENTH ADDRESS TO CITY COUNCIL (Re: A Resolution To Impeach)

2008-05-30T09:23:00.003-05:00

May 27, 08.

At this meeting, at the conclusion of remarks by Diane and myself, one of the council members gave us a little speech explaining why the council has not responded to our request and why they've shown no interest. The main reason, he said, was because "we've heard it all before and most of what you've said has just been your opinions and not facts, and frankly, I don't share your opinion."

Given that we are very careful to present the facts and to base our opinions on the facts, this seemed like an outrageous insult, which I will be addressing in my next talk.

Meanwhile, here is the most recent:

Mayor, Council members, some of you may recall that Ulysses Grant faithfully served as a captain in the Mexican War about the middle of the nineteenth century. Later, writing in his memoirs, Grant said he regarded that war as “one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation.”

Something about that sounds eerily familiar. Could it be that our colossal mistakes in Vietnam and now Iraq are little more than history repeating itself?
Grant went on to say that “nations, like individuals, are punished for their transgressions.” No, he wasn't talking about religious concerns. He was far too practical minded for that. He was talking about blow-back.
He believed the American Civil War was the logical outgrowth of the Mexican War that preceded it. That was our punishment for unnecessarily invading and occupying a sovereign country.

Now it seems logical to ask what is apt to be the blow-back of our Iraq debacle. Well, we know we have created far more enemies than we started out with before Bush launched this war based on lies.

What about the blow-back to our soldiers? Besides the killed and wounded, over 300,000 veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan are currently suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome, or major depression—that's one out of every five soldiers who have served there.

In a recent email that just came to light, Dr. Ira Katz, a top official at the VA, reported over 1,000 suicide attempts per month among returning veterans. Then he went on to discuss how this alarming news might be covered up.

The highest number of suicides seems to be among those forced to do multiple tours of duty by this administration. More than half are aged 20 to 29. Three-quarters used a firearm to take their lives, such as Joshua Omvig, an Iowa reservist who shot himself in front of his mother in December, 2005, after an eleven month tour in Iraq.

In 1942 on the eve of War, President Franklin Roosevelt said, “This will require, of course, the abandonment not only of luxuries, but of many other creature comforts.”

Nowadays, President Bush encourages Americans to go shopping and spend those stimulus checks. Carry on as if nothing has happened or is happening.

And so another Memorial Day has come and gone. But this year, concerned citizens come before this law-making body asking for something more than prayers.

We come saying we are tired of prayers for soldiers killed, wounded, traumatized, by needless war. We say we are tired of lies. We believe those who told the lies that got our soldiers in this predicament should be answerable to the people, and brought to justice.

Thus, do we ask you again to stand for the Constitution and the rule of law.

Thank you.

FIFTEENTH ADDRESS TO CITY COUNCIL (Re: A Resolution To Impeach)

2008-05-21T07:42:00.003-05:00

May 20, 2008

My goal in this speech was to respond to the Mayor who had cut me off last week, admonishing me about attacking any members of the council. I felt certain that he was going to be "on point" this time, looking for an excuse to cut me off again.

Sure enough, Ben and I noticed that he switched my card with Diane's (though I knew I had signed up to speak before her) thus putting me last, which would make it easier to cut me short and end the session. We also noticed him conferring with the retired Air Force officer on the council prior to my going up, as if they were hatching some plan. Also, the bailiff who almost always sits down low on the first row in the chamber nearest the council members' dais moved to stand just behind me and Ben where we sat on the top row. Never seen him do that before.

I turned to Ben and said, "I think he's laying for me." Ben nodded: "I think you're right."

When the Mayor called my name, when I got to the lecturn, he started right in: "Now, Mr. Harper, remember what happened the last time you spoke. I will not tolerate attacks on this council--I don't want to hear how we're not following our oath of office, you understand? Nothing about that."

"May I respond?" I asked him. He nodded. I reminded him that the previous week I was responding to remarks by the retired Air Force council member, just as I had responded to remarks of the Mayor in other speeches. "So I don't know when it's okay to respond and when it's not."

"Well, I'm talking to you in advance of your speech and I'm warning you that if you say anything about our not following our oath of office, I will cut you off. Do you understand?"

I said I understood, but continued to insist that I had not been insulting to anyone.

The tension in the room was pretty thick as I read my speech, certain as I read every line that he was going to cut me off. In my remarks, I went over the freedom of speech clause in both the U.S. and Texas Constitutions, looking the mayor in the eye as I did so. He did not look happy.

Meanwhile, council member Hicks kept looking over at the mayor expectantly, as if she, too, were certain that he was going to pull the trigger at any moment. He never did. I think he was quite frustrated, actually. My speech was so carefully worded that he simply could not find a way to stop me; yet, I was able to get my points across.

Score one for me on this round. It will be interesting to see what happens next week. Diane says she's going to go after the mayor for conflicts of interest--his voting on gas drilling issues while invested in the gas industry.

Mayor, council members, good morning. I appear again to ask you to pass a resolution calling for the impeachment of the Pres. & V. P. of the United States.

People ask me why are you doing this? What do you hope to achieve? Often, I notice people in this chamber seem to look at me with expressions of disdain or even ridicule.

For me, the basis for this project has always been the Constitution, which, along with freedom of speech, gives citizens the right to petition their government for a redress of grievances. In fact, the first Amendment states that such rights cannot even be abridged. I take that to mean that, in the context of civil, reasoned discourse, these rights cannot be thwarted or silenced by anyone—certainly not by any elected official of this state or of this nation.

The Texas Constitution is, if anything, more blunt.

Section 8 of Article 1 of the Texas Bill of Rights says that “Every person shall be at liberty to speak, write or publish his opinions on any subject. . .and no law shall ever be passed curtailing the liberty of speech or of the press.”

So it was my thinking, however misguided, to come to this place, being the seat of law and government of this town, consisting of a mayor and council members who have sworn an oath to protect and defend this Constitution and laws.

I came because I saw there were members here who seem to think of the rules and the law as of paramount importance. Members like my own representative, Mr. Silcox, who I've seen time and again stand up for the rules, on such issues as the rule governing leaf blowers. Which I strongly agree with, by the way. I still rake and sweep up my grass just like I did before there were all these noisy polluting contraptions.

And Mr. Silcox has also stood for the rules on gas drilling. As Mr. Burns and Ms. Hicks have done—always considerate of the environment in which we must all live. The Mayor himself--Mr. Moncrief--has been a heroic advocate of the homeless.

So I came here believing that surely some members of this body would be in favor of standing up for the rules when they seem threatened by the national government.

Surely, I thought, someone here would be outraged that the rules had been broken by the needless invasion of another country; by those who have taken away the right of habeas corpus, who would actually legislate the torture of human beings.

I thought perhaps the outrage over homelessness might somehow translate to similar outrage over the fact that some 4 million Iraqis have been driven from their homes since we invaded their country. Or that increasing numbers of our veterans are homeless.

In closing, let me remind you that some sixty years ago, our boys in uniform defeated the Germans and the Japanese and were back home going to college on the G.I. Bill in less time than we have now spent in Iraq.

Meanwhile, Mr. Bush's idea of honoring our soldiers killed in this war that he started was to give up playing golf.

Do you really believe that this man and his cohorts deserve a free pass?

Thank you.

FOURTEENTH ADDRESS TO CITY COUNCIL (Re: A Resolution To Impeach)

2008-05-18T15:03:00.003-05:00

May 13th, 2008

My goal in this speech was to answer the statement of the previous week by a City Council member who referred to his Air Force career, noting that he "certainly knew what it meant to defend the Constitution."

Mayor, Council members, I come before you again to ask you to consider passing a resolution calling for the impeachment of the President and Vice President of the United States.

Last week, one Council member suggested that his service in the Air Force made him an expert at standing by his oath to defend the Constitution.

And I believe with all my heart that that's true. Therefore, I would simply ask him: Then, why aren't you doing it?

(At this point in my speech, the Mayor stopped me. "Mr. Harper," he said, "I've been very patient with you. But I've told you before that I will not tolerate personal attacks on anyone on this council. Now, I will stop you from speaking if you continue in that vein, do hear me?" To which I responded that I was not aware that I had attacked anyone or that I was rude to anyone on the council. "Did you hear what I said?" he asked again. "I will end this meeting and close this chamber if you continue in this vein." "That's your prerogative," I replied, and repeated again that I did not believe I had spoken offensively. He continued to repeat: "Did you hear what I said?" "Yes, I hear you," I said. And he allowed me to go on.)

We have mountains of evidence that laws have been broken, the Constitution violated.

We have a President who lied to Congress and the American people. We have a war based on those lies. We have very young servicemen and women killed, maimed and psychologically damaged, perhaps beyond repair. We have hundreds of thousands killed on the other side and millions driven from their homes. Because of lies.

We have the suspension of habeas corpus for non-citizens, whom our military has detained for months and years without lawyers or trials.

One was just released from Guantanamo after being held in a cage for six years. He was never charged, no evidence was ever presented against him.

We have others, many others, who are not so lucky. Such as Dilawar, an Afghan taxi driver who was beaten to death by our military at Bagram air base. Shackled, terrified, and screaming for Allah's mercy, he was repeatedly beaten by as many as four guards at once. His wrists were chained above his head. His legs had been reduced to pulp. He was just 22 years old, barely a man. He weighed 122 pounds. It took five days to kill him. He was found innocent of any crime.

We have mountains of evidence that torture techniques came from the top down, from the Vice President to Donald Rumsfeld and on down the chain of command.

We have mountains of evidence that the most basic principles of American law and American policy for 200 years have been thrown overboard by the Bush Administration. Principles that my father certainly believed in and fought for, when, as a captain, he flew the China-Burma hump in World War II.

The America my father defended stood by the Geneva Conventions; it stood by long established military tradition that forbade the inhumane treatment of prisoners, and was a model to the world.
In my father's America, we prosecuted Japanese soldiers for the crime of water-boarding, and our leaders condemned and punished the torture even of proven Nazis, on the principle that we must uphold our own humanity, and not descend to the brutish level of the most degraded among us.
And if he could, I'm quite certain my father would be standing here, now, calling on each of you to honor your oath of office, to stand for the rule of law and the
Constitution.

Thank you.

copeland morris DESIGN

2008-05-17T22:18:00.002-05:00

An angel parts the curtain and leaves the door
Ajar. And under the moon the winter passes.
We understand but little of things which freeze,
Which still search for design. The unseen
Have deeper translations. Breakfast is early.
The lights are switched off. We are careful
Not to give away our movements. The luggage
Slow dances around us. I think of white feathers
Under a dove's wing, and empty seats on a train.

THIRTEENTH ADDRESS TO CITY COUNCIL (Re: A Resolution To Impeach)

2008-05-09T07:04:00.003-05:00

May 6, '08
____________________________________________________________________

Mayor, Council members, the America I believe in does not torture.

The mayor insists that you are all people of conscience. I take that to mean that noone on this council would stand by and watch another human being tortured without trying to stop it. Is that wishful thinking?

Time after time, Condoleezza Rice has denied that the U.S. tortures detainees in its custody.

In 2005, she said, “The United States does not condone, permit or tolerate torture under any circumstances.”

She also said, “Torture and conspiracy to commit torture are crimes under U.S. Law wherever they may occur in the world.”

“Crimes. . . .”

Now, thanks to recent revelations and by the President's own admission, we know that the U.S. not only condones torture, but the current program was authorized by Bush's most senior advisors. Rice herself chaired the secret meetings that included John Ashcroft, Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld, George Tenet, and Dick Cheney.

So while Miss Rice was telling Congress and the American people that “torture and conspiracy to commit torture are crimes under U.S. Law,” she was telling the C.I.A., “It's your baby, go do it.”

In open defiance of all ethical, moral and legal precedents, George W. Bush flatly admits that he was aware of these meetings, that he approves of torture.

This is just one snapshot in a catalog of lies, abuses of power, and violations of law by this administration.

As I said in my last appearance, virtually every legal organization in the land has urged not only Congress but all members of the legal community to speak up in defense of the rule of law.

Countless other individuals and groups that advocate in behalf of our Constitution and civil rights are doing the same. Over a million signatures have gone to Congress urging them to begin impeachment proceedings.

86 cities and towns have passed resolutions calling for impeachment. The Vermont senate has passed such a resolution.

These are not wild-eyed fanatics and neither am I.

This is not and should not be treated as a petty or partisan issue. I believe it is our civic duty to use the power vested in us as Americans to impeach a president and vice president who commit crimes.

To that end, citizens of this town have presented you with the most obvious means for you to act in behalf of the oath you took to defend the Constitution and the rule of law, an oath you swore to the people and to God.

The Mayor has staunchly argued that he and you take your oath seriously, without explaining why he or you can see no reason to act on it.

Thus, in the face of overwhelming evidence that something is seriously amiss, we have no more than your word.

Thank you.

The Mayor talked and laughed quite a bit with the City Attorney during my talk--they're such cut-ups! Then, he called on one of the older council members to offer a defense, of sorts. The man fell back on his service in the Air Force to say that he knew what it really meant to defend the Constitution and that it gave him the right to disagree with people like me, and so on. For the life of me, and those with me, we could not discern what that had to do with honoring his obligation to his oath of office in the current circumstance. Just another case of using one's military service to intimidate and show some kind of superiority, I suppose.

I will address his remarks in my next talk.

RANDOM THOUGHTS

2008-05-02T18:03:00.009-05:00

ANOTHER SWIFT BOATED

Ever the cockeyed optimist, I had almost begun to think perhaps we were on the threshhold of a new and brighter America with our Democratic candidates competing to replace the outlaw regime in Washington. Then came the madcap blowup over Obama's pastor, with Hillary gutter-sniping alongside the scumbags at Fox News and all the other quacks posing as journalists, from George Stephanopoulos to Tim Russert.

It must have slipped Hillary's mind that the same Reverend Wright she was now piously condemning had been summoned to council the Clintons at the White House during the Monica scandal. At some point, the girl came up for air, noticed a familiar taste in her mouth--blood. Feeling thus invigorated, she beat her chest and threatened to obliterate Iran, thus signaling her full-throated embrace of the thug mentality of John McCain and the Bush Administration.

So now that Barack is getting his craw full of what it really means to run for President of America, the question is whether it is already proving too much for him. Based on his lackluster responses to Chris Mathews' inane questions on Fox News, it almost looks like he's down for the count.

The real shame and disgrace is the spectacle of our man withering like a frail violet amid the swarming flies. So this is how he faces down Hillary? What will he do when it's McCain, who hasn't even started in on him, yet? I'm expecting at least an apology per week. Suddenly, we're back in the John Kerry campaign, swift boated to smithereens.

The hatchet job on Kerry's stellar war record was so thoroughly done that he seemed to go into a kind of paralysis that prevented him from offering a proper and righteous response. There he was in a nationally televised debate with W.--the real shirker and fraud--yes, had him in his sights!--and let slip the golden opportunity of asking the cud-chewing frat boy point blank where he was when he apparently went AWOL during his Air National Guard service.

This caving in that "liberals" seem to have developed into a fine art--I almost wonder if at the bottom of it lies some deep-seated self-loathing, a desperate need to lose, peculiar only to Democrats.

I watched Reverend Wright's sermons, the ones in question, and his subsequent performance at the National Press Club. Apart from having an ego the size of Montana and seeming to positively relish the sudden notoriety heaped upon him, I am struggling to figure out what in blazes all the noise is about. As far as I can tell, here is a man who is telling the history of his people, a man who has been to school, whose intelligence is far-ranging and deep, who also has the temerity to speak the truth about why this country is so reviled in the world that it might cause someone to want to fly planes into our buildings.

Instead of distancing himself and repudiating his pastor Barack should have come out swinging as Kerry should have done: "Yes, my pastor is irreverent. He says controversial things--which is his right to do! Get over it, America. Grow up! My pastor is not me. I am not him. Sometimes I agree with him and sometimes I don't. Now, let's talk about health care. Let's talk about ending this illegal war."

But no, we liberals are just too nice for that.

ON MICHAEL MOORE'S FILM, SICKO

The film exposes the brutality of this country. Ambulances cruising seedy neighborhoods in search of places to dump the uninsureds like so much garbage. It's amazing. You can drive around any modern city and see huge medical complexes, hospitals, clinics of every size and specialty; and I always think to myself, "Now, there's everything you need right there if ever you're sick or injured. . .if. . . .IF--you can pay for it."

In this country, those fine shining citadels are off-limits to around fifty-million Americans. And really more than that, probably far more, if you count the numbers who naively think that just because they're "insured," that their policies will actually cover them for any procedure, when, in reality, they may not be covered at all. The whole insurance industry is a flim-flam.

Europeans would not put up with this insanity for five minutes. The only reason we do so here is because the majority of the population appear to be rather easy pickins for just about every charlatan and scam artist on the planet, beginning with our own government, which, starting with Ronald Reagan (himself an overgrown child), and continuing right through the current regime, quickly caught on to the extent to which the average American is the most simple-minded gullible pushover imaginable. You can tell them just about anything and they will buy it hook, line and sinker. Behold how easy it was to sell them the Iraq War.

Americans so believe the myths of their country that they can brook no criticism or even the suggestion that something sinister and rotten might underlie the shiny exterior; hence, we have three weeks of near-hysteria, verging on foaming at the mouth, over Obama's learned pastor, instead of reasoned discourse about education or health care or how to get us out of this insane war.

The real malady, I fear, is bone-deep and probably can't be repaired by normal, rational means. Reason and facts have been thrown overboard, replaced with fables and magical thinking. The economy, the country itself, will collapse. It is already in a free-fall. The oil companies--mega-flim-flam war profiteers--are reporting record high profits. Bear-Stearns gets bailed out while hundreds of thousands lose their homes; the people, having bought into their own bullshit, have been duped and fleeced as predictably as a yokel in a game of three-card monte. By the time they figure out what hit them, the rats will have stuffed their carpetbags full of boodle and moved on to the next place.

But no, they won't figure it out, after all. What is more apt is they will stand there with their twittering cellphones, jaws flapping in surprise, while the apes at Fox News pin it all on Tom Hayden and the Sixties; and the wars for freedom will grind on because that's the way we drink our health and good order. . . .

And after noon the well-dressed creatures come
To sniff among the dead
And have their lunch

And all the many well-dressed creatures pluck
The swollen avocados from the dust
And stir the minestrone with stray bones

And after lunch
They loll and lounge about
Decanting claret in convenient skulls*

*After Lunch, by Harold Pinter

ADMONITIONS AND WARNINGS

2008-04-29T05:25:00.013-05:00

Ah, ye admonitions and warnings! why stay ye not when ye come? But rather are ye predictions than warnings, ye shadows! Yet not so much predictions from without, as verifications of the foregoing things within. For with little external to constrain us, the innermost necessities of our being, these still drive us on.

--Herman Melville, Moby Dick, p.163

Ahab is Ahab; and we have not tried hard enough to throw off the fate that is ready to meet us. How many admonitions and warnings have the people received? At Tholos of Athena, we have tried to put all these cautions into perspective, since we began writing about this war, five years ago. If Melville was right in thinking that “depths outlast heights”; he surely must have meant that the depths of the moral life outlast human prowess. The examined life is superior to the obsession that robs us of our humanity. The idea that God will no longer bless a country that repeats its crimes and abuses, is not a new concept. In only seven years, we have begun to follow Ahab onto the high seas of paranoia. The end is fast approaching in the frenzy of Wall Street, in the criminal complicity of Congress, in the outright criminality of the current president. How many people have to be enslaved, occupied, dispossessed, orphaned, widowed, killed and maimed, before the Empire's House of Cards comes crashing down?

We should remember the admonitions and warnings of Martin Luther King Jr. that are found in his famous speech, Beyond Vietnam-A Time to Break Silence:

...There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I, and others, have been waging in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor--both black and white--through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam, and I watched this program broken and eviscerated, as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. So, I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such. [...]

At this point I should make it clear that while I have tried in these last few minutes to give a voice to the voiceless in Vietnam and to understand the arguments of those who are called "enemy," I am as deeply concerned about our own troops there as anything else. For it occurs to me that what we are submitting them to in Vietnam is not simply the brutalizing process that goes on in any war where armies face each other and seek to destroy. We are adding cynicism to the process of death, for they must know after a short period there that none of the things we claim to be fighting for are really involved. Before long they must know that their government has sent them into a struggle among Vietnamese, and the more sophisticated surely realize that we are on the side of the wealthy, and the secure, while we create a hell for the poor. [...]

A true revolution of values will lay hand on the world order and say of war, "This way of settling differences is not just." This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged , cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death. [...]

We can no longer afford to worship the god of hate or bow before the altar of retaliation. The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever-rising tides of hate. And history is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals that pursued this self-defeating path of hate. As Arnold Toynbee says: "Love is the ultimate force that makes for the saving choice of life and good against the damning choice of death and evil. Therefore the first hope in our inventory must be the hope that love is going to have the last word" (unquote).

Americans have been admonished and warned for years now, about the losing position the US military is in, as its forces continue the occupation and brutalization of Iraq. In 1966, the Israeli general, Moshe Dayan, was given permission to tour the American frontlines in Vietnam, and his memoirs serve as springboard for the military historian, Martin Van Creveld. And Creveld sums up the US dilemma well, in a 2004 article, Why Iraq Will End as Vietnam Did.

The...most important reason why I think Vietnam is relevant to the situation in Iraq is because the Americans found themselves in the unfortunate position where they were beating down on the weak. To quote Dayan: "any comparison between the two armies...was astonishing. On the one hand there was the American Army, complete with helicopters, an air force, armor, electronic communications, artillery, and mind-boggling riches; to say nothing of ammunition, fuel, spare parts, and equipment of all kinds. On the other there were the [North Vietnamese troops] who had been walking on foot for four months, carrying some artillery rounds on their backs and using a tin spoon to eat a little ground rice from a tin plate."

That, of course, was precisely the problem. In private life, an adult who keeps beating down on a five year old--even such a one as originally attacked him with a knife--will be perceived as committing a crime; therefore he will lose the support of bystanders and end up being arrested, tried and convicted. In international life, an armed force that keeps beating down on a weaker opponent will be seen as committing a series of crimes; therefore it will end up losing the support of its allies, its own people, and its own troops. Depending on the quality of the forces--whether they are draftees or professionals, the effectiveness of the propaganda machine, the nature of the political process, and so on--things may happen quickly or take a long time to mature. However, the outcome is always the same. He (or she) who does not understand this does not understand anything about war; or, indeed, human nature.

The spread of abnormal American aggression is treated as if it were nothing out of the ordinary in the debate of our presidential candidates. Political Kingmakers in the two parties don't hesitate to bring along another Commander-in-Chief who is willing to "obliterate" smaller countries; while we cross our fingers and hope the new president isn't another psychologically damaged individual. "Talk not to me of blasphemy, man;" says Ahab, "I'd strike the sun if it insulted me." This is exactly the America that the rest of the world dreads.

No sooner had General Petraeus told us that recent security gains were fragile and reversible, than there was a reversal. US collaborator, Prime Minister al Maliki, tried to send Iraq's military to disarm part of the militia of nationalist leader, Muqtada al Sadr. The government soldiers (many of them Shia) tore off their uniforms in Sadr City, and ran, and bugged out of their units when they were sent into Basra.

Leila Fadel of McClatchy Newspapers reports from Sadr City, the Shia enclave in Baghdad, where part of Muqtada al Sadr's nationalist militia is faced off against American troops.

"[Abu Youssef] returned one more time [to his little store] and asked to take the cigarettes to sell and support his family until he could come home.

"Tell him to stop coming here," Bowen said.

Bowen said he didn't feel bad for seizing Youssef's home. "They have the power to stop this shit and no one does. The power is in the people: it's always been with the people, but no one wants to stand up."

Spc. Brodie Berkenbile, 20, of Athens, Tenn., said he'd fire a sniper rifle from his rooftop if a foreign army took over. But this is different.

"We're trying to help them," he said.

US forces have now pulled into the outskirts of Sadr City, where they exchange sniper and small arms fire with Muqtada's Shia militia. American troops have been forbidden, for political reasons, to describe the enemy as al Sadr's people. Higher authority insists that they describe the enemy as "insurgents" or "special groups."

Brian Cloughley, a former UK army intelligence officer, writes about an Egyptian peddler whose boat pulled up "too close" to a [US] Navy contracted ship on the Suez Canal, and was clumsily killed--according to the AP report--"by one of the warning shots".

It doesn't matter that some poor Egyptian, trying to make a few cents by selling trinkets to people on passing ships in his country's Canal (a trade that has existed for over 130 years), is murdered by trigger-happy mercenaries. It's all part of the great con-trick, the idiot "war on terror". And it shows that the Bush-Cheney mentality is alive and thriving throughout the armed forces and intelligence agencies and among those responsible for anonymous brutal attacks which take place in Africa, the Middle East and, especially Pakistan. Members of the special forces are accountable to nobody for what they do.

Have we reached that fateful point where we are saturated with admonitions and warnings? What have we done for our soldiers, who are caught by stop-loss in Iraq and Afghanistan? Some of our professional soldiers and National Guard are on their 4th tour. They have once more been shipped back to this war, to meet occupation duties and demoralizing urban combat. If they could put the bad memories and losses behind them; they would. Where then, is the evidence that Americans support their troops?

The gist of it, is that Ahab is not interested in the petty battles of life, but rather in the grand confrontation, in pursuit of the Leviathan; certainly the wars that have come thus far do not meet his criteria of striking at the embodiment of evil, laying hands at last, on the wholeness of revenge, as the rolling sea subsides and the darkness of blood spreads over it.

But whose blood?--whose lungs washed with salt water?

STEERING now south-eastward by Ahab's levelled steel, and her progress solely determined by Ahab's level log and line; the Pequod held on her path toward the Equator. Making so long a passage through such unfrequented waters, descrying no ships, and ere long, sideways impelled by unvarying trade winds, over waves monotonously mild; all these seemed the strange calm things preluding some riotous and desperate scene.

At last, when the ship drew near to the outskirts, as it were, of the Equatorial fishing-ground, and in the deep darkness that goes before the dawn, was sailing by a cluster of rocky islets; the watch--then headed by Flask--was startled by a cry so plaintively wild and unearthly--like half-articulated wailings of the ghosts of all Herod's murdered Innocents--that one and all, they started from their reveries, and for the space of some moments stood, or sat, or leaned all transfixed by listening, like the carved Roman slave, while that wild cry remained within hearing. The Christian or civilized part of the crew said it was mermaids, and shuddered; but the pagan harpooners remained unappalled. Yet the grey Manxman--the oldest mariner of all--declared that the wild thrilling sounds that were heard, were the voices of newly drowned men at sea.

(Melville, p. 514)

TWELFTH ADDRESS TO CITY COUNCIL (Re: A Resolution To Impeach)

2008-04-16T14:15:00.002-05:00

April 15, 2008

Mayor, Council-members, I always thought there was a difference between saying and doing. . . .

I have come in these past weeks and tried to point out what seem to be outrages committed against the Constitution and the rule of law, by the Bush Administration.

Thus far, neither the mayor nor anyone on the council has challenged me on the facts I've brought before you, other than to express no interest in doing anything about it.

Suppose I'm right, and the Bush Administration has indeed violated laws or otherwise posed a threat to the Constitution? Wouldn't you be obligated to act according to your sworn oath to speak up in defense of the Constitution and the rule of law?

By not acting, by not speaking out, all of you, each of you, appear to say that you can find no violations of law, no usurpation of power by the Bush Administration, no threat or even the appearance of a threat, to the Constitution. Nothing's wrong. Everything's fine.

And you have strenuously argued that you are all people of conscience and that you take your oath to defend the Constitution seriously. . . .

Recently, the National Lawyers Guild voted unanimously calling for impeachment of the President and Vice President, citing the oath they took to defend the Constitution.

"It is time," they said, "for the legal community to rise up in defense of the rule of law."

The American Bar Association, the largest and most conservative legal arm in America, has stated that the Bush Administration has violated the FISA law in its warrantless wiretapping program.

They also called on Congress to override Bush's claim to the right to torture prisoners in U.S. custody.

The American Association of Jurists has said that the war in Iraq is not a war in self-defense, but a war of aggression, thus a violation of the U.N. Charter--which makes it a war crime. Past president of the U.N. Koffi Annan agrees.

George W. Bush himself has claimed, in written documents and public statements, that his administration need not obey the laws passed by Congress, nor be subject to judicial oversight.

But here in Fort Worth, we see no threat to the Constitution, no violations of the law.

In Fort Worth, we believe the National Lawyers Guild is wrong. The American Bar Association is wrong. The Center for Constitutional Rights is wrong. Human Rights Watch is wrong. Koffi Annan is wrong. And Britain's third most senior judge, who called Guantanamo a "monstrous failure of justice". . .is wrong.

And surely no one here would stand by and watch another human being tortured without trying to stop it. Because we're all people of conscience here.

Thank you.
The mayor was absent this day, so I mailed him a copy of the speech with this note attached:

Dear Mr. Mayor,

Sorry not to see you at Tuesday morning's meeting. I knew how sorely disappointed you would be to miss the latest chapter in my project to get you and the Council to do the right thing. So I thought I'd drop it in the mail in the off-chance that you might actually have three spare minutes to read it.

Very best wishes and regards,
etc.

ELEVENTH ADDRESS TO CITY COUNCIL (Re: A Resolution To Impeach)

2008-04-09T14:38:00.002-05:00

April 7, 2008

Diane spoke, as well, on both the impeachment issue and on gas drilling. She addressed the safety and environmental threat posed by all the urban drillers, high pressure used in the wells and the very real threat posed by the massive tons of toxic waste pumped into injection wells.

She got the Mayor defensive on gas and I guess I made him pretty defensive by questioning whether the Council has a conscience, since they refuse to move on our proposed resolution.

During the early part of the meeting, Councilman Espino referred to an event celebrating Cesar Chavez, which took place at an elementary school by the same name. I quickly inserted a phrase related to that at the end of my speech, which elicited a smile from Espino.
_________________________________________________________________

Mayor, Council members, good evening. Allow me, if you will, to recite the names of towns where conscience still resides:

Amherst, Massachusetts
Santa Rosa, California
Binghamton, New York
Detroit, Michigan
Bristol, Vermont

Oberlin, Ohio
Chapel Hill, North Carolina
Tacoma Park,
Maryland
and Stockbridge, Massachusetts—Norman Rockwell's hometown.

These are just a few of the 86 towns in the country that have passed resolutions calling for the impeachment of George W. Bush and Richard B. Cheney.

Why? Why did they do it? In almost every instance where these resolutions passed, some by unanimous vote, the reason most often put forward was simply this: Because all those council members felt that in good conscience, they could not ignore the oath they took, similar to yours, to protect and defend the Constitution.

Your collective indifference on this matter must therefore be viewed alongside those city councils whose members have followed the dictates of conscience—men and women, brave and true, who did not want history to record that they were silent on an issue of such magnitude.

The argument that this is not a local matter is simply wrong. This is a local issue. Citizens from this city may be sent or have been sent to Iraq to fight in an illegal and unjustified war. Some of our people have been killed. Others perhaps will be.

This is a local issue.

More than half our taxes--54%--now go to pay for war and military. Tax funds from this city that we could have spent here have been squandered in Iraq. Money that could have gone for low income housing, for teachers, for universal health insurance—or just to fix all the roads—a huge problem around here.

This is a local issue.

Warrantless wiretapping is happening in every city and town, including ours. A local issue.

When the President vetoes a bill that would have prevented torture, he does so in our name. So torture is a local issue.

And now, they are enlisting the same arguments and lies used to start a war in Iraq to persuade us to attack Iran. If that comes to pass, believe me, that, too, will be a local issue.

You are our most direct body to give credence to the voice of conscience. The fact that Congress has failed to defend the rule of law, the fact that other Texas towns cower in silence, does not absolve you of responsibility. If anything, it places the greater burden on you to step forward and let right be done.

In the name of our mutual hero, Cesar Chavez, I ask you to please let history show that the people of Fort Worth do have a conscience and were not silent during this profound moral crisis.

Thank you.

TENTH ADDRESS TO CITY COUNCIL (Re: A Resolution To Impeach)

2008-04-06T08:28:00.003-05:00

April 1, 2008

Mayor, Council members, I appear for the tenth time asking you to pass a simple resolution calling for the impeachment of the President and Vice President of the United States.

In my remarks awhile back, I raised the question of whether you take seriously your oath to defend the Constitution. At which you seemed to take offence. The Mayor spoke for you, so I assume you were all equally offended.

We're all familiar with the husband who loudly protests his allegiance to his wife and children, but then fails to show up when those who depend on him need him most.

And it seems to me that now is one of those times in the life of our Constitution. . . when those who have sworn to defend her can show how seriously they take that oath. Or not.

I think it's safe to say that we are in the midst of a Constitutional crisis. That's how the Watergate era is typically described, and there is no question that the abuses of power of the current regime far surpass those for which Nixon was impeached.

There's a new film now called Taxi To The Dark Side, about an Afghan taxi driver tortured to death by our military. The film has won numerous awards, including an Oscar for best documentary film. This man, this taxi driver, it turns out, was probably innocent of any crime.

The film also shows that this was no isolated incident. Over one hundred prisoners have died in suspicious circumstances while in U.S. custody during the war on terror. We know people have been tortured at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and other places around the world.

Meanwhile, on March 8, George W. Bush became the first American President to use the veto power to preserve the right to torture. And that is just one item on a list that includes warrantless wiretapping of citizens, lying to Congress and the American people, invading a sovereign country for no apparent reason.

You say you take seriously your oath to protect the Constitution, and, again, all I can say is I can't imagine a better opportunity to demonstrate the truth of that statement.

It's easy to get mad at me. The question is why you should find it so difficult to be outraged at those in high places who threaten our Constitution and subvert the rule of law.

Having said that, I wish to add that I have only the utmost respect for all of you and the work that you perform here. It's only because I happen to hold in such high regard your sense of morality and integrity that I bother to come down here at all, and why, even now, I find it so difficult to accept that this cause is hopeless.

Thank you.

copeland morris SONNET (for Becky)

2008-04-05T23:29:00.002-05:00

Fog still holds the haunted. The dull telephone
Wires didn't help us much when we tried to speak,
Years after we parted. And still, sometimes, a phrase
Begins to meet new ink; as if the Muse heard
A trumpet lower its voice to murmur your name.
The cat puts down her chin. The frost gathers
A winter, so long, since I heard your music.

Sweet Valentine, it's been so long since I froze.
A man stopped me, "Could you help me get a little
Food or coffee?" the formal bumps into the informal,
The rave, and the trumpet solo. This silence cries
For jazz in blue's city in blue's land. It needs
A message suddenly from two seagulls out of the fog,
So close you could touch them, and white, like alabaster.

BE HAPPY IN YOUR THOUGHTS

2008-03-31T16:22:00.006-05:00

My cousin, Jasper, is always sending me these diatribes based on religion. I won't say what his religion is; it's more or less liberal, I guess, but trying to have a normal discussion with him is like pulling teeth. As far as I can tell, he virtually has no opinions of his own. No kidding. He truly doesn't appear to know what to think about anything. He won't vote or participate in politics in any way. His religion forbids it, he says. It's almost like his beliefs and delusions have so clouded his mind over the years that he's finally turned into a zombie.

And this has happened to literally millions of people around the world. Millions of people, it seems, have had their brains snatched out of their noggins by the hocus-pocus of religion.

As I see it, the idea of Jesus being martyred on a cross so the rest of us can be “forgiven our sins” is simply ridiculous. Of what possible use is that to anyone? What is the point of a religion that doesn't move one to try to make the world a better place? I think of Martin Luther King, Jr., whose religion caused him to be an activist for civil rights; and the actor Martin Sheen's Catholicism, which compels him to work for peace.

I saw Sheen at a peace conference in Crawford, Texas awhile back. When he was introduced, he stood up and said, “You all know what I do for a living. This is what I do to live.” Then, he and Cindy Sheehan proceeded to hold a requiem mass for the dead in Iraq--the first real religious moment I've experienced in a long time.

Weren't the disciples proactive in trying to make things better? Wasn't their leader an activist, himself? So much is made of Jesus' birth and death, yet nobody talks much about what he did between the time he was a helpless baby and when he became helpless again as a condemned criminal on the cross. But didn't he, in fact, spend the best part of his short life advocating for the poor, the downtrodden, the hungry, for those in prison? Didn't he plea for peace instead of war in the Sermon On The Mount? And wasn't he finally put to death for challenging the ethics of the state? Isn't that the real message of his life? What other lesson is relevant for us, if not that one?

EASTER

Jasper recently dropped me a line citing, in his opinion, a certain discrepancy concerning Easter. Some 2,000 years ago, according to my cousin, the day began at sunset rather than midnight. “So if Christ was crucified on Friday evening,” he asked, “how could he have arisen on the third day?”

“Beats me,” I replied.

Curious, I did a little research and found that there is rather an intricate method for “calculating” the exact day when Jesus rose from the dead. It goes like this. First you determine when the Vernal Equinox occurs, or the first day of Spring (Between March 21st and 22nd). Then look for the next full moon. Resurrection Sunday falls on the following Sunday. Simple.

The writer on this site happily notes that this was rather inconvenient for merchants doing their annual planning for sales. But, as he says, the resurrection is one thing not determined by commerce, but by the movements of the sun and moon. So it agrees with the “divinely ordained purpose of heavenly lights as markers for times and seasons.”

Well, that sounds pretty good, but somehow, I have a feeling the merchants are doing just fine on Easter.

To me, the notion of dryly debating on which day somebody “rose from the dead” in the same way that historians might argue over, say, a timetable for the life of Shakespeare, or the last words of Robert E. Lee, seems completely removed from reality. If we accept as fact (beyond what is proven historical record) some particular detail of the Biblical epic, then, it seems to me we are in the impossible position (in which so many evangelicals and the like have placed themselves) of accepting as literal truth all the phantasmagoria, the allegories and myths of the Bible, or whatever “holy” book or prophet's version of things you've settled on as your basis.

And if we are to believe the Bible is the literal “word of God,” then surely we must accept that God really is the deranged, homicidal maniac presented to us in countless passages, from Genesis to the book of Revelations. This is a God whose ego-driven flights of anger could spell the doom of men, women, children, newborn babies, birds, cattle, koala bears, you name it. This God would put witches and homosexuals to death, approves of slavery, made a willing accomplice of Abraham in the murder of his son. He kills with plagues, boils, disease, hailstones, fire, drowning, turns people to salt—in short, uses every means at his disposal. Might as well say you believe the coldly psychotic fiend going around punching out people's brains with a pneumatic cow killer in the film No Country For Old Men is none other than God himself.

THE DEBATER

I recall my own father debating the Jehovah's Witnesses who came to his door, happily in his element, I imagine. He, too, fancied himself something of a Bible scholar, and I suppose he was. And that's good. I think it's a fine thing to know the Bible, undoubtedly a majestic and poetic book. But I don't think one should necessarily know it any more than one should perhaps know the Quran or the Upanishads or the Bhagavad Gita . In fact, I would hope one would be just as familiar, if not more so, with such books as All Quiet On The Western Front, Slaughterhouse Five and A People's History Of The United States. Surely, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn qualifies as one of the most religious books I've ever read.

I think my old Dad, bless his soul, was as “right”--and as mistaken--as the humble Jehovah's Witnesses at the door. What we have is simply millions upon millions of magical thinkers all equally convinced that they are right. . .pitted against each other. My father, getting himself up in the armor of his voodoo to do battle with the charlatans on the porch, clutching their magical book and their leaflets—what do they call them? “Tracts.” Periodically, the disagreements and bickering between this group of magical thinkers and that one breaks out into real actual war that destroys cities and maims and kills hundreds of thousands of people.

And that's what we have now in the Middle East. We have the Christian magical thinkers making war on all the Muslim magical thinkers. So, too, with Israel's nonstop aggression and slaughter of Palestinians—the basis for which may well be that passage in the “Good Book” where God hands over the land of Canaan forever to Abraham and his descendants.

And, as it happens, we just posted our four-thousandth American death in Iraq. On Easter Sunday! Imagine that. The Iraqis have lost over a million, the highest percentage of which happen to be women and children. I wonder how many of the survivors woke up Easter morning wondering which day precisely Jesus popped up out of his tomb and walked around. . . .

Happy Easter, all you Iraqi children!

THE WITNESSES

Speaking of Jehovah's Witnesses, I always enjoy talking to them, myself, as a matter of fact. I tend to get the same two black ladies appearing at my door--about three times a year. I think I've become their special project. I like them not so much for the foolishness they've stoked away in their heads, but mainly because they're so sweetly well-intentioned about the make-believe they're so determined to perform. Never intrusive, always acting with the utmost decorum and kindness. And always dressed in their Sunday best—which, for most of the people on my street would be sad weeds, indeed. And I love them for that, too.

And it's rather comforting, I must say, to have a couple of grandmothers showing up at my door who so ardently yearn to save me, even though I'm quite sure in the end, it would have to be on their terms rather than mine. And if saving me meant counting on either of them for a blood transfusion, say, then I imagine the odds of my survival in that moment would go right in the crapper.

But they're so childlike, they can't help it, I guess. It's what often happens to people who completely surrender to their delusions. They're just not as deceitful or as cunning as the rightwing Evangelicals.

Another reason I like them is because I happen to know a little about their history. The Witnesses historically have suffered terrible abuse at the hands of mainstream religions in this country, including mob violence and lynchings. So I can't help having a special sympathy for them, as I tend to have for the underdogs.

Thus, have they come by their belief in church/state separation by hard experience, which deserves high praise in this day when it seems like all the religious nuts are doing their best to infiltrate our schools and our government. Just recently, we were treated to the spectacle of a presidential candidate suggesting we should change the Constitution to bring it more into line with “God's standards.”

God's standards. . . .

* * *

I always smile brightly at the two ladies and welcome them to my door. I usually offer tea. I reflect back to them all the love they seem to be beaming at me. And they always look a little sheepish when I smilingly remind them how important it is to get out and vote in the next election, and that I still believe in science and Darwin's Theory, rather than the goofy pseudo-science of “Creationism.”

Only, I leave that last phrase unstated, of course.

MAMET IS A LIBERAL NO MORE

2008-03-24T23:39:00.006-05:00

It would be more tolerable for the rest of us on the left, if playwright David Mamet had snarled like Christopher Hitchens, when the moment came to defect to the right wing. But we only feel a light breeze of urbanity and complacency. The high emotion of an apostate would still be jarring, but not as unsettling as this.

But Mamet reckons that the facts have changed--and he feels that he is one to change with the times--and what is untoward now is being a "brain-dead liberal". And no, he hasn't passed liberalism and gone further to the left, like Harold Pinter, one of his colleagues in the theatre.

For Mamet, the society we live in is just fine, on balance; and the liberal mind exaggerates the corruption prevalent in government, and the so-called evils the nation has committed, and the exploitative habits of business, which are blown out of proportion by a liberal's faith. He is comforted himself by the idea that the liberal nonsense about people being generally good at heart is well and truly nonsense.

Mamet has learned that it's good to be successful; and it's no skin off his nose that the haves are better off than the have-nots.

What is so disillusioning about the defection of this man who wrote Glengarry Glen Ross, is what my friend r'giap writes:

a living art is about remembering so deeply you cannot forget the present & understand all the implications of the future

so when a david mamet turns--he has only to turn his vest as the french would say. a real playwright worthy of that name--harold pinter, the scenarist, dennis potter & the writer john le carre & the great edward bond have moved so far to the left that they make me look like a liberal.

What so astonishes about Mamet's essay "Why I Am No Longer a Brain-Dead Liberal" is the lightness of the tone, the glibness in parts of it, with its aftertaste of complacency.

Here is the language the playwright uses to describe his epiphany:

These cherished [liberal] precepts had, over the years, become ingrained as increasingly impracticable prejudices. Why do I say impracticable? Because although I still held these beliefs, I no longer applied them in my life. How do I know? My wife informed me. We were riding along listening to NPR. I felt my facial muscles tightening, and the words beginning to form in my mind: Shut the fuck up. "?" she prompted. And her terse, elegant summation, as always, awakened me to a deeper truth: I had been listening to NPR and reading various organs of national opinion for years, wonder and rage contending for pride of place. Further: I found I had been--rather charmingly, I thought--referring to myself for years as "a brain-dead liberal," and to NPR as "National Palestinian Radio."

This is, to me, the synthesis of this worldview with which I now found myself disenchanted: that everything is always wrong.

[...]

I found not only that I didn't trust the current government (that, to me, was no surprise), but that an impartial review revealed that all the faults of this president--whom I, a good liberal, considered a monster--were little different from those of a president whom I revered.

Bush got us into Iraq, JFK into Vietnam. Bush stole an election in Florida; Kennedy stole his in Chicago. Bush outed a CIA agent; Kennedy left hundreds of them to die at the Bay of Pigs. Bush lied about his military service; Kennedy accepted a Pulitzer Prize for a book written by Ted Sorenson. Bush was in bed with the Saudis, Kennedy with the Mafia. Oh.

I have to stop and take a breath here, at the place where Mamet so glibly makes an equivalence between JFK and George W. Bush. What first comes to mind is a famous line by the poet William Blake:

A fool sees not the same tree a wise man sees.

But in this case it is worse. The fool covers his eyes and cannot claim to see the tree at all.

I don't know if Sorenson wrote the damn book or not; but I do know that Mamet's comparison of Kennedy and Bush is trite, and obscene right down to the roots. Bush was strung out, while in the Air National Guard; it wasn't JFK who got so coked up that he couldn't pass his physical or perform his military duties. JFK had roughly a thousand days in office and sent a relatively small number of troops into Vietnam. George Bush has sent a huge force, 130,000+ into Iraq, completely destroying that country, and has thus far, killed about a million people. The phrase "Bush was in bed with the Saudis" functions as a figure of speech; and unfortunately Kennedy was literally in bed--not with the Mafia--but with women who were, in point of fact, in bed with Mafia dons. The Kennedys were the enemies of the Mafia. The big military escalation in Vietnam didn't come until after President Kennedy was assassinated. What have I left out? The ballot boxes Mayor Daley controlled in Chicago? A little amateurish compared to Jeb Bush's fix at the state level in Florida, and a conspiracy wired all the way up to the Supreme Court.

Mamet has rationalized the truth away; and the worst, most insidious falsification, is to equate the outing of CIA agent Plame to the Bay of Pigs. The outing of Valerie Plame--let us remember--functioned as a pre-meditated obstruction of justice; and its object was to derail any investigation of George W. Bush's major crime against peace, which,--until a greater horror comes along,--is America's biggest contribution to the Crimes of the Century. And insofar as the Bay of Pigs is concerned, history records that the CIA criminally misinformed the President about "the facts on the ground" in Cuba. And then, when things went wrong on the beaches,--something the Agency had discounted,--those Agency spooks tried to strongarm the President into making a commitment that amounted to a really dangerous and costly escalation of war. The CIA was acting like a rogue then, trying to finesse its own agenda over the better judgment of the President.

In a hostile world where the privileged class feels especially threatened, Mamet admires those marvelous young men and women who protect the privileged. Imagine yourself having a conversion experience like his, after which your hatred of corporations will turn into pure love.

And I began to question my hatred for "the Corporations"--the hatred of which, I found, was but the flip side of my hunger for those goods and services they provide and without which I could not live.

"Aha" you will say, and you are right. I began reading not only the economics of Thomas Sowell (our greatest contemporary philosopher) but Milton Friedman, Paul Johnson, and Shelby Steele, and a host of conservative writers, and found that I agreed with them: a free-market understanding of the world meshes more perfectly with my experience than the idealistic vision I called liberalism.

And thus it was that Mamet saw God. And the man became as a prophet. And Mamet saw a Wheel away in the middle of the air. A Wheel within a Wheel. And the Little Wheel runs on faith. And the Big Wheel runs like the Chicago School of Economics.

DEBATE

2008-03-16T09:40:00.005-05:00

"If Barak was a white man, he would not be in this position. And if he was a woman, he would not be in this position. He happens to be very lucky to be who he is. And the country is caught up in the concept."
--Geraldine Ferraro

An exchange of emails between me and Benny the firecracker salesman regarding Geraldine Ferraro's comment that blew up in the press, causing her to resign from the Clinton campaign.

Hey, Benny,

What's up? I thought about what you said at the bookstore last night about Geraldine's stupid comment. I still tend to think she's being racist, here. She went on FOX News the next day to defend her remarks and made them again--this time, I suspect, to a more receptive audience. She made exactly the same statement in 1988 about Jesse Jackson in his run for President. So Geri's been down this road before. There's a sort of pointlessness to it which characterizes all racist language and behavior, because it focuses on just this one aspect of the person (in this case, skin color), to the exclusion of all their other traits. So if she's not being racist, why can she only think of that one thing to say about the person running for high office? And why does it come out sounding so critical? In this day and age it's about as relevant as saying that John McCain is in this race because he's white. The correct response is "So what?" Ferraro thinks of herself as a nice modern liberal woman, but underneath, there's a little dark stain of bigotry that she just can't wash out no matter how she tries to spin it.

--G.

Benny's Response:

I tend to avoid self-satisfied, overbearing Yankee ladies. Neither Ms. Ferraro nor Hillary would be impressed with me. I'm proud of that. Ferraro's comment has the ring of factual commentary, however. The thing is that it was thoughtless to spout to the media because the aftermath was inevitable. The response is the same as when she commented on Jesse Jackson and it will be the same if the old bag lives long enough to utter it concerning another black presidential candidate. She did not say he was in because he was black. She said he was lucky. She said the country, the kids, the college students, the activists, were enthralled by a black that talked, behaved, and had everything in common with a Sierra Club-Oprah Winfrey-style male person. We like our own selves for finding a black person we can back for President of the United States. We're ok. We're decent liberal people and here's the proof that we're alright. We're endorsing and voting for a Negro for President. It's new, it's kind of a cult, and we love it. You saw it at the Fort Worth Convention Center. That's why new voters are joining in like never in history. And I goddamn well hope we can elect the Jaycee-acting rock-star bastard because it appears we're just too fucking stupid to do any better. Additionally, if he were to suggest a real black leader, like Cynthia McKinney (who does her Presidential campaigning at the Spiral goddamn Diner) as his Vice-Presidential nominee, his race for the Presidency would end before nightfall. So, yeah, he is, in fact, lucky to be where he is. Being smart won't get you there. Remember Kucinich, and Gravel, and Richardson, and Edwards? Pray for peace.
--Benny.

To Benny:

Well, maybe so. What's funny--if you go back and look close at what Geri actually said, she said: "If Barak was a white man, he would not be in this position. And if he was a woman he would not be in this position. . . ." Hm. Hillary Clinton is a woman (I think), and, uh, she's in this position. So why isn't Ms. Ferraro making the same statement about Hillary that she made about Barak, only perhaps with some slight variations?--i.e.--"If Hillary was a man, she would not be in this position. If she was a black woman, she would not be in this position. If she was a black man (blacker than Barak), she would not be in this position. If she was a man and her first name was Bill, she would not be in this position." And so on. I'm sure there's even more possibilities for John McCain, such as, "If John McCain wasn't a decrepit old white man, he would not be in this position. If John McCain hadn't sung, "Bomb, bomb, bomb Iran, he would not be in this position." And so on. Make up your own.

--G.