Wage Laborer

Agribusiness

2012-01-17T10:44:00.000-08:00

Beauty pagaent contestants frequently respond, when asked what they dream of, "I want to feed all the little children of the world." More likely, they dream of a modeling contract, followed by a movie career.

Monsanto also proclaims its desire to feed all the little children of the world. More likely they just want increased profits on its way to controlling all the genetic plant material of the world.

A governments main concern should be the welfare of its people, and the protection of basic needs should be number one. Food is one of the most basic needs, along with air and water. In the last 30 years, our government has turned from protecting our ability to feed ourselves, and has also attacked the ability of people around the world to feed themselves. Although there are 4600 calories of food per person, per day, produced now in the world, a billion people go hungry. Obviously, Monsanto is not the solution, since the problem is not food production, it's food distribution.

Even before fossil-fueled agriculture, farmers grew more food than was needed to feed the people. Michael Pollan points out that excess corn grown in the 19th century was turned into whiskey, leading to very high rates of alcoholism in early America.

In the previous Great Depression, farmers produced more food than they could sell, while people went hungry. The government stepped in with a price support program, including paying farmers not to grow crops on marginal or environmentally sensitive lands. Food prices were kept high enough so that farmers were not driven bankrupt, while any excess was stored for future needs.

Farm policy changed when Nixon was president. Earl Butz, his Secretary of Agriculture, encouraged farmers to grow as much as possible, telling them to plant hedgerow to hedgerow. The new policy gave payments to farmers based on how much they grew. The more they grew, the more they were paid. Earl Butz also told them to get big, or get out. The new policy, coupled with Paul Volcker's high interest rates in the 80s, led to hundred of thousands of farmers losing their land, Farm Aid concerts notwithstanding. Farmer suicides soared, and there were occasional murders, although the phrase "going farmer" never caught on the way "going postal" did.

Now, less than 1% of Americans are farmers. 75% of the billions of dollars of farm subsidies go to the top 10%, including "farmers" in New York and San Francisco, who own the land in the Heartland that actual farmers farm. People like David Letterman, David Rockefeller, Scottie Pippen, Charles Schwab and the Walton heirs all receive farm subsidy checks.

What does overproduction of food mean? What effects does it have upon America and the world when 6,000 daily calories of corn for every American is produced?

The effect on the environment of the 40% of the world's corn grown in the US starts with massive amounts of herbicide dumped on the Monsanto Liberty-linked and Round-up Ready corn. Coupled with the fertilizer which leaks into the underground water and rivers of America, this already created a massive dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, south of where the Mississippi River flows, before the BP/Halliburton oil spill.

Americans can't possibly eat 6,000 calories of corn a day, so most is fed to animals, who are kept in cramped and horrendous conditions in CAFOs, which is animal abuse on a massive scale. The waste the packed together animals produce, which should be a source of fertility for the land, becomes an air and water pollutant, instead. Not only do the animals lead a miserable life, so do the humans who live near the concentrated confinement camps. Nine billion animals are killed yearly for food in the US, so that a people who used to think chicken every Sunday was high living now eat dead animals for every meal, usually deep fried in corn oil. High frutose corn syrup is added to almost all processed foods, and to the sodas which have gone from 8 oz. to 20 oz. over the past decades.

The result? Obesity rates in the US have skyrocketed, along with the rate of diabetes. 75% of Americans are now considered either overweight or obese. It is interesting to see that farm subsidies are never mentioned as the source of the 500% increase in obesity since 1975. As with the skyrocketing unemployment rates, individual Americans are blamed. Just as no one ever asks why 20 million unemployed Americans became "lazy" in the last 10 years, when globalization increased the numbers of factories moved out of the country, no one ever asks why so many Americans lost their willpower when the farm subsidies started. Instead, they are sternly lectured on healthy food choices.

Americans don't eat all of the surplus, of course. The rest of the overproduction is burned in cars or shipped overseas.

The effect of NAFTA on Mexico is instructive. In 1995, one year after NAFTA, Mexico imported 30,000 tons of pork, rising 25 times, to 811,000 tons by 2010. That means that 4,000 Mexican pig farms went out of business. Corn imports rose from 2 million tons to over 10 million tons.

The rate of poverty in Mexico rose from 35% to 50%, and millions of Mexicans were pushed off the land. Many went to live in the slums of Mexico City, but millions came to the US, where they went to work on our farms and slaughterhouses. In 1990 there were 4.5 million Mexican born people living in the US. By 2008, there were 12.68 million. Their increased numbers are used to divide the working class of the US, and to increase support for decreased freedom of movement for us, along with calls for Big Brother-like biometric IDs for all, to be handed over on demand to the new Homeland Security employees.

Our slaughterhouses became more cruel, as the nine billion animals to be killed were brought to fewer slaugherhouses, and the assembly killing lines sped up. Workers were injured by the speed-up and tales of animals not yet dead being boiled or skinned alive spread.

The story is the same across the globe, as US economic and military might is used to force countries to open up to US farm products and Monsanto seed. Monsanto now supplies 25% of the world's seed, and they are using all their power to prevent peasants from doing what peasants have done for 10,000 years, save seed for next year's planting.

When the US invaded Iraq, the cradle of civilization, the birthplace of agriculture, one of the edicts forced upon that country was that Monsanto was turned loose to sell seed yearly to the farmers.

It is estimated that in India, every 8 hours a farmer commits suicide, frequently by drinking a bottle of Roundup, the Monsanto product that drives farmers into bankruptcy and despair.

In South Korea,opening Korean markets to cheap foreign imports devastated Korean farmers. Since the 1995 Agreement on Agriculture, Korean farmer debt grew four-fold to approximately $30,000, forcing millions off their land and into poverty. In 1970, farmers made up 44.7 percent of the Korean population. By 1995, only 11.6 percent were farmers. It was a South Korean farmer who killed himself in 2003 at the Cancun meeting of the WTO.

Haiti was self-sufficient in rice production 30 years ago, and now relies on cheaper imports, resulting in the same story: peasants forced from the land and into the cities, where they provide a cheap labor force for US multinational corporations.

The Earth now has 7 billion people crawling over its surface, with, for the first time, more than half of them living in cities, instead of the country.

Are these former farmers drawn to the big cities for a chance to live out their dreams of living in a loft and exploring their artistic sensiblities? No. What are called "mega-cities" are actually enormous open-air slums, with people crowded into shacks built from scraps in cities such as Mexico City, Lagos and Jahkarta.

The story is similar all over the world. The last 30 years of neo-liberalism, gone into high gear after the collapse of the Soviet Union, with the New World Order proclaimed by the first Bush, which was the triumph of imperialistic capitalism, with the WTO and GATT agreements turning sovereign governments into signing agents for multinational corporations to take over economies.

As much of the remaining undeveloped world,( which is code for the last of our remaining original planetary ecosystem), is razed and turned over to plantations and farms using genetically modified organisms, we humans, who evolved in the Holocene era, with its mild climate and diverse biosystems, are facing disaster.

Monsanto is the poster child of evil corporations, with its drive to monopolize the genetic material of all food plants on Earth, and its salesmen, lawyers and goons making life miserable for so many farmers around the world. But it's not the only one.

Either we break the control of the corporations over our lives, and the lives of all other species on our planet, or we, and they, perish.

Spiritually Dead

2012-01-16T09:54:00.000-08:00

"A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death". Martin Luther King, Jr - April 4, 1967

45 years later, we have reached official spiritual death. When the official voices of the United States of America openly celebrate and justify torture, assassination, unprovoked aggression, endless war and prison without charges or trial, when the ruling class breaks laws with impunity while the working class is imprisoned for owning plants or other trivial offenses, then we have reached spiritual death.

When Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke, the US still pretended to believe in the rule of law, elected officials tried to avoid appearances of impropriety, there were very few lobbyists on Capitol Hill, and the President called for a Great Society, in which the poor would be uplifted. There were about 500,000 Americans in prison. Now there are over two million. In the 90s, millions were thrown off welfare, and now they are going after the safety net for the elderly.

Now the President only speaks of the "middle class", while cynically appointing bankers to his cabinet, including the new Chief of Staff, who bet against homeowners during his time at Citibank.

I heard a speech by the ex-president of Amnesty International. He said that people asked him how he could continue day after day, while being overwhelmed by the evidence of torture around the world.

Because, he said, history is never over.

Yes, they told us in the 90s that history was over, and the US had won, and there was now a New World Order, in which the US reigned supreme and would forever rule all the peoples of the world. And, for good measure, space.

And yet, history has moved on, and the US has turned on its own people now.

We need a rebirth of values. We need to start talking again about peace and justice and freedom, We need to talk about economic democracy and how to build a great society without oppressing or killing other people or the ecosystem.

We need to talk about living more lightly on the planet, without destroying the surface on which we evolved to get to the last bits of fossil fuels, and minerals. We need to live on what we have, even if it means changing the American lifestyle.

I know that Dick Cheny said that the American lifestyle was untouchable, but he's wrong. Anyway, how many Americans can fly on private jets to kill animals in Texas, Alaska and Wyoming, and then fly to Europe for lunch? Oh, that's right. 1%.

How many Americans can shoot someone in the face without repercussion? OK, the police, but only when they're on duty.

We can make a better world. Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke for a more just society, but he was one of many people.

Langston Hughes was a great African American poet, and he spoke for a better America-

Let America Be America Again
by Langston Hughes

Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed--
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.

(It never was America to me.)

O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.

(There's never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this "homeland of the free.")

Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?
And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?

I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery's scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek--
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.

I am the young man, full of strength and hope,
Tangled in that ancient endless chain
Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!
Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!
Of work the men! Of take the pay!
Of owning everything for one's own greed!

I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.
I am the worker sold to the machine.
I am the Negro, servant to you all.
I am the people, humble, hungry, mean--
Hungry yet today despite the dream.
Beaten yet today--O, Pioneers!
I am the man who never got ahead,
The poorest worker bartered through the years.

Yet I'm the one who dreamt our basic dream
In the Old World while still a serf of kings,
Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,
That even yet its mighty daring sings
In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned
That's made America the land it has become.
O, I'm the man who sailed those early seas
In search of what I meant to be my home--
For I'm the one who left dark Ireland's shore,
And Poland's plain, and England's grassy lea,
And torn from Black Africa's strand I came
To build a "homeland of the free."

The free?

Who said the free? Not me?
Surely not me? The millions on relief today?
The millions shot down when we strike?
The millions who have nothing for our pay?
For all the dreams we've dreamed
And all the songs we've sung
And all the hopes we've held
And all the flags we've hung,
The millions who have nothing for our pay--
Except the dream that's almost dead today.

O, let America be America again--
The land that never has been yet--
And yet must be--the land where every man is free.
The land that's mine--the poor man's, Indian's, Negro's, ME--
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.

Sure, call me any ugly name you choose--
The steel of freedom does not stain.
From those who live like leeches on the people's lives,
We must take back our land again,
America!

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath--
America will be!

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain--
All, all the stretch of these great green states--
And make America again!

Pay No Attention to The Man Behind the Curtain

2011-12-22T14:19:00.000-08:00

The media is in full damage control mode. Who are these people in the Occupy movement who insist on pointing at the 1% as the source of our economic problems? How dare they talk about economic inequality!

This is not the way the ruling class prefers to run the show.

We are meant to be distracted by the puppets, and pay no attention to the puppeteers.

And the latest puppet show is in full swing, with weekly debates, fully televised and commented on, by the Republican wing of the corporate party.

While many people fell into their assigned roles of arguing about relative stupidity of the participants in the race, or laughing at the gaffes made in the debates, others refused to play, and turned their attention to the worsening circumstances of the majority of people in this country.

This must scare the ruling class. Sure, the Occupy movement is made up of peaceful people, but what about the Tea Party?

Observers have commented on the lack of concern showed by the police about armed Tea Party protesters, while Occupy people have been attacked, beaten and arrested.

What if the Tea Party people turn their anger from individual politicians and toward those who buy them?

The fear of that is driving the media push to deflect the attention of Americans back toward the politicians. Listen to the talking heads and it becomes very clear.

The military detention law just passed by Congress serves to turn the anger back to the politicians, and also to setup a framework for destroying any organized movement that may develop as Americans become more and more impoverished. They've got it covered!

Military Detentions

2011-12-22T12:11:00.000-08:00

From: "They Thought They Were Free", a book written in 1955 by an American who interviewed Germans after the war-

"What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.

"This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter.

Nazism gave us some dreadful, fundamental things to think about—we were decent people—and kept us so busy with continuous changes and ‘crises’ and so fascinated, yes, fascinated, by the machinations of the ‘national enemies,’ without and within, that we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing, little by little, all around us. Unconsciously, I suppose, we were grateful. Who wants to think?"

The manipulation of the people has progressed so much since then, and yet, the process remains the same.

We, too, receive news of deliberations made in secret, that we cannot know the details of, because of "national security". We are watching as groups are targeted and demonized by mass propaganda, which is swallowed by the unthinking and the fearful.

And this technique of keeping people busily arguing about trivia while the main problem goes unchallenged is used with great effect.

I first really noticed it after the announced death of Osama Binladen, earlier this year.

The first announcement was so unbelievable that even the most gullible found it hard to swallow. They finally found the man for whom they have been searching for 10 years! But then they killed him and then they threw his body in the ocean. What?!!

I was amazed at how few people believed this the first day, including people I would have thought would believe anything they were told.

But then the flak started. He fought back, he didn't fight back, he hid behind his wife, he didn't, he was asleep, he was awake, he was a coward, he was brave, Obama watched the murder on TV, no he didn't, Pakistan knew he was there, no they were embarrassed because they didn't.

Soon, the media and the people were busily arguing about the details of the supposed mission, and forgot to question the main points. Was it really Osama? If it was, why wasn't he brought back for questioning and a trial? Should the SEALS involved be prosecuted for war crimes, for summary execution?

The new law to codify the illegal practices of the past decade, the indefinite detention of accused people, without evidence, charges or trial, aroused great opposition from Americans.

I had right wingers who usually don't speak to me come up and tell me how outraged they are by this law.

So, Obama threatened to veto the bill, and liberals calmed down. That is, until youtube video started circulating of Carl Levin explaining that the White House had been the ones to insist that Americans be included in the act.

Then they voted on whether to take out the part targeting Americans. It failed. Then they voted to put in language saying that the President didn't have to obey that part of the law if he didn't want to. That passed.

Then Obama delayed signing the Act.

By this time, most people are so confused that no one can organize against the bill, because so many people think that it's no longer a problem.

Mission Accomplished.

As a very interesting part of the theater, Leon Panetta, Secretary of Defense, and General Petraeus and others spoke against the bill. Why?

During the Egyptian uprising earlier this year, I emailed my Egyptian friend (who lives in the US) and asked him what was going on. He replied that he didn't know what was going on in Egypt, but he did know that top Egyptian generals were meeting at the Pentagon.

And then the military refused to shoot the protesters, and gave them rides on the tanks, and the protesters hugged the soldiers, and gave them flowers and proclaimed that they were part of the uprising. How beautiful was that?

And then Mubarek stepped down and the military took over, and victory for the protesters was announced, and they basked in the adulation of the world for their peaceful victory, and the protesters left the plaza, and went home to start living in their new military dictatorship.

Whoops! Now they are being shot down in the plaza by the military instead of the police.

The propaganda continues, however, bizarrely enough. They get Time Person of the Year, and they give advice to the Occupy Wall Street protesters, just as if they actually had won, and were not being shot down. Amazing.

So what was the point of our national "security" apparatchiks testifying against the detention bill?

Was it to make us feel all warm and gooey inside about our principled top members of our repressive apparatus? Gosh, the evil Congress may pass this law, but we can be assured that our military will never enforce it. Our soldiers are the good guys, even when they're kicking down doors of civilians in other countries. So they would never kick down doors in this country. That's up to the civilian SWAT teams. That's how free we are.

More from "They Thought They Were Free" -

"And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can’t prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don’t know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, the end? On the one hand, your enemies, the law, the regime, the Party, intimidate you. On the other, your colleagues pooh-pooh you as pessimistic or even neurotic. You are left with your close friends, who are, naturally, people who have always thought as you have.

"But your friends are fewer now. Some have drifted off somewhere or submerged themselves in their work. You no longer see as many as you did at meetings or gatherings. Informal groups become smaller; attendance drops off in little organizations, and the organizations themselves wither. Now, in small gatherings of your oldest friends, you feel that you are talking to yourselves, that you are isolated from the reality of things. This weakens your confidence still further and serves as a further deterrent to—to what? It is clearer all the time that, if you are going to do anything, you must make an occasion to do it, and then you are obviously a troublemaker. So you wait, and you wait.

"But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.

"And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jewish swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way."

Ptokemin Party

2011-12-03T09:16:00.000-08:00

Last night was my 19th year of attending the Holiday Party. When I moved here, I was shocked at my new job, the low pay, the lack of holiday and sick time, the expensive health insurance and the attitude that management had towards the employees.

But the party made up for some of that. What a blast! $5 a ticket, with great food, an open bar and a disc jockey for dancing the night away.

New management (with a WAY worse attitude toward labor) came a few years ago. First, the party stopped serving any alcohol except beer and wine. They changed the disc jockey.

But this year, they announced that the entire system would combine their parties. And instead of being held in the college ballrooms, it was held in an aluminum pole barn (the "convention center") in a town 12 miles away.

No alcohol for the first two hours, and then one free drink, followed by a cash bar.

We got there a 6pm. I walked in, and it took me a minute to realize that the droning voice over the microphone was praying, which explained all the bowed heads. We never had a prayer at the old party. I was looking for the food. After the prayer, the food line formed and it was incredibly long. But gone were the platters of shrimp, fresh vegetables and dip, chicken wings and other tasty finger foods, lavish desserts, and white coated men carving roast and ham. There were two casseroles, one with chicken and one without. There were green beans, carrots and potatoes au gratin. The food was served on plastic plates which quickly burned your fingers, so you had to leave a space to hold it, instead of piling it with food. There were no desserts, just another long line for the candy bar, where you took a little box, and they filled it with leftover Halloween candy bars.

The first two hours were supposed to have a video on Hospital Heroes, followed by dancing at 8pm.

My husband and I left out of boredom, planning to return after the corporate propaganda. But when we came back at 8, it was still(?) going on. Or maybe it started then. I was afraid to ask, because there was no one there that I knew, and I didn't want to get fired for asking. One of the announcers of the Hospital Heroes asked who was sexier, the CEO or the Human Relations head, and someone yelled out "Neither". The announcer said "You just lost your job". How funny was that? At least, I assume it was a joke.

My husband pointed out that this was a lot like the US economy. You still had a party, but the food was worse, you had to pay for things that used to be free, and you had to listen to religion and propaganda that you never heard before. It was austerity in action. Sadly, the new employees didn't know the difference. I've never had the experience of seeing passenger pigeons fill the sky, and they have never been to a fun holiday party.

I said, it's worse than that. You see all these people? We are all paid to keep people alive who the ruling class doesn't really see any value in. When Obamacare kicks in, and Medicare and Medicaid are cut, so are these people's jobs. Liberals made fun of the guy holding the sign that said, "Keep your hands off my Medicare", but he was inadvertently right. They are taking funds that went to Medicare and giving it to private insurance companies.

The money that went to Medicare actually goes to me and my co-workers, not to the elderly or poor themselves. They are the cardholders that enable us to bill the government.

So, although I deplored the austerity of this party, I know that there probably won't be any more parties in future years. Or, if there are, there won't be as many people attending.

America Under Attack

2011-11-29T07:44:00.000-08:00

200 year old towns in New England washed away, Joplin blown away, New Orleans drowned. East St Louis, Detroit and many more looking like Dresden after the firebombing of WW2.

Entire mountains blown to bits. Toxic lakes that kill any birds landing on them. A massive dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, even before the BP/Halliburton oil spill. Ranchers who live near fracking operations with water that catches fire, and a plan to do the same for the millions of people who live on the East Coast. Massive amounts of farmland depleted of topsoil and poisoned with herbicides and pesticides. Plans to drill for oil in the last great remaining wilderness of Alaska.

The Bill of Rights gone. Police breaking down doors, killing dogs, arresting citizens and confiscating four billion dollars worth of personal property a year. Police tasing, pepper spraying, and beating protesters. People being sentenced to decades-long sentences for small crimes, while rich criminals roam free. Americans subjected to ID checks, porno scanners and gropings. Every American treated as a potential criminal and terrorist.

One out of five American children living in poverty. Millions of homes empty, while millions of people are thrown out of their homes. People living on the streets, in their cars, in the woods. Food stamps cut.

TV talking heads whipping up hysteria at potential enemies overseas while our country is destroyed by those who profit.

What enemy can destroy land, water, air, the atmosphere, communities, civil rights, and living conditions and go unopposed by the majority of Americans?

Parts of America look as if they've been bombed. Thousands of Americans are internal refugees.

Yet the class war continues. And most Americans don't even notice.

The End of Consumerism

2011-11-23T15:55:00.000-08:00

I know that I just wrote about Americans and their stuff, and my Facebook friends are divided between those decrying consumerism and pushing for Buy Nothing Day, and those ready to spend Thanksgiving night in the parking lot at Best Buy, but, actually, the decision to decrease American consumerism has been taken out of our hands. Or our consciences.

I read an interesting Citibank prospectus, from a few years ago, telling investors that there was no money to be made in selling to so-called "middle class" (actually workers with higher wages or salaries) anymore. They're calling it the hourglass theory, with the very rich able to afford goods and services, and the very poor able to afford only a little, and no one really left in the middle.

It's like the old joke where the kid is selling lemonade for $100 a glass, and someone tells him "You're not going to sell much lemonade that way, son". And the kid says "I only have to sell one!"

Luxury items are selling well. Cruise lines are advertising to the rich now, and not so much catering to the buffet-eating masses. On the bottom part of the hourglass, Dollar General is doing well. One woman was quoted as saying how much she preferred Dollar General to WalMart, because she didn't have to dress up to go there.

And now Time magazine has made it official. I quote from the Oct. 31, 2011 edition, which lays it out in Time's usual cheery fashion - "If successful, the shift to consumer spending will take a good chunk of the weight of the global economy off the shoulders of American consumers and make China a gotta-be-there market for everything from video games to surgical tools to potato chips".

Let me translate that. Americans no longer make enough money to interest capitalists looking to sell consumer goods. Or health care items. As if the insurance companies we're going to be forced to pay tribute to are actually going to pay for surgery! No, out of 7 billion people on this planet, there are enough elsewhere to keep profits flowing without the participation of US consumers. So, bye buy!

And if we all switched to a simpler lifestyle, the way my family has been doing for years, (Live simply, so others may simply live), it wouldn't be so bad.

I mean, shoes that light up when you walk? Cards that sing when you open them? Four-wheelers? Disposable everything? All ending up in the landfills, polluting the water supplies?

But, as usual, the cutbacks are spread unequally. More and more people are living in tent cities, students are preyed upon to put them into eternal debt, and 21% of American children live in poverty. (Because we're a child loving nation!)

I'm hoping that the OWSers don't start petitioning the 1% for a return of a wider section of the US population to the resource wasting consumption of the past.

We live on a finite planet, with finite resources, much of which we've already wasted. We need to move forward, not back to the US version of the late 20th century.

Forward to a sustainable population living in harmony with each other, and the ecosystem on which we depend.

Private Property

2011-11-22T10:49:00.000-08:00

Americans love their stuff. We think of ourselves as a consumption based society. McMansions, fancy cars, tricked-out phones, shoes that light up, trinkets and baubles galore. We have shopping channels, and malls, and credit cards, to make sure that we can always get more stuff.

Without mention or notice, however, this is changing. Many Americans have lost their big stuff, like houses, and are reduced to hoarding the little they have left in shopping carts, or stashed under a tarp in a corner of a vacant lot. Still, the things they have left mean a lot to them, and it devastates them when cops come in and destroy or discard their possessions.

The protesters in Zucotti Park were outraged when cops came in and destroyed their encampment, trashing tents, sleeping bags, books, and whatever else they could get their hands on.

US cops confiscate four BILLION dollars a year in US citizens' cars, real estate and cash.

Americans lose their land to road widenings, and the Supreme Court has upheld the taking of private personal land for private corporate profits.

But when I bring up the idea of the corporate death penalty, people are appalled! Take away property from the rich, even if they've killed people? This is considered unthinkable by the average American.

Before the Civil War, people who advocated abolishing slavery were considered radical. The economic worth of four million slaves was a lot. To just take all that money away from slaveholders seemed outrageous to some.

But abolitionists kept on. Interestingly, there were a lot of people who were also fighting corporate power before the Civil War.

But now, most people consider slavery to be outrageous, and corporate power untouchable.

Sure, corporations are laying millions of people off, control our governments, and most other countries' governments, kill people with their processes and their products, and are destroying the planets' ecosystem.

But even aware people who realize all of this are afraid to advocate the abolition of corporations. They want to end corporate personhood, or use taxpayer moneys to fund elections (i.e., use public money to pay corporate media for attack ads), or some other wimpy solution that falls short of the needed transformation of our society.

If a corporation commits a criminal act, it should get the death penalty and its assets turned over to its workers, to be owned and controlled by the workers, with responsibility for its actions.

A country that throws citizens, (real human beings) into prison for stealing bicycles or pizza slices should not flinch at rescinding corporate charters for poisoning of water supplies or murder.

Mass hysteria is whipped up at "terrorists" who ponder the feasibility of putting arsenic in a town's water supply, but a corporation that poisons the water supply of millions is allowed to continue.

USS Titanic

2011-11-18T08:29:00.000-08:00

The greed of the 1% baffles most people. The 400 richest Americans own more than the bottom 150 million combined, yet most of the bottom 150 million Americans would be happy with economic security. While they may dream of winning the lottery, a good-paying job with a house and a car are all they really aspire to.

But multiple mansions and cars and private jets and private islands don't seem to be enough for the insatiable rich. What character defect drives them? How can they justify taking from people who have almost nothing, in order to add to their inventory of expensive belongings?

The USA is sinking,like the Titanic, but in very slow motion. We have been sinking for 30 years, but even the people in steerage have managed to stay alive. Sure, they had to tread water, but the leavings from those above them have kept them alive.

But now those in the cabins above steerage are starting to sink. They are outraged! Why are they being treated like steerage? This is wrong! They always thought that they were right up there with the first class people, just not paid quite as much.

But the first class people are cutting off the crumbs for all, causing so much turmoil that even the corporate media remarks on the surges.

What keeps the Titanic afloat? The inflated bubble, they tell us.

So the rich are using the last bits of wealth that the steerage has to keep their parts inflated. They must keep taking from those below them, or they will sink with us. It's as if our drowning screams are the air they need.

They position the police and the military between us and them, enforcing their power to take.

Even some of the police and military are starting to realize that they will be cut loose when their usefulness is through, but, like everyone else, they're hanging on to the sides of the lifeboats as long as they can.

But, as George Bush said, this sucker is going down.

The Cradle of Democracy

2011-10-19T17:01:00.000-07:00

Greece's Parliament has voted in more austerity measures, so that the workers may pay off the loans the ruling class took out. Greeks are striking and rioting, while their police attack them.

The US has multiple cities with Wall St. protesters occupying public spaces. Some are allowed to stay, while police attack others. With no trace of embarrassment, Hilary Clinton lectures Syria on the importance of allowing free speech and public assembly.

Meanwhile, the corporate media desperately tries to interest people in next year's election, giving endless airtime to the Republican candidates for the Presidential race in 2012. Just who will get the Chief Puppet position nomination? How exciting!

And Hilary Clinton gives a press conference sternly lecturing the Libyan people on how to have a democracy, while warning that some voices will not be tolerated.

The majority of Americans want out of Iraq and Afghanistan, want to raise taxes on the rich, want to keep Social Security and Medicare, want to more on education and less on war, want a single payer health care system, and more.

What do we get, in this shining example of democracy?

War, homeland repression, unemployment, evictions and bank bailouts.

It is now obvious that millions of Americans don't believe that pushing a button every 2 years has anything to do with democracy, defined as self-rule.

Apparently, neither do the Greeks, the British, the Portuguese, or many others.

Poor Libyans. After going from the poorest country in Africa to the richest, raising their life expectancy, having food, housing and education readily available, they now get "democracy". No, not the people's councils that Qaddafi pushed, the purple-fingered variety that they get until they are all properly processed, fingerprints and DNA collected for their IDs. Then they can show their papers before they vote for NATO approved candidates, and their democracy will be complete.

On to Iran!

2011-09-13T09:51:00.000-07:00

We, the people of the US, have just been through the most over-the-top exercise in self pity imaginable. Perhaps we could be excused for the days after September 11, 2001, for indulging in grief and righteous indignation. The horror of watching people die in New York City upset even Americans who usually pour abuse onto New York. The blowing up of the buildings was a spectacular show, and very few people questioned just how that show was produced, at the time.

But now, after 10 years of the US bombing, maiming, ethnically cleansing, murdering, terrorizing, blowing up buildings, driving into exile, deforming the babies and killing the livestock of the people of Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and others we don't yet know about (as Rumsfield would say, the known unknowns), now we have the nerve to indulge in an mass orgy ofbathos, complete with light shows and solemn speeches and monuments. To remember one day? Ten years of murder and destruction versus one day? 3 buildings versus thousands? 3,000 people versus over 1,000,000?

Jeez, can any people be more clueless or lacking in perspective or empathy?

And, to explain how the original show was produced, watch this video from Architects and Engineers for 9-11 Truth.

London Burning

2011-08-09T13:59:00.000-07:00

We hear a lot about our Anglo Saxon heritage and culture. It's usually to point out the superiority of our legal system to one, say, of stoning adulterers to death.

As we watch England burn, though, it's wise to recall that part of our culture is a propensity to violence.

It's been England who has stood by the US as we bombed, killed, kidnapped and tortured our way through Central Asia, the Middle East and North Africa in the last decade alone. Sure, England is a junior partner, not given to the excesses of the US, but-still.

A young woman, hiding in her apartment in London, has this to say about the cluelessness of her ruling class-

No one expected this. The so-called leaders who have taken three solid days to return from their foreign holidays to a country in flames did not anticipate this. The people running Britain had absolutely no clue how desperate things had become. They thought that after thirty years of soaring inequality, in the middle of a recession, they could take away the last little things that gave people hope, the benefits, the jobs, the possibility of higher education, the support structures, and nothing would happen. They were wrong. And now my city is burning, and it will continue to burn until we stop the blanket condemnations and blind conjecture and try to understand just what has brought viral civil unrest to Britain. Let me give you a hint: it ain’t Twitter.

Parts of our population have 40%-50% unemployment and have been living in poverty for years, recently joined by more and more of the formerly employed. Now our ruling class has decided that the paltry benefits that the American working class (including the unemployed) have must stop.

What do they expect to happen?

Well, because the US now has a military command assigned to it, and because the police have been militarized, and the nastiest in each police force taken for special training, (as one of our local police said "I get to wear black pajamas and kick down doors"), because Homeland Security has dossiers on millions of Americans, and enormous prisons are being built, and new "non-lethal" weapons developed....I'm guessing that our ruling class is not clueless about what will happen.

They're ready.

No Joking Matter

2011-08-09T08:18:00.000-07:00

Saturday night I was at a party with a bunch of intelligent, good-hearted liberals.

One of them told a joke about Bush. He dies and goes to heaven, but is stopped at the pearly gates and told that he must preview heaven and hell, and then choose which one he wants. He says that of course he wants heaven, but St Peter insists on him following the rules.

So he goes down to hell and there are Cheney and Rumsfield, driving around a golf course, drinking and carousing with women. Bush refuses a drink, but they tell him "You're dead now, George. You can drink again".

Then Bush goes to preview heaven. The pearly gates open, and there are a bunch of nice people sitting around listening to classical music on NPR.

"Well", says Bush. "I never thought I'd say this, but I want to go to hell".

So they send him back, and there is fire and brimstone and people screaming in agony.

"Hey!" says Bush. "Where's the golf course and the booze and the women?"

"Oh", says Satan. "That was just the campaign!"

We all laughed heartily. Then I said, "That joke would work even better with Obama!"

Instant hostile silence. Then the hostess asked me what I could possibly mean by that.

Gosh, just that Bush never promised much, but Obama did. You know, Obama promised peace, rule of law, openness, the end of torture, prosperity, and the end of a government for the rich. Instead, the torture continues, the wars have widened, secrecy prevails and whistle-blowers are prosecuted, war crimes go unpunished, and Obama prescribes austerity for the working class and subsidies to the rich. Really? I have to explain this?

That's when I noticed the framed Obama poster on the wall.

Oops!

End of the Republic

2011-08-03T09:26:00.000-07:00

Congress voted yesterday to give up its budgeting power to a Super Committee, 12 members who will be picked for their belief in small government.

Ha, ha, just kidding. They will believe in a massive military, increased Homeland Repression, and more prisons added to the gulag that already imprisons more people than any other country in the world.

They just don't believe in a strong sovereign government which represents US citizens, instead of multi-national corporations, and which provides for the common welfare. Chris Floyd sums it up very well, in his post "If the republic had not died a long time ago, this would indeed be the death of the republic".

If you actually read the Constitution, that short document which is easily contained in the booklets that Congresspeople wave in the air while legislating against US citizen's interest, Congress has almost all of the power in government. The only duties that the President really has are to enforce the laws that Congress passes, and to give a speech to Congress yearly. And to command the armies if Congress declares war.

Congress has already given up the power to declare war. That power has been taken over by the President, wielding the incredible death dealing apparatus of a massive standing military. The power to raise an Army, and pay for it (but for no more than two years) was also given up by Congress.

The power to coin money and regulate the value of it was given up long, long ago.

Here's a duty of Congress - "No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law; and a regular Statement and Account of the Receipts and Expenditures of all public Money shall be published from time to time."

Where's the amendment that says, "except for the black budget"?

So this appointment of 12 people to be more equal than the others is just one more step down the slippery road of oligarchy.

But it's an amazingly big step. They are giving up the power to raise revenue, and to decide how the revenue should be spent. The more equal 12 people will decide those questions, and the only thing the rest of the 435 representatives can do is to approve it or not.

I've quoted Lily Tomlin before "No matter how cynical I get, I just can't keep up".

I have agreed with Michael Hudson and Glenn Greenwald, that this entire artificially suspenseful debt ceiling theater was a way to attack social spending for US citizens.

Obama even threatened to withhold Social Security checks for the elderly, the disabled, and orphans, even though Social Security is funded separately from the federal budget. Not even Bush or Cheney ever sunk that low!

But I wasn't cynical enough to realize that this power play would go far enough to further strip Congress of its powers.

I just can't keep up!

Terrorist Attack in Norway

2011-07-22T11:15:00.000-07:00

Breaking news is that Norway is undergoing multiple terrorist attacks, of unknown origin.

The US announces that Norway doesn't have strong enough "security", and that is why they were attacked.

On September 11, 2001, I turned on ABC News to watch the coverage of the terrorist attacks.

I watched for one hour, and then a talking head (whom I did not recognize, and I don't remember his name) announced that the reason that the US was attacked was that we were "too free" and that that was going to change.

I turned off the TV in disgust. The US too free? What a crock!

The loonies were coming out.

But now I see that the man was prescient. Of course he was. That was the plan all along.

Now I know that the 9-11 attacks were carried out by US operatives, with the intention of scaring the American people into accepting homeland repression and military aggression.

I am willing to bet that the Norway attacks are being carried out by US operatives, with the intention of scaring the Norwegians into accepting homeland repression and buying US tools of oppression, such as the Michael Chertoff pornoscanners, and police weapons.

Update : Glenn Greenwald points out that Norway resisted and refused to go along with calls (including from the New York Times) for greater repression in Norway.

Two Americas

2011-07-03T10:23:00.000-07:00

Observers have pointed out that there are two Americas. One - an educated, latte-drinking, Prius-driving, NPR listening kind and gentle people. The other - an ignorant, Bud-light drinking, pick-up truck driving, Rush Limbaugh-listening rough and violent people.

My new neighbors moved in a few months ago. My husband was at the fence introducing himself to the male, and I came up to be friendly.

My husband kept asking the man if he was attending the local college, and the man kept ignoring the question, while salivating over our billy goat's well-hung testicles and powerful build, asking unseemly questions about his potency and violent behavior. I felt like interrupting my husband by saying "Of course he doesn't go to college, you unobservant, NPR-listening man! Quit asking!"

Today, my neighbor has been blowing up fireworks for a solid two hours, freaking out my animals, and getting on my last nerve. Where the hell does an unemployed person get the money to buy so many fireworks?

Oh. Wait. I'm an American. My country is broke, but still manages to terrorize people all over the world by dropping explosives onto them. No expense spared, even if we have no money. My neighbor is simply aping his rulers.

When the US first invaded Iraq, they dropped bombs on Baghdad day and night, 24 hours/7days/week. The expressed plan was to break the Iraqis will by psychologically terrorizing them.

It had the desired affect on one family with two teenaged girls. The mother told of the girls shaking, covering their ears and screaming, unable to take the stress anymore.

So the father, mother and the two girls got into their car and headed out of Baghdad, looking for a quieter safer place.

They came up to a checkpoint. The father was an engineer, and had gone to college in America, so he knew English. He got out of the car to explain to the soldier about his terrified teenagers.

The soldier blew him away, and then turned and shot up the car, killing both girls and wounding the mother.

When I heard this story, I realized that the Iraqi had only met nice Americans in his college years. He thought that he could reasonably explain his situation, and the American would listen and respond in a rational manner.

Unfortunately, he met one of the other Americans. Some low-life rough kid, who decided that joining the Army was a morally acceptable way to make money, since his morals were lacking.

I heard the story from the mother's viewpoint.

I wonder about the soldier's. Did he take pictures of his kill and post them online? Or did he realize the horror of what he had done and kill himself when he got home, as so many soldiers have done?

We live in an insane society, where murder is glorified and kindness is ridiculed. It's a tribute to stubborn human values that a small portion of the country resists the constant mantra of death worship we are subjected to, and holds onto decency.

I salute Decent America.

Too Late

2011-06-01T07:52:00.000-07:00

I quoted Martin Luther King, Jr. in a previous post, in which I talked about the American police state and its perpetual wars.

"We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked and dejected with a lost opportunity. The "tide in the affairs of men" does not remain at the flood; it ebbs. We may cry out desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is deaf to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residue of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words: "Too late"."

Liberals are fond of predicting the future "end of our democracy". This seems absurd to me. Our ruling overlords clearly have no interest in what we think, or the way we want them to vote. Elections have been a farce for years, with two corporate selected candidates duking it out on TV, with the outcome of no more significance to our real lives than the outcome of the Super Bowl. Now that votes are "counted" by computerized machines, the announced vote totals need have no relation at all to what buttons the voters actually pushed.

But we are exhorted to get out there and push so many buttons that they can't steal the election! Seriously? Do these people not know how computers work?

But the structure of our society is a subset of our environment. The only thing that truly matters to our lives is that we have enough food and water to stay alive. All the rest is superfluous.

Scientists tell us that if we don't stop dumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere "soon" we will be past the point of no return.

Soon? 3 weeks ago, we had almost 2 feet of rain in 10 days, leading to widespread flooding. Last week, we had tornadoes. Today it is 90 degrees outside. Meanwhile, the South is suffering through a drought.

Last year, Australia flooded and Russia burned. Polar bears have been drowning for years.

What do they mean- soon it will be too late?

The reason we are here is because Cyanobacteria changed our atmosphere. Before them, there was only 1% oxygen in our atmosphere. They took the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and turned it into 21% oxygen, through photosynthesis. The effect of trillions of bacteria upon our planet was immense, leading to life as we know it.

Of course, it killed off most of the anaerobic bacteria. We still have some around, but they have it rough, needing to stay away from oxygen. Tetanus, botulism and gangrene are all caused by anaerobic bacteria, which flourish when provided with an oxygen deprived environment.

So when people tell you that we puny humans can't possibly affect our vast planet, they are very wrong.

And I think that it might be too late.

That Is Not Who We Are

2011-05-07T03:20:00.000-07:00

Obama refuses to release evidence that Osama is dead, saying "That's not who we are".

Damn straight!

When Bush announced that a man in a cave in Afghanistan orchestrated an attack on the United States of America, the most powerful country in the world, shutting down any military response, exploding 3 skyscrapers into concrete dust and literally striking the heart of the military-industrial complex, the Pentagon, the head of Afghanistan offered to turn the man over for justice.

He meant a trial. Bush, the arrogant swaggering cowboy, refused. We don't need no stinking evidence for no stinking trial!

Our trillion dollar military may not be capable of defending the United States, but, by God, we can blow up goat-herders, brides and children gathering firewood! We can make the abode bounce when we destroy families' houses in tribal societies. And, just for good measure, we can invade an industrialized society, pulverize not just three, but hundreds of buildings, destroy water, sewer and hospital facilities, and kill a million people, and drive millions more from their homes.

Americans were so disgusted by Bush that we elected a professor of Constitutional law as President.

Surely a law professor would know that bringing an accused man to justice would mean arrest, an open trial with evidence presented and scrutinized, deliberation by a jury and a verdict. Surely a law professor would know that in America, a man is innocent until proven guilty.

Nope. The smooth-talking lawyer, like his stammering predecessor, prefers murder to trials. "Justice" means assassination.

We've come full circle, as the media tells us. The unbelievable story of a man in a cave shutting down the biggest military on the planet and imploding skyscrapers, ends with the unbelievable story that, after searching for ten years, the US found him and chose to go shoot him in the face and dump his body in the ocean.

And when skeptics ask for proof, the President, after doing a victory lap (but not a football spike), at Ground Zero, tells us that we don't need no stinking proof.

That's not who we are.

Big Daddy Fails Us

2011-05-05T08:02:00.000-07:00

Although the President takes an oath to support the Constitution, after 9-11, "everything changed".

The Constitution, a goddamned piece of paper, was overthrown by the Patriot Act, the Military Commissions Act, and countless Presidential decrees.

But, as Americans were wiretapped, strip-searched, finger-printed and treated generally as potential "terrorists", we were assured that it was all done to "keep us safe".

George W. Bush presented himself as our protector, as some sort of Father figure, bizarre as that may seem to anyone who actually had a decent father. He continually announced that his role as President was to keep Americans safe.

And Obama came in, took his oath of office, and also promptly disregarded it, the new boss being much like the old boss.

But now, the media is warning us that the hit on Osama has made us less safe, that we must increase our internal repression, accept torture without reservation, and kill even more people in other countries, because the "terrorists" will strike us again, in reprisal.

So what happened to keeping us safe? What happened to the "I spend every minute thinking about ways to protect Americans?"

If they knew that announcing an assassination would put us at risk, then why do it?

I question their sincerity.

Mafia State

2011-05-03T09:32:00.000-07:00

Major General Smedly Butler pointed out years ago that the role of the US military was that of a hitman for capitalism.

But surely we have now reached new heights, with the President bragging about successful hits, mass media discussing them without a hint that they may be illegal, and the actual throwing of a body into the ocean! What is this, an episode of the Sopranos?

Even the Mafia didn't brag about their murders. They had the decency to pretend that they were not involved.

Obama "takes out" (more Mafia language) Ghadaffi's son and three grandchildren on Saturday, and then claims to "take out" Osama Bin Laden on Sunday. Quite a weekend for Murder, Inc.

The media plays their role of swallowing the story whole, and then regurgitating their appropriate talking points. Democracy Now focused on the "blowback" theory, in which "terrorist" attacks are payback for US imperialist deaths abroad.

Fox News openly cheers. Vengeance is ours, saith the bimboes.

But. My right-wing Christian co-worker made a point of telling me yesterday that she didn't believe the story Obama and the media were spinning. My liberal Obama-supporting friend didn't believe it either. And a African-American family that were in the ER told me that they didn't believe it either.

Well. That's a pretty wide-spread sampling of opinion, albeit in one small town.

Is it possible that the Obama puppet and his handlers have jumped the shark? Gone too far?

Unfortunately, Harper's Index points out that there were 164 episodes of Happy Days after the one in which their credibility legendarily was blown.

US imperialism has a few episodes left in it, I'm guessing.

What is the point of this announcement, at this time? It certainly can't be an election stunt. That would be an October 2012 assassination.

No. This is something else. I no longer feel qualified to predict with any certainty what the ruling class has in store for us, since I've guessed wrong in the past.

But, since all media is spouting variations on the line of "al queda is going to get us" in revenge, I'm going to guess another "terrorist" attack on US soil. That part isn't too wildly speculative, since you can tell what they want you to believe when all media spouts the same line.

But then what? Here's my wild speculation. The US has used war to get out of economic depression in the past.

The US is in deep economic trouble, and its creditors are starting to bail. There is a due date coming up in June.

The conclusion I draw is that the US will start a massive war rather than default. But I could be wrong.

Things Up With Which We Will Not Put

2011-04-23T08:39:00.000-07:00

Let's get this straight. Wall Street speculators gambled with home mortgages, running up trillions of dollars of collateralized debt obligations. Millions of people lost their houses.

Americans were unmoved. They shouldn't have bought houses that they couldn't afford when the mortgages went up.

Wall Street speculators gambled with wheat and rice commodities, leading to widespread hunger and food riots in 2008. Americans paid no attention, even to reports that Haitians were eating mud. Serves them right for living in poor countries.

But Wall Street speculates on oil and the price of gas goes up? Outrage! Even President Obama is moved to make stern noises!

Never mind global warming. Never mind peak oil. Never mind the 50,000+ dead in car crashes a year, the dead bodies along all our roads, the air pollution, the urban sprawl.

Americans have a right to cheap oil!

It's blood for oil, right? That's the bargain? And we've spilled plenty of blood, so where's the cheap oil?

My Planet

2011-04-18T09:38:00.000-07:00

I know that I called this planet a lovely jewel floating in an immense universe, but, after the storms last Friday, I have to readjust.

A mind-opening author introduced me to a different way of looking at the "5 billion year history of Earth in one day". I'm sure we're all familiar with the basic plot. The Earth is formed and the day starts. Nothing interesting happens until the last minute, when humans arrive.

That's a little egocentric! Let's look at the rest. A boiling ball of hot lava, eventually cooling, and forming land, involving earthquakes so massive they break apart continents and land smashes into other land so violently that massive mountains are formed. And then, occasionally the planet is slammed by meteors from outer space, throwing massive amounts of debris into the atmosphere.

And then there's the weather. Watching satellite pictures of hurricanes is pretty impressive. Massive movement of air and water, slamming into the ground and blowing everything in its path. And the tornadoes! Swirling winds over 100 mph, moving over the land and picking up and tossing anything that gets into its way.

But, lived experience as a human on this planet, in my alloted nanosecond of time and nano piece of space, is that Earth is a beautiful green place, with blue skies and oceans, and bountiful life. I expect the ground to remain solid under my feet, even though I have lived through 2 massive earthquakes. I expect rainstorms to stay outside of my house, although I can see on TV that that doesn't always happen. I expect things in outer space to stay in outer space. And when I look outside and see the immense power of a storm, I am shocked and afraid, but convinced that it is only temporary.

Otherwise, I'd be a quivering mass of protoplasm, hiding in a hole in the ground, awaiting disaster.

The Troubles in the Middle Kingdoms

2011-02-22T13:13:00.000-08:00

The uprising in Egypt is followed by the uprising of besieged labor unions in Wisconsin. People are eager to make connections and equate the two, but they have different causes.

The Egyptian uprising in Tahir Square was a classic "People's Power" celebration of the replacement of one ruling class puppet for another. You can tell that the US was ready to back a new puppet by the corporate media coverage of the events. They made it look like a spontaneous uprising, not in any way influenced by the typical CIA Color Revolution program. It's always inspiring to see millions of people coming together in collective joy to celebrate the end of a murderous dictatorship. Unfortunately, they often don't notice that the new boss is the same as the old boss, and the powers that select the figureheads remain in place,

Our version of that was the exciting Election Day, 2008, and the joyous Inauguration Day of 2009, when the Washington Mall was packed with ecstatic people cheering the end of the Bush-Cheney era.

Heck, most of the world was celebrating. Even the Nobel committee was inspired enough to give the new President a Peace Prize, which he accepted, and then gave a speech in which he gave a Just War defense of American militarism.

When the Egyptian uprising began, I asked my Egyptian Facebook friend what was going on. He replied that he didn't know, but that Egyptian Army generals were at the Pentagon, at that very minute. Hmmm.

Then we got stirring pictures of the Egyptian Army soldiers refusing to fire on the protesters, and protesters riding on tanks. How inspiring! But odd, unless you want to make a guess what the Generals were told at the Pentagon.

Then we are told that Mubarak was going to make a speech in which he would step down. Hallelujah! But just how did corporate media "know" what he was going to say?

But he didn't go along with the announced script. He said that he was planning on staying until the elections in September and that no foreign power could change his mind. Hmmmm.

And then he disappeared. The next day his vice-president appeared and announced that Mubarak had changed his mind. But where was he? They told us that he flew to a resort. Or that he was in a coma.

Whatever. The TV switched to the dancing crowds in the streets, busily celebrating the military takeover of the government. (Although, as Chomsky pointed out, the military has been in control for decades).

And then the military announced that the Emergency Laws would be lifted as soon as possible. But not now. And that strikes were prohibited, and that people needed to leave the Square, because the revolution was over, and everything was OK now.

And most of the people did. Just like in the US, while Obama continues Bush policies of war, torture, (hey, how's that Guantanamo closing coming along?), government secrecy, hand-outs for the rich and cut-backs for the poor, and even re-opens Bush policies that failed - the most obvious being attacks on Social Security-there are still millions of Democrats who blindly accept these policies as tolerable, as long as the President claims to be a "Democrat", instead of a "Republican".

The same thing happened in the Eastern European countries, the first to have People's Power revolutions. Once the party was over, a whole lot of people missed their guaranteed jobs, houses and food. Now some of them have had their own IMF riots. It turns out that punching a ballot every four years doesn't actually give you a lot of say over your life. How about that? About half of voters in our country remain stubbornly sure of the same thing, refusing to vote no matter how much pro-voting propaganda is aimed at them.

So what, then, is the uprising in Wisconsin, if not a People's Power revolution?

Well, it's the American version of the IMF riot, the expected revolt of the people when faced with cutbacks, privatization of public property, layoffs, and more, to pay for the debts run up by the wealthy.

Here's a quote from "The Sorrows of Empire", by Chalmers Johnson, about Argentina, and its IMF riot.

"By 2002, Argentina held the unenviable record of having accumulated the largest amount of public debt by any single country in history-some $160 billion. Its national income shrank by nearly two-thirds in the space of a year; more than half of its largely middle-class population found itself living below the poverty line; and no politician of any orientation dared appear on the streets for fear of public lynching.

The IMF agreed to help the Argentine government meet its debt service payments and then made exactly the same mistake it had in 1997 in East Asia. As a condition for its loans, it demanded an austerity budget that involved firing large numbers of government workers, cutting pensions, reducing wages, and eliminating fringe benefits. Rioting and a fierce police reaction brought the country to a standstill. In December 2000, the IMF provided nearly $40 billion to Argentina on the condition that the government continue to pay foreign debts by intensifying its squeeze on the poorest elements of the society. No government could meet these terms and avoid revolution. Argentina went through five governments and six economic ministers in

fourteen months, but the IMF decided that the country was still not being tough enough and was, in any case, of little strategic importance to the United States. It therefore pulled the plug, and refused to supply any more loans. Double-digit monthly inflation resulted, the peso fell ion value by 220 percent, and social order collapsed. Argentina, once the most prosperous country in latin american, became a basket case-thanks to neoliberalism, globalization, and the IMF."

This being the American version, there is craven acceptance by the workers of the "need" for cutbacks, and the focus turns to peripheral concerns. In this case, the right of collective bargaining. Of course, it's important, but one of the things it's needed for is to protect workers from wage cuts and give-backs! What good is it to have a union if you all agree to the corporate agenda?

The public workers meager demands remind me of the Republic Windows workers, who occupied their factory. Unlike their Argentinian counterparts, they did not operate it as a cooperative. No, they simply demanded what was DUE to them under the LAW, and it was hailed as a great victory when the owners paid them what they were owed! Pitiful!

We'll see if Mr. Johnson was right and "no government" could withstand revolution when cutting out social spending and attacking workers.

This is America! We are brainwashed to hate on command, and it works on our fellow citizens as well.

Welfare mothers, prisoners, homeless people and minorities have been hated for years. The campaign against teachers, prison guards (ironically) and other public workers has just started, but is coming along swimmingly. (The prison guards, of course, are not being attacked for their brutality to the caged, but for their sick time and pensions).

We'll see what develops, as more and more people lose everything.

No Patient Left Behind

2010-12-20T13:50:00.000-08:00

Clear Skies, Healthy Forests, No Child Left Behind, Health Care Accountability - gosh, our ruling class gives us so many wonderful things!

I started working as a nurse in 1979. At the time, it was a fairly good job. The pay was about equal with other blue collar jobs, like factory work and construction.

Then the attack on unions started, and out-sourcing blue-collar jobs began. In the meantime, medical care became big business.

So, now we have nursing paying more than other blue collar jobs, what there are left of them.

What is to be done?

For a few years now, there has been a concerted effort to get more young people educated as nurses. Articles in the corporate media, "news reports" on TV, advertisements everywhere, even Jon Stewart had a segment on the "need for nurses".

And, as we've been flooded with eager new nurses, ready to work for almost half our pay, we older nurses have been increasingly threatened with being fired. My old supervisor told me that she was under a lot of pressure from her immediate boss to get rid of her experienced nurses and hire new grads. She was resistant, arguing that an ER should be run by people who know what they're doing, but they made her life so miserable that she quit.

Now we are told that the new "health care" Act calls for cuts in Medicare to hospitals which don't perform up to standards.

Well, who could be against that? It's like children not learning in school. Surely we want good health care, just like we want our children educated.

How's that No Child Left Behind thing working out for you? Is all our children learning now? (As Bush would say).

That's what is coming with hospital care. They are going to base Medicare pay, on which most hospitals depend, on core measures.

Some of them are worthwhile, like making sure that heart attack victims get aspirin promptly, and making sure that people with pneumonia get antibiotics.

But there also is a Press Ganey part. There is a corporation that mails out cards to patients and asks them to rate their care on a 1-5 scale. Then they grade the hospitals on a curve, based on the responses.

So, just like schools are continually expected to improve their scores ( a mathematical impossibility), hospitals which fall below others will have their funds cut off.

And hospitals can turn around and blame their nursing staff for the problem, laying off whomever they choose. (Hmmm, I wonder who that will be?)

More and more hospitals will close, lowering the cost of medical care, since more and more people will go without.

And nursing wages will be forced down to every other blue collar worker's wages, just a couple of decades after the rest.

Conversation with a Non-Racist

2010-12-15T22:03:00.000-08:00

I walked into the utility room and four of my co-workers, ER techs, were there.

Two were doubled over with laughter, one was sputtering, and the other had a pained, but game, smile on her face.

What was so funny? The one co-worker had walked into the room and announced loudly - "I'm tired of being the nigger around here". Which the two convulsed in laughter found wildly inappropriate, since the fourth co-worker was in the room, and she is African-American.

I expressed mild disapproval, and "D", the first one, explained, in her defense, "I didn't mean "nigger" in a bad way. I didn't mean Black! I meant that I'm treated like a pack mule around here".

My Black co-worker kept smiling, but it looked more strained. Luckily, her shift was over, and she got to go home.

Later, D came out to explain herself further to me. She again said that she didn't mean "nigger" in a bad way, not as a term for Blacks.

I said that she actually used it in a revealing way, that she was acknowledging that Black co-workers were treated with disrespect and asked to do a lot of work.

"No!" she said. "I've heard all that 'victim' stuff. I don't believe in that. That's bullshit."

I again pointed out that the way she used the term had justified the "victim" label.

She became agitated and told me to look up "nigger" in the dictionary. I would find that the dictionary definition of "nigger" is "low-life", not black person.

I refused. We don't have a dictionary in the ER, but I actually am quite sure that if the word is in the dictionary, it won't be defined as "low-life".

(Another of my co-workers, in 2008, informed me that Obama and Clinton, then running against each other in the primaries, had both voted in the Senate to make English a second language in the USA. I challenged that statement, and she told me she read it in the Congressional Record, and I should look it up. I didn't do it. Sometimes you just don't have to).

But here's the kicker. After we discussed it a little more, "D" said "I'm not racist. My best friend in high school was black. And I didn't like it when people insulted her. We're all just people".

Taxing my Patience

2010-12-09T12:07:00.000-08:00

The farce being played out by Obama and his Merry Band of Cowardly Quislings, in which they pretend to be helplessly tied down by the Republicans, Present and Future, is too much for me to take.

How can people swallow this bullshit? Isn't it getting to be a bit much?

In order to give a pittance to SOME of the millions of unemployed Americans, they must fork over $700 billion to the very rich? No other choice? The Big Bad Republicans who are coming in January made them do it?

And Obama plays his stance as a populist standing for the little guy? This is why people call him a Republican in Democratic clothes - because he's shameless!

Let me go all Warren Buffet on these fools.

Tax me. Go ahead. Take my $300 a year, if it means restoring the Clinton era tax system.

Or, better yet, bring back the Eisenhower tax rates, when the top rate was 90% and corporations paid 49% of the taxes.

Or. Let's get real. People only care about high taxes because they are told that taxes are the reason that their incomes are dropping.

They can't do anything about their wages, or risk losing their jobs to China, or one of the unemployed. Every year insurance costs go up, but the choice is pay it, or lose it, so a lot of people pay it.

They still believe that they live in a democracy, so they feel that the only way to increase their income is by lowering taxes.

We are lied to without shame. Obama, who appointed a commission to "reduce the deficit" which conflated Social Security and the Federal Budget, then turned around the very next week and shamelessly added $700 billion to the Federal Deficit by making a deal with the ruling class to extend the tax cuts.

AND - they are selling it as a way to improve the economy!! The economy which has had said tax cuts for the last 10 years and has deteriorated to Great Depression depths!

Social Security is not part of the Federal Budget. You can look at your own paycheck, if you still have one, and see this.

There is Federal income tax withheld and there is FICA withheld.

The Federal tax is nominally "progressive" and the rich are supposed to pay more.

The Social Security tax is a flat tax, paid only by the poor, and their employers. Anyone making more then $106,800 doesn't pay ANY Social Security tax on the excess income. And on my paycheck, it's almost as much as the Federal tax, already.

So, here's an easy fix. Raise the damn federal withholding tax, as scheduled.

But make the SS tax cover everyone! As a flat tax, the way the right wingers want.

And stop taxing more than is paid out, as they've been doing since Ronald Reagan cut the income tax and raised the SS tax, using the excess to cover his expenses. They have been using money collected for Social Security not just to pay to the elderly and disabled, but to prop up the Federal budget, promising that the money would be repaid later.

Except that now that we're getting close to having to pay it back, they don't want to do it. So they lie and say that the money owed is not owed. So quit collecting it and loaning it! If a deadbeat announces that they aren't going to pay you back, why would you keep loaning them money?

If the Social Security tax were levied onto everyone, and it was only used to pay for current expenses, then we could LOWER the tax rate and still cover everyone, thereby increasing take home pay for workers, which is all we care about anyway!!

Simple solution, but the ruling class will not even let it be discussed.

The Vietnamese War Against Trivia

2010-11-14T15:27:00.000-08:00

Last night I participated in a trivia contest, the proceeds going to the local homeless shelter and food bank.

The announcer's first announcement was that last Thursday was Veteran's (really Armistice, but I'm sure that's a piece of trivia he didn't know) Day. He asked all the veterans to raise their hands so that we may honor their sacrifice, since they fought so that we could be here tonight.

Really? We had a Vietnam vet at our table, long an anti-war activist, and editor of the local Peace newsletter. What a surprise it was to him to find out the REAL reason the US invaded, bombed, napalmed, and Agent Oranged that small country, killing 3,000,000, poisoning millions more, (including babies still born with horrible birth defects ), torturing and herding into concentration camps civilians, did I leave anything out?

Those damn "gooks" were trying to prevent us from playing trivia!

And no doubt the terrorists have the same goal!

The lionization of veterans is more meaningless ritual, like voting, but the purpose of the mandatory genuflection is the legitimization of war and military participation. Even anti-war people feel pressure to bow and "support our troops".

Bullshit.

They don't support the Viet Vets Against War, and they don't support the Iraq Vets Against War. Look at what happens when our heroes speak out or demonstrate against war.

All of a sudden, they're no longer heroes.

I'm pretty picky too. I only support veterans that have repented and now are against war. Like Smedley Butler and the Iraq veterans against war.

The smug, self-righteous veterans who feel no sorrow or shame for what they've done most certainly do not deserve any honor or respect.

Tribal Passions

2010-11-05T12:34:00.000-07:00

So an atheist anarchist walks into a bar in Texas. No, really, I did.

It was a piano bar and a fun time, packed with drunken people singing with and swaying along to the music of beloved pop songs.

The piano players (2 of them) tried to stir us up even more by talking about football teams. Please! I am way too intellectually advanced to care which pack of overdressed mesomorphs trample the other to victory.

Then they tried to wave the militaristic Fort Hood flag. Please! As a kind and loving citizen of the planet Earth, I am opposed to the US plan for military domination of other peoples.

Then they divided the bar into two halves, and announced a singing contest - judged solely by volume.

There I was - singing as loudly as I could so that my side could beat those dirty bastards on the other side of the bar!

How fricking easy it is to manipulate we humans by emotion and tribalism.

I was the same way during the election.

Intellectually, I know that the system is rigged, the media biased, the voting machines preset.

But I still got all caught up in the excitement of my Green tribe going against those bastard Demopublicans!

And I'm still mad that they used the system to stomp us down. I am bitter that my fellow citizens, here in my homeland of Dumbfuckistan, are unable to see through the lies and hype that we are constantly fed. I feel that we will never overcome the ability of the ruling class to play us for fools with their advanced and efficient propaganda machine.

We are like the dissident yeast in the vat of tasty sugary barley and hops, saying "Hey, slow down the party! We're going to eat and reproduce ourselves into poisoning our environment!"

How's that working out for us?

Meaningless Rituals

2010-10-30T20:28:00.000-07:00

Happy Samhain!

There was a time that I felt a certain sanguinity about pagan customs that we follow today. I felt as if The Man couldn't totally stomp us out, that we would prevail, if only through stubbornness.

I was amazed when a Nigerian co-worker said something and then "knocked on wood". Wow. An ancient custom which survived the annihilation of it's original followers, transplanted to another whole people. Cool?

Not so much.

Two of my co-workers claim Trail of Tears ancestry. Why the hell would the Trail of Tears even go through Southern Illinois? Hello - people from the Deep South, Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana, going to Oklahoma, for some reason strolling through Southern Illinois? But it's true - they did go here, herded on the death trail by pre-Blackwater mercenaries.

Here's the way one of my co-workers describes her great-great-grandmother - she was a toddler whose mother died on the Trail of Tears and "they" left her by her mother's body, where she was found crying by a Christian minister and his wife, who adopted and raised her. She was Indian, but became Christian and spoke English, and married a white man, so she was OK.

Who was this "they" that abandoned the toddler? My co-worker blames the other Indians, but people being herded by mercenaries are not exactly free to follow their traditional practices. Her emphasis on her ancestor speaking English and being Christian show the shame that many Native people have been taught since the genocide. Those who assimilated frequently show shame for their ancestry.

So what about me? I know that my Dad was born in Northern England. I know that many of England's invaders came from the mainland, invading the South, pushing the original inhabitants to the North.

Who am I descended from? I don't even know. Am I a descendant of the Druids, pushed to the North, and forced into Christianity? Or a descendant of the invaders, whether Norse, or Saxon, or Franco, or Roman, or whatever?

Here we are, on Halloween, still acting out the old customs, long after the original practitioners were murdered and tortured into submission. Dressing up in scary costumes, lighting fires, going door to door, all meaningless rituals, still being played out, but without purpose.

And three days from now, we do it again, on "Election Day".

Candidates give speeches, news reporters remark upon them, people go to the polls and make a mark for who they choose to represent them.

But it's all meaningless ritual. Speeches are now soundbites, reporting is superficial, and voting machines make the marks totally divorced from tallies. No more ballot box stuffing, it's as easy as pushing a button and getting the result preordained!

But we all pretend that our rituals have meaning, especially the voting one.

Celebrities encourage us, statesmen exhort us, TV pushes voting continually.

Tellingly, they never tell us who to vote for. THEY DON'T CARE!

It's the turnout that legitimizes their system. That's all they care about, here and abroad, if you notice the "news" coverage of other elections. A big turnout, a purple-fingered groundswell, that 's what they like. That's why the 2004 election, with people waiting 9 hours to vote for Kerry, was considered a "triumph of democracy", even though the person they stood in line to vote for had the election stolen from him. Not that he fought at all, of course, conceding before the votes were even counted.

But even that no longer matters. They no longer announce exit poll results. They can simply declare that x amount of people voted, and they voted in a particular way.

Who's going to know any different?

Billions of dollars are being spent for these elections. Why? All they have to do is announce the pre-determined results.

But where does that money go? To the corporate media.

Election ads are really media buy-off ads.

Elections are to the media as Christmas is to retail stores. They need that money. And the money buys their submission.

We are participating in something as meaningless to us as knocking on wood is to a Nigerian. As meaningless as a child dressed as a ghost. But much more harmful.

American adults who go to the polls and press a touch screen button for a pre-screened, corporate-approved candidate have as much relation to true democracy, in which people participate in the decisions that affect their lives, as American children, dressed in Disney-trademark costumes created by child labor in some third world country, going door to door to get factory wrapped candy, have to their pagan ancestors honoring the end of summer and those who had passed to the other world.

The Farce We Call Elections

2010-10-13T11:57:00.001-07:00

There are many different opinions on what to do about our oligarchy.

It is very clear that the biannual farce that we are all urged to participate in is meaningless, rigged, and, since the imposition of the voting machines, totally unreliable. Who knows how many really vote, or who they vote for?

However, we have the forms of democracy, even though they are hollow.

Greens choose to use those forms, as if they meant something, to present our ideas to the citizenry.

This apparently is a threat to our ruling overlords, because they exclude Greens from forums in which they could actually present their program to citizens.

Last night, Laura Wells, the Green Party candidate for governor of California, was arrested for trying to use her ticket to get into the debate from which she was excluded!

And Huffington Post has an article on the exclusion of Rich Whitney from the debate sponsored by the League of Women Voters.

Here's my comment on the article, discussing the LWV betraying their stated principles by agreeing to the banning of the Green Party candidate-

30 years of right wing propaganda has an effect.
The League of Women Voters, supposedly a non-partisan group, now offends democratic principles by banning Rich Whitney from the debates.
Have they no shame?
They need to change their platform to match their actions. No more bragging about their non-partisan stance. How about this?-
"The League of Women Voters stands with the corporate media to make sure that American voters only hear from the two corporate parties. We have no interest in educating the American voter. We will use the respect we have earned over the decades to fool the voters into thinking that we have an interest in free and fair elections, while, behind the scenes, we scheme with corporate media to ban and exclude those candidates that threaten the oligarchy".
I think that this statement of "principle" is more accurate than the current, outdated one they profess.

Jobs and Justice March

2010-10-04T10:38:00.000-07:00

On Saturday, tens of thousands of people showed up in Washington, DC to "demand" jobs.

Yeah. How's that working out for you?

Actually, it turned out to be a get-out-the-vote for the Democrats. Republicans were scorned for their repressive values, their I've-got-mine-screw-you economic principles and their constant conjuring of fear, nameless, faceless terror, orange alert Muslims are coming fear!!!

Look out! It's Sarah Palin! Run for your life! And vote Democrat!

But even the job demanding is a ridiculous exercise.

We workers have no standing to demand jobs. We are pathetic beggars, kneeling before our masters and petitioning for a means to live. They can afford to sneer at our pleas, because as long as we limit ourselves to believing that we must sell our labor power to get money to buy us things, we will NEVER be a threat enough to them that they would supply us with such means.

There are 300 million people in this country, and almost 7 billion people on this planet.

It is absurd to believe that we need that much 40 hour/week labor. We need less labor all the time. (Although when the oil runs out that will change.)

But there has been a surplus of labor in class-divided society for centuries, even before capitalism. We are told that part of the reason for the Crusades was to get rid of some surplus people. The Black Death, which killed off 1/3 of Europe, was a boon to workers, driving up the price of labor, until we reproduced enough to drive down our wages again.

The Americas, Australia and South Africa used to provide a place for surplus European labor to immigrate.

We now have a super abundance, more than we need, all produced with very little labor.

The only way to have everyone employed is for everyone to work fewer hours. When I bring this up to people, they invariably say "But I couldn't afford to work less hours!"

Well, no, not on the wages we are getting now! Obviously, if everyone worked fewer hours, and we produced enough for everyone, then the proceeds of your labor would be worth more than it is now.

In other words, we all pitch in to produce enough for everyone, and then everyone has enough.

The people who suck the profits from the proceeds now would no longer be allowed to do that. Yes, the masters who sneer now while they lay off people for profit would be demoted.

They would have to work like everyone else, and be entitled to a modest, decent standard of living, like the rest of us.

Because if you restrict yourself to calling for "jobs", you get the military-industrial complex, the prison-industrial complex, Homeland Security, Big Box stores, McMansions covering farmland, endless road-building, and the rest of the environment-destroying economy that we live under.

Ahmadinejad and 9-11

2010-09-24T12:29:00.000-07:00

US media is reporting that Iranian President Ahmadinejad told the UN General Assembly that many in the Arabian world believe that the Bush administration was behind the 9-11 attacks, and that the US delegation walked out when he said that.

My first reaction was that it isn't only Arabs that don't believe the official story, and for the US media to report it that way was totally bogus. And for them to report that "Americans are outraged" is reminiscent of their constant reporting that "we all loved Reagan", which never fails to send me into sputtering outrage.

And more recently, that "Americans were outraged" when Hugo Chavez smelled sulfur after Bush exited the podium. And ain't I an American? My friends and I laughed and agreed with Hugo.

And when they announced that "Americans were outraged" that the Iraqi threw a shoe at Bush. Really? Then why did Americans mail a million shoes to the White House?

But it gets worse. I was just listening to Thom Hartman's show. Thom toed the official line, calling Ahmadinejad "crazy" and expressing outrage that he would say such a thing, although he did point out that many Arabs DID believe that the neo-cons engineered 9-11 to manufacture consent for an attack on the oil and mineral rich countries of Iraq and Afghanistan. Yes, Thom. Again. Not just Arabs believe that!

But a caller from New York said that she had been at the UN and the speech was being reported WRONG by US corporate media.

Why does this shock me? Do I still have some semblance of belief in journalists? Why would I? I guess I do though.

She said that Ahmadinejad actually ran through the three main beliefs about 9-11. The "incompetent American/crafty Arab" scenario that is the official US story, the "let it happen", and the "made it happen" stories, and that he didn't say which one he personally believed in.

Her theory was that the false story was part of the propaganda for war against Iran that the US is clearly pushing. Conspiracy theory? I think not!

She wanted people to get the truth out there, and I am doing my part.

Voting Is Not Enough

2010-09-17T12:03:00.001-07:00

Americans are assured that their civic duty consists of voting every four years. Super Americans vote every two years.

Some Americans have noticed that voting doesn't seem to make a difference. They have become radicalized, American version.

These are the Americans who scream "Voting isn't enough. We need to get into the streets!"

Then they apply for a permit, assemble on a weekend and walk along the approved streets holding signs.

Or they write letters to their congressmen, or sign online petitions, or boycott certain corporate products.

Many of these Americans are for peace, against environmental destruction, for government working for the good of the citizens.

So what happens when some citizens realize that the corporate-bought parties, the Democrats and Republicans, will NEVER go against their bosses, no matter how many people sign petitions? When these people organize themselves into a non-corporate party, and jump through the corporate parties's hoops, and run candidates for public office? Candidates that have other jobs, along with family responsibilities, and are trying to run for office in their "spare time"?

They are sneered at by the bystanders as "non-viable".

Apparently, some of the politically aware Americans, who actually pay attention to what is going on, and are alarmed enough to resist it, still are unable to bring themselves to vote for a Green, instead of a Dem or Repub.

They prefer to support the candidate who can win, (because that candidate has been bought by corporate money), and then beseech them not to do the job they were paid to do, which is to further enrich their bosses.

This is like standing outside of a prison with signs demanding that the prison guards release the prisoners. They aren't going to do that, they're paid to keep them in. So why would you write letters, or march in the streets to ask corporate paid politicians to legislate for the people, instead of their bosses?

I think that this is insane. But that is why I'm a Green.

How Long?

2010-09-03T12:09:00.000-07:00

Bush announced the end to "major combat operations" on May 1, 2003.

Obama announced the end of "our combat mission" on Aug. 31, 2010, seven years later.

Will the next president announce the end of "major occupation" in seven years, when US forces drop another 25,000 or so?

I was at work during the speech, and the only people who were watching Obama lie in real time were an African-American couple. Everyone else had something else on TV.

Just hearing snippets of the New Liar-in-Chief made me ill.

I didn't hear a word about the million dead Iraqis, the four million Iraqis in exile, the widows and orphans now left alone in a destroyed society, without clean water, subsidized food, electricity or sewage systems. The babies being born with horrendous birth defects, and the children dying of leukemia from the bombs that our heroes dropped on them.

The president slobbered all over the heroes, as a matter of fact, lauding their "service" to their country, totally disregarding the fact that more of them have come home and killed themselves than have died in Iraq.

Too bad for the kids who believed the bullshit until they were sent over to destroy a country and its people for the good of the US ruling class.

Then got home and found themselves in a slowly collapsing country and people.

Caused by the very same ruling class. What a coincidence.

Too bad that they didn't stay alive, join IVAW and fight for freedom and justice right here in the Homeland!

Borrowing to Prosperity

2010-08-31T11:20:00.000-07:00

Obama sternly rebuked the Republicans for holding up his "Jobs" Bill. According to Obama, this bill will loan money and give tax breaks to small businesses, which will then magically create enough jobs for the 14.6 million people who are officially unemployed.

Are there really people out there just itching to start new businesses so they can get tax breaks? Who yearn to go into deeper debt to start a business which will probably go bankrupt within a few years?

Americans are more in debt than their government. To pretend that offering more credit is the way to economic health is astonishingly irresponsible.

Especially because while small businesses are encouraged to borrow, large corporations are subsidized by tax money. They get grants, not loans. They get land giveaways, infrastructure building, tax holidays and other "incentives", which workers and small businessmen pay for. They get welfare mothers forced to work for them for minimum wage.

We need to quit talking about stimulating the economy, saving the economy, or helping the economy.

The economy, which now seems to be a code word for the FIRE section of the economy, the part that lends money, is not working for actual people..

The government should help people, not the "economy".

Screw the banks. Let them fail.

The government has the power to issue money. The Constitution gives them to power to mint coins, i.e., money. The Powers That Be twist this into saying that the mints make coins, and the Federal Reserve prints the paper money. This is absurd. Clearly, minting coins means issuing money.

The US government has the power to mint coins, i.e. money.

Let the US government print money and pay people to do useful work, like teaching, firefighting, planting trees, refurbishing housing, laying lightrail track, building solar panels and windmills, taking care of children, providing clean water, and other socially necessary things.

The workers can then take that money and spend it on what they see fit, keeping farmers in business, local businesses going, etc.

Bring home all the troops and stop spending so much money on killing, corporate welfare, agribusiness welfare, Homeland Security, prisons, and other oppressive functions.

There. Take care of the people and the "economy" takes care of itself.

Interesting Juxtaposition

2010-08-09T15:07:00.001-07:00

My co-worker's husband had a kidney stone, and he cried and whined and writhed. When a kind woman tried to empathize with him by saying that she had heard that kidney stones were as painful as childbirth, he reacted with outrage. "No woman has EVER felt the kind of pain that I am feeling!"

While Americans are busily venting their outrage that some Muslims want to build a community center right next (kind of) to Holy Ground, the site of the WTC buildings blown away nearly 9 years ago, some Muslims in Afghanistan killed 9 Christians from a missionary group.

Hmmm. Let's see.

There was a tragic loss of life in the WTC buildings. Imagine the horror of choosing to jump from the window, rather than be burned alive. We don't have to imagine the horror, actually, it has been pumped into us for nine years now. TV shows, movies, books, politician speeches, we still get daily doses of The Day That Changed Everything.

Three weeks after The Day That Changed Everything, the US invaded Afghanistan, and has been occupying it ever since, killing civilians daily. How many? We don't know. We don't bother to count. We don't care. But for them, everyday since Oct. 2001 has been a Day That Changes Everything.

While each person killed in the WTC got a picture and a bio for us to memorialize them, the deaths of the people of Afghanistan are part of a daily synopsis of deaths, sometimes one, sometimes 130. Whatever. We know that some of them were brides, on their way to their weddings, some were children, executed after US troops kicked down their doors, but their names and faces are unknown to us.

We do know that Bush called the attack on Afghanistan a Crusade, and that some of the generals make explicit references to killing Muslims, and that most of the Americans attacking Afghanistan and Iraq are Christians, and that most of the people attacked are Muslims.

So while it is the very height of insensitivity for Muslims to build a community center in downtown New York City, it is heart warming and beautiful to have Christian missionaries working in Afghanistan.

Right? Cause there's no pain like our pain.

Accountability

2010-08-09T08:21:00.001-07:00

In May, Obama announced that he and Gen. McCrystal were accountable for Afghan civilian deaths. Wow, what a man, standing up and taking responsibility for the devastation his policies are causing to innocent civilians being attacked by heavily armed and armored young Americans.

So why is Bradley Manning in prison? Why is Julian Assange being attacked and hunted?

Why are the two of them being accused of causing civilian deaths?

Where is the accountability? When two men with no blood on their hands are being verbally assassinated, and physically imprisoned, what kind of bizarre twisting of reality are we being subjected to?

The Red Queen rules our country and Humpty Dumpty our media. War criminals go free, while information givers are hunted and jailed. Words mean what the ruling class chooses them to mean, no more and no less.

Depleted Uranium

2010-07-29T08:46:00.000-07:00

Although the supreme war crime of illegal invasion encompasses all other war crimes, there are multiple other war crimes committed in the years afterwards.

The US attacked Fallujah twice in 2004, targeting the hospital the second time, because they didn't want the bad publicity they got when wounded civilians in the hospital were shown on TV.

They used illegal weapons, and weapons that should be illegal, such as depleted uranium weapons.

Now, again, there is proof that the suffering of the Fallujans continues although they are not being bombed at this time.

I mentioned on my radio show last year that we Southern Illinoisians are partially responsible for the increased birth defects, leukemia and other cancers in Iraq, since we have a depleted uranium weapons manufacturing company right here, in a wildlife refuge, employing lots of people. (Jobs, jobs, jobs! No morals allowed.)

One of my listeners told me an interesting story. She works as a driver for people wanting to go to the St. Louis airport, a two hour drive.

She had a Canadian professor in the front seat, and two teachers for military brats on a base in Texas in the back seat.

She brought up the fact that we make depleted uranium weapons to the professor.

The women in the back seat went nuts! They started screaming at her and the professor. The US wouldn't use those such things, and anyway, it was OK, and just SHUT UP! SHUT UP!

She said that the professor, (luckily), knew about the weapons and calmly tried to explain it to the teachers. They put their hands over their ears and refused to listen!

Yeah, but they heard!

I was pretty pleased that two women, deliberately and proudly ignorant, were exposed to the truth, as unwilling as they were to hear it.

"I Don't Care About the Facts"

2010-07-25T21:53:00.000-07:00

"I will never apologize for the United States of America. I don't care about the facts".

George H. W. Bush, speaking about the US shooting down of a civilian Iranian airline in 1988, which killed 290 people, including 66 children.

We are now in a mini-media uproar about the Scottish pardoning of Megrahi, the Libyan convicted of the Lockerbie bombing of Pan Am 103. Great indignation flows from the talking heads! 270 people died!

And the man convicted was pardoned!

The man responsible for the shooting down of the Iranian airline, Captain William Rogers, was not convicted or imprisoned. He was given a medal.

The US in 1988 was backing Iraq in its (US sponsored) war against Iran.

Saddam Hussein, our man in Iraq, had attacked Iran in 1980, after the 1979 Iranian revolution had deposed the US man in Iran, the Shah. The US supported Iraq, but also sold arms to Iran, because the Reagan White House was also attacking Nicaragua illegally and needed the money. By the way, Israel was the country who actually delivered the arms. The illegal guns-for-drugs operation was run out of the White House basement by Oliver North, now a well-paid right wing talking head, and "investigated" by a committee headed by Lee Hamilton, who later "investigated" 9-11.

In 1988, the US started militarily attacking Iranian targets, and this culminated in the shooting down of the civilian airline, killing everyone on board.

Immediately after the war crime, the US put out a cover story, claiming that the civilian airliner was not on its flight path, that it was descending towards the US warship, and that it didn't respond to signals.

These claims were all lies, but the truth came out in dribbles, buried in the back pages, and then put back down the memory hole for the propaganda parts.

The United States has never apologized for or admitted wrong doing for shooting down the airliner. No one was ever prosecuted or punished for it. Vice-President George H. W. Bush said repeatedly that he didn't care about the facts, he wouldn't apologize for America.

Six months later, Pan Am 103 was shot down over Scotland.

At first, the US blamed Iran-backed Palestinians for the crime, but, in the meantime, Saddam Hussein had fallen out of favor. He seemed to think that the US owed him for the attack on Iran. When he told the American ambassador that Kuwait was slant-drilling Iraqi oil, and he was planning on attacking them,

she said "We have no position on your border dispute with Kuwait".

He was punk'd!

The US organized international backing for their attack on Iraq, and part of the deal with Iran was blaming two Libyans for the bombing of Pan Am 103, instead of the Palestinians. Libya wasn't cooperating with the US.

But they did hand the two over in 1999, and after a "trial", one was convicted. Abdelbasit Ali al-Megrahi.

But on appeal, a Scottish court found that he had suffered a "miscarriage of justice", and the defense was planning on showing that the US had lied about evidence and bribed witnessses to get the conviction. Pan Am hired investigators to help them prove that they weren't liable and they found some interesting facts. Maybe the Palestinian terrorists planned to blow up that plane, but their efforts were facilitated by the very same drugs for guns terrorists that were working with Oliver North!

(And who was on that plane, although others were warned against boarding? A team of DIA investigators looking into the drug-running of Oliver North and his terrorist buddies.)

So, suddenly, Megrahi was released on "compassionate" grounds.

Now we have the villain of the day, BP, being accused of interfering with the justice system. Well, we can't have that!!

What I'm curious to see is if they use their original story in the propaganda attack on Iran.

It wouldn't be unprecedented.

The gas attack on the Kurds was said to be done by the Iranians, back in 1988, when the US backed Saddam.

Then, in 2002, it became Saddam's attack! (Is this getting confusing?)

Would they have the nerve to use this issue to heap anger onto BP, and then change the story to whip up hysteria against Iran?

I wouldn't put it past them!

Remember that within 6 months after the US attack on Iraq in 2003, the story was that Saddam had refused weapons inspections.

And, within 2 days, Georgia's attack on South Ossetia became a Russian attack on Georgia.

We'll see. After all, they just don't care about the facts!

Protecting Americans, the Class Difference

2010-07-22T12:25:00.000-07:00

The news just announced that Congress passed a bill to protect Americans from predatory lenders. Well, good for Congress! That's the kind of protection Americans need. I'm sure we'll see an end now to usurious interest rates, payday lenders, unasked-for credit offers, outrageous bank fees, etc.

But it got me thinking about "protecting" Americans, because that seems to be the phrase de rigueur for any number of Congressional actions.

Regular Americans, and by that I mean the 99% of us on the bottom, not the Sarah Palin "white" version, want to be protected from the excesses of capitalism, even if 98% of us couldn't identify capitalism as the problem.

Adulterated food, unsafe water and dangerous workplaces were among the first dangers to be identified. Ralph Nader identified cars with windshields that acted like guillotines when unseatbelted people flew into them as a problem, followed by cars that exploded when rearended (the number one version of the millions of car crashes a year).

Polluted air, mercury contaminated water, unsafe chemical additives in food, as well as bacterial contamination. You get the picture. There are plenty of dangers that Americans need to be protected against.

Now we are in danger of losing our jobs, our houses, and our healthcare.

But what does the ruling class identify as dangerous to Americans?

Bolsheviks! Are they in your washroom? The ruling class was in an uproar over Bolsheviks for a while.

Russian Communists! After WWll, in which the USSR lost 20,000,000 people and most of its infrastructure, we were told that their greatest ambition was to come across the ocean and attack us!

The Nicaraguans were only a couple of days drive from Brownsville, Texas, remember? So we had to attack them, as well as Cuba and Grenada, both islands from which armies were unable to drive, if Grenada had had an army.

The Vietnamese were a threat to our freedoms! And Iraqis (and now Iranians) were working on getting a nuclear bomb someday, and then working on a way to launch it towards us someday after that!

The US military has attacked people all over the world to "protect our freedoms".

After our freedoms were attacked by Congress and the Presidents under the Patriot Act, the Homeland Security Act, the Military Commissions Act, the FISA Act, the Homegrown Terrorist Act, and all the rest of the sorry bunch, they dropped the "protect our freedoms", and now just "protect Americans".

Notice that? It's the one very small concession to reality. Our freedoms, having been attacked and destroyed at home, can't really be protected overseas, can they?

So the rhetoric changed. No longer having freedoms, our very persons must be protected.

From random individuals, though, not from systemic class based violations of our ecosystems and economy.

Plague of Locusts

2010-07-20T08:59:00.000-07:00

"We have nothing to fear but fear itself"

This snippet is occasionally recalled, but not the rest of FDR's exhortation -

" So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance. In every dark hour of our national life a leadership of frankness and vigor has met with that understanding and support of the people themselves which is essential to victory."

This was from his first inauguration speech, in March, 1933, when millions were unemployed and hungry.

Now, of course, our rulers prefer us to be in a state of nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror, exactly because it paralyzes us, and makes us more malleable to their schemes. Instead of FDR, we have Hitler, invoking the homeland and terrorizing us into submission to an overwhelming police state.

Back in FDR's day, communists and socialists were on street corners and soapboxes, asking why the ruling class was allowed to shut down productive machinery, when people were willing to work, and goods were needed. Why was food being buried or destroyed, when people were hungry?What kind of crazy system would allow such waste?

So FDR addressed this in his speech-

"In such a spirit on my part and on yours we face our common difficulties. They concern, thank God, only material things. Values have shrunken to fantastic levels; taxes have risen; our ability to pay has fallen; government of all kinds is faced by serious curtailment of income; the means of exchange are frozen in the currents of trade; the withered leaves of industrial enterprise lie on every side; farmers find no markets for their produce; the savings of many years in thousands of families are gone.

More important, a host of unemployed citizens face the grim problem of existence, and an equally great number toil with little return. Only a foolish optimist can deny the dark realities of the moment."

And then he acknowledged the obvious, that which no President today would ever say-

"Yet our distress comes from no failure of substance. We are stricken by no plague of locusts. Compared with the perils which our forefathers conquered because they believed and were not afraid, we have still much to be thankful for. Nature still offers her bounty and human efforts have multiplied it. Plenty is at our doorstep, but a generous use of it languishes in the very sight of the supply. Primarily this is because the rulers of the exchange of mankind’s goods have failed, through their own stubbornness and their own incompetence, have admitted their failure, and abdicated. Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men."

Ooh, did he say that? Snap!

He acknowledges that Nature and workers create wealth, not the "rulers of the exchange of mankind's goods".

Yet today we are told that the rulers create the wealth! And that we must grovel before them, and beg them for "jobs", no matter how destructive those jobs may be to Nature, or our fellow human beings.

FDR rejected the rulers calls for more money, for more credit, in 1932-

"True they have tried, but their efforts have been cast in the pattern of an outworn tradition. Faced by failure of credit they have proposed only the lending of more money. Stripped of the lure of profit by which to induce our people to follow their false leadership, they have resorted to exhortations, pleading tearfully for restored confidence. They know only the rules of a generation of self-seekers. They have no vision, and when there is no vision the people perish.

The money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization. We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths. The measure of the restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit."

"Faced by failure of credit they have proposed only the lending of more money". Sound familiar? This would be the Bush/Obama/Geitner plan for prosperity - borrow more money to "get the economy growing again".

Growing? There are limits to the bounty that Nature can provide, and there are 4,000,000,000 more people on the planet than there were in 1933. Unlimited growth on a small planet is clearly impossible to rational people. Like the unlimited growth of cancer, unrestrained growth will kill its host, our Mother Earth.

What is FDR talking about, there are values more noble than mere monetary profit? What kind of commie hippie was he? No wonder the Right hates him so-

"Happiness lies not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort. The joy and moral stimulation of work no longer must be forgotten in the mad chase of evanescent profits. These dark days will be worth all they cost us if they teach us that our true destiny is not to be ministered unto but to minister to ourselves and to our fellow men."

Now he's talking about "work", instead of "jobs", implying that WHAT a person does is as important as just getting a paycheck.

"Recognition of the falsity of material wealth as the standard of success goes hand in hand with the abandonment of the false belief that public office and high political position are to be valued only by the standards of pride of place and personal profit; and there must be an end to a conduct in banking and in business which too often has given to a sacred trust the likeness of callous and selfish wrongdoing. Small wonder that confidence languishes, for it thrives only on honesty, on honor, on the sacredness of obligations, on faithful protection, on unselfish performance; without them it cannot live."

Now he's saying that the rich, as well as the poor, must have ethics! Can you imagine a President today saying such outlandish things?

"Our greatest primary task is to put people to work. This is no unsolvable problem if we face it wisely and courageously. It can be accomplished in part by direct recruiting by the Government itself, treating the task as we would treat the emergency of a war, but at the same time, through this employment, accomplishing greatly needed projects to stimulate and reorganize the use of our natural resources."

Again, he refers to "work", instead of "jobs". What is the difference?

"Work" implies that something of value will be done, that something of value will be created.

"Jobs" simply implies people will do anything for money, whether it be blowing up mountains for coal, or blowing up buildings and people in other countries, or building the bombs to drop on those buildings and people, or locking people in cages and guarding them, or building a vast repressive "Homeland Security" apparatus, and giving people badges, so that they can badger everyone else, or any of the other "jobs" that people now fight to get.

Again-

"Happiness lies not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort. "

What needed to be done? The Dust Bowl, caused by plowing up prairies, was fought by sending men to plant trees. Millions of people were given electricity by the REA. The National Parks were improved. My Dad was in the CCC, and fought forest fires with a gunny sack. I grew up crossing a bridge everyday in LA, built by the WPA. Here in southern Illinois, the Shawnee National Forest was expanded and a beautiful lodge was built, which still stands.

Writers, photographers and artists were paid to produce plays, photos and art! The last remaining slaves were interviewed for posterity.

And for the victims of capitalism, unemployment insurance, workman's comp, and Social Security, all under attack now, instead of being strengthened.

And what about now? What do we need, besides help for the victims?

We need trees planted, to capture carbon and water, and to stop erosion of topsoil. We need art and plays. We need new sources of electricity. We need our houses retrofitted to save energy. We need our children to be educated. We need public transportation. We need safe and healthy food.

We need to put our money and our people to work providing for our needs!

Why are we spending on war, oppression, road widening and bank bailouts? Only a people reduced to begging for jobs, instead of demanding work for our common good, would assent to such a travesty.

It's Too Damn Hot!

2010-07-16T15:21:00.000-07:00

Here's the dilemma. It's really, really hot here, but I know that using electricity to cool my house contributes to further global warming, so I don't. My electricity comes from burning coal, with it's mercury pollution, carbon dioxide production and acid rain problems, not to mention the destruction that mining it causes. It seems wrong to me to waste it. And it aggravates me to know that I'm one of the few that doesn't.

Since voting in elections is widely known to be ineffective, we are now told by the propaganda organs to vote with our dollars.

Great idea. If I had enough dollars, I would buy solar panels and supply my own electricity. I would put in geo-thermal, and use the earth to cool my house.

That would be the major flaw to voting with your dollars. Very few of us have any.

But you know who does? Major corporations. So here's a grievance that I have.

My city, like most others, gives my tax money to giant corporations so that they will come to my town and bestow jobs upon us. We beseech them like primitives sacrificing animals or virgins for crops. We sacrifice land, money and infrastructure.

I went to Lowe's the other day. They have probably over 2 acres of parking lot. Why? There are never that many people at Lowe's.

Anyway, I like to park in the shade, so that my car will be cool, since I usually have my dog, and my car air conditioning doesn't work very well.

In those 2+ acres, they have about 12 spindly saplings, not capable of throwing shade.

Why can't they have parking sheds, with the roofs covered with solar panels? Sacramento, California, has the fairgrounds with such parking lots.

The solar panels could be used to shade the cars, and provide electricity for the building's air conditioning, instead of burning coal.

Instead, Lowe's was busily re-blacktopping the parking lot! Causing it to retain that much more heat! Why would you paint two acres black at the beginning of summer?

This is insane.

And if we lived in a sane society, it would be easy to implement sane solutions. But we don't.

Musical Chairs vs Coliseum

2010-07-14T12:00:00.000-07:00

In the old days, we played a game called Musical Chairs. There was one fewer chair than children, the music would play as we circled the chairs, and when it stopped, we fought over the chairs, and one kid was the loser. Then they took away another chair and it started again.

This was preparation for life under capitalism, where the jobs are always fewer than the available workers, but the music keeps playing and people leave jobs and people get jobs, so it appears that there is always a chair, or job, open.

No one plays those games anymore, so instead we have "American Idol" and "Survivor" TV shows, where cruelty reigns when throwing people out.

Because you can almost always find a "Help Wanted " sign somewhere, people with jobs are told that people without jobs are "lazy". They are told that they are working hard to support those lazy people, and that if it weren't for them, we would all be rich.

Remarkably, propaganda trumps actual life experience for many. We now have 8 million fewer jobs than we did in 2007. That means that there are 8 million Americans who became very lazy in the last three years. There are 6 Americans looking for work for every job that opens.

So, although people repeat the mantra "You can always work at McDonald's", there are at least 6 people for every hamburger flipping job that opens up.

Really, though, this is unrealistic. Some of the jobs that open up are for engineers, or nuclear physicists, or cement pourers. Anyone without those skills must compete for the limited amount of unskilled labor jobs.

I am a nurse. I became a nurse decades ago, when the wages were comparable to many other jobs.

In the meantime, luckily for me, my wages went up, while, unluckily for them, millions of other people's wages went down. So suddenly, comparatively, my job looks like a good one to have. The medical-industrial complex became very profitable, and some of those profits trickled onto me and my co-workers. But now, those profits are cutting into other corporations' profits, and they are screaming about it. Hence, "health care reform", which turned into insurance company profit enhancement without actually cutting health care costs. Something else must be done.

The ruling class, like the dinosaurs in the old horror movies, having devoured the first victims, slowly swings its giant head around, and its beady eyes fix upon me, hiding in the corner. Yes, that's the ticket, cut nursing salaries, that'll solve the problem!

You can't open a magazine, log onto a website, listen to TV, without hearing the news "Be a nurse! There's a shortage, and they make great money! Unemployed? Go to school. Be a nurse."

My previous boss told me that she had continuous pressure put on her to get rid of us experienced, better paid nurses and hire new grads, who make just a little more than half as much as we do. Upstairs, on Med Surg, they have continuous turnover, as new grads come in, work a year, get experience, and then head out to greener pastures, out of fly-over country, where nurses make more money than even the most experienced here. Then the hospital hires the new crop.

My boss resisted this, pointing out that it is better for the patients to have experienced nurses. She's not my boss any more.

I went to a class in marketing today. Apparently, part of the new health insurance company enrichment bill is a No Child Left Behind-like impossible goal.

Starting in 2014, the Federal government, sugar daddy to the health industry, will start grading hospitals on a percentile basis, based not on patient outcomes, like trauma or surgery or pneumonia, etc., but on patient opinion questionnaires.

The bottom few won't be paid, thus throwing them out of business, and resetting the stack with fewer hospitals, which will be paid on a opinion-based percentile basis, closing a few more hospitals, and resetting the stack with fewer hospitals, etc., etc., etc.

What????? The logical end to this is two hospitals open in the US, one of which will fall below the other, leaving only one.

The speaker today accepted all this, telling us that we were in a competition with the hospitals down the street and across the country and that we had to learn to please our customers, so as to get better ratings. Their loss is our gain.

He used the old - two men in the woods who see a bear, and one laces up his shoes, and the other one says "Don't be silly. You can't outrun a bear" and the other one says "I don't have to outrun the bear. I just have to out run you"- joke, but he was serious!

But this isn't outrunning a bear. This is being thrown into an arena and having the lions pick one off at a time. You're not outrunning the lions, you're just postponing your inevitable death.

I question the premise. Why would the Federal Government want to foster competition to close hospitals?

The emphasis used to be on quality improvement, as in improving patient outcomes, with increased survival rates, fewer nosocomial infections, and the such. Patient satisfaction, while important, is not the same as patient survival.

I can't imagine that closing hospitals, throwing more people into the remaining ones, is going to improve patient satisfaction at all!

People mostly are dissatisfied with waiting for hours! We need more clinics and doctors and nurses, not less.

But basic medical care is not profitable, so won't be pursued.

Who's to Blame?

2010-07-12T08:59:00.000-07:00

The distraction is now complete.

The coverage of the on-going disaster in the Gulf of Mexico has faded, and the scapegoats settled upon.

BP for the left and Obama for the right. Let the finger-pointing continue!

As I pointed out before, some things can't be undone, once started.

Therefore, don't start them! Just Say No.

Screaming about the lack of remedies while the oil spews into the Gulf is like driving your car off a cliff, stomping on the brakes, and then blaming the car manufacturer for your inability to stop the car.

Who do I sue? These brakes are faulty!

There must be money passed out to make everything all right again!

Science and Belief

2010-07-06T10:24:00.000-07:00

Gaileo claimed that the Earth was not the center of the universe, that it wasn't even the center of our solar system. Earth was just a planet, circling the sun.

Well. All hell broke loose with that claim. Galileo had to recant, because he challenged the powers that were.

Newton, on the other hand, supposedly was sitting under an apple tree, saw an apple fall, and developed the theory of gravity.

There was no conflict with the ruling class with that claim, so Newton got knighted.

But suppose the apple hadn't fallen, but the apple tree had exploded, shooting tiny pieces of apple hundreds of yards onto neighboring apple trees, and then collapsed into a pile of twigs?

And the King immediately claimed that Robin Hood had shot an arrow into it, causing the collapse, so there was a full -out attack on Robin Hood and his Merry Men, and Englishmen were whipped into a state of fear that Robin Hood would shoot an arrow at them, with the ensuing anger being deftly used to get rid of the common law, the Magma Carta, and to increase the king's men.

But a few people pointed out that apple trees had never before collapsed from arrows being shot into them, so Newton was appointed the task of explaining why it happened this time.

It took him a couple of years, because this was not an easy task!

Finally, he explained that the arrow had knocked off all the bark on the tree, and everyone knows that trees can't live without bark, so of course twigs started to fall, and then the twigs fell onto the branches, knocking them down, and the branches knocked the trunk down.

It's called gravity!

He still would have been knighted, because his theory would have suited the ruling class.

And the bits of apples found hundreds of yards away on the other apple trees?

His theory didn't address that, did it?

How many people would believe such a story?

Hmmmm.

City Government-As Annoying as the Rest

2010-06-28T07:25:00.000-07:00

I believe that we, the people, should organize and make life better for all, I really do. And I believe that government should be that voice and power, really!

But, jeez, these people in no way represent me, or my fellow Americans. They seem to exist only to funnel money to construction companies and agents of repression.

Thus, my letter to the editor-

To the Editor,

Apparently our city government is incapable of determining cause and effect and foreseeing the consequences of their actions. But shouldn't the Carbondale Times make the obvious connections?

One week you report on the city's budget crisis, said to be caused by police and fire pensions. The mayor wanted to sell our public water system, supposedly to pay for the pensions.

The very next week, you report that the mayor gleefully hired five more policemen, because the Federal Government gave him money for five years! And after five years? While people who bought houses with five year adjustable mortgages are excoriated for their lack of fiscal responsibility, you report on the new hires without mention of salary and pension payments due in the future. So individual home owners must think of their fiscal future, but not the city government?

One week you report on the city cutting funds for at-risk children, quoting a volunteer plaintively asking "What is to become of these children?"

The next week you report that the city is building a giant new police station in the very center of town. Even more ironically, where a school used to be, now razed and moved out of town.

I guess that answers the question of the city's plans for at-risk children, doesn't it?

Is that really the welcome we want to give to the people arriving in Carbondale by train? A giant police station right by the train station?

People used to talk about our children being our future. I don't hear that anymore.

I guess no one wants to point out that our children's future involves paying off the debt we incurred building prisons and police stations. That is, when they're not actually inside, doing time.

Some future!

Dogs and People

2010-06-26T13:54:00.000-07:00

It's summertime and my dogs have fleas. They seem pretty miserable. Who would want hundreds of creatures crawling around on them?

So, I give them baths. They hate baths. But I believe that, as much as they hate baths, they should realize that the flea-free bliss they enjoy after the bath should make them learn that baths are to be tolerated.

This doesn't happen. They never make the connection.

My route to work involves 2 traffic signals. My Green ideas, coupled with the habits derived from driving a car with no first gear, makes me save gas by timing my approach to the signals so that I cruise up to them as the light turns green.

This drives some people insane. Why am I going so slow? They get right on my tail, then speed up, and speed past me, only to get to the red light and stop.

Then I cruise past them on the green light, imagining that they are feeling pretty, pretty stupid, as they watch me pass.

Nope. Like my dogs, they never make the connection, flooring their gas pedals to zoom past me, so they can wait at the next red light.

If a Peasant Dies in a Forest, And TV Doesn't Cover It,Does It Make a Sound?

2010-06-13T10:36:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I finished a book called "Xamon Song", by Adam Stone. It's about a teenaged American boy who joins the military and is sent off to "defend his country", and how he learns that he's really there to protect a logging company, and the paramilitaries they have hired to kill the indigenous people who live in the forest.

By coincidence, later on I watched Arundhati Roy speak about the indigenous tribal people of India, being wiped out for the profits of multi-national corporations. The interviewer scolded her for supporting the armed resistors, pointing out that India is the country of Ghandi.

She replied that Ghandian resistance requires an audience, but tribal people are being massacred without an audience.

That is an incredible insight.

While world-wide attention is being paid to the Israeli oppression of the Palestinians, NO attention is being paid to the wiping out of the last hunter-gatherers on our planet, unless someone famous calls attention to it, as when James Cameron, the producer of Avatar, got involved with a Brazilian tribe trying to stop a dam from wiping out their homelands.

What about the people of the Congo? The people of Indonesia?

Avatar was a great movie, and at the time, I connected it to the American genocide of the Indians of our continent.

But the genocide continues to this day! Capitalism, having looted the riches of its own countries, is moving on to the last unspoiled forests and oceans of the rest of the world.

And tribes are being wiped out, without the rest of us even knowing that it is happening.

Good Guys vs Bad Guys

2010-05-31T10:23:00.000-07:00

Americans are accustomed to having complex realities framed in a cowboy movie fashion, so that they can easily be swallowed without thinking.

Whenever the US military kills someone, be it bombings, drone assassinations, or old-fashioned kick-down-door-and-kill-everyone-inside, the victims are always the "bad guys". Because, of course, we all know that the US is the "good guy".

We also have things personalized for us. Financial speculation isn't systemic to capitalism, it's that evil Bernie Madoff. Energy speculation? Kenny Lay. War profiteering? Dick Cheney.

This simplistic way of looking at problems is in full view in the ongoing disaster of the oil gusher in the Gulf.

The right blames Obama, although the really far out ones blame North Korea, or environmentalists. The left blames BP, or if they're really radical, Halliburton.

The posturing continues. Bobby Jindal holds press conferences and demands that the government DO something. Obama announces sternly that BP will be "held accountable". (Just like he's "held accountable for the civilian deaths in Afghanistan? I bet BP executives are shaking in their boots!)

I will quote right wingers when they're correct, and my co-worker told me something his Green Beret Vietnam veteran Dad told him when he bought a motorcycle.

"Some mistakes can't be fixed".

Damn straight! This unshakable belief held by the right and the left that SOMETHING could fix this mess is another typically American axiom.

If we can send a man to the moon, we can certainly.....fix this gusher, cure cancer, provide free energy, etc., (or my personal favorite "why can't we send all of them?").

I used to work in a rehab hospital, full of car crash survivors who were now paralyzed. The paraplegics would sit around all day and discuss when science would find a cure for their paralysis. The quadriplegics couldn't discuss anything, being unable to speak because of their endotracheal tubes. That was many years ago, and there is still no cure.

Some things can't be fixed.

This is why we had a moratorium on off-shore drilling. George H. W. Bush, who was also a veteran with a bad experience, one that couldn't be fixed, signed an executive order banning off-shore drilling, which was allowed to lapse by the Democratic Congress in 2008. It was recognized that an oil spill would be an unfixable disaster, and the only way to avoid it would be not to do it in the first place.

Now we watch the posturing, the finger pointing and the fervent beliefs that the gusher can be stopped, the environment can be "made right", and that someone will pay.

No. The gusher will stop when the pressure eases. The environment is damaged, and cannot be made right. The only ones to pay will be the wildlife that pays with their lives for the spoiled demand by the American people that their "lifestyle", as they like to call the car centered, cheap agribusiness-supplied fast food consumption, air-conditioned, plastic-wrapped way of living that has evolved over the last 60 years, continue unchanged.

But if you point out that our infrastructure must be changed, people scream "Impossible".

Yes, the same folks who are quite sure that a oil geyser a mile undersea can be stopped are equally sure that the American "lifestyle" is written in stone. Never mind that each zoning decision, each marketing decision, each federal pork decision has gone to make the mess we're in, and each COULD BE UNDONE!

People like lights at night, that is true. And the whales were about hunted to extinction before we switched to electricity. Do you hear anyone screaming today that they prefer whale oil to coal? No. As long as the lights come on, people are satisfied.

Do we really need every cheese slice wrapped in plastic? Do we really need every piece of trash we toss to be wrapped in plastic? Do we really need to continue "stimulating the economy" by widening roads and building McMansions?

Just like "good guys vs bad guys", the "economy vs the environment" is a false dichotomy.

The environment is real. It is the natural wealth that we evolved to live in. We breathe air, we drink water, we eat food. The capitalist economy that produces what we call wealth by turning the natural wealth of our Earth into consumable, disposable products for sell is man made, and can be changed.

Nay. It must be changed, or we will find out the hard way that some things, like destroying our ecosystem, can't be fixed.

Spy vs Not Spy

2010-05-26T10:05:00.000-07:00

Iran tried an American citizen for espionage and was subjected to great pressure to let her go. There were impassioned denials from the West, impassioned demands for her release and impassioned denunciations of Iran's cruelty and lack of fair trial standards. (omigod, how embarrassing, for the US to accuse Iran of lack of fair trials!). Eventually, they did let her go. I am not privy to the deal that was made for that outcome.

Now, Iran is holding three hippy kids in prison and accusing them of being spies. The silence from the "world community" (the US and its minions), is interesting.

Note to Iran. The US doesn't really care about these kids. You have no leverage with them. And this lack of concern kind of shows that they're not really spies.

However, I'm betting that Roxanne Saberi really was a spy!

Another note to Iran. Whoever had their camera trained onto Neda Agha-Soltan, (a beautiful Iranian girl, who was on a side street near the June demonstrations last year), at the exact minute that a sniper shot her in the head, and immediately managed to get the footage of her death publicized around the world?

I'm guessing "spy".

Progressive ADHD

2010-05-23T11:03:00.000-07:00

When Sarah Palin led the mentally challenged in chanting "Drill, baby, drill"!, progressives were all over it, pointing out that off-shore drilling was a danger to the ocean environment and our coasts.

But now that the worst has happened, and an undersea oil gusher spews toxic oil unchecked, progressives have changed their tunes.

All of a sudden, they are talking about BP, and how criminal it is, and how this whole thing could have been prevented by the proper gadget which was left off the destroyed rig.

Yes, progressives like Thom Hartman and Amy Goodman are pretty much implying that off-shore drilling can be perfectly safe, if the right gadgets are installed.

WTF?

This is the time to be talking about getting off of our addiction to oil! Not how to properly build an oil rig.

Clearly, we are pathetically continuing our addiction long past the intervention stage. We are like nicotine addicts, who smoked the carton, and are now rooting through ashtrays looking for butts.

Peak oil, global warming, ocean acidification and oil gushers, wars for oil, what will it take for politicians to stop spending the Treasury on oil based infrastructure?

We need to rebuild our infrastructure to discourage car and air travel. Quit subsidizing the addicted. Why should the rest of us pay for wars, highways, airline bailouts and urban sprawl? Let the cost of oil rise to its true value, and stop the tax handouts.

But Obama's "stimulus" plan mostly involves widening roads!!

What is wrong with these people? Are they homicidal and suicidal?

It is definitely time for some interventions.

Goons Killing Dogs

2010-05-15T22:17:00.000-07:00

One of the stories that Dhar Jhamail told in his book, "Beyond the Green Zone" that affected me deeply was about US soldiers breaking into an Iraqi family's house, and when their dog did its job and barked at them, they shot it. The mother of the house was furious, and screamed at them, so they shot her, also.

I could relate to that woman. I love my dogs, and if armed goons shot one of them, I would not be able to accept it passively.

Here is a video of cops in Missouri, breaking down a family's door, and shooting their dogs.

The crime? Possession of marijuana. And after what looks to be 10 heavily armed men shoot their way through the house, they arrest the parents of the 7 year old, (who was present while they broke in, threw his dad on the floor, and killed his dogs), with the charge "child endangerment".

Why shoot the dogs? They were trying to protect their property from armed invaders. Clearly, in American terms, that made them bad guys. And terrorists, yeah, that's it. Maybe even, gasp, al Quaida! Wave the flag, folks. The heroes took out terrorist al-Quaida dogs!

http://reason.com/blog/2010/05/05/video-of-swat-raid-on-missouri

Allowing the police to profit from stealing people's property is a recipe for oppression, and yet it goes on daily, unreported by the corporate media, who prefer to dwell on non-events like the Times Square non-explosion.

http://www.chicagonow.com/blogs/publius-forum/2010/04/policing-for-profit---the-abuse-of-civil-asset-forfeiture.html

And setting up a paramilitary force in every town to enforce laws, especially laws against non-violent offenses, gives us proof that we live in a police state. Just because they haven't knocked your door down and shot your dog yet, doesn't prove that you are free.

Most Germans had absolutely no problems with the SS, either.

http://www.swatreform.org/index.shtml

In The News

2010-05-14T22:49:00.000-07:00

"Controlled burn" of oil in the Gulf of Mexico.

Car that didn't explode in Times Square.

Questions-

Which perpetrator caused more harm?

Which perpetrator will be prosecuted?

Which is more likely to happen? Ordinary Americans will now be watched more, inspected more and hassled more by the security state in the name of fighting "terrorism",

OR is it more likely that BP and Halliburton will lose their corporate charters and be fined and prosecuted for the massive destruction that they have caused?

Hmmmm.

We live in a country in which we are routinely solemnly promised by our President -Bush or Obama, Republican or Democrat, white or black - that their job is to protect us. From terrorists.

Not from bankers, or oil companies, agribusiness or for-profit health care. Nope. From terrorists and that is all.

And the way they "protect" us is by accusing every single one of us of being terrorists. That's right. Show your papers. Take off your shoes. Pee in this cup. Pay for guards and police and cameras and ID chips, while oil pours into the Gulf and bridges collapse and people are thrown out of their houses.

Is something wrong with this picture?

Mother's Day Talk

2010-05-10T17:36:00.000-07:00

"Arise then….women of this day!’

Arise, all women who have hearts!

Say firmly:

“We will not have questions answered by irrelevant agencies,

Our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage,

For caresses and applause.

Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn

All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience,

We, the women of one country,

Will be too tender to those of another country

To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.”

From the bosom of a devastated Earth a voice goes up with

Our own. It says: “Disarm! Disarm!

The sword of murder is not the balance of justice.”

Blood does not wipe out dishonor,

Nor violence indicate possession."

Yes, the great Unitarian and feminist, Julia Ward Howe’s original Mother’s Day proclamation in 1870 was a call for women to come together and make peace. Horrified by the carnage and misery of the Civil War, she called for a better way. At the time, women were considered, by virtue of their nurturing capacities as mothers, to be more inclined to peacefulness. Sarah Palin was not yet born. Women were encouraged to use their kinder and gentler natures to speak for peace.

Today, 140 years later, Mother’s Day is a money maker for Hallmark, a day to honor individual mothers and sell more stuff. Other mother's children toil in sweatshops to produce trinkets for us to give our mothers.

I was asked to speak about my experience of motherhood. I have three kids, born in different cities, in 2 different decades, with 2 different fathers. The circumstances made a huge difference in my mothering.

Like a good Unitarian, I believe in 19th century Enlightenment ideals of the perfectability of the human race, and I took my job as a mother seriously. I intended to be the perfect mother, which I defined as kind and loving, nurturing and also intelligence stimulating, because I took to heart research which showed that it was environment and not genes, that determined intelligence.

I had my first child in the traditional post WWll way, in the hospital, isolated, while my husband paced in the waiting room in the way popularized in the situation comedies of the time. Those comedies never showed the mother to be, scared, in pain, alone even while in a room with 5 other laboring women, most screaming or moaning in pain. At the end, they tied me to a guerney, pulled out my baby and briefly showed her to me before taking her away until the next day. Not so funny.

The next day, I got my baby and a bottle to feed her with. I explained that I intended to breastfeed, and the nurse brusquely informed me that I had to bottle feed, or the doctors wouldn’t let me take her home. Stubbornly, I tried anyway, but she was asleep for the entire hour I had her.

Four hours later, when I went to get her again, the nurse told me that she had cried for four hours and I had better give her the bottle. Four hours! A sixth of her life! I was absolutely devastated and gave her the bottle, resolving to try again when I got home 3 days later.

After 3 of the longest, most boring, most depressing days of my life, seeing my newborn only 4 times a day, I took her home. She was now used to the bottle and didn’t want to switch. It took two days of her crying, me crying, my mother telling me that I was starving her, etc., before she accepted the switch.

No wonder the year she was born had the highest percentage of bottlefed babies ever. If I hadn’t been convinced by Adelle Davis that she would die if bottlefed, I might have given up.

There I was, stuck in suburban LA with a newborn. Long hours of walking and bouncing a crying baby, with no help from my husband unless I threatened bodily harm, truly was horrible.

Other women had discovered the same thing, and the third wave of feminism was in flower, with demands that men help with children and housework, as well as for equal pay for equal work and the Equal Rights Amendment .

How’d we do? More men now help with the childcare, at least. I remember 15 years after my husband refused to take the baby with him on a walk to the store, because people might see him with a baby!, seeing a big, tattooed macho Mexican guy walking around the swap meet with his infant. So that changed.

The Equal Rights Amendment? No.

Equal pay for equal work? Not so much. But the capitalist class seized on the women’s movement, twisting it for their own purposes. A living wage used to be a family wage, with one person able to support a family on a full-time job.

Corporate media now pushed the idea that women’s liberation meant never leaving the workforce, even to nurture an infant. With women now staying as wage workers with only brief timeouts for childbirth, American business could save on labor costs. Minimum wage no longer was a family wage, which now took 2 workers, one making 57% less than the other one. Such a deal!

The 70s fight to commodify motherhood by hiring out the actual caretaking parts to others was resisted by rightwingers and hippies, but economic forces and the selling by the corporate media of fulltime wage slavery as the “progressive” thing for a woman to do won out. Interestingly, the right wing, like the good corporate slaves that they are, have internalized the commodification so much that Republican mothers now boast about how little time they take off from work to produce their offspring and hand them over to child care workers. It's like machisma!

Ironically, bottle feeding had been sold as the progressive thing to do back in the 20s, with “modern” women bottle feeding and only the poor and backward still breastfeeding . As I mentioned, in the 70s it started to be widely recognized that breastmilk was superior to formula, and educated and progressive women resumed, while the poor and backward stuck with bottlefeeding.

But breastfeeding has also been commodified. It now involves fossil fuels, including an electric breastpump, plastic bottles, a freezer, and a paid child care worker, to what was formerly a loving and physical relationship between a mother and her child.

Mothering became much easier for me when I left my husband and moved into a child ghetto. In those days, discrimination against children was perfectly legal, and most apartments advertised “No children or pets”. So when I found a place which took kids, there were 5 other women with toddlers there, and I discovered that if I offered to watch their kids, they were more than happy to let me. So I would sit out and read a book, while our children played happily for hours.

I managed that way for years, until I met Rich and moved to San Francisco, where we moved into an apartment that allowed children and I offered to babysit the girl upstairs, giving my daughter a friend and me a break.

My second child was born at home, with Rich and my sister and my friend and my dog all with me. What a difference from the first time! I bonded with my second child within the first few hours, instead of months. Any here who have had good experiences with childbirth in a hospital can thank those of us who cut into hospital income by refusing to participate in that dehumanizing experience more than once.

Plus, although I still had to walk the baby to keep her from crying, I could walk the streets of San Francisco, instead of a suburban living room. It was much more interesting. And, Rich put in many hours of baby time. These things made me a much better mother the second time. Infrastructure matters!

I planned to have my third child at home, but I went into premature labor. Totally freaked, I went to the hospital to stop the labor, but instead had another horrendous hospital experience, complete with another baby started on bottle feeding in the hospital. I had learned from the previous experience, though, and switched to breast feeding in two long hours, instead of two days.

Although I still believe that newborn primates should be held constantly, and babies should have fulltime mothering and plenty of visual, auditory, proprioceptor and tactile stimulation, I now think that there should be a lot of social support for the parents. The nuclear family isn’t enough.

Every time I lived in a neighborhood with lots of kids, I was a happier mother, because my kids were happy to have playmates. Everytime I lived with no support, motherhood overwhelmed me.

But my problems pale beside of the problems of mothers in other countries.

There are 4 million Iraqis, 2 million Pakistanis, and 3 million Afghans who have been driven from their homes by US bombs, drones and ethnic cleansing. Homeless, cold, hungry, living in tents, or crowded apartments, forced into prostitution to support their families, how nurturing can these mothers be? Shouldn’t we people of this country be too tender to those of other countries, to allow our sons (and now daughters, also sold to us as “women’s liberation”) to be trained to injure theirs? Shouldn’t we spend Mother’s Day raising our voices in protest over the treatment of mothers and children in countries unfortunate enough to be targets of US imperialism?

What would Julia Ward Howe do?

Julia Ward Howe called for “a general congress of women without limit of nationality to be appointed to promote the alliance of the different nationalities, the amicable settlement of international questions and the great and general interests of peace”.

It’s about time we took up the cause of the original Mother’s Day call for peace, and insist on using instruments such as the United Nations as the framework for working out differences, instead of rubberstamping American invasions and bombings. The walkout of Americans and their flunkies from the UN when Ahmadinejad spoke recently was undiplomatic, against UN principles and downright rude. Who raised these people? Their mamas should be ashamed.

Tell our politicians in the name of gentle womanhood that we want peace and we want it now.

They Went That-a-Way

2010-05-03T09:31:00.000-07:00

Faced with a precedented disaster in the Gulf, the corporate media has picked BP as the scapegoat.

Disregard that oil spills are a predicted and expected part of offshore drilling, which is why they are opposed by environmentalists. Disregard that they cannot be cleaned up easily, and that much death and damage will be done before any "clean-up" begins.

Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal is now posturing before the cameras, demanding the the US government and BP break out the ShamWow and wipe up the mess. This is the same Bobby Jindal who pushed for more offshore drilling.

Interesting, though, is the anointment of BP as the scapegoat. Only the non-corporate media even mention that Halliburton was working on the rig, under contract to BP.

As I pointed out in Some Pig, people are absurdly easy to misdirect. An angry mob pulls up on horseback, a man points and says "They went that-a-way", and there they all furiously ride.

Apparently, Dick Cheney and his corporation remain off-limits to criticism, and oil spills will be blamed on technical difficulties and not inherent flaws.

BP, Exxon, Shell and other oil companies have all been involved in environmental devastation over our planet.

And yet, US consumption of oil has sky rocketed even since the days when we were oil exporters! Urban sprawl, SUVs and pickup trucks, massive highway construction, it all continues.

And Obama pushes road construction as a job creator, to save us from economic downturn.

FDR had people planting trees, writing plays and compiling oral histories, along with infrastructure building.

There is no reason that we couldn't do the same now, but with public transportation and decentralized energy production as the preferred infrastructure.

Oh, wait, there is. Massive construction corporations, massive energy corporations, etc., have a complete stranglehold on our government.

The killings will continue until morale improves, and we, the people, take our country back and give the death penalty to lawless corporations.

Addendum:

Wow. It's worse than I thought. Those scapegoating BP are the responsible ones. The right wing crazies are blaming either eco-terrorists or North Korea!!!

You can't make this shit up!!! Oh, wait, they do.

Just realizing that 33% of the people of this country will believe them, no matter how crazy, is depressing.

Community of Citizens, or Collection of Taxpayers?

2010-04-09T15:20:00.000-07:00

The discussion I've been having with the anti-abortion people has sent me to thinking about American culture.

"We, the people" seems to be no more. One reason, of course, is that there are just too many Americans. We've almost doubled the population of the US since I was born. How can you have a sense of community with over 300 million people? The only time Americans care about other Americans is when the government mobilizes patriotism in preparation for yet another attack on people elsewhere in the world. The rest of the time, Americans step over the homeless Americans, support mass imprisonment of Americans and complain about American welfare mothers and children.

The teaching of American values, called civics class, has been under attack since the Reagan years by the right wing. So our "rights" have been turned into personal consumption rights, (like the right to drive over 55), and the rights that protect us from governmental oppressions have been scorned as "criminal protection rights", to be given up by Americans to prove that they "have nothing to hide".

The abortion debate has been framed, by both sides, as individual rights - woman vs fetus, with pro-choicers taking the side of the woman, and anti-choicers taking the side of the fertilized egg.

But what about the rights of the community and the obligations of the individual to contribute to it?

Abortion was not outlawed until relatively recently in the human experience, and it's only been a couple of decades that a fertilized egg was called a "human". Partly, it's because we now have microscopes and ultrasounds, but it is also used as a way to divide the US population on purely cultural grounds. Anti-choice people are whipped up into frothing frenzies about zygotes, while pro-choice people are baffled by the lack of concern for the born. The two sides will never be able to agree, because they are looking at different parts of the problem.

Part of previous acceptance of abortion was probably based on communal needs. Too many mouths to feed was seen as a problem, when communities were based more on the reality of actually providing food for every mouth.

Americans see this only as tax money. The costs of feeding, schooling, transporting and imprisoning unwanted children is the only downside that anti-choice people see, but they insist on individual self restraint as the solution. 6.8 billion people worldwide prove that an unviable solution.

I advocate paying Americans to be sterilized. Most responsible people end up sterilized anyway. As a nurse, I have to ask women if they might be pregnant. Most women over the age of 30 respond that their tubes are tied, or their husbands had a vasectomy.

Only irresponsible people continue to have children that they can't take care of. I know of two young women in my community who have 8 or 9 children apiece. They don't take care of them. DCFS steps in and removes the children shortly after birth. These children are not just a drain on society's finances. They are a potential "menace to society". As I pointed out before, people fret over the fear of their children being raped and murdered, and fantasize about their bloody revenge (with many books and movies having this very theme), but preventing harm to their children by ensuring that every child born be a wanted, and nurtured child? They don't make the connection.

My co-worker told me that her crackhead cousin has 6 or 7 children, all of whom are raised by their grandmother, except for one whom her cousin gave birth to, and then just left the hospital.

An acquaintance pointed out a young woman with 9 kids and said that she was planning to have 15 children, so that she would be in the Guiness Book of Records. I was appalled, and told her that 15 children is not a world's record. "Really?", she said. Don't you think that an intelligent person would look up the current record before trying to top it?

If we rewarded responsible behavior with substantial cash payment, say $5,000 for males and $6,000 for females, we would hopefully stop a lot of this behavior. I have just accounted for 33 unwanted children in my personal circle. I assume that these women would choose tubals if properly rewarded, saving society a lot more money in the long run. Each would probably produce a couple of children first. Maybe they would do a better job at mothering if the task were simpler.

Plus, the responsible people who already were sterilized would be rewarded. Occasionally, the government hands out "stimulus" checks to all, young and old, rich and poor, to stimulate the economy.

Young people usually are poorer than older people. A chunk of money could go a long way to finance education, buy a house, or take time out of work to nurture a new baby. (Most women have their tubals just after delivering a baby).

With fewer Americans around, all who were nurtured as children, we would have a much better society.

Many people believe that people should "have a license" to reproduce, or that the government should involuntarily sterilize the irresponsible. I am totally against giving that kind of power to the government. But rewarding people is completely different from forcibly interfering with their reproductive rights.

Less strain on the environment, less traffic, less crime, less food and shelter needed to be produced, less garbage produced, less need to attack other peoples for their stuff - I think we should try it.

Addenum: I was told by the mother of one of the two women I cited that her daughter is now sterilized. Well, hallelujah!! And she has two of her children back. Hmmm, maybe not such a good idea.

Israel and America - Best Friends Forever

2010-03-27T16:55:00.000-07:00

What is up with the BFFs, the United States and its Mini Me, Israel? Just a spat, or a realignment of alliances? And why?

Democratic support of Israel has dropped in the last year, but Republicans remain strong in support of Israel, mostly because of its important starring role in the upcoming Armageddon that Repubs cherish so much.

But where does the drop in Democratic support come from? Clearly there has been a corporate media propaganda push in which Fox News has not participated.

You got your Goldstone Report, which sternly rebuked Israel for attacking Gaza and killing 1,000 people. Not to discount human life, but come on! The US attacks Iraq and kills one million human beings and not a peep comes from the "international community", but Mini Me kills one/thousandth of its BFF, and all hell breaks loose!

You got your General Petraeus sudden concern for Arab public opinion and how it affects US soldiers occupying Iraq. Again, come on! The US invades, kills and occupies a Middle Eastern country but all of a sudden it's Israel's smaller occupation that is going to make Arabs mad?

You got your Biden snub, which was ballyhooed about the corporate media, and then Obama's dinner snub. Oh, snap! I guess he showed Netanyahou!

But, as Claud Cockburn said, "Never believe anything until it has been officially denied."

The loud denials and proclamations of eternal love suddenly emanating from the mouths of the political class should make Israel very nervous.

They can ask Manuel Noriega, Saddam Hussein, or Osama BinLaden what happens when the US turns against its former best friends.

The US can be fickle, if, say for instance, its pursuit of oil is being hampered by its ties with Israel. And now that it has bases in Iraq, does it need to keep up the friendship? With a massive military presence to enforce its interests, why keep the alliance with the tainted buddy?

Former President Jimmy Carter, author of the Carter Doctrine, which proclaimed that the Middle East had our oil, and we would kill to keep it, has become a champion of the Palestinians. Really?

The Palestinians are the greatest ally of Middle Eastern dictators, who use their plight to keep their citizens riled about Israel, instead of their own dictators.

Why would the US move against Israel, and by extension, against its favorite Mid Eastern dictators?

Is this the move where they overthrow the Saudi royal family, as dreamed of by the neocons?

Or do they want the "Arab Street" to support Obama's attack on Iran?

Whatever is going on, it isn't about justice for the Palestinians, you can guarantee that.

And you can also guarantee that oil is somehow involved.

That there is American oil, and those Persians and Saudis have it!

Bye, bye, Israel.

The Battle Against Dehydration

2010-03-26T11:40:00.000-07:00

For the last 10 years, Americans have been convinced that they must carry a bottle of water with them at all times, or face imminent dehydration and death. You wonder how people 150 years ago made it across Death Valley, when their descendants are unable to make it through math class without water.

I refuse to drink bottled water, since the environmental impact is so devastating.

Last week I attended a meeting, and noticed that everyone there had a drink in front of them, except for me. There were 23 people in the meeting.

The drinks ranged from flavored water to cans of soda, to unidentified drinks in Styrofoam cups. The meeting was 3 hours long, with a break every hour. There was a water fountain just across the hall.

Interestingly enough, I noticed that of the people with cans of soda, all were diet, except one.

The woman who had the can of Pepsi (non-diet) and I, the one with no drink at all, were the only thin people in the room.

Coincidence? Maybe not. Apparently artificial sweeteners help people to gain weight.

Yeah, it was a boring meeting.

Battling Fascists

2010-03-25T12:41:00.000-07:00

The arguments between Democrats and Republicans are noisy and hostile. Both sides attack each other's morals, intelligence and sanity. You might be forgiven for thinking that they are on different sides.

Progressives point out that the "debates" are Kabuki theater, designed to keep the masses entertained and diverted, while the business of looting them continues unabated. In reality, they are on the same side. The side of the ruling class. And picking a favorite and rooting for it is like watching WWF and rooting for your favorite wrestler.

It's like a gang of thieves. Two of them stage a fight, and while the crowd watches, the third picks their pockets.

The Health Insurance Enrichment Act was the latest installment of the show. Now we will see the Financial Services Freedom Act and the Social Security Looting Act start.

And the "liberal" pundits carry out their part beautifully. After the Insurance Enrichment Act passed, Michael Moore, Thom Hartman, even Amy Goodman repeated the mantra, "It's not what we wanted, but it's a start".

No. It's not. It's a step in the wrong direction, and they should know it.

Yesterday I told my contractor, Fred, as it became clear that the Dumpster we hired would not fit all the old shingles that we had to dump. "Well, ideally we would like to put the shingles into the dumpster. But that's not feasible. Why don't we pick them all up and put them into another part of the yard? It's not want we want, but it's a step in the right direction".

He didn't want to do that. He insisted that we either put them in the Dumpster, or leave them on the ground where they were.

How disruptive to the process is that? Sure, the part of the yard I pointed to was further away from where any future Dumpster would be, but let's not let the perfect be the enemy of the good, shall we?

Listening to my friends repeat "At least it's a step in the right direction", I was eerily reminded of my Republican co-workers during the Bush years "We have to fight them over there, so we don't have to fight them here".

Neither soundbite makes any logical sense, but almost every camp follower repeats them as if they were received wisdom. Creepy.

Even creepier is that they think they thought of it all by themselves. They'll say, "Wait. Listen. Did you think of this?" And then they say it as if they were coining the phrase as we speak.

It reminds me of Christians, who have been trying to convert me my entire life. Inevitably inarticulate and slow, they get angry when I become impatient when they are trying to get out their well thought argument, and answer it before they actually finish. It's almost always this- (which I considered and rejected as inadequate in the third grade, and don't want to humor any longer)- "Look at this big, involved world. How could it just happen? It couldn't. Someone had to make it".

Yes. They think that they invented that argument, just like liberals think that they invented the "It's a first step" argument.

Sad.

I Forgive you, Dennis

2010-03-19T23:09:00.000-07:00

When Dennis Kucinich caved to White House (insurance corporations) pressure, many progressives screamed with disappointment.

"Et tu, Dennis?"

I watched Democracy Now, with Dennis and Ralph Nader, and Ralph pointed out that so many people look up to Dennis as the great dissenter, and look to him to be the One who will save us.

But Dennis isn't going to do that. He's going along with Obama and the corporate plan, even though he knows it's wrong.

At first I thought that Obama got Dennis on Air Force One, and threatened him with death. But now I don't.

Watching Obama give his speech in Ohio, with thousands of people cheering his lies, and Dennis there to witness it, I think I know why Dennis caved.

Obama railed against the insurance companies, against greed, against profiteering on sick people. He even used his own mother's death as propaganda. It was like the robocall I wrote about. And the crowd roared! The more he orated, the louder they roared. Someone called out "Vote yes!" And Obama turned to Dennis and said "Did you hear that?" And the crowd roared.

As Charles Krauthammer pointed out about Afghanistan, "the liberals get the speech, and the neocons get the policy". This could be Obama's Presidential motto. The sad part is that the liberals don't realize that they're only getting the speech.

So, I forgive you, Dennis.

Obama works the crowd to a populist frenzy in support of a corporate bailout. They are too stupid to stop cheering when he slides from attacking insurance company greed into giving insurance companies millions more customers and billions more dollars. The crowd is worked into a frenzy and pointed off a cliff, and they cheer as they pour over it.

What defense does Dennis have? The truth? The facts? Yeah, right. He can look to Ralph Nader to see what the Democrats can do to demonize an uncorrupt human being. The truth doesn't matter. The Democrats who voted for Bush (more than voted for Nader) are left undemonized, (just like the Blue Dogs who voted against the insurance enrichment bill are left untouched). Jeb Bush and Katherine Harris, and the purging of Black voters in Florida is left untouched.

The Supreme Court coup is left untouched. Even the fact that Gore actually won the election is unmentioned!

And millions of idiot Democrats fall for it. The venom spewed by these unthinking puppets is vicious. Dennis Kucinich doesn't want to be a target. He knows that the Democratic elite will target him, and he knows that enough Democrats will be misled that he will lose his seat.

Raul Emmanuel was right when he said that progressives are fucking retards. Not all of us, of course, but we have no voice compared to the Presidential bully pulpit and mass manipulation tactics.

At some point Obama learned that he can lie without consequence, just like Cheney learned that he could steal without consequence. Our Orwellian society is complete and the President can say Black is White (or in his case, White is Black), and the corporate media will amplify it and the liberal cheerleaders will wave their pom poms in support.

The Enlightenment experiment is long gone, and we live in a country which wages perpetual war for perpetual peace, with corporate subsidies in the name of "the people" and a President who never fails to end his speeches with religious ritual.

The Ticking Time Bomb

2010-03-18T18:06:00.000-07:00

Alfred McCoy, in his book, A Question of Torture, pointed out that the favorite scenario of the torture apologist is the ticking time bomb scenario, fed weekly into Americans' brains by the pro-torture TV show, 24.

Mr. McCoy points out the numerous fallacies in this scenario. An excerpt from the article I linked to-

"Number one: In the real world, the probability that a terrorist might be captured after concealing a ticking nuclear bomb in Times Square and that his captors would somehow recognize his significance is phenomenally slender. The scenario assumes a highly improbable array of variables that runs something like this:

—First, FBI or CIA agents apprehend a terrorist at the precise moment between timer’s first tick and bomb’s burst.

—Second, the interrogators somehow have sufficiently detailed foreknowledge of the plot to know they must interrogate this very person and do it right now.

—Third, these same officers, for some unexplained reason, are missing just a few critical details that only this captive can divulge.

—Fourth, the biggest leap of all, these officers with just one shot to get the information that only this captive can divulge are best advised to try torture, as if beating him is the way to assure his wholehearted cooperation."

But, here's the thing. Ironically, we have a chance to see if this works in real life on the very person who is pushing it in public to this day, long after the US voted in a President who lies about US torture, instead of bragging about it. Most Americans prefer it that way.

Dick Cheney is certain that there will be another attack in the US, but he is refusing to tell where and when! If anyone knows about terrorism , it's Dick Cheney. If anyone knows about about terrorist attacks on the US, it's Dick Cheney. So when he makes a threat, it's more believable than just about anyone else.

Why should we stand and wait while this madman continues to taunt us with his refusal to name time and place? Here we are, upholding his constitutional rights to free speech and immunity from cruel and unusual punishment, while he goes free to plot with the attackers.

No. We must arrest and torture Dick Cheney until he tells us what he knows. He won't mind. He knows that the Constitution is just a god damn piece of paper, as he taught his idiot regent Bush.

We must keep Americans safe! Torture Dick Cheney!

Robo Call for Insurance

2010-03-16T07:46:00.000-07:00

Last night I got a robocall. A forceful man told me that insurance companies make too much profit. Yeah! I said. They pay their executives too much money, and deny people benefits, and deny coverage to those who need it, and co-payments are too high. Yeah, yeah, yeah and yeah!

Then he tells me to call my Congressman to support the Health Insurance Subsidy Act.

WTF?

This roboman (and Obama) think I'm an idiot. If health insurance companies are so bad, why are 43,000,000 more people going to be forced to pay them premiums?

War is Peace. Black is White. If you are against insurance profiteering on the sick, support the bill to funnel billions more dollars to them.

The truly pathetic thing is that so many Democrats fall for this doublespeak. Sad.

Right Wing Consistency

2010-03-13T10:27:00.001-08:00

Many progressives are baffled by the apparent inconsistency of right wingers who insist that every fertilized egg be carried to term, but then support killing actual living human beings, whether in war or with the death penalty.

But if you talk to them, it is all very consistent.

It's all about punishment. Women who don't "keep their legs closed", (which is the most common saying among "pro-lifers"), must have the baby. Don't bother pointing out that a child should not be a punishment, or that someone too irresponsible to use birth control is certainly too irresponsible to raise a child, or even that you can get pregnant with your legs closed.

Common sense is simply ignored, and they continue to repeat that if a woman is irresponsible, she can't have an abortion.

But when they talk about crime; (and it's rather creepy how they fantasize about their own children being raped, tortured and murdered); they are all about killing the imaginary murderer of their child.

Wouldn't it be better to make sure that every child born is wanted, and therefore has less chance of being abused and neglected, which is usually the background of actual real life murderers? No, right wingers seem to prefer salivating over fantasies of revenge, more than actually preventing harm to their children.

The same with supporting bombings, invasions, occupations and torture. Nothing is too violent to inflict upon other peoples, as long as right wingers are convinced that it is punishment for some dirty deed. Or maybe they were thinking about dirty deeds against Americans. Thought crimes are enough to make them guilty and deserving of mass punishment.

Right wingers are all about revenge and punishment. Ironically, the government that they hate is the one that they trust to mete out the punishments. So I suppose they aren't too consistent there. But in matters of life and death, it's all about innocent life (which can only be pre-birth) and accused guilty, worthy of death.

Cop on the Beat

2010-03-11T17:13:00.001-08:00

More and more people are expressing amazement that the US hasn't yet collapsed.

What on earth could be keeping it going?

We are trillions of dollars in debt, but no one calls it in, the US is allowed to swagger around the world killing people, the President says outlandish things and everyone nods as if it is wisdom.

Then I thought of the old movies, where the cop on the beat takes apples from the merchant, and he doesn't say anything, because, well, he would get arrested on a trumped up charge, or beaten, or killed.

Is it that simple? Will we be allowed to keep stealing and killing indefinitely, because no one is strong enough to stand up to us?

Who's going to demand that the mafia godfather pay his debts?

No wonder the war budget is off limits.

Rep Massa Makes a Joke

2010-03-09T09:48:00.000-08:00

I can see that a Congressman should resign when a dead body is found in his office. (Or preceding it). Although why he then gets a TV show is beyond me.

To be bi-partisan about it, Barney Frank's gay lover ran a prostitution racket out of his home, and Barney is still in Congress. So anything less than murder should be OK, right?

But a joke? Someone makes a joke and someone else complains and a week later he's out?

There is something really, really fishy here. Rep. Massa says that the Obamabots wanted him out because he voted against the health insurance company enrichment bill that the Wall Street bosses want passed so badly. Massa is for single payer.

I believe that more than I believe that someone was devastated by a joke.

Obama's bosses aren't content with the bank bailouts, the nuclear power handouts and the expanding wars.

They want people like me, people who can't afford to pay for health insurance, to be forced to buy a defective product under threat of fines or jailtime.

And they will screw anyone who stands against them.

Look out, Dennis Kucinich!

Interesting News from Feb 18th

2010-02-19T11:26:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, a plane crashed into a 7 story building, causing a horrible fire.

Interestingly enough, the building did not collapse into its own footprint at the speed of gravity.

Actually, it didn't collapse at all.

Obama is appointing a commission to balance the budget. EVERYTHING is on the table. Everything.

Except, of course, not military spending. But this most interesting omission was not mentioned in the news reports. They breathlessly announced that EVERYTHING was on the table, but somehow didn't think that the most logical item, the thing that the US spends over half its budget on, was even worth bringing up.

Just like the 9-11 Commission didn't consider explosives when investigating the collapse of the WTCs 1,2 and 7. The most obvious item never gets explored.

The talking heads did talk about Social Security a lot. It seems that the billions of dollars that US workers who make less than $75,000/year have been putting away for their old age is not off the table. That money, supposedly locked away in a trust fund, is now said to be gone.

And, apparently, there is no feeling among the ruling class that this particular debt must be paid.

Social Security is a flat tax on lower paid workers. We have been paying extra since 1986. There is no mention of this in the corporate media.

401 Ks lost $5 trillions in worker's retirement funds last year, an average of 25% from each 401K. There is no mention of this in the corporate media. Even more amazing, private funds are held up as an alternative to public funds for our retirements. But public funds are being used to repay lost investments for the rich.

Obama was chosen to do what Bush could not - refuse to repay the Social Security Trust Fund to the workers who have contributed all these years.

They call it "entitlements", as if being entitled to being paid back is something wrong.

Amazing.

And the most amazing thing is that they will probably get away with it.

Because the liberals who would fight Bush just want to "give Obama a chance".

Anyone Who Loves Dogs and Kids

2010-02-08T10:44:00.000-08:00

Americans frequently congratulate themselves on their loving, kind inner beings, most recently with the Haiti earthquake, where they brag about how much money the Red Cross collected in the name of the victims.

Never mind that the Red Cross has weathered major scandals about what they did with the millions they collected for 9-11 and Katrina victims. That, of course, is down the memory hole, so that the gullible can feel self-righteous when they pony up for Haiti.

Nothing touches hearts like a cute little face of a starving child. But if you ask why the child is starving? If you point out that the elected leader of Haiti was TWICE overthrown by US backed coups because he threatened to raise the minimum wage which would make it possible for the child's parents to buy food?

Then you're a communist, of course.

A frequent assertion is that animals in the US are treated better than people in other countries. This is usually referring to the pampered animals of the rich, and the fact that you don't see starving dogs picking through garbage in the US.

You don't see a lot of starving dogs picking through garbage in the US because we have a government program called Animal Control that picks the dogs up and kills them, along with millions of other unwanted dogs and cats.

And the lives of the millions of animals that we eat for food, of course, is pretty much unmitigated hell.

What of our kids? We love kids, just ask us. Especially the right wing Christians, who love kids so much they want to force women to take every fertilized egg to term.

Right-to-lifers love fetuses so much they're willing to kill for them.

But once they're born? Not so much. Then they're welfare cheats, free-loaders on hard-working Americans, potential threats who must be beaten into submission and jailed for life if necessary.

Other countries give paid maternity leave for years to new mothers. Those socialists!

American women, especially Republicans, brag about how they work until they go into labor, and then drop that infant off in day care mere weeks after they were cut out of their bodies. (C-sections are big money!)

A good mother is defined as one who can afford to have someone else raise her child. And buy matching furniture for the nursery, of course.

Yep, anyone who loves kids and dogs can't be all bad.

Tweedledum and Tweedledee

2010-02-01T09:31:00.000-08:00

Americans are mad as hell and they're not going to take it anymore!

By golly, when Tweedlebush made enough people mad, they went out and voted for Tweedlebama. The Tweedledummers were furious and a great uproar went up on Faux News.

Then, it turned out that Tweelebama was also a corporate stooge. So in a great show of defiance, Tweedledeers voted for Tweedlebrown. Then a great uproar went up on Huffington Post. What could be wrong with Tweedledeers, that they betray their party so?

Americans, proud of themselves as independent and open minded, restrict their rebellions to the impotent. No mass strikes or storming the barricades for them. No turning to the non-corporate Green Party. No, when they've been screwed, lost their jobs, been bled dry by corporate greed and see no future for themselves or their children, they voice their anger in the way they've been taught. They vote for the other party!

That'll teach our ruling corporate overlords. I'll bet they're quaking in their Gucci boots now.

Howard Zinn

2010-01-29T08:07:00.001-08:00

Howard Zinn, a great human being, died on Wednesday, mercifully missing the State of the Union speech by the Great Black Hope who failed.

This is a great loss to the country and the world.

In memoriam, TV and radio (that I listen to) have been playing Zinn speeches.

Of particular interest to me is when he talks about how social movements start. He was part of the civil rights movement and the anti-Vietnam war movement.

They started with just small groups of people getting together, sure that their small numbers were insignificant, but determined to protest anyway.

Lately, I've seen a lot of moaning about the Democratic Party and its betrayal of we, the people. And a lot of vain wistful wishing that there was an alternative. This drives me crazy. There is an alternative, if you're inclined to party politics. It's the Green Party, based on peace, justice, environmentalism and grassroots democracy.

But, no, the teeth gnashers don't want to join a small party and help it to grow. They want a full fledged mass movement that they can join after others have done the work. They want an alternative to spring full grown from the forehead of Zeus.

It's not really hard work anyway, it's just unpleasant work. It's not like building a railroad, or something. It's attending meetings, and standing on corners asking for signatures on petitions, and going door to door passing out leaflets. It's not fun, but it isn't backbreaking. Jeez.

Listen to Howard Zinn and be inspired. I know that I am.

http://www.whitneyforgov.org/

Poor Haiti - So Far From God, So Close to the US

2010-01-20T09:19:00.000-08:00

OK, I paraphrased a quote about Mexico, but it fits Haiti also. Here's another, from Lily Tomlin

"No matter how cynical I get, I just can't keep up".

I know the the US will kill for profit, but watching people dying for lack of aid, while US troops prevent civilian planes from landing and stockpile needed food and water in the airport, instead of getting it out to the people, is a new low in horrifying eye opening reality.

Americans, used to giving up their own rights, freedom, privacy and dignity for "security", are now apparently fine with watching people die under rubble, from crush wounds and compound fractures, move into their second week without food or water, and suffer great pain without analgesics, because, you know, our troops must be "secure".

Heavily armed troops are afraid of starving people? They're refusing to feed people because hungry people might rush to get food? And not letting other, braver, people into the country to supply relief?

I am so appalled that I don't even have words. And I am more appalled, and depressed, by reading comments to the Guardian UK website, when they reported that a French official criticized the US military for turning back relief planes, and for setting up an occupation force.

Hundreds of ignorant Americans wrote in to deny that the US would ever want to occupy Haiti. That the US military would ever be used to oppress other countries. There was a lot of chest beating bravado and inflated self aggrandizement about the unsurpassed virtues of the American people and the cowardice of the French. I am so embarrassed. Again.

This is the third century that the US and France have united to oppress Haiti. Originally a French colony, with African slaves worked to death to grow sugar, after the American and French revolutions, the slaves rebelled and overthrew the French. The new United States of America freaked out and helped impose a blockade on the new republic of Haiti. Then the French imposed reparations onto the Haitian people, to make them pay for their own freedom. They totally overcharged them, also, 150 million francs. They sold the Louisiana Purchase for 80 million francs. The US didn't recognize Haiti until 1863, when they freed their own slaves. Without paying for them, by the way.

Haiti was forced to borrow the money ($20 billion in today's prices) from French and American banks. The US invaded in 1915 (as pointed out by Major General Smedley Butler, of "War is a Racket" fame) and occupied Haiti until 1934. Yes, although the ignorant among us don't believe it, the US did indeed occupy Haiti, only leaving when puppet governments were assured. Papa Doc and his son Baby Doc, were among the dictators that America backed. They assured their continued rule with the Tonton Macoutes, paramilitary thugs who ran death squads against opponents. They borrowed more money, for themselves and their off-shore bank accounts, leaving millions for Haitians to pay back, with interest, of course. Haiti pays $1 million a week, just on the interest.

In 1991, after years of organizing, Jean-Bertrand Aristide was elected President on a program of helping ordinary Haitians. G. H. W. Bush promptly backed a coup against him. Clinton sent in US troops to return him in 1994. At last, the US doing something right? Sadly, no. They constrained him by forcing him to agree to neo-con policies as a condition of returning. Aristide was elected again in 2000 and was again forced out by a US backed coup in 2004. The US kidnapped him and shipped him to Africa, where he remains, requesting to return to no avail.

To have Obama appoint Bush and Clinton to head the relief efforts is an insult to the Haitian people. I guess that they shouldn't be surprised that the US military is withholding food, water and medical care from them.

Haiti was self sufficient in rice production in 1980. The US dumped subsidized rice into the country in the 80s and now Haiti imports not just rice, but sugar! The Federal Government subsidizes agribusiness in this country, including using scare water to grow rice in the California desert, then threatens other countries to "open their markets". During the 80s, the US tried to get Japan to open its markets and throw its rice farmers out of work, but Japan refused. The vitriol directed at Japan by American yahoos then matches the vitriol directed at France today. In the meantime, Farm Aid notwithstanding, hundreds of thousands of American farmers also lost their land in the 80s.

The Haitian farmers flooded Port au Prince, becoming cheap labor for American sweatshops. Last year, they almost starved when food prices rose. They lived in flimsily built houses, perched wherever they could.

And that brings us to today, when desperate people wait for help, while overfed Americans sit and sneer at their poverty. Boastful, swaggering Americans, who see no irony as they brag about their massive military, armed and armored to the teeth, who are afraid to go out and feed starving people.

Important article by Bill Quigley, who survived Hurricane Katrina.

http://www.sfbayview.com/2010/why-the-u-s-owes-haiti-billions-the-briefest-history/

Update: I was telling a co-worker about this tonight and he said that he knew of previous similar stories. I asked - where? and he mentioned Somalia. He said that he knew a Special Forces veteran who was told to fire on an American truck. He questioned why, but did it anyway. Then the soldiers were told that there were "snipers" out there, so the aid couldn't be distributed and it sat in the warehouse until it rotted.

The Day I Almost Saved the Plane

2010-01-11T13:54:00.001-08:00

In October, 2001 I took a plane to Maine. Well, I took 3 planes to Maine, because the system was still in disarray, and I was shipped all over the place. Including a stop at LaGuardia.

We flew over the WTC site. I thought it was ghoulish to gawk at the site of so much death and misery, so I remained seated until the people across from me asked the stewardess to point it out and she did, so I jumped up. Tacky. The stewardess pointed out that it was still smoking, but when I mentioned that to my friend back home, she said - How could it be, six weeks later? Well, that made sense, so I figured that I must not have seen what I thought I saw. Later, of course, I found out differently. And here's a great video of an official 9-11 NIST "investigator" denying what witnesses saw.

Anyway, on one of the planes back I was sitting up front of the plane, reading. I was in a single seat and the flight attendant was across from me. He got up and left and didn't come back. Then another man in a uniform came down the aisle and started trying to get into the cockpit. I jumped to the only possible conclusion. Clearly, someone in the back had attacked the flight attendant, stolen his uniform and was trying to get into the cockpit to hijack the plane. And it was up to me to stop him, because all the other passengers were in the back.

I hesitated, however, because the hijacker was big and I'm kind of small. I didn't think I could take him, frankly. And while I was hesitating, he got into the cockpit. The rest of the flight was stressful, as I waited for the plane to be crashed.

As it turned out, the hijacker was actually one of the pilots. And the flight attendant showed up again. And I was really glad that I hadn't attacked the pilot.

Ralph Nader was asked by a condescending reporter on one of the few times he got airtime, how he would have dealt with 9-11. The correct answer was, of course, either increased passenger surveillance or torture or war. Ralph Nader, however, said that he would have put locks on the cockpit doors, as he was calling for many years before 9-11. It wasn't done, because of the expense of the locks, you see.

How much does Homeland Security cost? How much are the occupations costing? How much are they planning to spend on the pervert scanning machines? How much to pay to shut up the 9-11 families?

And then, of course, they paid for locks after all.

The Collapse of the Facade

2010-01-05T08:35:00.000-08:00

What's going on in America? What happened to make the ruling class turn to open looting and murder, without trying to hide it?

Somehow, they realized that there were no consequences for their bad behavior. Like a child that tests the parents with a few infractions, the ruling class took more and more chances, and found out that they could get away with it.

Last year, the Congress handed over the Treasury to Wall Street. Obama and McCain both stopped their campaigns to go back to Washington, DC and vote for the bill that 95% of the American people opposed. Yet we are told that 99% of the people in this country voted for one of the two of them the next month. Wow. Talking about getting away with it!

Emboldened, this year, Congress passed a law forcing every American to directly hand over money to health insurance companies. Wow!

Cheney hunted with Scalia, while he had a case in front of the Supreme Court. They openly scoffed at people who protested. This was after the Supreme Court handed the Presidency to Bush, although Scalia and Thomas both should have recused themselves due to conflicts of interest.

Whatareyougunnadoaboutit?

They openly brag about a "jobless recovery", making it obvious to all but the braindead that the ruling class no longer even pretends to care about the working class.

America now openly invades other countries. They openly assassinate people. They openly kidnap and murder people. Whatareyougunnadoaboutit?

They put in computerized voting machines, even though people protested. So what? When Mike Connell was finally scheduled to testify about the stolen 2004 election, he died in a plane crash. Whatareyougunnadoaboutit?

Now Obama is putting a Raytheon executive in a high position at the Pentagon. Here is the change we can believe in. They are waiving the ethics rule. See the difference? The Bushies just broke the home rules. Obama waives them. But not the international rules. Nope. Obama is just as lawless as Bush when roaming the planet with the American military machine.

This is what happened in the USSR, in my opinion. After decades of pretending to have socialism, the ruling oligarchs found out that they could just grab the riches of the Soviet Union and divide it among themselves. There was protest, until Yeltsin turned tanks on the Russian White House and cemented the demise of the Soviet Union, for which he is still hailed as a "hero" by the US corporate media. Millions of people died and millions were impoverished, which is called "freedom" by our media.

We used to pretend to have democracy in this country, with elections and writing your congressman and a court system to turn to for justice and all that. While the forms still exist, the vast majority of Americans know that they are hollow. Most people don't even bother to vote, although there is great corporate pressure to do so. That will probably stop soon. All they have to do is program the computers to show a big turnout, thus "legitimizing" the system in the last way they cling to.

In the meantime, we the people slip more and more into poverty and oppression. And, really, what are we going to do about it?

Avatar

2010-01-01T23:51:00.001-08:00

I went to see Avatar yesterday.

Before I went, I read about US soldiers breaking down a door and killing 10 people in Afghanistan, including 8 children. The absolute horror of having massively armed terrorists breaking down your door in the middle of the night, and murdering your children, is something too terrible to contemplate, yet people in Iraq and Afghanistan have lived this nightmare for years now.

I then listened to NPR news, which was recycling the same manufactured terror of a wannabe that might have blown up a plane a week ago, if only he had had explosives and had been competent. Here we were a week later, still drumming up fake terror about what might have happened to Americans, while Americans were dishing out real terror to real people, unremarked upon, even by NPR, which then had a long commercial about how they provided "news" for intelligent people.

Then I went to see Avatar. Wow! There it is. The horrors that the US ruling class wreaks upon defenseless people, for the profit of the multinational corporations, from the viewpoint of those people. This is an incredible movie.

Weirdly enough, the National Guard had a long commercial before the movie, complete with the same music. Apparently, they have enough faith in the stupidity of American youth to totally miss the point of the movie to think that they'll get recruits!

An interesting part of the movie was when they (spoiler alert!!) destroyed the Home Tree. They made a point of saying that they needed to destroy the core columns. Hmmm. Then they showed the destruction of the Tree. Interestingly enough, although it started to look like the destruction of the WTCs, they didn't have the tree fall straight down in its own footprint, in a pile of splinters.

I wondered why. Then I realized.

This was a science fiction movie, but come on. You can't get too weird, or people will turn off.

Have a giant tree explode into splinters and fall into its own footprint at the speed of gravity?

That's just too unbelievable!

Survival of the Fittest

2009-12-27T10:55:00.001-08:00

ER nursing, like policing, exposes you to the worst of humanity. It doesn't take long to become jaded. It's actually a struggle to hold on to liberal ideals.

For instance, my feminism tells me that domestic violence is a horrible manifestation of patriarchal society, with defenseless women being preyed upon by their overbearing husbands.

My ER experience tells me that a lot of domestic violence is two drunks getting into a fight, with the weakest one getting hurt the most.

And that soon, they will be calling out to one another in slurred voices, "I looooove you". "I looove you, too."

It's hard to hold on to your ideals in this situation.

But there is one conclusion that every new employee draws that I vehemently argue with.

It never fails that after they have been working in the ER for a while, they announce that they have a new theory. What might that be?

Well, it's that we are messing with Mother Nature. People used to die if they were stupid, but now we save them and they reproduce, and there will be none but stupid people in the future.

For one, this is not a new theory. It's called eugenics, and it was invented right along with Darwin, although not by him.

Hitler gave it a bad name, but every new generation invents it. (See "Idiocracy" for a very funny example.) And I remember a comedian, talking about the people in San Francisco who heard that a tsunami was predicted and went down to the beach to watch. He called it "Nature's way of weeding out the stupid".

Actually, smart people were not the ones who survived in the past. We are the descendants of a very long line of people who survived disease. Some of each of our ancestors were the only ones out of multiple children in a family who survived to adulthood.

To this day, disease kills millions of people each year, far more than die in stupid accidents. And smart people, of course, can make careless mistakes that lead to death.

Disease actually kills more people than war. This is why the US war machine spends so much money on biological warfare. They even tried, in the late 1960s, to engineer a disease that would attack a person's immune system, so that any disease would kill them, stating that it would be perfected in 5 to 10 years. But of course, no such disease showed up, did it?

And, as a heretic, I feel solidarity with all the heretics burned at the stake in medieval Europe. To me, this was the ruling class weeding out the intelligent, leaving only those who were willing to either believe, or to submit to fear and pretend to believe, to reproduce.

Galileo was a famous victim of the Church, but there were countless (because not counted, like victims of the US today) others who died for being intelligent or rebellious.

The Obama Doctrine

2009-12-24T18:53:00.001-08:00

Liberals screamed in scorn when George W. Bush announced the "War on Terrorism".

They pointed out that terrorism is a tactic, not a country with an army that the US could go to war with.

But when Obama announces that we will fight evil(!) the silence is deafening.

Evil? Really? It's not even a tactic. It's a judgement. And we're now at war with it?

My judgement is that the country that spends the most on WMDs, that attacks other countries at will, that pollutes the Earth with depleted uranium and perchlorate and TCE, that maims and murders children and calls them collateral damage, that sends drones to assassinate people who have no means of self defense, that locks up millions of its own citizens and laughs about the rape that ensues in the cages:

If anyone should be judged "evil", that would be the best candidate.

Amazing Speech by War Veteran

2009-12-23T17:47:00.000-08:00

This veteran testified at the Winter Soldier hearings. I was quite impressed with him.

Foreshadowing

2009-12-21T16:25:00.000-08:00

Liberal Democrats who are paying attention are shocked and horrified by the actual existing Obama, as compared to the really great imaginary Obama. How could he have turned out so bad, when they hoped and believed that he would be so good?

He gives such exciting speeches. How could his actual performance be so flaccid?

I can't really criticize liberals who are now paying attention. They're better than the ones who are still dreamy-eyed reality deniers, wanting to give him more time, another chance.

Awake liberals are upset that Obama promised health care reform and is giving us insurance company forced tributes. He talked a tough talk about the need for single payer, or at least a public option, but it turns out that he was two-timing us with the insurance and drug companies all along.

He orates that "No one is above the law", but refuses to prosecute previous puppets of the ruling class who broke multiple US and international laws. Words clearly mean nothing to Obama but a pacifying mantra to recite to the clueless. And there are those, probably a majority, who listen to the words and don't pay attention to deeds.

He had the nerve to go onto 60 minutes and say "I did not run for office to be helping out a bunch of fat cats on Wall Street".

Really? This is the man who suspended his campaign to run back to Washington and vote for the bailout? The one who has continued pumping trillions into the financial system? He actually goes onto TV and has the nerve to say he didn't plan to do what he's been doing for a year? He clearly believes that he can get away with bald faced lies, like Bush.

Oh, wait. He can. And did.

He appeared to acknowledge the importance of not destroying our ecosystem, but there was a secret plan to turn Copenhagen into Seattle, the Sequel, all along. Clearly, if you plan to turn the very air we breathe into chips in a gambling casino, you're not serious about climate change.

These betrayals were foreshadowed in the primaries, when his anti-NAFTA rhetroic to desperate unemployed MidWesterners were shown to be for their ears only. That should have been a big red flag.

He also lied about transparency in government, stopping the occupation of Iraq, and stopping torture as an American policy.

Of course, he was upfront about some things. He promised to increase the occupation of Afghanistan, attack Pakistan, and threaten Iran. These promises he has kept.

Sometimes you still hear liberals say that we have to stay with the Democrats for the sake of the Supreme Court. You know, to protect the right of abortion. The one that the Democrats just attacked more effectively than Republicans ever did. This argument should be getting old and unusable. To drag it out again, when the Dems are in control of the Congress and White House and could actually legislate good policy, instead of having the Supreme Court command it, shows pitiful desperation. They should be embarrassed to use that line.

I hope that those who swear to never vote Democrat again will remember this in 2012, when the Republicans will produce some totally repulsive candidate that will make decent people shudder. That's what they do! That's how they get you, again, Charley Brown! Don't fall for it.

A Modest Prediction

2009-12-16T12:06:00.000-08:00

It is a national scandal that well over two million Americans are in prison, with millions more in jails and on parole. Progressives have long decried the prison-industrial complex and demanded that it be reformed.

I predict that at some point the question will be taken up by Congress. Hearings will be held on the prison industry. Of course, the hearings will be open to the industry. How can you have hearings without the people who know about the problem? Prisoners won't be heard from, of course. They're locked in cages far from Congress.

I predict that prison reform advocates will only be heard shouting demands and slogans as they are dragged from the hearings and thrown into jail themselves. (Ironically).

The focus of the hearings will turn from reform to discussing ways to increase the prison population in order to create jobs. Prison guards will testify that the jobs pay well. Senators and congressmen will tell their constituents that the way to prosperity will be to have a prison in every town.

The final bill will propose that 3/4 of all American citizens should be put into prison, with the other 1/4 guarding them.

Liberals will scream!! No, we demand that only 1/2 of Americans be put into prison.

Congress will argue for weeks. The Democrats will offer amendments with different percentages, each time giving way more and more.

Eventually, it will come down to the wire. A few really radical people will argue that no bill would be better than the one that puts 3/4 of all Americans in prison. The rest of the "liberals" will argue that any bill is better than no bill and we really need prison reform now! Let's go with the actually existing bill and not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. We can tweek it later.

Over the top? I don't think so.

We are watching two precursors now.

If a country decides that their health care system is inadequate, they need to decide what should be done. Obama states that we can't throw our system away, we should build on it. OK. We have public health centers. We have a program that trains doctors in return for them serving underserved communities. Let's expand it. Let's have our health centers do more than vaccinations and STD care. Let's train more doctors to work in primary care in the centers.

At the very least, we could expand Medicare to cover everyone.

But no, we're going to expand the other system. The one in which people pay health insurance companies to pay their doctors. The one in which 30% of all the money they pay goes to processing claims, denying care and paying inflated salaries to executives. That system.

For the first time, every American will be forced to pay tribute to private corporations - a major change from any previous law.

And we get "liberals" telling us to support this insurance company giveaway because it's better than nothing! Just force by law subsidies to private insurance corporations and we'll tweek it later.

And the destruction of our planet by fossil fuel burning is being addressed this week by a United Nations conference in Copenhagen. National representatives of 182 countries showed up hoping for a cooperative agreement to face a global problem.

Instead, they are being faced with a demand that the UN structure be bypassed, that national sovereignty be overturned, that corporate dominance over the planet be finalized in political as well as economic treaties.

And what do liberals say? Gee, isn't any agreement better than nothing? Can't we just start with a WTO arranged corporate giveaway of our atmosphere and tweek it later?

This is American politics played out to its most ridiculous ends. Meekly accustomed to voting for one of two corporate sponsored candidates, unable to imagine any better world, Americans take the "lesser of two evils" mantra to heart, no matter where it takes them.

While we in the US may be screwed by the health care industry, others in the world are not so blind. I am hopeful that the developing countries will stand firm and reject what the rich countries are offering them, even when the superstar politicians fly in for their cameos on Friday.

Taxing Sin

2009-12-14T14:38:00.000-08:00

Our state government wants to finance its operation by taxing smokers, drinkers and gamblers. But not all of them, of course.

If you want to puff on a cigarette that weighs a few grams and puts out a couple of minutes of pollution, you will pay multiple taxes. And stand outside in the cold, to boot.

If you want to dump tons of mercury, sulfur dioxide, carbon dioxide and other pollutants into the air 24 hours a day, no problem. You might even get tax writeoffs. And overweight trucks just got a present from Governor Quinn, a raise in the speed limit! Whoohoo! Now they can kill more people directly by crushing them to death, as well as through diesel fumes.

If you want to drink alcohol and get polluted, you're going to pay heavy taxes. If you want to use community water, and dump it all polluted into the river, go right ahead. Well, EPA may give you a slap on the wrist, if someone complains, and they follow up and they find you guilty. But don't worry, you can appeal.

If you want to play the lotto, so our kids will win too!, you're going to pay. If you plan to finance your retirement with your winnings, you will be ridiculed.

If you want to gamble with other people's money, including other people's retirement funds, go right ahead. No taxes on Wall Street gambling, except for capital gains, which are half of taxes on money earned by actual labor.

The poor, who have lost earned income in the last 30 years, because wages have fallen (in real buying power), while the rich have gotten a much higher proportion of the increase in productivity, are being taxed at a higher rate than the rich. This is fundamentally wrong.

And our vices are being taxed at a higher rate than theirs.

We might like to smoke, drink and gamble, but they are destroying the planet, mining, overfishing, clearcutting, burning and blowing up vast portions of the Earth's mantle. Our ecosystem.

Which sin is worse?

Free Lunch

2009-12-10T16:46:00.000-08:00

A few weeks ago, I trashed the mayor on my radio show, after he proposed balancing the city budget for one year by selling the water and sewer systems to a private corporation.

My friend and original IT guy, Dave, will say or do anything for a laugh. So he invited me to come as his guest to the lunch hour State of The City address, to which he was invited as the mayor's IT guy. Boy, did we laugh when I accepted!

Boy, did he squirm when, for once, I remembered the date. But, manfully, he kept his promise, although he was pretty full of etiquette tips!

His plan was to hide in the back of the room so the mayor wouldn't see us. But we were caught on admission and escorted to the very front table as guests of honor. Now Dave was really not laughing.

The mayor began by lecturing us on fiscal responsibility. We shouldn't expect to get things without paying for them. We have debts to pay and we need money to pay for them.

I saw a great T-shirt in an Austin bookstore, "I don't have ADHD. It's just that.......oh, look! A bunny rabbit!"

This is Brad Cole. "We have no money to pay the police pensions. Oh, look! A grant to pay for more police for three years! Oh, boy! Let's hire three more police."

Gosh, mayor. What happens after three years? Do we fire the police? Or do we pay their salaries for the next 17 years and then their pensions until they die?

If it's so irresponsible for people to get a house mortgage that they can afford for five years, but can't afford when it resets, why is it responsible to hire 3 cops because the Federal Government gives you a three year grant?

How dare Brad Cole lecture us on fiscal responsibility while bragging in the same speech about- new roads, new police, the new SIU Saluki arena that the city is helping to pay for, the giant new police station they plan on building. (On the downtown site where they tore the old middle school down, so that they could move it outside of town and pay for busing kids from now on. Cause the Federal government gave them a grant.)

And then he bragged about the "cleanup" after the May 8th hurricane. When everybody, from the tattooed toothless tree worker I wrote about, to the most rabid right winger, to the Shawnee Green Party, clearly saw that the downed trees could be a literal windfall to the city, the mayor bragged about how many cubic tons they burned!! I believe he said it was 3 football fields worth. What a waste. And then he talked about how we had to pay for all that overtime. Really? I think they should take it out of the city manager's pay, since he gave the order to burn potential revenue. How much money went up in smoke?

The mayor likes to collect titles and awards, so he listed a few. I noticed he left out the Mother Earth News "Best Small Town You've Never Heard Of" mention last month. Guess he didn't think it would impress the Chamber of Commerce crowd.

One he did mention was the Mayor's Agreement on Climate Change. He's quite proud of that one. I think the time that really severed any hope of cordial relations between he and I was when he gave a talk about his accomplishment of signing the statement and I questioned his commitment to sustainability by pointing out that he has razed the downtown and funded sprawl along the Rt. 13 corridors. He said "I don't know what you're talking about".

Really?

I remember a Chilean immigrant asking me if the plan was to build airplane runways through the center of town. She noticed the vast wasteland but the mayor doesn't?

He did mention downtown this time though. He said he wanted private developers to come up with a plan for it. He didn't think the city should be involved in the downtown area, except to approve plans for private development.

Except for the giant police station, of course. Nothing says "welcome" to people getting off the train like a fortress of oppression next to the train stop!

Anyway, thanks for the lunch, Dave, and I hope I didn't get you fired.

Now I'm Heating with Gas

2009-12-07T16:36:00.000-08:00

As a Green, I try to live lightly on the earth. So, as winter approaches, I tried to postpone the use of fossil fuels to heat my house. I wear multiple layers of clothes, cook things that require boiling and baking (although that uses fossil fuels), and various other things.

The other night, I gave up. It was frigging cold, so I flipped a switch and the gas central heating came on. Within 15 minutes, the house was comfortably warm enough.

I started rhapsodizing about the wonderfully easy life I live. I don't have to chop or haul wood for heating or cooking, I turn knobs. I don't have to walk 3 miles with a bucket to haul water, I turn on a faucet. I have plenty to eat without sowing or reaping. Someone else does that for me, and, conveniently packages it for me. I can wear 3 or 4 layers of clothes without growing, spinning or sewing. Someone else does it for me.

All my needs are provided for me by others. Pretty sweet.

Then today, Amy Goodman on Democracy Now had a story about the US government Export-Import Bank giving $3 billion dollars to Exxon to finance a project to extract New Guinea's natural gas.

That can't go well for the natives. It never does. And New Guinea is home to some of the last hunter gatherer tribes on our planet.

How many houses could have been supplied with geothermal for that $3 billion that US taxpayers are giving to Exxon? Why does Exxon, the most profitable company in the US, need funding from us?

This is one more travesty to add to the list.

What Is Wealth?

2009-11-20T14:06:00.000-08:00

It is becoming increasingly clear to more people that money has become detached from any intrinsic value. It's no longer based on gold or silver, cattle or salt or beads. It isn't even something that you can put into your pocket anymore. It's simply numbers in a computer.

And yet the world economy depends on these artificial numbers. If the computer screen shows you have enough, you can buy a private jet to fly to France for dinner. You can own seven houses, and pay for workers to maintain them while you're not there.

Food flows across the planet, steel is made and turned into cars, oil is pumped and burned, clothing in sewn in one place and worn in another, plastic gewgaws galore are passed around and sold.

But without the correct numbers, you're thrown out on the street, reduced to foraging through dumpsters for dinner, and begging from strangers for your beer.

Some urge a return to the gold standard, but this didn't work out so well for our ancestors. (Unless your ancestors were bankers, of course.)

The ingenuity of humans has led us to a place where we can all live in well fed comfort. And yet, only 2 billion of us do. Two billion live in utter starving misery with the rest in between. And now, more and more of us are sliding into poverty everyday. Why? Why is is that the lack of money, which has become more and more ephemeral, still has the power to destroy lives?

As Franklin Delano Roosevelt pointed out in 1933;

And yet our distress comes from no failure of substance. We are stricken by no plague of locusts. Compared with the perils which our forefathers conquered because they believed and were not afraid, we have still much to be thankful for. Nature still offers her bounty and human efforts have multiplied it. Plenty is at our doorstep, but a generous use of it languishes in the very sight of the supply. Primarily this is because the rulers of the exchange of mankind's goods have failed, through their own stubbornness and their own incompetence, have admitted their failure, and abdicated. Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men.
True they have tried, but their efforts have been cast in the pattern of an outworn tradition. Faced by failure of credit they have proposed only the lending of more money. Stripped of the lure of profit by which to induce our people to follow their false leadership, they have resorted to exhortations, pleading tearfully for restored confidence. They only know the rules of a generation of self-seekers. They have no vision, and when there is no vision the people perish.
Yes, the money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization. We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths. The measure of the restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit.
Happiness lies not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort. The joy and the moral stimulation of work no longer must be forgotten in the mad chase of evanescent profits. These dark days, my friends, will be worth all they cost us if they teach us that our true destiny is not to be ministered unto but to minister to ourselves and to our fellow men.
These are fine words, but FDR didn't really live up to them. The money for the New Deal was borrowed from the Federal Reserve and social values were not universally applied.
But we don't even get lip service today. Our money changers were not driven from the temple, their tearful exhortations were heeded, and trillions provided for their continuance and profit. Their vision of bonus checks became reality, while the people perish.
At least FDR put people to work doing useful things, like building bridges and parks, planting trees, interviewing former slaves, painting murals, writing plays, and other things that would never be considered today.
We have three wars going on, with young people spread out on 700 bases around the world, millions in prison, and still the unemployment rises.
Wealth used to be recognized as the product of labor. Adam Smith pointed out that things that are of value don't cost anything unless there is human labor involved.
The value of any commodity, ... to the person who possesses it, and who means not to use or consume it himself, but to exchange it for other commodities, is equal to the quantity of labour which it enables him to purchase or command. Labour, therefore, is the real measure of the exchangeable value of all commodities (Wealth of Nations Book 1, chapter V;
Interestingly, Adam Smith and others recognized the value of that which has no price, like water, air and common land.
The word VALUE, it is to be observed, has two different meanings, and sometimes expresses the utility of some particular object, and sometimes the power of purchasing other goods which the possession of that object conveys. The one may be called 'value in use ;' the other, 'value in exchange.' The things which have the greatest value in use have frequently little or no value in exchange; and on the contrary, those which have the greatest value in exchange have frequently little or no value in use. Nothing is more useful than water: but it will purchase scarce any thing; scarce any thing can be had in exchange for it. A diamond, on the contrary, has scarce any value in use; but a very great quantity of other goods may frequently be had in exchange for it. (Wealth of Nations Book 1, chapter IV)
(Of course, now Betchel and Nestle have managed to turn water into a profit making commodity, another sign of how far we've fallen from common sense.)
Marx pointed out that nature is as important as human labor in providing wealth.
"Labor is not the source of all wealth. Nature is just as much a source of use values (and it is surely of such that material wealth consists!) as labor which is itself only the manifestation of a force of nature, human labor power."
America, which started the 19th century with immense forests and fertile plains, plentiful water and bountiful wildlife, ended the 20th with remnants of all those things. Forests stripped, waters dammed and polluted, a massive dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, mass extinctions of some species and near extinctions of others, poisoned air and atmosphere pumped full of carbon dioxide and rising. Our natural wealth has been strip mined!
Our human resources are mostly underused or misused, by contrast. As I pointed out earlier, millions are in the military, trying to take resources from people in other lands. Millions are locked up with millions employed in getting them and keeping them in prison. Millions work in the FIRE industries, spending their days leeching wealth from the very few left who actually produce anything of value. Millions are unemployed.
We must revalue our wealth. Each person's labor time should be equal to anyone else's, and other species must have equal worth to ours.
That sounds to radical to 21st century Americans, convinced as they are that some are WAY more equal than others, and that other species can be eliminated if profitable. If you don't go to college, you don't deserve to make a decent living, in the new American thinking. And the longer you go, the more money you may make.
There is no reason to value some labor so much more than others.
After our hurricane, I was so glad to see the tree workers, and the electrical workers, and the roofers. They moved the trees, turned on our electricity and repaired the roofs. They did productive work.
But when they fell off a roof and broke their legs, or cut themselves with a chainsaw, they were glad that I was there to help reset their bones, or sew up their wounds. The doctors, nurses, techs and others are also doing productive work. But why should the labor of sewing skin be worth so much more than that of sewing cloth? Why should resetting a bone be worth so much more than clearing a road? The skill of splinting is no more exacting than that of reconnecting a high voltage wire.
And, of course, those who do very little productive work, make the most. CEOs and the financial leeches making the million dollar bonuses, have helped no one.
And at the very top, where Paris Hilton lives, there is no productive work done. Those who own and do no labor, make much more wealth than those who are productive members of society.
Since we are capable of producing enough for all, we should do so. And all should contribute to the production, unless unable.
Everyone's time is valuable and all productive labor should be measured in time.
If we pay people to go to college and learn to be doctors, lawyers or engineers, they won't feel that they are owed more for the rest of their lives for the time they put in as young adults. That way, people can choose professions to which they have a calling, and not for the prospect of making more money than others.
The only way to make more than other people should be by putting in more hours than other people. Those that wish to do that are welcome to it. Personally, I'll put in enough time to pay the rent and buy food. Kind of like I do now.

The United States of Amnesia

2009-11-18T17:45:00.000-08:00

Americans have no sense of history, but we mark anniversaries anyway.

Last week, it was ten years since the Glass-Steagall Act was abolished. This anniversary, coming as it does as capitalism collapses, made a handy whipping boy, complete with villains, conveniently comprised of both flavors of the corporate parties. Democrats could point at Gramm and other Republicans in the Senate, Republicans at Clinton for signing it.

All agreed, however, that the Glass-Steagall Act had made capitalism work beautifully, and if we only re-passed it, all would be well again.

Talking head amnesia prevented them from remembering that they have spent months comparing this depression with the one in 1981, back when the Act was in effect.

And there is total amnesia concerning the saving and loans speculation in the 80s, complete with bank failures.

Far right commentators, however, go farther back in blame. Capitalism, they claim, worked well for all, back in the gold standard days. They blame all dysfunction on the Federal Reserve Act of 1913.

Did capitalism work without problems before 1913 or 1999? Even with google, it's hard to research this. Google "depressions, crashes, recessions" and you get the Big One, the 1930s, that was traumatic enough that very few Americans who lived through it have forgotten.

You have to google "panic" to get the 19th century depressions, which came in 1819, 1837, 1857, 1873, and 1893, and then 1907, long before the Federal Reserve or Glass-Steagall.

Here's the thing. You really can't understand how capitalism works unless you listen to

Karl Marx. This is why the ruling class has trained Americans to respond like Pavlov's dogs to any mention of the man.

Try it on yourself. I say "Marx". You say, "Failed!! Dictator!!! Millions killed!!!"

Really, however, Marx was a philosopher, writer and believer in the ability of humans to band together and make a better world. What people did with his writings after his death is not really his responsibility.

Here's Marx on the ability of the Glass-Steagall Act to regulate financial firms such as Goldman Sachs who were able to make billions on credit derivative speculation: (quoted in the Monthly Review),

"If...new accumulation meets with difficulties in its employment, through a lack of spheres for investment, i.e., due to a surplus in the branches of production and an over-supply of loan capital, this plethora of loanable money-capital merely shows the limitations of capitalist production. The subsequent credit swindle proves that no real obstacle stands in the way of the employment of this surplus-capital."

Although it is difficult to read 19th prose, I think that his point is much more believable than the colloquial speaking talking heads desperately trying to convince us that all is well.

Capitalists will only operate when there is a profit to be made, and it is impossible to continue to expand in a closed system. Therefore it has to collapse every few decades. (Just like cancer stops when it kills its host).

Capitalists are not here to "give us jobs". We are here to make money for them, and when there is no money to be made in productive enterprises, they will turn to speculation until the bubble bursts. There is no law that will stop them.

People have starved before in the midst of plenty. As a matter of fact, people are starving now while others burn food in their cars.

Either we choose to use our wisdom and our capabilities to provide a modest standard of living for all, or we choose to let billions die to keep some wealthy.

Seems like an easy choice to me, but I'm not in control.

Happy Veteran's Day!

2009-11-10T23:52:00.000-08:00

Time for the annual genuflecting to our brave soldier heroes, the waving of flags, the ritual parading of veterans bragging about how they fought for our freedoms. Really? I didn't see any troops attacking Congress when they voted for the Patriot Act and abolished the Bill of Rights. What freedoms did they protect?

Read the Bill of Rights and tell me which rights the military has protected.

http://www.earlyamerica.com/earlyamerica/freedom/bill/text.html

And now for another view-

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IsrMzfhdmkU

Unitarians and Mass Murderers

2009-11-09T13:24:00.000-08:00

Unitarians and other empathetic bleeding heart liberals take a lot of abuse from the belligerent chest thumpers and wedding party bombers on the right.

We are accused of being cowards, unlike the brave heroes sucking up billions of tax dollars to protect us, in the military, the police state and Homeland Security.

Is it immodest to point out that in every mass killing (in the US, that is) so far, only the Unitarians rushed the shooter and subdued him? Without hurting him while doing so? The cowardly, unarmed Unitarians risked their own lives to stop the killing and save others.

The cop heroes usually cordon off the killing site and wait for the killers to go ahead and finish and then kill themselves, and then the cop heroes go in. I'm not sure what the soldier heroes did, but the (accused) killer ended up with bullets in him, so they didn't subdue him unarmed.

I'm just saying.

Tragedy in Texas

2009-11-06T14:19:00.000-08:00

A soldier flips out and uses his weapon to indiscrimately kill a bunch of people.

What makes this news? Big news? Front page, top of the broadcast, day after day news?

The fact that it happened in Texas, not Iraq or Afghanistan.

And the fact that the victims were US soldiers and not sleeping mothers and children.

Too bad that no one else will point this out.

Doh!! Fooled Again

2009-11-04T16:17:00.000-08:00

In yesterday's election, voters that voted Democrat last time voted Republican this time, in New Jersey and Virginia.

Ellen DeGeneres did a great bit where she wondered if goldfish ever get bored. She wanders back and forth across the stage as if it were a fishbowl, saying "I guess I'll go over here now. I guess I'll go over here now".

Who are these voters who never get bored with the duopoly of the corporate parties? Why do they fall for the "choice" again and again, like a baby playing peek-a-boo, endlessly believing that they are voting for something different? "I guess I'll vote for team A this time. I guess I'll vote for team B this time."

Half of the people in this country refuse to play this game. Most refuse on principled grounds, realizing that it doesn't make any difference who you vote for, and resisting the browbeating, the guilt tripping, the lecturing, the pleading, the preaching, the endless celebrities trotted out to insist that voting is important.

They tell us that we can't complain if we don't vote. Well. That's certainly the epitome of democracy! Vote, so you have the right to complain when they screw you over.

Then they tell you that you deserve the government you get. Well, that's infuriating! Not only do you have to deal with the betrayals, but then you're told that you asked for it. It's now not PC to announce that a woman deserves to be raped because of her dress or because she went to a bar, but voters are told that they deserve their government because they voted! That ain't right.

And my favorite, when people who actually vote complain about their choices, when they realize that both of the corporate vetted puppets are objectionable, when they want something that neither of the puppets are even bothering to promise, like peace, or liberty, or fair taxation, and you suggest that perhaps they should vote for the Green Party candidate, they laugh.

"I don't want to waste my vote", they say.

Media says "Jump" Americans say "How High?"

2009-11-03T11:36:00.000-08:00

It takes a few months to get the American people worked up enough to attack people they've never heard of before they're told that the New Improved Hitler has appeared in that country, wherever it may be. This is the task of the corporate media and their efficiency at focusing bloodlust to the approved target has been remarked on before.

My last post drew a comment from someone who has been turned against his fellow Americans by the media. It took a long time to work up this division, and, actually, it's only working on the young, not so much Baby Boomers and their parents, who mostly cling to the idea that they shouldn't be allowed to starve in their old age, as people did before Social Security.

Of course, it is ironic that people who are willing to kill millions of non-Americans to "save" American lives are usually the same ones who aren't really that fond of actual Americans. Actual Americans include non white people, poor people, old people, children on food stamps, liberals, and tree huggers. Except for those who are unborn, most killer Americans would be happy to see these Americans dead, or at least disappeared.

But I digress. What I meant to marvel at is the ability of corporate media to manipulate the public on a more basic level.

When the media hype about swine flu reached its peak, life in the ER was miserable. We were completely swamped. Everyone who coughed or sneezed ran in to be saved.

My coworker said that CNN had announced that "People are dying!! Get to the ER immediately or you will die!!"

Apparently, my ER was not the only one swamped. The word went out.

So my local TV station then said "Only go to the ER if your child looks blue or gray".

OK, that was too much of a turn around. But it started to make a dent in the flow.

All of a sudden, it stopped.

A patient who came in for a twisted ankle explained why. She said "I was afraid to come to the ER, because the TV said that I could get swine flu here, but I was afraid my ankle was broke".

The tsunami of coughers, followed by the dearth of patients, was an astounding demonstration of the power of the media on the day to day personal behavior of the well trained American public.

Terrorist=Someone with a Bomb, but no Air Force

2009-10-31T13:36:00.000-07:00

Many years ago, I lived near Moffett Air Force Base, and for two years, attended the Blue Angels show on 4th of July.

In some sort of dissociative state, I watched the precision flying with enjoyment, as if it were synchronized swimming or something innocuous like that.

Then I invited my Dad to go. He refused, pointing out that the purpose of those planes was to terrorize people and to drop bombs on them. Plus, it was a giant waste of energy.

I didn't go again.

But one year, as I was getting my mail, with my back to the base, a Blue Angel bomber flew very low over my head. I didn't hear it until it was over me, it was flying so fast.

Now I know what my Dad meant by terror! My heart was pounding, and I went inside and called the base to complain. Some sort of community soother calmed me down and promised that it wouldn't happen again. He told me that it was the last year the Blue Angels would fly there.

Lucky me, to be an American, and to be able to complain.

When the US attacked Iraq with their "shock and awe", which is very clearly an euphemism for raining terror on people, 24 hours a day, for days on end, how many people cared about the human beings on the receiving end?

I heard testimony about a woman whose two teenaged daughters couldn't take it. They were crying and screaming, so her husband and she and the kids got into the car to get out of Baghdad. They came to a roadblock of American soldiers.

As it happened, her husband had gone to college in the US., and spoke English very well. He got out of the car to explain to the soldiers that his daughters were terrified, and needed to leave the targeted area.

The soldiers killed him. Then they killed her kids.

I think about that man often. He came to America and met the tolerant, educated, friendly sort of Americans. Did he ever run into the nasty, ignorant, violent kind before that day? (At least, in person. Obviously, he had been a victim from the air). What did he think as he died?

Howard Zinn, like my Dad, was in WWll and came out with a hatred of war. I paraphrased his observation on terrorists for the title of this post. It says a lot about Americans that they think that someone with explosives around his waist is a despicable terrorist, but dropping bombs on people 24 hours a day is something to be proud of.

Baby Boomers-We Will Get Screwed Again

2009-10-29T09:41:00.000-07:00

Many, many years ago, so many babies were produced for a couple of decades that they got their own name - Baby Boomers.

The Baby Boomer mass of people created their own economic conditions, like rain forests creating their own weather. From coonskin caps to hula hoops to rock and roll records, money was made from catering to boomer whims.

And the millions of boomers provided cannon fodder for the Vietnam War, while the ones left behind got drugs funneled to them to keep them subdued, and to keep the CIA well-funded beyond their official allotment.

In the 80s, Alan Greenspan announced to us boomers that there were too many to continue to fund Social Security on its pay-as-you-go system. We needed to pre-pay our retirement, creating a trust fund of trillions to pay for us, and only us.

So ever since then, boomers and all others working since, have paid extra for this temporary trust fund, so as not to burden our children. And now, of course, we're told that they spent it and we shouldn't be so greedy as to expect them to provide for our retirement. Think of the children!

And here we go again. The health care bill that is supposed to "reform" the insurance companies and stop them from discriminating against people has a loophole.

Older people can be charged more! And by older people, I don't mean over 65. They are covered by Medicare.

No. The people younger than 65, that is, the Baby Boomers, can be charged more than everyone else for their forced health insurance tributes!

As screwed as we have been, from Vietnam to extra SS payments to now being forced to pay extra into the insurance coffers, I have to wonder what they have planned next?

Are they hoping we die before we get old? Or are they going to make sure we do?

Markets for Opium

2009-10-21T23:37:00.001-07:00

When the US invaded Afghanistan, the head of my ER, an Air Force brat who then used the military to become a doctor, announced that we were switching from Demerol to Morphine as our main pain killer.

This was a big switch. We give morphine all day and all night long, so it adds up.

I was always suspicious of that guy anyway. He was a right wing Christian, homeschooling, gun hoarding type, with, as I said, ties to the military.

I thought it was just us, but I've heard that the switch was nation-wide. I find that very suspicious. The US invades a poppy growing country, and suddenly only morphine is suitable to relieve pain.

But lately, we've been giving a lot of Dilaudid. On a hunch, I looked it up, and sure enough, Dilaudid is a morphine derivative, but six times stronger.

Are the CIA sharecroppers growing too many poppies for the ordinary markets to absorb?

By the way, I went to a forum sometime about 2003 where the local district attorney was speaking, and he mentioned that for some reason, they were arresting way more heroin users than before. Well, duh!

A Vietnam Vet Speaks and Boy, Is He Confused

2009-10-16T23:04:00.000-07:00

So yesterday, I run into a man wearing a baseball cap saying "Viet Vet".

See, I don't think that's anything to brag about. What are they trying to say? "I killed peasants who were trying to improve their lives and I'm damn proud of it"? But that doesn't fit on a cap?

So this guy starts telling me how his wife went without medical care for two years, until they got poor enough to get public aid, and how she's ashamed of her medical card, but he thinks that he deserves it, since he paid taxes for years and all.

So I say that in other countries, people just get health care as a right. No shame, just medical treatment. And he says, oh yeah, that's how it should be.

So I say, but the US spends too much on war, so they tell us we can't afford health care.

OK, now he's torn. So he says, well, I'm glad there's no draft, because my son doesn't have to go into the military like I did. I was forced.

So I push a little, and point out that the US is waging two wars and is trying for more and we can't afford it.

This confuses him. He wants health care, but he's all about US dominance. So he says that the US should just go in and kill everyone, and then it would be over and we wouldn't have to pay anymore money.

So I say that that is uncivilized.

So he says, "I don't mean we should nuke them", in an aggrieved, misunderstood voice. How could I possibly have thought he meant nuke them when he just meant kill them all with conventional weapons? Jeeeez.

So I say we should mind our own business and not try to dominate the world.

Well, he didn't think we should dominate the world, but the world needed to do what we want, or we should kill them.

Then his wife put a stop to our conversation.

So. He's for universal health care, and against the draft, but he's for US imperial domination and mass murder of resisting dominees.

Does that make him a Democrat or a Republican?

Big Brother Makes Sure You Deserve Health Care

2009-10-13T10:24:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, I noticed the ER Business Office had added cameras that literally looked like eyes, on eyestalks, at each desk. I asked what was up with that?

Well, it turns out that the hospital is concerned that some unworthy people might be getting treatment that they don't deserve. Some people who are ill, and don't have money or insurance, are borrowing other people's Medicaid cards and seeing doctors when they can't afford it! This, of course, must stop. Only people with money or insurance are allowed to see doctors in this country. The Congress and the President say so. And the hospital is spending more money to survey all its patients, to catch the few undeserving sick.

Congress is dealing with people's lack of money to buy insurance by passing a law to make it illegal. As someone pointed out, maybe they should deal with the homeless people living under bridges by passing a law that they must buy houses.

When my sister was in New Zealand, she needed to go to an ER for stitches. They treated her without retina scans, or ID, or billing info. They just took care of her. An alien!! For free!

This is absolutely unheard of in America. The right wing accuses the Congress of possibly allowing non-Americans to buy health insurance and the "liberals" respond by denying it heartily. No one in America defends the right to health care for all.

No one in America defines "health care" as access to doctors and nurses. "Health Care' is defined as insurance buying, although everyone knows that insurance companies deny claims, demand large deductibles and co-payments, and find pre-existing conditions at will.

I think that the next time there is a typhoon in the Phillipines, or a hurricane in Pakistan, and the rest of the world is sending doctors and supplies, the US should send insurance agents.

If it's good enough for us, it's good enough for them.

Not Clear On the Concept

2009-09-09T10:47:00.000-07:00

Saturday, I spent time petitioning at the Illinois State Fair in DuQuoin. The Green Party space was off (way off) the main path. We were near the track where the Motocross and Demolition Derby were held. So we tried to get those on their way to watch vehicles crash to sign the petition.

A surprising number of people claimed that they were registered to vote. Is this possible? Do people so incredibly uninterested in politics actually register to vote? Why bother?

It really didn't matter whether they signed or not. Almost all offered their opinion of the US morass in this way "This country is going socialist".

How is giving public money to capitalists - socialist? This is a clear contradiction. Socialism wants to overthrow capitalism and replace it with a worker owned and run society. I am unable to comprehend how giving billions of dollars to capitalists could possibly be socialist. Somehow, the American people have been convinced that the ownership of the country's wealth by a very small minority is "socialist".

Local schools didn't show Obama's speech because it was, you guessed it, "socialist".

Let's see. He informs the children that it is their responsibility to educate themselves. He informs them that if they fail to work hard and study and go to college, they won't get a job. He informs them that they need to be smart and educated so that the US can prevail over all other countries in the world.

Sounds pretty capitalistic to me! You're on your own, kid. If you fail, you deserve to sleep in the streets. We will use your brainpower and your labor to take over the world, but all you get out of it is a job.

I can't see how Obama could have made it any plainer to kids that they live in a dog eat dog capitalist society, and it is their problem if they can't make it to the top. (Of course, if they understand math, they will know that, by definition, if there is to be a top 1%, there has to be a bottom 99%).

I tip my hat once more to the amazing propaganda masters of the media. They are outstanding in their field!

Living Outside the Green Zone

2009-09-07T09:15:00.000-07:00

Iraqis who live in the Real World try to carry on their everyday lives without knowing if they will survive ordinary ADLs (activities of daily living). Will they be blown away on a trip to the market?

Americans who created the Iraqis living hell live safely in the Green Zone, complete with Subways and Burger Kings.

How about the good ol' USA? Sunnis and Shiites have nothing on us, divided between black and white, native born and immigrant, employed at this time and unemployed. We've had death squads, but we called them the KKK and the Pinkertons, so we don't acknowledge their functions, which were to keep the oppressed in their place.

Friday night my small town had five gunshot wound victims! As the economic victims of the US economy mount, the small time criminals increase. The first guy was robbed of all his money, but shot anyway. This is a breakdown in a transaction. Traditionally, it's been "your money or your life". These small time criminals tried to take both!

The large criminals are breaking the rules. Banks fail and get bailed out instead of filing for bankruptcy. Cheney authorizes torture and goes on national TV to justify it, instead of going to prison for breaking international and national laws. The US invades multiple countries in violation of international law and rakes in the booty, instead of facing World Court prosecution.

So is it any wonder that small time criminals break the rules? Your money and then your life. You don't like it, tough. If Cheney can shoot someone in the face, why can't everyone else?

But the rich who created this living hell for us, live their lives safely in gated communtities, with security guards and armored limousines. They won't be partaking of the blood letting in the streets of America, just like they don't partake of the bloodletting in Iraq or Afhanistan.

Their posh lifestyles and lavish parties will continue, while the dispossessed fight it out on the streets and in the prisons.

It's no fun living outside the Green Zone! Although here, the Subways and Burger Kings are on the outside.