An Even Keel

Success Formula for the Occupy Movement

2011-10-25T16:18:00.001-05:00

PROPOSAL

I’m in love with the Occupy Movement. Having attended the first day of the October2011 sponsored occupation of Freedom Plaza in Washington, D.C. and a meeting of the local group Occupy Springfield as well as watching and reading news of other gatherings around the country and the world, I am heartened by the extent to which this movement has stirred people to action. They have called their dissatisfaction to the world’s attention, and the world has responded positively. Every world leader must now be aware that there is a powerful wave of discontent among the majority of the world’s people. That should make knees knock in some places of power.

The question now is what is the next step? If all the movement can express is its discontent, it is unlikely to have a very deep impact. What is needed is a focal point around which these now disparate movements can operate.

The movement exists largely because of anger. People are angry at the rich and powerful 1% who have hoarded wealth in their own coffers at the expense of the 99% who have seen their buying power shrink over the past 40 years. Americans are also angry because their patriotic energies have been diverted into expensive, wasteful and unnecessary wars.

Anger is a powerful emotion that can provide valuable motivation, but if the movement is to achieve positive ends, that energy must be used in a positive manner. If the movement is to really accomplish anything beyond stirring unrest, it needs, as a starting point, to limit the scope of its outrage to a few issues it can impose on the present system.

For instance, in my area the anger has generated a call for the local “Occupy” group to confront the police over its “right” to use public places on their own terms rather than accepting rules like allowed hours of operation, etc. If the group accepts this as a valid way to protest, it will dissipate its energies and go in no positive direction. The movement will have morphed into a fight against park rules emplaced by representative government. If the movement removes its own impetus in this way, the other side wins because they have distracted the protestors from their initial purposes.

Unless the Occupy Movement influences the American political process by shifting the emphasis from empowering and enriching a small percentage of the population to enhancing the lives of 100% of the population, all the furor will have come to nothing. It is my conviction, too, that any significant change in the American system will have profound impact on the world. Regime change does indeed begin at home. Endnote – explanation that these are systemic changes that need to be put in place.

If that is an agreed upon goal, then it’s reasonable to ask what the movement might do that will advance that goal and to evaluate every proposed action against that goal. It’s also reasonable to recognize that the sea-change demanded by the primary objectives (or is that primary objections?) is national in scope. Occupy Movement members should certainly seek to find candidates for local office who accept and will act on the movement’s philosophy, but this central goal can only be achieved on a national scale.

Another issue of great importance is time. The movement must ask itself whether a proposed action can advance desired objectives within the timeframe allowed by the present political system. The problem is endemic to our huge economic and political system. Given that the ultimate goal is a complete remake of the current system, it is overly optimistic to think that much change could be accomplished before the next presidential election. It is more likely that the movement could gather enough clout before November, 2012 to influence the platform of the existing parties. While it is much more likely that the Democratic Party platform will be drastically impacted by this kind of progressive action, it is not at all unrealistic to expect to have some impact on the Republican platform as well. After all, some Republicans holding national office have already endorsed the Occupy Movement’s ideals, and any political party that would completely ignore the focused anger of 99% of the people would be on a fast road to the trashcan of history. This writer has no doubt that a longer term plan – up to twenty years – will be necessary if the movement should decide to create another party to rival the two now in existence or to force one of the existing parties to accept all of our demands as its permanent platform. (I say twenty years because that’s how long it took American colonists to move from anger at the king to declaring independence.) It’s also realistic to recognize that Congressional and Presidential elections are not all that need to be influenced. The Supreme Court is currently just as corrupt as the Congress, and civil servants have been appointed over the last thirty years by right wing presidents intent on proving that the government is dysfunctional. Remedying these situations will call for a long term plan implemented over time.

The first objective though, that of significantly influencing the Democratic Party platform before the 2012 presidential election can be accomplished. As evidence of that, one has only to look at the Tea Party’s accomplishments in moving the Republican Party further right in less than two years between its inception in 2008 and the Congressional sweep in 2010. The Occupy Movement could do the same by forcing the Democratic Party or perhaps even the entire political spectrum further left between now and 2012.

What it would take is:

1. A simple, clear mission statement such as:

i. The mission of the Occupy Movement is to end lobby-induced governmental corruption, stop wasteful governmental spending, and end discrimination in economic policy and the administration of justice.

2. A clear statement of demands. The Tea Party didn’t even have this. They accomplished their purpose just by saying they were fed up with business as usual. As a result of this lack of direction they have now been co-opted by special interests. The Occupy Movement could do more and protect itself at the same time by being more succinct and thus diverting co-option. Here is a suggested list as a starting point:

i. Tax reform

ii. Social Security contribution reform

iii. Reduction of the military budget from its current $733 billion, which is more than the rest of the world combined, to 1/3 of the rest of the world’s expenditure in the prior year, combined with a call for world-wide arms reduction.

iv. Campaign finance and process reform

v. Means tested single payer health care

3. A census of Occupy Movement members that would allow the movement to say we have X members who will not vote for a Democrat or Republican unless he or she agrees to implement our demands. (Attendees at Freedom Plaza all signed in. If all locals did the same, we would just need to count all members in a central database.) Imagine the effect this could have on a political party if we had 150,000,000 members. That is not an unattainable number if we truly are the 99%. We just need to frame our positions clearly and launch a national petition drive.

RATIONALE

1. Proposed mission statement - The mission of the Occupy Movement is to stop wasteful governmental spending, and end discrimination in economic policy and the administration of justice. - The other night I listened as a member of my local Occupy group read a lengthy mission statement. I agreed with all the sentiments he expressed, but don’t believe that a statement of that length will have the desired impact. This is the day of the Tweet, and few people seem to have the attention span to comprehend and apply a lengthy statement. This proposed statement is an attempt to state the mission in as few words as possible while striving to use language that will allow people of all political stripes to nod in agreement. The devil is always in the details, but getting people to nod at the beginning of your “sales spiel” is sound strategy. A mission statement is not a strategic plan, but is the intellectual and emotional basis for such a plan. The objectives detailed below are the framework for a strategic plan. The plan is to get enough signatures endorsing these objectives to influence the platforms of candidates for national office.

There is never any doubt that those most motivated by greed and personal interest will find a way around any system put in place to thwart them, but it is essential to start somewhere. What I am about to propose are starting points for national debate. The need for that debate is part of my belief that we cannot afford to ignore timelines in our planning. These suggestions are kept simple in the hope that alternate objectives to be met arrived at by consensus will be the same. I do not purport to be “the man with the answers”, but only to be a man who is offering a starting point. Here are the suggested initial positions and the arguments for them that generated the five objectives stated above:

1. Equal taxation for all personal incomes and capital gains above the poverty level and mandatory taxation for retained corporate earnings – This is a response to the grossly unjust present tax system. That system was devised as a way to give special incentives to certain kinds of spending, but its injustices are widely recognized. This goal lumps personal incomes and capital gains in the same category because the latter are used by the wealthier among us as tax dodges, and that tactic can be counteracted by eliminating the difference in taxability between the two. Corporations use the same dodge, and they should be taxed for Retained Corporate Earnings, which are revenues set aside for future use. Taxing those earnings could spur some investment of earnings in jobs as a way for the corporation to shelter itself from taxation while not offering a large enough shelter to starve government coffers. Dividends to stockholders should also be taxed as personal income. The essential point would be to set the taxation levels so that we would experience some improvement over our present national tax income.

Initial review of this proposal by progressive editors has raised the argument that taxation should be higher on high earners than on lower level earners. I can support that to a point, but that point is very low on the income scale in my mind. I have no vendetta against the very wealthy and believe that each of us should contribute an equal percentage if our incomes to the nation’s coffers as long as that percentage does not interfere with our ability to meet family needs. In other words, great care should be taken to avoid placing undue burden on the lower earners among us, but when a person’s income reaches a level at which he/she can be expected to meet all the financial needs of the family through prudent management (certainly a level higher than now identified as the poverty level), no special consideration is any longer needed.

2. Equal percentage contribution to social security for 100% of income – The present system that exempts higher incomes from contribution has been unjust from the day it was implemented. Requiring full contribution refutes the notion of trickle-down economics and fully funds social security so that those who were unable to achieve high income still have a safety net after retirement. The idea of “privatizing” social security is, of course, just a means of making taxed money intended as a pool for support of those in need after they are no longer able to work available to Wall Street investors and so is completely unacceptable. Instead, the movement should act to ensure that those funds are retained in government hands and not available as funds for any other purpose.

This writer also believes that means testing for withdrawal is an acceptable strategy if necessary to ensure availability of funds for citizens in need, so would be open to that stipulation provided it is made based on a reasonable level of income, which would, again, be well above the present poverty levels. Another method would be to reduce the amount of payments to eligible recipients based on a scale dependent on income.

3. Reduction of the military budget from its current $733 billion, which is more than the rest of the world combined (Source: Inter-Faith Peacemakers of Edina, 5320 Windsor Avenue, Edina, MN 55436 (952) 922-3401 www.mapm.org), to 1/3 of the rest of the world’s expenditure in the prior year. (Not to 1/3 of present spending, but to 1/3 of the rest of the world’s spending as a starting point.) These expenditure reductions should be combined with a call for world-wide arms reduction including a moratorium on international arms sales, nuclear weapons, and robotic weapons.

The Obama administration recently approached the UN with the statement that that body would need to find a way to increase its defense capabilities because US budget cuts will necessitate reduced military abilities. Part and parcel to our military budget reduction, we should call for new world-wide arms control measures as a means of ensuring our own national security as well as that of the world. That is why my recommendation includes moratoria on arms sales, nuclear weaponry and robotic weaponry. This would, of course, be hard fought in the US because so much of our economy is based on arms production and sales. This, combined, perhaps with some tax exemptions or other incentives, should give us leverage to argue for re-investment in alternative energy production, infra-structure improvement, etc.

A special note on robotic weaponry: This author believes that the development of automated warfare holds horrendous potential because it further removes public and even military awareness from the horror of war, and reduces it to something like a video game. Since the Vietnam war protests, our government has learned that it can keep wars going longer if the public is not subject to the draft and does not see daily body counts or photographic accounts of daily battles. Posting soldiers in Nevada to operate drone bombers in Afghanistan isolates even the military from the front lines. That isolation from the realities of war will make it much easier for governments to wage wars.

Robotic warfare can be waged with tools as simple and cheap as remote controlled model airplanes. The fact that the other side can also use these tactics puts our own security at greater risk. The evolution of military tactics into the use of robotics should be outlawed before it develops further.

4. Campaign finance reform - Repeal of the Citizens United decision through a constitutional amendment stating that corporations do not and cannot have the rights of citizens, but exist at the will of the state– not just to generate a profit, but for the betterment of `society. - This would be – and should be touted as – a return to the original Congressional stance on corporations which, when first established in this country, were chartered as being created for the interests of society and were not allowed to operate strictly for profit generation. Incorporated into this position should be the expectation that companies operating in the US are obligated to these terms regardless of where they are headquartered.

Existence for the betterment of society could be defined as job creation with appropriate wages and benefits, development of product lines designed to improve the personal and cultural well-being of the citizenry, and development of products and production methods designed to enhance the health and well-being of the planet.

The upshot of this change would be to greatly reduce the gambling aspect of the Wall Street investment wheel and increase the level of investment in bricks and mortar businesses engaged in culturally appropriate enterprise.

A further step would be to restrict national political campaigns to public airwaves in government sponsored programs that restrict the length and content of campaigns. While this is akin to the goal of repealing Citizens United, it goes further in that it seeks to stop the blitz of expensive, mud-slinging campaign ads that glut our network and cable airwaves during extended campaigns. Restricting all national campaigning to public airwaves would force candidates to discuss issues in debate formats devised by non-partisan panels.

5. Establish a single-payer health care system with participation based on means testing. The present system of private health insurance has long been an obscenity in that only the very rich can afford full coverage, pre-existing conditions are denied any coverage, and insurance companies with an average administrative overhead of 34% make huge profits while shielding themselves from having to pay out benefits. The Obama administration’s health care program is widely recognized as a compromise program that extends the insurance companies’ control of the health care system. The Medicare program operates with a 2% overhead expense even while offering Advantage Care options that provide nearly 100% coverage at reasonable cost. (For instance, my current Advantage Care plan costs me $100/ year for Part B coverage, drug coverage at $7.00 per prescription, primary care visits for $10 co-pay, specialist visits for $50 co-pay and hospitalization with a $2,500 maximum co-pay.) A single payer system modeled after this kind of Medicare plan but implementing a fair means test to determine premiums is, to me, an acceptable method of containing health care costs while ensuring coverage for all citizens.

While I see the last goal as essential to making our campaigns more meaningful, it would be the first of these goals that I would agree to drop. There are a great many other issues that will demand resolution as well, but as I said at the outset, it is essential for us to limit the scope of our protests if we want to accomplish needed change. The health care initiative is a largely unattainable demand at this time, and others would be, too. Still, I sure would love to force politicians to endorse these ideas if they want my vote!

My challenge to the Occupy Movement is to generate enough clout in the American political system to force these proposals or something like them into the debate for the 2012 presidential election.

The “Occupy” Movement

2011-10-12T10:37:00.001-05:00

When David Swanson proposed the idea of Occupy DC via his newsletter this summer, I signed up immediately. This seemed to me like exactly what the country needed – a people’s movement that says not just that we are fed up, but what we see as being wrong with our country and exactly what needs to be done to make it the place we want it to be.

The United States economy has come full circle since the days of my father’s youth. The situation we now face – trying to recover from a huge economic failure – is so like that faced by Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1930s that it seems uncanny until one realizes that following the money always leads to the same places and the same kinds of people.

The basic problem is not the structure created by our forefathers. It is the manipulation of that structure by the present system of corporate power and politicians owned and operated by the corporate powers that be. We can and must work within the framework of rights and responsibilities created and guaranteed by the Constitution.

My hope was that being on Freedom Plaza on October 6 would put me on-site for the beginning of a sea-change in American politics - a true dawning of the Age of Aquarius – and I believe it did. Although Occupy Wall Street stole some of Occupy DC’s thunder, the two movements have the same soul and will grow together. What I saw there was a gathering of people from all walks of life; all ages; all beliefs; all states, and the full range of life experiences from green youth to veterans of Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.

There were a few misguided people carrying signs supporting one or the other of the two political parties now in power in the United States, but most understood that the purpose there was not to beg those parties to do something for the people, but to tell them that the people were giving up on them. This was the true tea party – the Boston tea party revisited – but this time there were no costumes. These were the people stepping up to say loudly and clearly that they had had enough; that the usual flag waving and Bible thumping would never again lead them down the garden path; that the problems they were facing were real enough to bring them out into the streets demanding that their government change its ways. These folks aren’t just saying they are fed up, they are exactly defining the problem as they see it and refusing to take the usual political pap for an answer.

They aren’t just saying cut the defense budget. They are going to the Smithsonian drone displays and saying specifically that this kind of immoral approach is unacceptable. They aren’t just moaning that big business doesn’t care about them, they are shutting down the national Chamber of Commerce offices on the grounds that the huge controlling corporations have too much power. They aren’t just complaining about lobbyist control of government, they are stopping business-as-usual at the Hart Senate Office Building with their chants of “We are the 99%”.

They were in the streets saying what I have been trying to say to Springfield for years – that they are protesting not against the workings of one party or the other, but against the vile workings of the entire system.

They embrace no existing political party. They are, instead, very like the citizens of France storming the Bastille with pitchforks and pikes in hand demanding that the aristocracy quit robbing them of their self worth as well as their monetary worth.

Unlike the conservative Tea Party whose efforts are aimed at pulling the Republican Party further in their direction, this tea party is a signal to both parties that neither of them has met the needs of the people, but that both have become servants not of the people but of the corporations designated as people in the Citizens United decision of 2011. This stance has struck such resonance with the people of the United States that “Occupy” groups have sprung up in every city in the nation. This is a movement that truly is of the people and as such it is truly dangerous to the future of the current system of economic dominance by the United States.

“Occupy” does not call for the overthrow of capitalism, but for the reasonable management of it for the benefit of the entire nation - not just the top 1%. “Occupy” doesn’t call for the destruction of our ability to protect ourselves, but for reasonable expenditures and efforts to do so. “Occupy” doesn’t call for reductions in services to the people but for their expansion as needed to truly meet the needs of the people. “Occupy” doesn’t call for the destruction of the corporate system, but for the use of the corporate system as a tool for the betterment of our society – the way it was when Congress first recognized corporations. “Occupy” should not be seen by citizens as a threat to their well-being, but as a means to ensure that their voice can be heard in the halls of Congress.

The one thing we cannot afford to do is to cave and conclude that we have no choice but to continue along our present path. “Occupy” must build a political alternative to the entire existing political establishment, but do so within the framework created by the founding fathers.

This movement has the power to turn this country around for the benefit of its people and those of all the nations on earth. This will be a long and difficult struggle, but it is high time for an American Season not only to rival the overthrows of the Arab Summer, but to exceed them via the creation of a system of governance centered around the needs of the people rather than the desires of the rich and powerful whose attempts to create American hegemony actually morphed into the destruction of the American economy.

It is quite possible that “Occupy”, if it models itself after the actions of the founding fathers, could create a new American approach that would permanently change the world’s approach to commerce for the better. The people of this country and the world should hail the American “Occupy” movement as a welcome and even vital addition to their future and encourage it in any way they can.

America's Stockholm Syndrome

2011-01-03T07:58:00.001-06:00

A question commonly pondered among my friends is, “Why do so many people in southwest Missouri, whom we know are not wealthy, so strongly support a system that shifts what little wealth they have to people who already have a lot more?”

One person might answer. “It’s because they don’t understand. Every time somebody says ‘taxes’ they are conditioned to say ‘evil’. Every time somebody says ‘liberal’ they are conditioned to say ‘taxes’. Ultimately, then, when somebody says tax the wealthy, they think – tax equals liberal equals evil.”

Another might say, “It’s because they are conditioned not to analyze things. They believe their duty is to get in line and not ask questions.”

Others think that as long as the nation is happy with its TV, couch and car there is little incentive to change.

Bob Burnett, a writer from Berkeley, CA, recently published an article (OpEdNews 12/28/10) that offered a very interesting theory on the question. He began with a famous old Groucho Marx story about a man who goes to a psychiatrist to ask what he can do for his brother who thinks he’s a chicken. The psychiatrist said, “Why don’t you just tell him the truth?” “I would,” the man replied, “but we need the eggs.”

America’s problem, Burnett asserts, is that we are all convinced that we need the eggs the top 1% supposedly lay for us, so we are willing to follow the right wing line and give them all the tax breaks they need. The problem, though, is that someone saying he’s a chicken doesn’t mean he’ll ever lay any eggs.

Take a good hard look. When was the last time that tax break laid any beneficial eggs for us? Did the tax break they’ve had for ten years keep us in jobs or help keep the deficit down?

Burnett likens the situation to Stockholm Syndrome, a condition by which hostages come to admire their captors and adopt their point of view. “Government is the problem” has been hammered into our heads so well and often that even the poor have come to believe their best interest is in a rich man’s pocketbook, but does the ability of the rich to buy luxury items really enrich the rest of us? Too many of us seem to believe that their lives won’t be as good if Donald Trump can’t have all the yachts he wants. Too many seem to believe that if they just hold their mouth right they might get to have all they want, too.

As Burnett asserts, “Not only are we not angry at the rich, we want to be like them!”

But that’s where the line gets drawn. I don’t want to be like them, and neither do most of the “evil” liberals I know. We want to live comfortably in a world where each of us strives to ensure that neither he nor his neighbor is deprived of work, shelter, health care or dignity. How evil we must be.

Why I Can't Vote Republican

2010-12-27T17:22:00.002-06:00

One of my recent columns provoked a fine discussion including an interesting question from the right. The left talks about bi-partisanism, the reader said, but when did they last vote for a Republican? My answer is that my first national vote was for a Republican, and I voted for a local Republican in the last election, but I would not vote for any Republican on the national level now. The reason is morality.

You think that’s a shocking statement? After all, the G.O.P. is the moral majority, the opposition to abortion, and the party of church-goers, isn’t it?

I think morality is better displayed by seeking truth than by opposition to abortion or by wearing religion on your sleeve. The pro-life morality breaks down in the refusal to relieve a child raped by her father, and in unquestioning support for the death penalty and unnecessary war. Immoral behavior too often hides behind religious boasting. Morality, to me, is striving to live up to ideals by seeking to make the way the world is be closer to the way it ought to be.

The Republican Party has been the party of short-term self-interest for at least thirty years, and I can’t vote for that. After Eisenhower, the G.O.P. has nominated one slow-witted caricature after another and then let a network of very intelligent Machiavellians run the country behind the scenes. The only requirement for a president seems to be a certain ability to wave the flag and look pious.

The way the G.O.P. machine works its Karl Rovian black magic through a media network designed to broadcast any lie that will advance its march toward domination is enough to turn any moralist’s stomach.

Our right wing friends constantly decry the “liberal press”, but I defy anyone to point out a liberal media network as insidiously vicious as the FOX News, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck matrix that is underwritten by the “damn the truth, full speed ahead” support that people like our own (thankfully slipped away in the night) Vince Jericho lend it on the local level throughout the nation. It is a network of disinformation that leads by the nose those voters who buy into any sound bite that meets their emotional approval, and it is horribly dangerous to the future of democracy.

Any party that maintains such a media propaganda machine to support the kind of back-stabbing, ends-justify-any-means campaigns the G.O.P. constructs has strayed so far from any acceptable definition of morality that it will never capture a single vote of mine on the national level, and that’s the bottom line.

What’s essential for this nation is not the voter’s undying support for his party no-matter-what, but his or her constant striving to make that party adhere to truly moral behaviors and attitudes. When that happens I, too, will join the moral majority. In the meantime, as long as the G.O.P. continues its present tactics, their opposition will have my vote, and I’ll remain loyal to the moral minority.

Why Not Vote Republican?

2010-12-16T15:22:00.001-06:00

One of my recent columns in Springfield, MO’s News-Leader provoked a fine discussion including an interesting question from the right. The left talks about bipartisanism, the reader said, but when did they last vote for a Republican? My answer is that my first national vote was for a Republican, and I voted for a local Republican in the last election, but I would not vote for any Republican on the national level now. The reason is morality.

You think that’s a shocking statement? After all, the G.O.P. is the moral majority, the opposition to abortion, and the party of church-goers, isn’t it?

At this point I have no great love for either party. What’s essential for this nation is not the voter’s undying support for his party no-matter-what, but his or her constant striving to make that party adhere to truly moral behaviors and attitudes. When that happens I, too, will join the moral majority. In the meantime, as long as the G.O.P. continues its present tactics, their opposition will have my vote, and I’ll remain loyal to the moral minority no matter what party's candidate I vote for.

Moral Clarity

2010-12-16T11:18:00.001-06:00

The growth of the tea party is the most glaring evidence of the pain poor governance has inflicted on the people of the country. When the right wing, a group heavily conditioned to stay in line, is moved by its government to rise up as the tea party against that government in ways that it has so long and loudly proclaimed as unpatriotic, it is obvious that something is terribly wrong.

To those on the left, though, these protestors seem to have finally seen the need to escape without finding the door. Their cries of protest are defeated by their lack of direction. Their generalities – smaller government, moral leadership, etc – lack specificity while calling for a return to the “good old days”.

The “good old days” of a chicken in every pot sound good to the left, too, but the “good old days” of pre-Social Security and Medicare - both positions expressed by tea party candidates who recently elections to state and national office – do not. That call is for a return to the county poorhouse and death by neglect. Such ideas lead us backward, not forward. What improvement lies within them?

A wonderful book, “Moral Clarity”, by Susan Neiman, Director of the Einstein Forum, discusses the rift between left and right in great depth. In extremely limited synopsis - she says that the right, as followers of David Hume, cling to the notion that mankind needs religion because it is incapable of internally governing its own behavior in a moral fashion. The left, as followers of Immanuel Kant, cling to the notion that ideas and ideals are each person’s guides to morality and that good governance explores the potential for ideas and ideals to achieve moral balance in society.

This right wing caution, she asserts, urges us to hold to known quantities – stability and security guaranteed by those whose abilities have put them in socially superior positions - as opposed to accepting the assertions of dreamers whose ideals tell them that “things” ought to be better. Such caution, however, may lead to security, but not to growth and social improvement.

We must be “realistic” the right tells us, and not follow the unproven dreams of idealists, but the expectation that an idea must contain from the outset a proven solution to a problem is absurd. The purpose of ideas is not to solve problems so much as to identify them and act as steps toward their resolution through political debate and compromise.

Poverty, for instance, remains a problem among our African-American population, but it is not as severe a problem as the slavery that preceded it. Nor is it the same problem it was before Dr. King dragged the white population into the harsh light of racial reality through the prism of Alabama State Trooper billy clubs wielded against his ideas.

Society advances through the evolution of ideas into realities. A movement striving to stifle those ideas is a return to old days that weren’t really all that good.

The U.S. is Guiltier than WikiLeaks

2010-11-30T06:48:00.001-06:00

Here’s an interesting tidbit published by CLG News.com on November 30, 2010:

WikiLeaks: US Senators call for WikiLeaks to face criminal charges --'WikiLeaks presents a clear and present danger to the national security of the United States.' 28 Nov 2010 Members of the United States Congress reacted with fury at WikiLeaks on Sunday, calling on the group to be designated a "Foreign Terrorist Organisation" and urging the United States government to pursue a prosecution. "Leaking the material is deplorable," Senator Lindsay Graham of South Carolina, a Republican, told Fox 'News.' "The people at WikiLeaks could have blood on their hands ... People who do this are low on the food chain as far as I'm concerned. If you can prosecute them, let's try."

I don’t disagree with Senator Graham that to the extent that such leaks as this one endanger lives the crime should be prosecutable. But where was Senator Graham’s when the Vice President of the United States’ outed Valerie Plame in retaliation for her husband’s opposition to the Iraq war?

For that matter, I think politicians who are willing to violate the Constitution they swore to uphold by imprisoning and/or torturing people without proof of criminal action should be open to prosecution – not to mention those who manufacture evidence in order to take the nation into war.

Now don’t you wingnuts start screaming at me for that last one. I am not just talking about George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, (Although I’m betting that they are the first people who came to mind when you read that sentence.) but also include our current president’s continued persecution of untried prisoners. There’s no way to prosecute the following, but calls to war from Teddy Roosevelt’s ouster of King Kamehameha to give an American corporation control of Hawaiian fruit production to insurgencies in South and Central American nations and LBJ’s Gulf of Tonkin incident were also criminal. (For a compilation of these offenses see: “Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq” by Stephen Kinzer. Times Books, Henry Holt and Company, New York. 2006.)

The point is that our country has used boogey man enemies to stir up support for war after war. By comparison Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks publication of classified documents is a pretty minor offense. Apparently Pfc Bradley Manning actually downloaded the info and gave it to WikiLeaks – maybe even conceived the idea himself – but his fate will still be little more than an echo of another of our favorite diversions – prosecuting someone at the bottom of the ladder so those at the top can go on pulling their deadly shenanigans. In effect, he may be more of a whistleblower than a traitor.

The fact is that the number – if any – of lives endangered by these leaks doesn’t come close to the number wasted by our invasions of other countries. By that measure this young man’s transgression is a drop in a sea of official sins that we will continue to support by ignoring them.

Amnesty International Calls for American War Crimes Investigation

2010-11-20T19:20:00.002-06:00

On September 17, 2001, just six days after 9-11, President G. W. Bush authorized the CIA to set up secret detention facilities in other countries. Now in his memoir, he has clearly stated that he was part of the process authorizing "enhanced interrogation techniques" (read torture) against detainees in those facilities. He also named others who were involved.

On November 11, 2010 Amnesty International, a London-based group that has done a lot of excellent work over the years, called for a criminal investigation based on that admission. On the 18th, the UN echoed that call. It is a call that should be heeded.

If it should happen the ramifications would shake this nation from Washington, D.C., where President Obama is still operating those facilities, to right here in Springfield because SWMO's own John Ashcroft will be among those who will have to explain their roles.

Of course there will be a lot of backroom bargaining – to put it politely – between the call for investigation and the day when the United States government refuses to participate. It might become a rather bloody public debate or – more likely – a story quietly buried on the back page if reported on at all. Certainly the American press – not so leftist after all – will not print the whole story. The U.S. has long pretended to be supportive of the UN and the World Court, but has always denied them the right of judging us. That certainly won't change in the face of this mess. It will take pressure from the rest of the world to make it happen.

As a child of the forties and fifties I remember comic books, cartoons and movies that showed caricatures of Japanese soldiers and told stories of their barbarous ways. We were pretty carefully taught that one of the things that separated us from them (aside from the broadly drawn racial characteristics) was that they tortured prisoners while our soldiers did not.

No matter how skillfully our leaders might maneuver their way out of the limelight on this one, the fact is that the nation that filled our heads with stories of its righteousness in WWII as compared to the savagery of the Germans and Japanese has now moved to an official policy allowing torture - a sad slide from a moral ideal (whether ever true or not) into a pit of immoral slime from which there is no honorable escape other than to admit guilt and beg forgiveness.

America owes it to the world to allow an investigation and agree to accept its findings. It's the only realistic way to regain the moral high ground our lapse into barbarity has stolen from us.

My bet, though, is that we won't do it. Instead we will continue to posture as though we never lost that ground. We might fool ourselves with such posturing, but we can't be our own judge. The rest of world, watching our continued vanity, arrogance and hypocrisy on full display, will judge us harshly. We have lost their respect for good reason. We could gain it back, but I'm betting we won't.

I’m Fed Up Too, Billy

2010-11-18T10:24:00.001-06:00

In his recent campaign for Congress Billy Long picked up the tea party chant "I'm fed up" and made it his tag line. Well, Billy, I'm fed up too.

I'm fed up with politicians who go to Washington pledging not to take earmarks and upon arrival declare that they will bring home all the money they can get their hands on ala Rand Paul. (Who got a knot jerked in his tail!)

I'm fed up with politicians who pledge to work for their constituency but link up with outfits like Halliburton and big oil companies bent on continuing their rape of the planet. Gee, Billy, what newly elected politician do suppose has done that?

I'm fed up with politicians who will spread any lie they think will get them traction. Lies like "Obamacare" is a government takeover of health care that will establish death panels and cut Medicare coverage. I'm completely fed up with politicians who say they will repeal "Obamacare" when they know darn well they can't and wouldn't if they could because it suits their private insurance industry friends from whom we must all now buy health coverage. While they say they're against this law because it forces purchase of a product, they will be working behind the scenes to modify it so that the forced purchase won't also force the insurance companies to provide the coverage required by the new law.

I'm also totally fed up with politicians who claim they will work for the needs of the people but argue that those who make significantly more than the average person should be exempt from taxation that could help those out of work get through tough times. It seems to me that if those on top were true patriots they would be not just willing but eager to contribute what they could to the well-being of the nation. Instead of patriotism they display only hunger for more wealth and power. I'm fed up with them, Billy, and the politicians who betray their constituencies to toady up to them.

And I'm fed up, too, with politicians who say they want to restore the Constitution, but support a Supreme Court that grants corporations human rights as unidentified, unbridled campaign spenders. I'm also fed up with an Executive Branch that usurps the powers of Congress and spies on the people.

Politicians who say they want to restore ethics but do nothing to stop the runaway system of false attack ads and huge advertising budgets that take the influence of the common voter completely out of the equation ought never to be reelected.

Yes, I'm as fed up as you are, Billy, so I want you to know that I, along with a great many Ozarkers, will be watching very closely to see how Congress goes about its business, and the next election will be even harder on those who said they were going to clean things up but don't than it was on those they just replaced. Keep watching.

What Now?

2010-11-08T21:15:00.001-06:00

We survived the off-year elections, but will we survive the next two years?

Chances are we've just elected a do-nothing Congress, so our odds for survival may be better than you think. After all, the theory says, a Congress that can do nothing can do no harm.

I'm not so sure. One of the first problems they'll argue about is whether or not to extend the tax cuts the Bush administration put in place. The Democrats will argue that they should be continued for the middle class, but rescinded for high earners. The tea partiers will argue for extension of all cuts. If they win the day the cuts will all stay in place, but the consequence will be that the government will have to borrow money to cover the shortcoming in revenue – exactly the kind of borrowing that helped toss away our surplus in the first year of the Bush administration. They will have won their taxation argument, but deepened the deficit as a result. If they allow the tax, their angry base will accuse them of ignoring public demand for low taxes. Either way, they could be hoisted on their own petard.

The big problem, of course, is still the economy. We should note that on November 5, two days after the election, the Department of Labor announced an upturn in employment levels, GM announced its intention to buy back the government's investment in its stock, Detroit announced that truck sales are up and global stock markets surged in response to the "Fed's" buy of $600 billion in Treasury bonds. Our new electees have no claim on these accomplishments, though if the upturn holds they will surely try it later.

Still, we have a long way to go and the jobs lost over the last ten years will never return. Our manufacturing based economy has gone the way of the dinosaur. That's why the only way out is forward, and that's where the argument against government involvement falls apart.

Government created the highway system that enabled freight hauling to make available the consumer goods that drive our economy. Government created the G.I. Bill after WWII that gave us a college educated, home owning middle class. Government created the space program (ERTS-1) that gave rise to Landsat and, ultimately, the internet.

Yes, corporations built the manufacturing base, but there was government assistance involved in that, too. Given free reign, existing big corporations will do more to guard their present positions than to find new ways of competing with those positions. Government R&D and infrastructure investments in alternative energy sources and other sustainability oriented endeavors would do us a great deal more good, including new jobs, than curtailing social programs could possibly accomplish.

The plus side of the election is that the two sides must now work harder at working together. The question is will they take us forward or backward? Stay tuned.

Don’t Vote Them In

2010-10-26T09:18:00.001-05:00

The first president I remember is Harry Truman. My favorite, Ike, was Republican. I've seen a lot of changes since then and seen several national neuroses, but until now I never thought I'd seen national insanity.

C'mon folks. Taxation is necessary, and godless Socialism isn't the problem. The problem is we are being robbed, and if you've bought into it you're blind to it.

Did anyone really think that Obama or anyone else could clean up this mess in two years? We are faced with economic and environmental disaster brought on by short-term policies favoring individual wealth over all other considerations. That's what's destroying both the American conscience and the middle class.

On September 17, the News-Leader reported that in 2009 poverty increased to 14.3% from 2008's 13.2%. The country is blaming Obama.

A new study released by the research and consulting firm Spectrem Group says the number of millionaires in the U.S. increased by 16% in the same year. So is Obama to blame for this, too? (http://www.spectrem.com/ProductInfo.aspx?productid=AFFLUENTMARKETINSIGHTS2010)

Unemployment remains over 10%, 12 million more home foreclosures are forecast, wages are dropping and college grads are competing for jobs flipping burgers. Department of Labor data says that if this continues, the income gap in the U.S. "will resemble that of Mexico by year 2043." What's really happening is that the widening gap between haves and have-nots is destroying the middle. (http://www.workplacefairness.org/sc/incomegap.php) (http://www.sustainablemiddleclass.com/Gini-Coefficient.html) (http://www.workplacefairness.org/sc/incomegap.php)

The problem is not the so-called "socialistic" policies of the Obama administration but the "welfare at the top and cheap labor at the bottom" policies of the right. To compound the error, tea party carping about going back to the "good old days" before Social Security and Medicare not only offers no solutions, but adds to the problem.

Voting current politicians out of office makes sense for the country, but only those from any party seeking to reinstate tax cuts for the top and remove initiatives for those in the bottom and middle, i.e. hard-line republicans, rogue democrats and tea partiers.

The policies of the present administration have been vilified by sound bites from the right, but facts show the country is making a slow but sure turn-around from the cliff's edge that trickle-down economics has brought us to.

Elect a group of wing nuts like Rand Paul (KY), Joe Miller (AL), Dan Maes (CO), Sharron Angle (NV) who favor abolishing income tax, Social Security and Medicare, and our own tragi-comedy team, Billy and Roy, who will belly up to the lobbyist trough, kill regulations on financiers and corporations in the name of smaller government, and reduce upper crust taxes, and they'll turn this country back toward the brink of disaster at breakneck pace.

Social Security is a universal safety net, Medicare a lifesaver, and "Obamacare" morphed from a 1993 Grassley/Hatch Republican proposal to counter "Hillarycare". (http://trueslant.com/rickungar/2010/03/27/hatch-and-grassley-poster-boys-for-gop-hypocrisy/)

Tea partiers talk of revolution, but "Taking our country back" a hundred years isn't revolution. It doesn't even make sense. Vote only for those who will take us forward.

Left, Right, or Just Wrong?

2010-10-12T15:35:00.001-05:00

It has been said that if a politician moved far enough to the right he'd get to the left (and vice-versa). With the emergence of the tea partiers, I began to ponder whether or not that was correct.

The far lefties and the tea partiers do agree on a few things like: concentrating power into too few hands creates problems for the people; the country has moved so far from its original constructs that we are on the verge of needing a revolution; and the people need to wrest power from entrenched politicians (Congress) in order to salvage what potential still remains for the nation.

The differences between the two perspectives re-emerge though, when you consider that the solutions offered from the left include reinstating taxation that tries to reduce the split between the upper classes and the working classes by asking for higher contributions from those who make the most, wage controls designed to return to the wage differentials of the fifties and sixties, and reduction of military spending while solutions from the right call for tax regulations designed to grow corporate strength, smaller government - which translates to relaxed regulation of banking and other financial industries, reduced investment in social programs, and steady or increased investment in defense and other security measures.

In short, the tea partiers seem to feel that any attempt to reduce military, defense or homeland security spending is unpatriotic while the left feels that excess spending in those areas is eating into our ability to take care of our own increasingly needy citizenry.

We all share the goal of a thriving economy with work for everyone, but the dividing line comes from the left believing that the way to do it is to empower the bottom end of the spectrum while the right believes that the way to do it is to empower the top end.

So far, though, what we've created is a system that tends to create a lower class that is dependent on welfare and an upper crust fattened by reduced regulation and tax breaks (hidden welfare) and favored by a constant source of cheap labor; none of which gives the poor a means of pulling themselves up or the nation a stable platform for security. So why are we, the middle class, living in a lopsided welfare state where the bottom gets welfare and the top gets welfare, but the middle just gets the squeeze?

It seems to me that if we want the nation to revitalize we need to devise a way to grow production from the middle. It's probably just campaign season hype, but I was encouraged recently by news of John Boehner's willingness to consider tax legislation that provides support to small businesses even if it ultimately means the end of the Bush tax cuts for the upper crust. If it isn't just hype, maybe it's the beginning of actual bipartisanship.

Well, I can dream, can't I?!

Tar Sands Oil

2010-09-13T10:49:00.001-05:00

A friend recently characterized President Obama as a modern day Lincoln because he is faced with a nation more divided than it has been since then end of the civil war. In the face of citizens divided right against left and a Congress at loggerheads across the aisle, Obama has succeeded in passing significant legislation just as Lincoln succeeded in quelling the revolution and managing the nation at the same time.

Whether you like him or not you must admit, as the CSA had to admit of Lincoln, that this president has a way of getting his way.

In much of this I have agreed with him, but he is about to accomplish a goal that I think is a great mistake. He will take advantage of our national addiction to petroleum to achieve bipartisan legislation by funding a new pipeline to bring tar sand oil into the U.S. from Canada as soon as he can ram it through Congress.

It won't take Lincolnesque diplomacy to do it either, because it fits in with the right wing desire to feed our appetite for cheap gasoline plus something they can point to as evidence of their bipartisan cooperation – in the face of their obstructive efforts to make this president fail. The more liberal wing sure won't fight it because they also recognize that "cheap oil at any price" has become our national motto.

We pay one of the world's lowest prices for gasoline at the pump, but ignore the fact that our government subsidizes oil well development and production so that the gasoline producers don't have to charge us the actual cost of that production. (http://cleantech.com/news/node/554) Even more insidious is the ecological cost involved.

The recent BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico was so graphic an example that it actually caused us to consider the wisdom of deep water drilling for, golly, almost three days! The ecological cost of tar sands extraction is even greater, but it takes place on Canadian soil not ours, so we can conveniently ignore it.

As Wikipedia puts it in their synopsis of 89 links related to greenhouse gases - "Making liquid fuels from oil sands requires energy for steam injection and refining. This process generates two to four times the amount of greenhouse gases per barrel of final product as the production of conventional oil. If combustion of the final products is included, the so-called "Well to Wheels" approach, oil sands extraction, upgrade and use emits 10 to 45% more greenhouse gases than conventional crude."

The indigenous peoples of Canada are up in arms about it, (http://www.ienearth.org/) but we are willing to overlook the true cost of our oil as long as the price at the pump is affordable.

The ultimate cost, as with all of our polluting practices, is the destruction of the planet, but what's that compared to being able to drive anywhere we want to any time we want to?

I Might Not Be a Patriot If . . .

2010-08-29T10:35:00.001-05:00

Jeff Foxworthy's "You might be a redneck if. . ." lines were funny. Sadly, these aren't:

I might not be a patriot if I think the Constitution is the greatest work in political history, but don't read it.

I might not be a patriot if I think that every time a president declares war I should salute the flag and send in my sons and daughters without question. (Hint: The Constitution doesn't authorize presidents to declare war.)

I might not be a patriot if I think my church should be the official American church.

I might not be a patriot if I think a person can't be a patriot and a Muslim, too.

I might not be a patriot if I think I owe my loyalty only to elected leaders from my chosen political party.

I might not be a patriot if I think that anyone who protests an American president's actions is unpatriotic.

I might not be a patriot if I think that my needs outweigh those of any other citizen of the world.

I might not be a patriot if I think anyone of any race other than mine is automatically inferior to me.

I might not be a patriot if I won't listen to or can't tolerate others' opinions.

I might not be a patriot if I'd rather accept a corrupt status quo than agitate for change.

I might not be a patriot if I am willing to support uncontrolled growth of ruthless corporate power instead of supporting regulation of that power. (Hint: Corporations aren't people.)

I might not be a patriot if I think that corporate well-being outweighs the well-being of the people.

I might not be a patriot if I support my government right or wrong.

I might not be a patriot if I think that the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians are justified as long as it keeps the U.S. at the top of the food (or oil) chain.

I might not be a patriot if I think that Karl Rove's tactics represent the pinnacle of American political thought.

I might not be a patriot if I think that no one has the right to reject my opinions.

I might not be a patriot if I think that ridiculing or belittling those with whom I disagree is a valid method of rejecting their views.

I might not be a patriot if I think that the country should be run by only one political party.

I might not be a patriot if watching news shows that support my views is more important to me than analytical, investigative reporting.

I might not be a patriot if I think that my freedom can be secured at the expense of anyone else's.

I might not be a patriot if I think we have no need for a strong national defense.

I might not be a patriot if I'm willing to sacrifice any of my freedom in exchange for security or safety.

OBAMA IMPROVES VETERAN CARE

2010-08-15T08:52:00.000-05:00

As a veteran I have been troubled by our nation’s treatment of its military since the beginning of the Iraq war. The continuous rotation of soldiers and marines into combat zones with little or no rest is horrendous and has led to an extremely high incidence of Post-traumatic Stress Disorder. Anyone forced to endure multiple rotations into combat situations is likely to emerge with some level of PTSD.
One of the most blatant contradictions within the Bush administration was the difference between the flag-waving rhetoric and the treatment of veterans. We saw it in the ugliness of mistreatment at Walter Reed and in the practice of prescribing psychotropic medications for PTSD suffering men and women so that they could be sent back into combat situations.
Department of Veteran Affairs regulations in place during that era made it increasingly harder for our veterans to obtain help in dealing with their PTSD, but the Obama administration has changed regulations to enable treatment.
In the past, veterans had to prove that they served in a specific situation which produced symptoms of PTSD. The paperwork was often arduous and the reaction of those charged with evaluating applicants was frequently demeaning and discouraging. All this kept a great many suffering veterans from seeking or obtaining help.
New regulations will not only eliminate the need to link the presence of symptoms to a documentable incident and the people present, but will also recognize that even those in support roles can be susceptible to the disorder.
The upshot is that one of the many problems faced by our veterans is being addressed. We should all be watching to see whether the changes have a real effect and also whether or not other problems are seriously addressed.
Will this administration stop sending people into multiple combat and other high-stress rotations? Will they end the military slavery created by extending service terms beyond the time agreed to at recruitment? Will veterans be able to obtain services throughout the VA system without humiliation or subjection to services below accepted standards of care? And, ultimately, will this administration that so proudly touts transparency achieve ultimate visibility by re-instating the draft?
The American public remains ignorant and powerless in relation to military policy by virtue of the distance created by a totally volunteer military. A volunteer army removes widespread objection to inappropriate warfare and attracts not only the highly motivated patriot, but those who cannot imagine anything they would rather do than fight and kill.
A draft forces all citizens to evaluate the quality of the war they or their sons and daughters are forced to fight and so requires constant public analysis that could squelch false wars like the one in Iraq.
Yes, we need a military defense, but we also need to use our military correctly and wisely and to honor their service by providing quality care for them.
Score one for the Obama administration, but demand more.

Fat Chance

2010-08-15T08:48:00.000-05:00

I recently spent some time with my brother and nephew fishing and, like most fishermen, discussing the ways of the world. We spoke of the way America’s thought was twisted into acceptance of a war against a nation that had nothing to do with 9-11. We spoke of the enormous price we have exacted from the people of Iraq – at least 200,000 Iraqis dead and 2 to 3 million displaced in retribution for the 3,000 Americans who died that day. We spoke of the continuing civilian deaths in Pakistan and Afghanistan where we have yet to extract retribution from those who did perpetrate 9-11. To say nothing of the financial, spiritual and mortal price the American people and military are still paying.
My nephew observed that if we were truly a Christian nation we could not wage war at all, much less inflict such damage on other nations in the name of national retribution. “Nor,” my brother said, “could the Muslims.” They’re right.
Fundamentalists might quote an eye for an eye, but that is not Christian. It’s an Old Testament reference belonging to the descendants of Father Abraham long before Christ. Even if it could apply to Christianity, it called for equal retribution, not unbalanced vengeance. Christ himself called for the abolition of the old laws. (Christ's new commands, (John 13:34f), are [1 Love God and [2 love your neighbor.)
Muslim fundamentalists might point to the Koranic saw advocating death to infidels - no more a valid imprecation today than eye for an eye - but they ignore Mohammed’s letter to the orthodox church in Constantinople advocating peace between Muslims and Christians.
The fact is that both warlike references belong to by-gone days, and the truth is that the irrationality of our attack on Iraq in response to 9-11 provided more fuel for fanatics wanting to embrace Jihad than anything we could have done short of bombing Mecca. We would be far better off if we had practiced the restraint the Pennsylvania Amish showed after the killings at their school. Their refusal to seek vengeance was a Christian lesson for us all from which we could grow both politically and spiritually.
Instead we are caught in a mesh of circular reasoning that leaves no one in the right and everyone in great danger. The saddest fact, as my nephew pointed out, is that both sides are disobeying the basic tenets of their own religions.
Mohammed saw the Christ as a great prophet. Jesus, being first, couldn’t speak to Mohammed’s beliefs, but both preached the same message - peace through loving generosity to others – and both suffered the ultimate degradation of their message into twisted reasons for war.
The only hope for mankind in that crazy scenario is for enough people to join King and Gandhi in the belief that each of us must be living examples of the change we want to see in the world. Either religion truly practiced could do that, but will they?
Fat chance.

A Tribute to A Great Lady

2010-08-02T17:14:00.000-05:00

I wish I’d known Joan Collins all my life, but I first met her when she organized a meeting to oppose war with Iraq. All this retired school teacher really wanted was to enjoy her grandchildren. But, being Joan, she couldn’t truly enjoy them or feel good about their future if our country attacked the people of Iraq in what she believed was an immoral and unnecessary war.
Her heart ached for this county caught up in the lies about WMDs and the false connection of Saddam Hussein to the events of September 11, 2001. Her heart ached equally for the people of Iraq who would simply be “collateral damage.”
Instead of sitting back and enjoying her well-earned leisure, Joan stood up far taller than her 5’1” and acted. She gathered like-minded people around her to make plans to do something – anything - to communicate to the powers that be that war with Iraq would be a tragic mistake. She did her research and thought things through before speaking or acting. She wrote letters to this newspaper. Some ignored the truths in what she said and responded with ugly personal attacks that were like a crown of thorns to this gentle and loving woman. Even though deeply hurt by this, it was not in her to respond in kind. She kept writing, marching, meeting, and talking in the hope that her carefully researched and thought out opinions would at last be heard and acted upon.
She wanted nothing more than to be heard and to generate civil discourse on a subject that deserved the highest level of scrutiny. The acid responses saddened her deeply, but she fought on.
If my wish had come true and Joan were Queen of the World, her way would have been to invite the world’s leaders, nabobs, peaceniks and war mongers to dinner. After the world’s best ham ‘n beans and peach cobbler, she would gently lead the discussion towards resolving conflict. All would be well. It was a lovely fantasy, but it had at its base the notion that people are interested in civilly discussing issues, thinking them through, and compromising. Sadly, as the attacks she suffered attest, that's the real fantasy.
Joan left us July 31, 2010. We have lost a soft but strong voice that spoke for peace, for the disenfranchised, for our children, for you and for me. Joan was a soft-spoken gentlewoman. She was filled with compassion for anyone in need, and her work was not just in the peace movement. She created programs and projects to help local children. She could always find a way.
Many people’s lives have been improved by her gentle example. The world will be a lesser place without Joan. We have lost a reluctant leader who taught us to stand our ground and not lose the hope that our voices will be heard. May we all honor Joan by being slower to speak and quicker to think and by building rather than tearing down.

FLOATING WITH THE GODS

2010-07-20T09:58:00.003-05:00

This past week-end I had the privilege of participating in what had to be one of the finest float trips that occurred on the continent this year. It was like fishing on Mount Olympus in the company of the fly casting gods – a week-end I will never forget.

Kyle Kosovich of Longboat Outfitters asked if I would serve as commissary for a trip he was hosting for Zach Matthews, a contributing writer for Fly Fisherman magazine. Zach is a world class writer, photographer, and fly fisherman. He wanted to write about fishing the North Fork of the White River, so Kyle called in Brian Wise, guide for River of Life Farm, Bryan Yates, a past flats fishing guide in the Florida Keys, and Randy Hanner, a member of the U.S. Fly Fishing Team who finished 22 in world competition last year.

My job was to paddle a 20’ longboat loaded with gear, set up camps, help cook and clean up, and play a little after-dinner guitar. When one of the guys asked why I wasn’t fishing I just told him that I wouldn’t pick guitar if Doc Watson was there and I wasn’t about to show my butt by fly fishing beside guys like him. All told, I did my best to stay in the background. My reward was watching those guys work.

Bryan and Zach dazzled me with their mastery of what to me is the mystery of fly tackle. They casually threw beautifully bending loops in 60 foot casts as handily as I can cast a spinning lure. Brian and Kyle wowed me as always with their abilities, too, but Randy was the man to watch if you wanted to see fish landed. A fine caster himself, his style, though personally more flamboyant, was in sum much more refined and subtle. It was as if he could catch fish on command.

Schooled in French and Polish methods learned during international competitions, his favorite method is nymphing upstream. Casting no more than a leader’s length and pulling the fly toward him in a drift of no more than three feet, he often set the hook and at the same time launched the fish into the air and whipped out his landing net to catch it before it hit the water again.

The stream is my religion. Standing in a running stream, the rushing roar of water dashing over cobble drowns out the concerns of the world while the line establishes a connection between the fisherman and the universe. There is no line of separation, only connection. It is all consuming, and people with skills like these fellows possess make the connection even deeper.

The first day and night were all about the spirituality of fishing. Then Saturday dawned and I went downstream to be out of their way. I waited near a popular put-in where the connection was shattered by hundreds of people putting in with their inner-tubes, coolers and boom-boxes.

I saw a kid probably not twenty kneeling on one side of a tube with a two foot plastic paddle. Draped over the front of the tube was a child under two years old. They were accompanied by a canoe containing another young man, a cooler and a dog - which says a lot about their priorites. Not two hundred yards from the put-in, the young tuber, tired already of spinning in circles cried out to his friend in the canoe, “What am I gonna do, Dude?”

I thought, what you’re going to do is kill that baby, DUDE, and I wondered how far they thought they were going to get before that child was screaming in pain from being draped over that raw, hot rubber inner-tube while burning in the 90 degree sun. I wanted to shout at him to get off the river before it was too late, but, stupidly not wanting to seem intrusive, I held my piece, but lost my peace.

The rest of the afternoon was a steady stream of rental canoes, inner-tubes, plastic blow ups, boom boxes and beer. Some people were competent floaters doing their best to enjoy a day on a wild Ozark stream, but the majority was out of their element.
Two girls passed by whining about the spider they found in their canoe and were answered by a woman in another canoe who said, “Well, I just saw a huge water snake”, her voice quavering to relay her contempt for the beast. And I thought – they live here folks. If you come out here wanting it to be just like your living room, why not stay home, watch some “Wild Kingdom” and drink your beer in air conditioned comfort?

The last straw of my day was the drunken woman who was floating by in a tied-together flotilla of blue plastic tubes while I was setting up the second night’s camp and letting the campfire burn down to coals for the evening’s grilled pork chops and baked cinnamon rolls. “Got any hotdogs for us?” she yelled. I said nothing. “Hey, you got any hotdogs for us,” she cleverly shouted again, and still I said nothing.

“He’s ignoring me.” She told her friends, “That’s so rude.” I’m rude?? I thought. I was enjoying the peace of the river and my work until you came along.
I had set up four tents and the others were all downstream fishing.

“Hey, you in the yellow shirt. Do you sleep in all them tents, just going from one to the other all night or what?” This lady was so clever.

“We have a party here,” I said, and went back to my work.

By then they had drifted far enough downstream that I suppose it was too much effort to keep trying to communicate with me, so she just said, “Oh” and then shifted her focus to whatever caught her attention next, and I, at last, was left in the peace and beauty of the river where I stole out to do battle with and lose to an over 20” rainbow who taught me that I might be able to fool him, but it was going to take more skill than mine to bring him to net.

The real fishermen came back, the stories flowed, the pork chops and cinnamon rolls disappeared, and we connected with one another in the peace and beauty of the river. The fishing gods, the river gods and the fly casting gods had all returned and all was well with the world once again.

THE HEALTH CARE DEBACLE

2010-03-17T08:41:00.001-06:00

Three times in my life I have seen the country at odds over health care. The first was over the creation of Medicare, and it was a quiet storm compared to what’s going on today.

Today’s battle is epitomized by this anecdote from an article in the Washington Post that told of a health care town hall meeting in South Carolina where ‘a man stood up and told Rep. Robert Inglis (R-S.C.) to "keep your government hands off my Medicare."’ The Congressman tried to explain that Medicare is a government program, but heckler would not listen.

That would be funny if it wasn’t so sad, but it illustrates how successful the anti-insurance reform right wing has been in confusing their followers.

The argument isn’t really about health care reform at all. No matter what Washington does in the coming weeks, the kind of health care people get in this country won’t change. If it was about health care reform, the AMA wouldn’t be endorsing it because that would call for restructuring of physician and hospital incomes to European levels.

The Democrats are trying to take the power over and control of health care delivery out of the hands of the insurance industry. Given that we all are or know people who have gone without coverage due to cost or pre-existing conditions or been denied payment for services even if we have coverage, I can’t see why anyone including Tea Partiers wouldn’t want that.

The Republican counter-budget as written by Paul Ryan – R, Wisconsin contains their proposals, touted as the way to avoid “socialism” and a “government takeover of health care”. Here they are:
1. Significantly reduce benefits to anybody under 55 at the time of passage, and then privatize social security.
2. Replace Medicare with a system of vouchers for buying private health insurance.

Why in God’s name would I want to trade the Medicare I now have and which allows me to see primary care doctors for $10 a visit, specialist for $35 and hospital costs with a reasonable deductible for a voucher to get back into private insurance? That is insanity.

We have operated our own business for over twenty years during which I carried catastrophic insurance with a $5,000 deductible at a cost of about $3,000 a year. My wife couldn’t get that wonderful coverage because she had pre-existing conditions, so her catastrophic coverage – excluding those conditions – ran about $5,000 a year. Our average income over those years averaged below the $65,000 level, so on average about 12% of our gross income went to insurance we never used. Beyond that, if we had needed to use it, we might have found out, as several friends have, that our insurance would not pay for the services we needed.

I’m also pretty fond of my social security check, minimal as it is. I did my own saving for retirement, but social security is the hedge against loss of private investments in a shaky market. I wish they’d just expand Medicare and be done with it.

The Health Care Conundrum

2010-03-03T10:50:00.003-06:00

Are you against a public option in health care because “government can’t do anything right”? If so, try this:

Walk into a senior citizen center and say, “Everybody who has Medicare and wishes they didn’t, raise your hand.” You’ll think everybody in there is an amputee.

Now go to a VA hospital and say, “I think the government ought to get out of the health care business. Raise your hand if you’ll sign this petition to stop funding the Veteran’s Administration.” The only hand you’re likely to see is some veteran’s just before it hits your nose.

Next, go to the Division of Family Services and say, “If you have Medicaid and wish you didn’t, raise your hand.” They’ll laugh you out of the place.

Let’s try another test. Drive to your nearest vehicle license bureau on a busy day. Walk in and say, “I’m sick of seeing my tax dollars spent on highways. How many of you will sign this petition to stop spending federal dollars to maintain the interstate highway system?” Or you could ask them to help you put a stop to state tax support for state roads. How many takers would you get?

Don’t like any of those tests? Try this one. Go to a library and ask for signatures on a petition to quit spending tax dollars on libraries, or ask the parents and teachers at any school to join your protest against using tax dollars to support education. Any takers? Not likely.

Here’s a question for YOU to answer. Be honest, now. Do you think tax dollars should be used for those purposes listed above?

If you said yes, then you don’t believe that the government can’t do anything right. Beyond that you don’t think there’s anything wrong with democratic socialism. That’s what pooling tax dollars for the common good is, and there is nothing wrong with it.

I know far too many people who are putting off health care until they can get Medicare. Not one of them is against a public option. They know that their private insurance won’t pay for the services they need, and they sure can’t afford to pay for it themselves.

Here’s the conundrum. How can people know something works and still condemn it? I know people who’d fight to keep their Medicare and/or VA coverage but won’t support making it available to everyone. If you fit that description, examine your conscience because you should be ashamed for not doing right by your neighbors.

The business of private health insurers is to prevent people from collecting on claims while administrators make huge salaries and the stock continues to rise. The business of public health insurers is to operate with less than 18% overhead while paying doctors for their services. Why would you choose the former if you could have the latter? It’s time we looked beyond the sound-bites and put some of our tax dollars to work getting the health care we need.

Our Ignored Crisis

2010-02-22T17:12:00.003-06:00

It has been two years since I posted to this site. I was too burned out by my political focus. I'm back now to write more generally and less rigorously and more likely on environmental issues than political ones. I hope readers will enjoy the journals of my excursions into the outdoors.

Today's edition is a copy of a submission that should soon run as a "Voices" column in our local newspaper, The Springfield News-Leader.
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Our Ignored Crisis

While most of the rest of the world is poised to address a world-wide ecological crisis, we argue over whether or not Al Gore was blowing smoke. Tick talk.

Even ignoring climate change, evidence of planet-wide degradation is devastatingly clear, and if humankind doesn’t recognize and adjust, we soon will have poisoned our nest beyond the point of no return. Sadly, our nation is a primary polluting culprit as well as the biggest obstacle to correcting the problem. Tick talk.

The issue is STEWARDSHIP. We are now fishing out the last of the breeding stock of the cod, sole and haddock. Salmon have dwindled so that they may never recover. Rockfish and blue crabs once plentiful are almost gone from Chesapeake Bay. Coral reefs are becoming a thing of the past. The Marshall Islands and others like them are being submerged world-wide. Fresh water river sediment is loaded with heavy metals; the water with chemicals and pharmaceuticals. Streams and lakes everywhere carry warnings about the danger of eating the fish. Missouri’s mussels are disappearing, and our air is polluted, but politicians say all’s well – the stock market’s up. Tick talk.

Humankind’s record as stewards of the earth is abominable, and it doesn’t take a tree-hugger to recognize it - just common sense. The Bible recognizes man’s dominion over the earth, but fails to instill a sense of stewardship, and the world’s political and economic structures prevent humanity from fulfilling that responsibility. Tick talk.

The well-being of our corporations far outranks the well-being of the planet or its people, and most citizens seem to believe that nothing that will increase our cost of living is acceptable. Tick talk.

The cost of energy produced by any means other than coal or nuclear power is too high to consider changing sources or behaviors. Clean coal and safe nuclear power don't exist, but we aren’t about to do anything that would make our electricity rates rise, so we invent fables that allow us to keep them and ignore facts that will sooner or later become incredibly invasive realities. Tick talk.

Each American burns four to six times the carbon resources of the average citizen of any other industrialized nation. We do it with our cars, air conditioners, fireplaces, clothes dryers, night lighting and attitudes. We need to see that the clock ticks while we talk. We are citizens not just of America but of the world. Weapons and armies eat up our wealth in ways that neither we nor the rest of the world can afford. Nation states and their interests have gone the way of city states and dinosaurs. If we don’t realize that soon we may very well go the way of the dinosaurs ourselves. The environmental clock tick tocks while we tick talk.

OpEdNews

2008-12-18T11:07:00.002-06:00

I'm no longer blogging on MySpace, but have been granted Trusted Author status and Editor status with OpEdNews. If you'd like to read the first article of mine that they published, go to http://www.opednews.com/articles/Pivot-Point-by-Bob-Ranney-081215-841.html.

To see their website - where you could subscribe to the newsletter - go to: http://www.opednews.com

You'll see that they post a super-wide range of articles and other information every day. It's an amazing site.

Be well - Bob

P.S. If you go to the OEN site, you can check on my work anytime by entering my name in the search box.

FAREWELL – One Last Blog

2008-10-20T10:13:00.002-05:00

Regular readers will know that I have been absent from this space for about two weeks. There have been many and varied reasons for that absence, but the latest was the best.

I just got back last night from a four day soul-feast on the autumnal beauty of our Ozark streams. It was a constant reverie; a spirit lifting sip of nature’s nectar; and an exercise in cooperative effort that was as beautiful to behold as the grandeur of the surroundings.

We were an unusual group in many ways – a core group of three who work together appended a fourth who volunteers at their workplace, and by a fifth, known to one of the core through his church. The six and seventh members of our group are related to one of the core by marriage. The point being that many of us were new to one another – not a guaranteed formula for serendipity.

Another unlikely piece of the formula was our ages. We ranged in age from 15 to 65 with the ages 19, 25, 27, 28 and 42 spanning the middle. We also varied widely in our religious preferences – from devout fundamentalist to dedicated agnostic. And yet the central focus of this story is the way we meshed rather than conflicted.

Those who have spent some time camping and floating will know that trips like this can be completely undone by conflicts – no matter the cause. But this group allowed no possibility of such a thing happening. The nineteen year old was there because his little brother really wanted to go, but was obligated to play through the semi-finals of a basketball tournament that didn’t end until late the first night of the trip. Instead of letting his brother miss the trip, Ben left college, then drove an hour to pick Tommy up and bring him to the campsite. They arrived around midnight, bringing with them the spirit of giving and sacrifice that characterized the trip.

It was two days of boys being men and the men being boys. It was caring spirits at play. When it came time to fish, those in their twenties were in the water first, fly-rods swinging in the rhythm of the stream, catching and always releasing the beautiful trout they landed one after another after another; shouting back in forth with gleeful voices filled with awe for the beauty and wonder of their natural surroundings.

The boys weren’t as well equipped for fishing, but there was no sullen pouting. They spent most of their time together exploring the caves, bluffs and gravel bars along the way. At one point I spotted Ben casting from their canoe enabled by Tommy sitting on a large rock holding the canoe’s painter so that the boat was in an ideal fishing position. Earlier, Mike and Kyle had collaborated on a method of teaching this old man a couple of new tricks on line control and before that I had spent a little time with Pete helping him to understand how current carries food and why trout lie where they do. Meanwhile, Matt was quietly observing and enjoying and doing many small things to support the pleasure and well-being of the entire group.

It was people – in love with their surroundings and ultimately with one another -- each making sure that all were comfortable, all were enjoying themselves and each received some recognition and thanks for his contribution. It was men – unafraid of showing caring feelings for nature and for each other. It was boys – no matter whether 15 or 65 years old – at play in the midst of nature’s abundance.

The camp chores were shared – not by dint of lists of who’s responsible for what – but by the fact that whenever a need for something became apparent someone – anyone – would step up and take care of it. The evening meal, for instance, was a fine repast featuring fried river-caught catfish, grilled burgers, hush puppies, and cinnamon rolls hot from the dutch oven all cooked over the coals of an open wood campfire. Afterward, when you’d expect to see a couple boys lolling around in a sated stupor, the first thing I noticed was a fifteen year old washing dishes. No one had told him to do it. No one had even asked who was going to do it. He just did it.

In the heat of the afternoon, when we took a break from fishing (Kyle had slipped down to the riffle below camp and caught 20 to 30 fish single-handedly!), we gathered on the gravel bar to sit in the shade, sip a cold drink, weave cordage from some dogbane Kyle had brought along, and tell fish stories. We had a few less chairs than people, but I noticed that no matter what the activity there always seemed to be a vacant chair so that the old man could have one whenever he wanted it. Again, nobody said anything, but it was apparent that this caring sharing was a part of the group’s unspoken protocol.

There were plenty of occasions to laugh. We laughed at each other’s gaffes. We poked fun at one another. We laughed at each other’s stories, and, most and best of all, we laughed together. We laughed mightily over my fall into the North Fork River two days before this trip began. When I lost my balance again over the campfire on the Eleven Point River gravel bar that was our final home on the journey, we laughed so hard tears ran down our cheeks. The guy that laughed longest and most in concert with me that time was fifteen year old Tommy.

We laughed at one fellow’s flatulence; we laughed at another’s fastidiousness; and we laughed just with the joy of our surroundings and the pleasure of one another’s company.

We shared solemn moments, too – stories of past trips and old friends now gone. It was a group who listened raptly to quoted verses of song or poetry and nodded in serious contemplation in response to one another’s deeper thoughts. We shared songs. We shared stories. We shared a deep feeling of well-being, and we definitely shared a love and heart-felt respect for the woods, streams and wildlife which we had come to visit.

And, ultimately we shared individually in one-on-one moments and collectively as a group, a feeling that no matter what happened we could count on one another. That as long as everything was going well we could laugh, but that the moment a more serious need arose, someone would be there to meet it. We looked at one another across that campfire and bonded in the way, I suppose, that people have done since the first caveman figured out how to make a fire, and we realized that our fire was warming more than our bodies; that our hearts and spirits were being warmed, too, by the heat of the fire and by the warm glow of our companionship.

Ultimately, it led me to conclude that for the past few years, while I have been putting so much energy into my anti-war and anti-governmental degradation campaigns, I have been focused too strongly on negativity. And so I am writing this by way of notice that I am going to give myself over to more positive pursuits.

My career as a political blogger is over. I will no longer start my day – every day – finding something to write about in the political sphere. I will let those little people with their huge egos and their bulging bank accounts run this country into the ground as best they can without a comment, a whimper or an essay from this corner.

I will read the news and moan and groan and laugh with my dear Roberta every morning about it, but I will no longer spend an hour or so every day writing about it in this space.

So, my friends, I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart if you have been following my thoughts here over the past couple of years and I want to reassure you that I will continue to care as deeply as I always have about your well-being and that of our society. But one of the great realizations I came to during the last four days was that experiences like that trip are of much greater importance to me than the bloviations of world “leaders” and that I, having so far used up more than six decades of my allotted years, would do better to seek out more of what last week-end’s respite from the world of politics offered than to delve into more what the "news" world offers.

I only have one more decade or at best two in which to enjoy the fruits of the natural world so in the future if you want my opinion on what the government is up to, you may have to come outdoors and find me. And whether I will have heard “the news” or not will be an iffy matter. But I’ll be able to tell you what the fish are biting on or, more likely, what they aren’t biting on, and whether or not we are able to solve any of the world’s problems, I guarantee we’ll have a good time, and when the sun goes down, we’ll be thankful.

May the rain fall soft upon your fields and the road rise to meet you and may your god hold you always in the palm of his (or her) hand.

“Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!” – Patrick Henry

Be the change you wish to see in the world. -- M. K. Gandhi

The reason for going was to keep the crude flowing and raise a false flag abroad. – from a poem by Jack Evans titled 3500 Souls - http://www.myspace.com/paralegal_eagle

Individually we have little voice. Collectively we cannot be ignored.
But in silence we surrender our power. Yours in Peace -- BR

WE NEED A "SAVE THE CITIZENS" BILL

2008-10-03T10:41:00.004-05:00

We don't need to save Wall Street. We need to save the people of the United States from Wall Street's greed.

I hope you are doing your part to get that message across to Congress.

Immediately below, is the message I sent to Congressman Roy Blunt this morning.

We don't need a "Save Wall Street" bill. We need a "Save the Citizens" bill. Essential inclusions in a "save the citizens" bill are:
1. Initial rate mortgages available to families in trouble due to escalating interest rates.
2. No potential for brokerage executives to gain from bailout.
3. Possession of real assets (i.e. not CDSs or MBSs)in return for investment.
4. Timetable for or scheduled committee hearings for re-establishing appropriate regulatory controls over banks and brokerages.

There is also a petition available through which you can support a petition by Congressman DeFazio for a No Bailout Bill. You can sign it by going to: http://act.credoaction.com/campaign/better_bailout/?r=1698&id=1015-1178271-r5hsAEx

You can notify Roy Blunt of your position by going to: http://www.blunt.house.gov/Contact.aspx

“Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!” – Patrick Henry

Be the change you wish to see in the world. -- M. K. Gandhi

The reason for going was to keep the crude flowing and raise a false flag abroad. – from a poem by Jack Evans titled 3500 Souls - http://www.myspace.com/paralegal_eagle

Individually we have little voice. Collectively we cannot be ignored.
But in silence we surrender our power. Yours in Peace -- BR

MORE & MORE INSANITY

2008-10-02T08:55:00.000-05:00

Last night the Senate passed its version of the bailout bill. This situation is so convoluted, that even those of us who are basically against the bailout must ultimately support it in order to avoid immediate self-destruction. Senator Claire McCaskill - D. MO said it best when she declared that she would hold her nose and vote for it.

I suppose that we all must hold our noses and try not to vomit as we watch the Congress do the same tomorrow. Ultimately, the only hope is that a new Congress and a new President will go to work immediately next year to install some regulatory control over the bandits that got us here.

Driving home from a tennis match last night I ran into another form of our national insanity while trying to find a radio station that was broadcasting the National League play-offs. In lieu of that I found a FOX radio station broadcasting Michael Savage’s talk show. This guy announced that within one year of Obama’s election to the presidency, the Democrats would take everyone’s guns away from them and within two years the United States of America would cease to exist. His solution to our current political mess is to throw all the Republicans out of office because there’s no way to control the Democrats anyway. Good god, what rock did this guy crawl out from under?

Then the news came on and I heard the last bit of lunacy for the day. The Senate dropped restrictions against selling nuclear materials to India so that BushCo can go ahead with its plan to supply the materials. Of course, India will not be required to sign the non-proliferation treaty. That way they can sell nuclear materials to anyone they like. Not only does this fly in the face of any hope for nuclear arms reduction, it fuels the race.

In a time when we are saber rattling at both Iran and Russia and our presidential and vice-presidential candidates are doing everything they can to anger Pakistan, our brilliant Senate joins BushCo in adding fuel to both fires. Do they think Pakistan will be mollified by our handing increased nuclear capability to its enemy neighbor? Do they think that India won’t be tempted to sell nuclear materials and capabilities to Iran? Or that someone within India won’t find a way to do it even if the government of India decides not to? Do they think that Iranians will decide that it’s quite all right for America to arm Israel and India and decide that they will deep six their nuclear program (if there is one) out of the gentle goodness of their hearts?

What chance do we have for stability on any front? If destroying our economy while increasing the chances for nuclear arms development and quietly doing our best to piss Russia off to the max isn’t setting America up for a downfall I don’t know what is. Maybe we should just turn it all over to Michael Savage, speed up the process, and get it over with.

“Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!” – Patrick Henry

Be the change you wish to see in the world. -- M. K. Gandhi

The reason for going was to keep the crude flowing and raise a false flag abroad. – from a poem by Jack Evans titled 3500 Souls - http://www.myspace.com/paralegal_eagle

Individually we have little voice. Collectively we cannot be ignored.
But in silence we surrender our power. Yours in Peace -- BR

STOPPING THE RIP-OFF

2008-10-01T10:32:00.002-05:00

Yesterday’s vote on the Paulson Bailout (Rescue my Ass) plan was a surprise that was both pleasing and disappointing. I’ve pondered the whys of the DemoRats supporting the administration’s plan as though it was the only possible option and lauded the Republicans who stuck to their conservative guns in refusing to support the use of tax payers’ equity to nationalize Wall Street’s risk.
My first reaction was to write up a list of reasons why anyone who voted for the proposal ought to get a swift kick in the britches, then ran into this blog by David Sirota. I think he did it so well that I’m just turning it over to him. The blog is a bit long, but well worth the read. (There are several great links that I didn't include here.) Here are some excerpts:
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In the face of this bipartisan opposition from objective experts, why should a lawmaker instead believe the same Bush officials who helped create this crisis with their deregulation, the same Bush officials who just months ago said everything was AOK? Shouldn't there be almost complete unanimity among both objective and partisan observers before spending 5 percent of our entire economy after just one harried week of White House demands? Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me. It's time, as The Who said, that we "don't get fooled again."

The mantra throughout the week has been that America has "no choice" but to pass Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson's $700 billion giveaway - that, in effect, there are no alternatives. But that's an out-and-out lie - one with a motive: Making it seem as if the only thing we can do is hand the keys to the federal treasury over to both parties' corporate campaign contributors.

The truth is, there are a number of alternatives. Here are just a few:

In the Washington Post last week, Galbraith outlined a multi-pronged plan shoring up and expanding the FDIC, creating a Home Owners Loan Corporation, resurrecting Nixon's federal revenue sharing, and taxing stock transactions (a tax that would fall mostly on speculators) to finance the whole deal.

The Service Employees International Union has drafted a plan based around a massive investment in public services and national health care, and regulatory reforms preventing foreclosures and forcing banks to renegotiate the predatory terms of their bad mortgages.

For those in the mindless, zombie-ish "someone has to do something, so we have to do what the White House says!" camp, consider the possibility that you are under the spell of the same kind of White House fear that led us to invade Iraq because of Saddam's supposed WMD. Consider, perhaps, that there may not even be a compelling basis for doing anything just yet (or at least not anything nearly so huge), and that the whole reason there is this urgent push right now has nothing to do with the financial situation, and everything to do with creating the political dynamic to pass a wasteful giveaway - one that couldn't be passed otherwise without a sense of emergency. And ask yourself why you would listen to this White House instead of listening to those experts who have been predicting this crisis and are now advising against this bailout - experts like CEPR's Baker. In two separate posts (here and here), he says that letting the problem play out could be the best path, because Treasury and the Fed may already have the tools they need. Following this path, the worst thing that happens is "The Fed and Treasury will have to step in and take over the banks [which] is exactly what many economists argue should happen anyhow," Baker writes. "So the outcome of the worst case scenario is a really frightening day in which the whole world financial system is shaken to its core, followed by a government takeover of the banks. Eventually the government straightens out the books and sells them off again. But the real threat here is not to the economy, it is to the banks."

Then there is the idea of simply taking the $700 billion and simply give it to struggling homeowners to help them pay off part of their mortgages. This hasn't even been discussed but the thought experiment it involves is important to understanding why there is, indeed, an alternative to the Paulson plan. If the root of this problem is people not being able to pay off their mortgages, and those defaults then devaluing banks' mortgage-backed assets, then simply helping people pay their mortgages would preserve the value of the mortgage-backed assets and recharge the market with liquidity. That would be a bottom-up solution helping the mass public, rather than a top-down move helping only financial industry executives.

On this latter proposal, some may argue that giving any relief to homeowners is "unfair" in that those homeowners created their problems, so why should taxpayers have to help them? But then, is helping homeowners any less fair than simply giving all the money away to Wall Street, no strings attached? I'd say no - and helping homeowners also serves a second purpose: namely, keeping people in their homes, which not only helps them, but helps an entire neighborhood (as any homeowner knows, nearby properties can be devalued when foreclosures hit).

The amount of brazen corruption and conflicts of interest swirling around this deal is odious, even by Washington's standards - and polls suggest the public inherently understands that. Consider these choice nuggets:
Warren Buffett is simultaneously advising Obama to support the deal, while he himself is investing in the company that stands to make the most off the deal.
McCain's campaign is run by lobbyists from the companies that stand to make a killing off a no-strings government bailout.
The New York Times reports that the person advising Paulson and Bernanke on the AIG bailout was the CEO of Goldman Sachs - a company with a $20 billion stake in AIG.
The Obama campaign's top spokesman pushing this deal is none other than Roger Altman, who Bloomberg News reports is simultaneously "advising a group of investors who are trying to prevent their shares from being diluted in the U.S. takeover of American International Group Inc." - that is, who have a direct financial interest in the current iteration of the bailout.
Add to this the fact that the negotiations over this bill have been largely conducted in secret, and you have one of the most sleazy heists in American history.

If this bill passes, it will be a profound referendum on the dominance of money over democracy in America. That - and that alone - would be the only thing an objective observer could take away from the whole thing.

Money will have compelled politicians to not only vote for substantively dangerous policy, but vote for that policy even at their own clear electoral peril. Such a vote will confirm that the only people these politicians believe they are responsible for representing are the fat-cat recipients of the $700 billion - the same fat cats who underwrite their political campaigns, the same fat-cats who engineered this crisis, and want to keep profiteering off it. Any lawmaker who takes that position is selling out the country, as is any issue-based political non-profit group - liberal or conservative - that uses its resources to defend a "yes" vote rather than demand a "no" vote. This is a bill that forces taxpayers to absorb all of the pain, and Wall Street executives to reap all of the gain. It doesn't even force the corporate executives (much less the government leaders) culpable in this free fall to step down - it lets them stay fat and happy in their corner office suites in Manhattan.

Even if they believe that something must be done right now, lawmakers should still vote no on this specific bill, and force one of the very prudent alternatives to the forefront. They shouldn't just vote no on Paulson's proposal - they should vote hell no. Our economy's future depends on it.
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“Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!” – Patrick Henry

Be the change you wish to see in the world. -- M. K. Gandhi

The reason for going was to keep the crude flowing and raise a false flag abroad. – from a poem by Jack Evans titled 3500 Souls - http://www.myspace.com/paralegal_eagle

Individually we have little voice. Collectively we cannot be ignored.
But in silence we surrender our power. Yours in Peace -- BR

POLITICAL GENETICS?

2008-09-30T08:37:00.000-05:00

The turmoil over the Wall Street bailout goes on with some surprising lines drawn in the sand, but I’m going to let that one lie next to a few other sleeping dogs this morning. Instead, I’d like to call your attention to an interesting observation gleaned from a sort of sidebar article in this morning’s paper.

Reading the article on the civil war, WAR DIVIDED STATE, Springfield News-Leader, Tuesday, September 30, 2008, I remarked to my wife that the more things changed the more they remained the same.

Asked what prompted that remark, I told her that this article pointed out that during the Civil War Missouri was so divided that it sent representatives to both the Union and the Confederate legislatures and that the division was rural/urban with the country folk – including Springfield – in favor of secession and the city folk – Kansas City and St. Louis supporting abolition and the Union.

If you drew a map of Missouri in 1864 and colored the Secessionist sections red and the Union sections blue, how different would a map of Missouri in 2008 look if you colored the Republican sections red and the Democrat sections blue? The answer, of course, is that you couldn’t tell the difference.

So the question arises. Is politics genetic? Is voting behavior inherited or learned? It’s the basic question the study of psychology has long sought to answer, of course, the great question of nature versus nurture.

With regard to politics, it was answered long ago by our two political parties. They have long campaigned on the principle that it is not their party loyalists who decide the contest. It is the INDEPENDENTS.

It is those few folks who actually weigh the issues; who are capable of listening to more than sound bites; who ask themselves questions as the campaigns grind on and answer them before they enter the voting booth who ultimately decide the election. (Provided, of course, that the election isn’t rigged!)

The others, largely because of the family into which they were born, will always vote with the party of that family’s tradition. Those who switch do so because at some point they encountered someone or the writings of someone whose train of thought more closely matched theirs even though their political instincts did not -- a point that slants me toward nurture as the determinant of political leanings and apathy as the crucial issue in whether or not one’s initial leanings are ever questioned.

So, friends, the moral of the story is that if you want to influence someone’s vote, first determine whether they are asking questions or they are influenced by the sound bites. If the latter, save yourself some time, effort, and frustration by walking away and find someone who is honestly seeking information. And as to ourselves – if we can’t imagine that the other side has anything of value to contribute – maybe we just aren’t listening.

“Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!” – Patrick Henry

Be the change you wish to see in the world. -- M. K. Gandhi

The reason for going was to keep the crude flowing and raise a false flag abroad. – from a poem by Jack Evans titled 3500 Souls - http://www.myspace.com/paralegal_eagle

Individually we have little voice. Collectively we cannot be ignored.
But in silence we surrender our power. Yours in Peace -- BR

OUT OF THE FRYING PAN

2008-09-29T10:14:00.001-05:00

The big news today is that our great leaders have at last created the final Wall Street bailout plan. Lo and behold, it is very nearly the same plan BushCo proposed in the first place.

“Oh no,” the administration says. “This plan includes Congressional oversight.”

“Oh, yes, it does.” I say, “But did you think we wouldn’t notice that it takes a veto-proof Congressional approval level of any oversight changes our representatives want to make in the executive branch approach? Or that Shrub routinely over-rides even veto proof legislation with signing statements he says give him the right to ignore any law Congress passes?”

Or maybe they think we won’t notice that the negotiations that produced this plan excluded any consideration of renegotiating mortgages to assure that homeowners can keep their homes? Or maybe they think that their ban on CEO bonuses until things settle down will mollify us.

Maybe they think that being told that we will regain at least some of our money when the assets are resold will calm us down, but why should it? When you buy something worthless, your hope of getting much back from future sales isn’t what I’d call a great prospect.

Basically, what this deal would do is throw Wall Street out of the frying pan into the lifeboat and the middle class out of the frying pan into the fire. Are we’re supposed to bend over and kiss the corporate bums on the way down?

If this deal goes through and no one follows it up with some hard slamming regulation of the loan and brokerage industry, it won’t be long before we’re faced with another big “crisis”. If the system doesn’t adjust to give Main Street a lift, we won’t even be able to see Wall Street from here, let alone participate in it.

I recently received an email titled “The Birk Solution”. Maybe you did, too. If not, you should know that it was written by a fellow named T. J. Birkenmeier. It was written to address the AIG bailout -- you remember that long ago time – about three weeks ago when we were told that the $85,000,000,000 bailout for them would solve our problems.

His suggestion was that instead of bailing out AIG, the government should send each of the country’s 200,000,000 adults $425,000. Sounds great, doesn’t it? I was certainly ready to jump on his bandwagon and demand that the government just send us each our share of the $700,000,000,000 bailout of Wall Street, but guess what? I did the math, and the bailout for AIG really amounted to $425 per each of 200,000,000 adults, and the Wall Street bailout would amount to $3,500 each. Not exactly a solution to the problem!!

The real bottom line for me, and the language that will go into today’s message for our friends in Congress, is that unless this bailout, rescue, loan or whatever they want to call it generates some real potential for return, reigns in the banking industry so it can’t continue to base its values on poor paper, and does something to keep the littlest guys from having to suffer the most, it isn’t worth any more than any of the rest of the paper that’s been created throughout this process.

Congress has to have some real power in the future, Wall Street has to have some real constraints in the future, and the country needs to base its value on real assets again instead of believing that piles of paper represent true wealth.

“Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!” – Patrick Henry

Be the change you wish to see in the world. -- M. K. Gandhi

The reason for going was to keep the crude flowing and raise a false flag abroad. – from a poem by Jack Evans titled 3500 Souls - http://www.myspace.com/paralegal_eagle

Individually we have little voice. Collectively we cannot be ignored.
But in silence we surrender our power. Yours in Peace -- BR

IT’S THE BAILOUT, STUPID

2008-09-26T14:57:00.000-05:00

So yesterday the Repulsicans stomped out of a meeting called by their own president because they were angry at being asked to reinstall the banking regulatory process and ensure that homeowners caught in the housing mortgage crunch don’t get burned. They were mad because the Democrats were getting their way and Bush was going along with it. What a bunch of Holy High Rollers. Clinton/Bush deregulation is the seat of the problem, and they either don’t see it, don’t care or don’t get it – pick one. Doesn’t matter which one you pick, of course, the result is the same – blockheaded politics as usual.

The other side of the aisle isn’t much better of course. The Democrats did get stand up for the regulatory process, protections for the mortgage holder, and some handslapping for the CEOs, but also completely overlooked the fact that this whole deal has been engineered by the administration as a means of sheltering private profits while making the public eat the losses.

Anyone treating this situation as anything other than a power play designed to keep power and riches in the hands of those who took us down the garden path in the first place is missing the point and setting the citizens of the country up for another, bigger fall down the road.

When I heard that the meeting had blown up my first thought was that the Democrats must have denounced the whole proposal for the sham it is. When I heard that it was the Republicans and what their reasons were and that the Democrats were ready to accept Bush’s capitulations to their demands and vote the thing in, it was all I could do to just slump in my chair and sigh. If any of our politicians are puzzled about why the people think they are a bunch of worthless louts, they should be able to look at what’s going on with this mess and figure it out in a New York minute.

Bill Clinton said it long ago – It’s the economy, stupid. He didn’t say enough though. It’s the way the economic system shafts the middle class, stupid. It the way Washington high rollers forget who they represent, stupid. It’s that CEOs earn 300 to 400 times as much as the average worker, stupid. It’s that short term gains have taken precedence over long term thinking since 1980, stupid. It’s that Congressfolk and Senators don’t believe that the man on the street can think, stupid.

But then again, whose the more stupid – the “leaders” who keep garnering more money and power to themselves or the people who keep voting for those “leaders” while they keep losing money and power? It’s all just stupid, stupid.

“Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!” – Patrick Henry

Be the change you wish to see in the world. -- M. K. Gandhi

The reason for going was to keep the crude flowing and raise a false flag abroad. – from a poem by Jack Evans titled 3500 Souls - http://www.myspace.com/paralegal_eagle

Individually we have little voice. Collectively we cannot be ignored.
But in silence we surrender our power. Yours in Peace -- BR

WHAT CAN YOU BUY FOR $700 BILLION?

2008-09-25T09:44:00.004-05:00

Last night our fearless (sic should be feckless) leader talked to the nation for 12 minutes without answering the question I have had foremost in my mind since the bailout was proposed which is: exactly what is it that the bailout is buying?

Is it stock in the companies that are holding the debt? Is it the base mortgages that unqualified homeowners around the country are unable to pay? Is it the mortgage based securities that the banks created in the slack created by deregulation so they could hide the true value of their loans? Is it the credit default swaps that the insurance industry covered and that caused their demise?

I don't even know if it's possible, but if we could buy up the mortgages themselves and get people out from under the ballooning ARM rates that the slime-ball lenders stuck them with the deal might be worth doing. If we are being bum’s rushed into buying any of the other stuff, we ought to run like hell in the other direction so we can be as far from the dirt of Wall Street’s implosion as possible.

This morning, thanks to OMB Watch, I finally found an article that explains in spades what it is that BushCo is telling us we have to buy and buy RIGHT NOW. BushCo wants us to buy Mortgage Based Securities.

I say let Wall Street keep their securities. We ought to offer to buy up all the mortgages represented by the MBSs, but not the MBSs themselves. The upshot would be that the government – through FannieMae and FreddieMac, in both of which we now own significant stock – could refinance the mortgages at current market prices and reasonable rates while Congress works on legislation to restore regulatory control over the lending industry.

So what would happen to Wall Street? Those who engineered and made the disastrous deals could look for work. Maybe if they are lucky some of those homeowners would hire them to cut the grass.

Would the country take an economic hit? Yes, indeed. We would lose all the false value the Wall Street paper represents, but then it was all BS in the first place wasn’t it?! There was no real value there. It was all based on the deceptions of a deregulated industry whose only concern was inflating the value of underlying stock so its CEOs could take home hundreds of millions of dollars of easily earned cash. Of course, stock in those companies would go to zilch and we would all feel that.

Would it impact the Main Street, too? Yes it would. It would hit us all pretty darn hard, but I believe that the recovery would put us all in a better place. No lesson is well learned that doesn’t come through pain and sacrifice. This nation has a soft underbelly gained from years of unearned benefits. We need a complete shake-up that results in a re-evaluation of the short-term thinking that got us where we are today. We are a resilient nation that knows how to cope. Wall Street losses wouldn’t destroy us; they would ultimately strengthen us.

The bottom line here is that this bailout, as the OMB Watch article's title tells us, is the end of the free market. How can BushCo claim to preside over the America we had when they took office? Their deregulation has created a capitalism that they are proposing to underwrite with federal funds. No economist has ever defined capitalism in terms of government ownership, so this is another milestone for Shrub. He can now lay claim not only to being the "war president", but he also holds the title of "destroyer of the capitalistic system". Karl Marx would be so proud.

“Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!” – Patrick Henry

Be the change you wish to see in the world. -- M. K. Gandhi

The reason for going was to keep the crude flowing and raise a false flag abroad. – from a poem by Jack Evans titled 3500 Souls - http://www.myspace.com/paralegal_eagle

Individually we have little voice. Collectively we cannot be ignored.
But in silence we surrender our power. Yours in Peace -- BR

BAIL WHO OUT?

2008-09-23T10:26:00.001-05:00

For several days now the proposed bailout of Wall Street has been rolling around in my head like a pea in a bottle. Admittedly it is a huge problem that needs to be dealt with by groups of people with a whole hell of a lot more education in economics than I have, but a few thoughts keep popping up in my mind like corks caught in an eddy.

The first is that, while I don’t consider myself a great thinker, I do believe that George W. Bush is even less of one, and he’s the guy who is proclaiming an immediate bailout to be essential. When George W. Bush says acting in a certain way to handle a situation he says is critical, my instinct is to holler “Stop!! I’m not following you over any more cliffs.”

The second is that we are being given no distinctions about whom we are bailing out and what their situation is. All we hear is it’s going to take $700 billion dollars to bail out Wall Street. What? Every investment broker on the street is broke? Is no firm on Wall Street in a good position? Or is it just that if the public tap is going to opened everybody on the street wants to be a recipient of the largesse?

The third is that what we are being asked to do is to throw more weak money after bad. The looming crash is looming because BushCo insisted on killing all the regulations and disarming the regulators. Now they want to inject the biggest sum of money ever promised (to be raised by selling weak securities backed by our tax pledges) into that same bloated, under-regulated mess. To top it off, Bush even refuses to take away the perks of the CEOs he himself defined as his base!!!

The fourth is that the bailout only serves to buoy up the jerks that set everybody up with mortgages they couldn’t possibly pay off in the first place. What about the poor saps like you and me who bought into the American dream and believed those great minds that kept acting as if housing markets always raise their values 10 to 20% a year? What happens to them? Why doesn’t the government want to refinance their mortgages at lower values, but reasonable rates that would allow current owners to keep their rental units or remain in their homes and, if they do so long enough, to regain the position they were in the day they got the original loan? To hell with promises that some day we might get our money back from our investment in Wall Street. We ought to know by now that a snowball in hell would have a better chance.

My ultimate conclusion is that W’s deal stinks. It does nothing for the little guy, but seeks to bail the high rollers out at the little guy’s expense. What should be done is to engineer a government bailout for the citizens who have already suffered from Wall Street’s greed. Devalue the assets and offer discounted mortgages to the homeowners and see how many take the deal. If it lets the Wall Street CEOs go under like the lead hearted sinkers they are, so much the better. Their successors might then understand why they will not be allowed to operate without regulatory oversight.

Maybe then American citizens could feel safe in their homes.

This blog is going to my representatives as a letter this morning. Please consider sending something similar to yours. Here's an easy way to do it: http://congressorg.capwiz.com/congressorg/mailapp/

“Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!” – Patrick Henry

Be the change you wish to see in the world. -- M. K. Gandhi

The reason for going was to keep the crude flowing and raise a false flag abroad. – from a poem by Jack Evans titled 3500 Souls - http://www.myspace.com/paralegal_eagle

Individually we have little voice. Collectively we cannot be ignored.
But in silence we surrender our power. Yours in Peace -- BR

Amy Goodman Charges Dropped

2008-09-22T09:49:00.002-05:00

I recently blogged about the arrest of Amy Goodman and her staff in St. Paul at the Republican National Convention. At that time, I signed on to a petition to the City of St. Paul asking that the charges be dropped.

Now they have been, and this morning I received a message from FreePress asking that signers make others aware of their efforts in an attempt to swell their ranks. As this is a group that is effectively fighting against the monopolization of news reporting, I am a supporter and decided to incluse the message below - which FreePress included in their mailing and asked signers to distribut - in the hope that you might consider joining them, too. At the very least, I hope you will take the time to follow the links below and read about the group.

Thanks, dear reader, for all you do to help maintain our freedom and our access to uncensored, undiluted, and unabridged information.

BR

Dear Friend,

Earlier this month, I -- along with 60,000 other members of Free Press
-- signed a letter calling on St. Paul City Hall to drop the charges
against Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! and the other journalists who
were arrested during the Republican National Convention.

Today, we found out that in response to public pressure, all of the
charges were dropped!

I'm writing in hopes that you will join me and the growing media
reform movement by becoming a Free Press "e-activist". It is free,
and takes about 10 seconds:
http://free.convio.net/site/R?i=3xPb6rPvOXax-GBy_ZISxQ..

Free Press is a national, nonpartisan network of people like you and
me who care about the future of our media. It is crucial that we
increase our numbers in the fight for more hard hitting journalism,
and independent media.

Please go to http://free.convio.net/site/R?i=AqAuKBstaA7kN7gRTouy-g..

Note: Free Press is a national nonpartisan organization working to
reform the media. Free Press does not endorse or oppose any candidate
for public office.

RETURNING TO MILDER INSANITY?

2008-09-19T07:28:00.001-05:00

Sufficient time has passed since the conventions for the “bubble” of emotional support to have passed with it. Polls yesterday showed the Obama has regained the lead in the presidential race, so Palin has paled and McLame is appropriately suffering from his own earlier statements about his incompetence in economic matters. So maybe the country is beginning to turn away from the radically rabid right approach to politics and getting back to asking what the country really needs. America has been a neurotic place for a long time, but for the last forty years it has been sliding into psychosis. Maybe the latest polls indicate a return to less dangerous frames of mind.

We all tire of the political mud slinging in today’s long campaigns, but one good aspect of that length is that there is time in a campaign to see and hear the candidates’ responses to tough situations that arise during the time span. Thanks to the incompetence of the current administration there have been plenty of issues for the candidates to address and plenty of opportunities for us to assess the quality of those responses.

McLame’s response to the tumbling walls of Wall Street was particularly revealing. He wants to fire the head of the Security Exchange Commission and create a new government agency for oversight. The party that always runs on “small government” and accuses the Democrats of favoring big government always grows government instead, and that is McLame’s first reaction.

Obama, on the other hand, advocates firing the whole bunch in charge through the upcoming election – that’s a good idea if I ever heard one – and instead of adding another layer of government, he wants to reinstate the regulations that used to prevent Wall Street’s free wheeling ways before BushCo (thanks to Phil Gramm) removed them immediately after taking office. When Republicans call for smaller government they always only mean less regulation, but regulation is definitely needed, and Obama has put his finger on the pulse of the problem.

You may have already seen the widely distributed email message titled “I’m a Little Confused”, but in case you haven’t I’m copying it here. I think it says about everything anybody needs to know to decide how to vote in November.

Subject: Fwd: I'm a little confused. Let me see if I have this straight.....

If you grow up in Hawaii, raised by your grandparents, you're 'exotic, different.'

Grow up in Alaska eating mooseburgers, a quintessential American story.

If your name is Barack you're a radical, unpatriotic Muslim.

If you name your kids Willow, Trig and Track, you're a maverick. (Palin)

Graduate from Harvard law School and you are unstable.

Attend 5 different small colleges (Palin) before graduating, you're well grounded.

If you (Obama) spend 3 years as a brilliant community organizer, become the first black President of the Harvard Law Review, create a voter registration drive that registers 150,000 new voters, spend 12 years as a Constitutional Law professor, spend 8 years as a State Senator representing a district with over 750,000 people, become chairman of the state Senate's Health and Human Services committee, spend 4 years in the United States Senate representing a state of 13 million people wh ile sponsoring 131 bills and serving on the Foreign Affairs, Environment and Public Works and Veteran's Affairs committees, you don't have any real leadership experience.

If your total resume is: local weather girl, 4 years on the city council and 6 years as the mayor of a town with less than 7,000 people, 20 months as the governor of a state with only 650,000 people, then you're qualified to become the country's second highest ranking executive.

If you (Obama) have been married to the same woman for 19 years while raising 2 beautiful daughters, all within Protestant churches, you're not a real Christian.

If you cheated on your first wife (McCain) with a rich heiress (Cindy), and left your disfigured wife and married the heiress the next month, you're a Christian.

If you teach responsible, age appropriate sex education, including the proper use of birth control, you are eroding the fiber of society.

If, while governor (Palin), you staunchly advocate abstinence only, with no other option in sex education in your state's school system while your unwed teen daughter ends up pregnant, you're very responsible.

If your wife (Michelle) is a Harvard graduate lawyer who gave up a position in a prestigious law firm to work for the betterment of her inner city community, then gave that up to raise a family, your family's values don't represent America 's.

If you're (Palin) husband is nicknamed 'First Dude', with at least one DUI conviction and no college education, who didn't register to vote until age 25 and once was a member of a group that advocated the secession of Alaska from the USA , your family is extremely admirable.

OK, much clearer now. Share the clarity...pass it on!

“Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!” – Patrick Henry

Be the change you wish to see in the world. -- M. K. Gandhi

The reason for going was to keep the crude flowing and raise a false flag abroad. – from a poem by Jack Evans titled 3500 Souls - http://www.myspace.com/paralegal_eagle

Individually we have little voice. Collectively we cannot be ignored.
But in silence we surrender our power. Yours in Peace -- BR

What Do You Expect?

2008-09-17T17:20:00.001-05:00

I read the article below in OpEdNews. It so closely paralleled my feelings at the moment that I decided to reproduce it here for you. I can't say I'm quite as optimistic as Obenzinger says he is, but you've got to hope that Obama really does represent the light at the end of the tunnel. I hope you enjoy this article as much as I did. If nothing else it is a good piece of writing.

Bob
***********************************************************************************

Original Content at http://www.opednews.com/articles/November-5th-2008-What-D-by-Hilton-Obenzinger-080911-402.html

September 13, 2008

November 5th, 2008: What Do You Expect?

By Hilton Obenzinger

Meditations in a Time of Delusions and Lies – 28

It's November 5th, 2008.

White people have been given the cue to reject a black man with code words like "hockey mom" and "pit bull with lipstick." Gender has been pitted against race to allow white people to talk about "working class" to mean white people got to keep what's theirs against the onslaught of effete wine-drinking law professor black men. Huh? Cavalcade of distractions, Swift Boats in all ports, blatant mendacious fabrications, and over-ripe baloney piled to even higher levels than the first 8 years of Rove.

New terms have been added to the twisted cynical fascist lexicon, "lipstick" joining "honor" and "service" and "homeland." Two colonial frontiers go head to head: Alaska of desperate last-chance white folks versus Hawaii of mellow mix-mix. America no mo' bettah mix-mix. Alaska crude wins.

What do you expect?

Bush has locked American logic into endless occupation of Iraq, which the Happy Fighter Pilot embraces with joy. The attack on Iran is now cleared for take-off. Pakistan is on the "to pulp" list. The solution to war is more war, wider war. The solution to occupation is more occupation, wider occupation. Israeli leaders can barely contain themselves; they decide to extend The Wall to Jupiter. America looks the other way.

Crazed victims of America get even crazier, and even more Americans still can't figure out why they hate us. Good people all over the world set up "Committees in Solidarity with the People of the United States" (CISPUS). In El Salvador and Germany and Vietnam they argue and agonize over what the true meaning of solidarity is all about – Sending money to besieged truth-tellers in New Jersey? Singing songs of the Spanish Civil War? Should they campaign for Boycott and Divestment? CISPUS reaches out to underground Americans waiting for the decades-long Alaska winter night to end, but they know that only the oppressed Americans are the ones who can defeat the Four Budweiser Delivery Trucks of the Apocalypse.

What do you expect?

Oh, I forgot. Russia now bad, them big bad Russians. Surround them with missiles, goad them with NATO, provoke them – and we can have a Cold War again. Good for arms business, happiness for missile guidance systems. The first Cold War turns out to have had little to do with ideology – something a lot of people suspected all along – so we can go back to square one – ah, containment and confrontation – all wrapped in the warm blanket of familiar fear, along with lust for oil. And then there's China . . .

What do you expect?

A thousand miles off the coast of San Francisco a mass of plastic bags two times the size of Texas floats in the Pacific – this is fact, check it out. Soon the continent of crap drifts toward the coast, and Americans strangle in their own garbage. Dead zones at the mouth of the Mississippi expand in all directions. Bees die off, fruit trees wither, frogs disappear – and perky Sarah hunts down polar bears from helicopters as they swim in Arctic Jacuzzis. Do you miss honey? Do you miss apples? Do you miss the North Pole?

What do you expect?

Americans are told they don't want a "Washington Bureaucrat" to make their health-care decisions. They are happy to have a bureaucrat in Connecticut or Wall Street to decide instead. Actually, once again Americans are left waiting in the Emergency Room – which is about to be shut down.

This is freedom of choice. Women have no choice, even if they die, to carry babies to the maws of death in Kabul or Baghdad or Texas Death Row, which is "pro life." Sex is bad, abstain from touching yourself in those goofy places, abstain from joy, avoid all candor, avoid all knowledge, keep your secret places to yourself – and, above all, do not touch anyone's private parts that look like your own.

Capitalism continues to eat its own. No regulation means constant regurgitation. Banks kill themselves off like bees. Putrid carcass free market burgers kill off entire cities like bees, no need for hurricanes. No one checks the meat, no one checks the drugs, no one checks the ads on TV to buy the drugs, no one checks the drug companies who are put in charge of saving the planet in sacred trust with oil companies. More poor, more pain, more jails, more crank, less school, no science, more God, less compassion, less jobs, more shopping days before Christmas, less reality, more reality TV, more stupidity, less art, more dead brain.

And what do I expect?

Actually, on November 5th, 2008, I expect joy. Joy for a government that, while no means perfect, hears people, that the people have not been fooled one more time, and that the ballot boxes have not been stuffed, and a black man leads the descendants of masters and slaves, immigrants and natives, the meager and the mighty, judged by his character and not by the color of his skin. For a government that acts without corporate veto, that harkens to an America of many-ness and ferment. That allows the community organizer to reach across the continent to gather the energies of multitudes to take up the task ourselves. That you are cared for when you are sick, that you are cared for in order not to get sick.

The People's Herald watches Great Greed, regulating, not allowing the thoughtless collapse of dreams and the careless injection of poison. That war is not the business of America, that problems are solved before countries and peoples are destroyed, that children will learn in schools that can teach, that people can work at jobs that pay and grow the spirit, that religion belongs to people and not politicians, that the people take the lead to save the planet, that that we grow prosperous through the exercise of new ideas, that bees will live, and songs and all the other expressions take us to the world, and the world brings us thanks, and that courage means living in that world, sharing problems and promises and power.

On November 5th, 2008, I expect it will be possible to imagine all of these things, and more.

Which America do you expect on November 5th, 2008? What will you do to make it happen?

Authors Website: www.obenzinger.com

Authors Bio: Hilton Obenzinger is the author of "American Palestine: Melville, Twain and the Holy Land Mania," among many other books of criticism, poetry and fiction, and the recipient of the American Book Award. He is a long-time Jewish American advocate of Israeli-Palestinian peace. Hilton Obenzinger teaches writing and American literature at Stanford University.

Back

ON THE BRINK OF DEPRESSION: Republican Socialism in Action

2008-09-17T17:20:00.000-05:00

There is very little difference between the present economic situation and the mess the country faced in 1929. Jobs are disappearing. Banks are failing. Even insurance companies are going under, and the little guys like you and me are finding that the little money they have doesn’t buy very much any more and the home they live in isn’t worth the mortgage.

So how did we get here? By the exact same means that took us over the edge in the great depression – once again we are on the losing end of a long Republican reign – just as in 1929. Once again, our so-called conservative party has deregulated the financial markets so that the “free” market could wheel and deal with no one looking over their shoulders – just as in 1929.

The truth is that the market is not and has never been free. It costs us little folks dearly every time conservatism, whose definition of small government is not small government at all but only the removal of government’s regulatory function, takes us down this garden path. The only thing free about the marketplace is the freedom the traders gain from Republican administrations to make terrible investments without risk to themselves.

Why, you ask, do I say free of risk? Not because there is no risk for you and me, but because the traders have no risk. If they fail, you and I are asked by this conservative government to bail them out. If we don’t, we are told, and here the Republicans are finally telling the truth, we all go down together. What it boils down to is that the Republicans offer their big-time wheeler-dealer friends privatized profits and socialized losses.

The government (i.e. you and I) now own 79% of AIG’s value. In other words, AIG has been nationalized, but hide and watch. If the company recovers, it will refund its reserve then start paying its stockholders back as the company regains its footing after paying back the government loan. (At 11%!) If the company doesn’t recover, you and I will lose the $85,000,000,000 our government has invested in it.

That’s right. The Republicans, those right wingers who scream about socialism every time a Democrat wants to use government money to give the little guy a leg up actually practice socialism in the way they bail out their big money buddies. What is socialism, after all, if it is not the use of public moneys to create the means by which the society can function? Isn’t that what the Bush administration is doing right now?

And how did we get into this mess? Thanks in great measure to Phil Gramm, John Mclame’s chief economic advisor – I know, I know. They fired him. Well then why does he still appear at Mclame’s side at rallies? -- who as a Senator engineered the deregulation that allowed banks to make home loans to unqualified borrowers and then to “insure” that risk through “credit swaps” so that when housing prices fell the whole house of cards went down with it.

Now McLame is running for president saying he is the reform candidate!! He actually said today that there was a need for more regulation and he’s the man to do it. For god’s sake this guy has made his reputation by being against regulation and now he’s telling us that he is the best chance the country has to recover by installing regulations?!? If you believe that, I have a bridge in Alaska to sell you.

The bottom line is that if in November the voters fail to oust the Republicans, we will have to try and live through a depression that will make the thirties look like a picnic. Even Sarah Palin ought to look McLame in the eye and say, “Thanks, but no thanks.”

And you and I had better batten down our hatches. This may be the beginning of a very long and very dangerous economic storm.

“Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!” – Patrick Henry

Be the change you wish to see in the world. -- M. K. Gandhi

The reason for going was to keep the crude flowing and raise a false flag abroad. – from a poem by Jack Evans titled 3500 Souls - http://www.myspace.com/paralegal_eagle

Individually we have little voice. Collectively we cannot be ignored.
But in silence we surrender our power. Yours in Peace -- BR

NEWSPAPER SPAM

2008-09-15T04:40:00.001-05:00

Listed as an advertising supplement to Sunday’s paper was a video disk labeled “Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West”.

It was distributed by someone called the Clarion Group. Researching that name yielded very little information other than that it is a 501(c)3 corporation whose "mission is to educate Americans about issues of national security."

Reading the list of papers to which it was distributed reveals that it went to those states considered swing states in the upcoming national election.

The group’s spokesman, Gregory Ross, says the film was financed by “a concerned citizen” who has long been connected with the group, but offers no further explanation. The group’s website offers nothing related to its board of directors or financers, but I did find out that its founder is a Canadian-Israeli named Raphael Shore. Wikipedia described him as a pro-Israeli who claims the press is anti-Israeli.

The group hosts a website at www.radicalislam.org which recently posted an article in support of John McCain. The article was removed, however, because, according to Ross it had “crossed the line.” That is a reference to the fact that 501(c)3 corporations are barred by law from supporting political candidates. In spite of that, however, it is painfully clear that the DVD is intended to spread fear and foment continued war in the Middle-East as well as to generate votes for the McCain ticket whose support for continuing the war is well known.

It seems that the only place this group has stuck up its head was an interview Wayne Kopping, writer, director and editor of the film had with that famously fair and balanced comedian, Rush Limbaugh, who rabidly proclaims the value of this film while damning the efforts of Michael Moore and Al Gore as laughably biased.

This effort is clearly the kind of tactic for which Karl Rove and his ilk – read Swiftboaters – have become notorious, and it should be dismissed for what it is – a campaign designed to spread hate and fear and to keep the drums of war pounding. It’s depiction of Muslims as, by definition, dangerous is the kind of stuff Hitler’s Nazis used to spread about the Jews.

It is too bad that the owners of our local paper care more about making a little money than about the harm that can come from spreading this kind of hateful propaganda.

“Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!” – Patrick Henry

Be the change you wish to see in the world. -- M. K. Gandhi

The reason for going was to keep the crude flowing and raise a false flag abroad. – from a poem by Jack Evans titled 3500 Souls - http://www.myspace.com/paralegal_eagle

Individually we have little voice. Collectively we cannot be ignored.
But in silence we surrender our power. Yours in Peace -- BR

The State Department is Beginning to Make Sense

2008-09-11T06:02:00.000-05:00

I heard an interview on the BBC this morning with U.S. Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Affairs, James Glassman that gave me hope.

For years, the Peace Network has been saying that our government needs to listen to the people of other nations and to understand that we cannot use force alone to resolve the hostility others feel for us. My favorite sound bite line has always been – who will be the next terrorist, the father whose son we feed or the son whose father we kill – and Glassman sounds like he might understand what we have been talking about.

He spoke July 15 at a foreign press briefing about the new emphasis on the "war of ideas", and his position is much more in line with the thinking of PNO than anything else I have heard out of Washington since the days of JFK. It's all about laying some solid groundwork for the next administration.

You can read his speech at http://fpc.state.gov/107034.htm, but I also recommend that you Google the BBC and listen to this morning's broadcast of World Update. They interviewed Glassman, and what he said was much more direct that this speech and it gave me hope that he might actually bring a needed sensitivity to American foreign policy development. It’s not world-shaking at this point, but after eight years of listening to saber rattling as the only expression of American foreign policy, it is definitely a breath of needed fresh air.

“Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!” – Patrick Henry

Be the change you wish to see in the world. -- M. K. Gandhi

The reason for going was to keep the crude flowing and raise a false flag abroad. – from a poem by Jack Evans titled 3500 Souls - http://www.myspace.com/paralegal_eagle

Individually we have little voice. Collectively we cannot be ignored.
But in silence we surrender our power. Yours in Peace -- BR

THE TWO FACES OF SARAH PALIN

2008-09-10T09:23:00.000-05:00

When John McLame named his choice for Veep, I made a quiet little vow to myself that I would follow Obama’s dictate to keep personal issues out of the voting question. I still agree with that dictum, and will continue to do my best to abide by it.

The problem I have with Palin is not what she says or what she does. It is that the two are so often so far apart. It is also that she doesn’t seem to learn from the lessons life puts before her and adjust her approach accordingly.

For instance, I don’t care at whether her daughter has premarital sex. I don’t even care whether or not she gets pregnant as a result. What I care about is that Palin herself continues to insist that abstinence is the only viable method of preventing extramarital pregnancy. Studies show that not only does abstinence not work as a means of preventing extramarital pregnancy, but it increases the chances for the unhappy little accident because its practitioners are not prepared when the passion of the moment sweeps away their restraint.

Palin has a clear example of that right in her own family and refuses to recognize it for the sign and symptom it is of a problem that requires more than a single answer solution. Kind of reminds me of somebody else’s approach to everything – Stay the course, Sarah. What change is there in that?

Well, stay the course, that is, until the pressure builds up to the point where the course is no longer politically viable as in the case of the famous bridge to nowhere. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122090791901411709.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

While Palin claims she told Congress “Thanks, but no thanks”, everyone now knows that she first lobbied for the bridge then kept the money when Congress ultimately withdrew support for the project. They never built the bridge, but they are right now spending $27,000,000 building a gravel access road to the site where the bridge would have been.

Sounds to me kind of like claiming you don’t want a war while you are working your butt off behind the scenes to build a false case for starting one. What change is there in that?

McLame/Palin keep pounding the podium about how they will bring change to Washington, then espousing issues like drilling for more oil, continuing the war in Iraq, and making the Bush tax cuts permanent. That sounds about as much like change to me as the Republican records sounds like fiscal conservatism. Take a look at the difference in national debt levels between Republican and Democratic administrations:

National Debt:
Carter $85 Billion
Reagan $252 Billion
Bush1 $399 Billion
Clinton $18 Billion
Bush2 $596 Billion (not counting off books Iraq War debt in the trillions).
Source U.S. Treasury-Bureau of Public Debt.

The bottom line for me is that I am sick to death of double talking politicians. And, yes, I agree with those on the right who point to Democratic double-talk. I abhor it, too, but beneath that bottom line is the one underlined by that debt picture in the little table above. The ultimate bottom line is that the little guy does better when the Democrats are pulling their shenanigans than when the Republicans are pulling theirs, and, being a little guy myself, I am for him.

So when it comes to change in Washington, D.C. this year, I think anyone who advocates for any change other than a change of the party in control is acting the fool.

“Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!” – Patrick Henry

Be the change you wish to see in the world. -- M. K. Gandhi

The reason for going was to keep the crude flowing and raise a false flag abroad. – from a poem by Jack Evans titled 3500 Souls - http://www.myspace.com/paralegal_eagle

Individually we have little voice. Collectively we cannot be ignored.
But in silence we surrender our power. Yours in Peace -- BR

HOW TO CONQUER TERRORISM

2008-09-09T10:51:00.001-05:00

In today’s world of think tanks as front groups for political propaganda, the first thought that always comes to mind when faced with a paper touted as research into the effects of military action on terrorism is that it is probably packed with circumstantial arguments for a preconceived notion. At least that was my reaction when I began reading a paper titled, “How Terrorist Groups End: Lessons for Countering al Qaida”, and published by the Rand Corporation.

My first step was to take a look at the Rand website and find out who sits on the board of directors. As I suspected, it would be quite reasonable to assume from that list that the focus of the organization would be quite conservative. Sure their mission statement touts their interest in objective research, but FOX news says their reporting is fair and balanced, too!

On reading the paper, though, I was forced to conclude that this might well be an objective view. Of course, I may be prejudiced in that I liked the paper because it agreed with the opinions I held before it was written, but while that might make the paper suspect if I had written it, I assume that the researchers for Rand undertook the task from a different perspective. It was presented to Congress on July 29, and you can see the entire report at: http://www.rand.org/pubs/research_briefs/RB9351/index1.html.

The paper, as its title explicitly states, asked what kinds of actions impacted terrorist groups most heavily with an eye toward developing effective responses that would reduce the danger we face from terrorism. At worst, just asking the question beat the hell out of trotting out the troops, planes and bombs to find out if they would do the job. Of course, we already knew that doesn’t work from our experience in Afghanistan and Iraq. (That is most of us knew. There still those incredibly hard heads who seem unable to accept it and would continue to keep our children at risk on nebulous front lines in those regions in spite of the myriad of facts that prove the notion that this somehow protects us to be nonsense.)

Well, maybe if those folks would read this paper, they would finally get it, too. The authors, Seth G. Jones and Maring C. Libicki had no political ax to grind. All they had was a question to answer: “How do terrorist groups end?” In seeking the answer, they examined 648 terrorist groups that existed between 1968 and 2006.

So what was the answer? The most common demise of these groups (43% of them) ended by being transition into legitimate political groups. They found that the narrower the group’s goals were, the more likely it was for them to achieve their goals without violence. That enables the government to negotiate a settlement of some sort.

If terrorist groups can’t accept non-violent solutions, police action is the most effective way to cope with them. That means intelligence, penetration and disruption. They also found that local police, rather than federal police, were the most effective.

About 10% of terrorist groups disbanded because they met their goals. So how does military action stack up? About 7% of terrorist groups were stopped by the military. The military, not surprisingly, works best against large, identifiable groups involved in insurgencies. The problem, also not surprisingly, is that military methods tend to kill a lot of innocent people, and that causes a backlash that creates more terrorism. Hmmm. Does that have a familiar ring to you? Takes me back to the question I asked before we invaded Iraq – Who will be the next terrorist, the father whose son we feed or the son whose father we kill?

Again not surprisingly, the hardest groups to destroy are those motivated by religion. Of the groups they studied, Jones and Libicki say that 62% have ended, but only 32% of those that were motivated by religion have ended. At the same time, the religious groups are the ones least likely to achieve their goals.

Ultimately, the most useful aspect of this study is its implications for our approach to dealing with Al Qaida. Their first point was that nothing we have done so far has been very effective. Here is a quote that I hope our Congressfolk picked up on and will give some serious thought to, “Al Qa’ida’s resurgence should trigger a fundamental rethinking of U.S. counterterrorism strategy.”

Here are their recommendations for action:
1. “Policing and intelligence should be the backbone of U.S. efforts.”

2. “Military force, though not necessarily U.S. soldiers, may be a necessary instrument when al Qa’ida is involved in an insurgency. (Emphasis mine.)
This means a light U.S. military footprint or none at all . . . its presence is likely to increase terrorist recruitment.”

3. Replace the “war on terror” with “counterterrorism”. (The concept of war elevates the terrorists’ position.)

Their final conclusion, “Our analysis concludes that al Qa’ida’s probability of success in actually overthrowing any government is close to zero” should, though it certainly won’t, release the U.S. from the grip of its paranoia.

Once again FDR was right—We have nothing to fear but fear itself.

All the presidential candidates keep talking about change, but most of it is hot air. When will one of them talk about meaningful change in our approach to dealing with terrorism?

When I hear a politician striving to calm our fears instead of trying to stir them up, I’ll know that he/she is truly deserving of my vote.

“Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!” – Patrick Henry

Be the change you wish to see in the world. -- M. K. Gandhi

The reason for going was to keep the crude flowing and raise a false flag abroad. – from a poem by Jack Evans titled 3500 Souls - http://www.myspace.com/paralegal_eagle

Individually we have little voice. Collectively we cannot be ignored.
But in silence we surrender our power. Yours in Peace -- BR

CHALABI AGAIN?!

2008-09-08T09:23:00.000-05:00

There are a few names that always trip my trigger when I see them in the news. Ahmad Chalabi is one of them.

He popped up this time because he was the object of a recent suicide attack. Why? Because he is as detested in his home country as he should be here. And why’s that? Because he provided a great deal of the disinformation BushCo needed to take us to Iraq. As a result, a great many Iraqis blame him for the mess their country is in now.

Spotting him as phony was easy back when he first appeared on the scene. He was paraded around Washington, D.C. as an exile from Saddam’s Iraq and the man with all the answers. He knew all about Saddam’s stockpile of weapons of mass destruction. He knew everybody in Iraq and could amass support for a new government there after Saddam’s removal. In short, he was BushCo’s darling. The horrible thing was that so few in our Congress seemed capable of seeing through him or the administration.

His image in D.C. only began to slip when it turned out that there were no WMDs. And then it turned out that the Iraqi people didn’t want him anywhere near their government. I don’t blame them. I don’t want him anywhere near my government, either, and the fact that he is no longer Washington’s darling doesn’t mean the neocons wouldn’t back him again if he could somehow gain control and keep things going their way. Nor does it change the fact that this administration pushed the words of Admad Chalabi ahead of the words of its own intelligence community in order to lead us into war with Iraq.

Reporters Ned Parker and Saif Hameed of the Los Angeles Times put it into one sentence that was reprinted in the News-Leader on September 6, “The politician, a longtime darling of Washington neoconservatives in and out of the Bush administration, provided much of the faulty intelligence that President Bush used to justify the invasion.”

The only thing they got wrong in that sentence was calling it faulty intelligence. It wasn’t faulty intelligence. It was false intelligence. In fact, the reliable American intelligence community never considered it intelligence at all. It was the fabrication of a man who would be king. Chalabi fancied himself as the right man to take Saddam’s place as the ruler of Iraq, and our neoconservatives, eyes filled the imagined glories of unseating Saddam and establishing a permanent American presence in Iraq through a near-puppet government under Chalabi, took the bait and ran with it.

The end result is the fiasco we are still living with today and will for some years to come. Suicide bombers are not often to be congratulated, but the one who tried to take out Chalabi, though his method was unforgivable, at least had a legitimate target for his disgust. What we need in this country are a few more legislators whose understanding of the dynamics of today’s international situation is as clear as that bomber’s was.

“Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!” – Patrick Henry

Be the change you wish to see in the world. -- M. K. Gandhi

The reason for going was to keep the crude flowing and raise a false flag abroad. – from a poem by Jack Evans titled 3500 Souls - http://www.myspace.com/paralegal_eagle

Individually we have little voice. Collectively we cannot be ignored.
But in silence we surrender our power. Yours in Peace -- BR

THE AMERIKAN WAY

2008-09-03T15:03:00.000-05:00

Amy Goodman is a name well known to those who seek independent news reporting but little known among those who think they get adequate information from network and cable news programs. While acting in her role as an independent television news journalist, she and two of her producers were been arrested yesterday in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Not so many years ago this would have brought every major news source in the country roaring into action to protest the silencing of the press. Today, with the news being controlled by the few remaining owners of the major press outlets and a government whose M.O is secrecy and manipulation, this arrest didn’t even make the standard news broadcasts.

I constantly read complaints in the local newspaper about the “liberal” press, but those complainers have obviously never encountered truly liberal press. Amy Goodman represents independent press and leans heavily toward what our local citizens would certainly classify as the liberal side. Her program “Democracy Now!” seen on Link TV, and the magazines the Utne Reader, Mother Jones, and The Nation” are about all that is left of the liberal press in this country.

As it turns out, the problem Goodman and her crew are facing in St. Paul is due to the fact that they refuse to be “embedded” in the police department. In the eyes of the police that puts them on the side of the protesters instead of the establishment, so they are considered legitimate targets for harassment. Here is a link that will provide you a short video clip of an interview in which Amy explains what happened: http://www.mediachannel.org/wordpress/2008/09/03/arrested-at-the-rnc/.

Embedding was the creation of the current Bush Administration for reporters on the war in Iraq. It consists of assigning reporters to military or police units to report what the unit does rather than giving them free rein to roam about and report on what they find for themselves. It was very touted as a means of getting reporters closer to the action, but has in fact accomplished its goal of controlling what is reported on. It further tends to soften reporters’ stories by virtue of the relationships they strike up with the troops with whom they are embedded.

Amy Goodman and other solid independent reporters have always refused to accept embedding and, instead, seek and report on the stories they believe are most important and insightful. For this, which was once the standard for American reporting and which was widely recognized as the most meaningful function of the Fourth Estate -- as the press was known when it actually functioned as a monitor on the balance of powers, Ms. Goodman and her crew are considered by the St. Paul police and Federal police to be criminals.

Thanks to the enforced blindness of today’s American press, most Americans are totally unaware that they are not getting unbiased news from any source. The omission of material like Goodman’s arrest, not to mention the constitutional implications of such arrests, leaves the American public without guidance as to the authoritarian oppressiveness of their government.

Arresting people for seeking to report all the news to the people was de rigueur for Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, but it has no place in America, and every citizen should be up in arms about it regardless of his or her political party affiliation.

“Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!” – Patrick Henry

Be the change you wish to see in the world. -- M. K. Gandhi

The reason for going was to keep the crude flowing and raise a false flag abroad. – from a poem by Jack Evans titled 3500 Souls - http://www.myspace.com/paralegal_eagle

Individually we have little voice. Collectively we cannot be ignored.
But in silence we surrender our power. Yours in Peace -- BR

IT’S WHO’S BEHIND THAT COUNTS

2008-09-02T10:26:00.002-05:00

Candidates pose and posture, strut and bellow, salute and sing the National Anthem, but looking at what’s behind them will tell us more about what to expect from them than the fronts they put up for us. If there is anything Americans should have learned from the last eight years it is that the face our political parties paint on their candidates is not what we should be looking at. We need to look behind them.

George W. Bush masqueraded behind a façade called the war on terror while he danced to the tune called by his neocon backers and led us into a war that had nothing to do with the terrorism he decried and everything to do with seeking the goals the neocons wrote position papers on to sway the Bush camp, but kept from the American people because they knew we wouldn’t buy into it.

If you need proof of that assertion, think back to the crocodile tears Paul Wolfowitz shed in his 2003 speech about how no one wants war in Iraq, but Saddam Hussein’s actions have made it impossible to avoid. Then compare that to the statement that while Hussein’s presence in the middle-east provided the rationale for war in Iraq, the real reason was to establish a permanent American military presence in that country. The paper that appeared in was written in September, 2000 by the neoconservatives of which Wolfowitz was a prominent founding member. (www.newamericancentury.org: Rebuilding America’s Defenses p. 14)

John McCain purports to have been a “maverick” on the war due to his support for the removal of Donald Rumsfeld from the Defense Department, but his history as a supporter of the neocon movement and its war long precedes and further succeeds that moment. As far back as January of 1998, he joined the neocons in signing an open letter to then President Bill Clinton urging him to go to war with Iraq.

Even during this presidential campaign he announced his willingness to stay in Iraq for 100 years. The neoconservative movement is the single most influential body in taking us into the Iraq war, and John McCain has been an active proponent of their philosophy. It stands to reason that if he is elected to the presidency, we can expect him to further their clearly stated goal of American hegemony through military domination.

The conduct of the war in Iraq is, to me, the single most meaningful issue being put before the American people in November’s election, and it should settle the vote in favor of anyone willing to seek a reasonable exit. But the single most important issue is not being presented at all.

That issue is the nature of the people who stand behind the candidates and in that regard no one who stands with the neoconservatives has a right to a single vote for any office in the country. A vote for John McCain is a vote for the continued dominance of a group of money grubbing, power hungry people who believe that the continuation of America’s dominance of world economic policies and the distribution of wealth through American coffers is more important than the well-being of the earth and all its people. That is not a position that should be acceptable to anyone.

“Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!” – Patrick Henry

Be the change you wish to see in the world. -- M. K. Gandhi

The reason for going was to keep the crude flowing and raise a false flag abroad. – from a poem by Jack Evans titled 3500 Souls - http://www.myspace.com/paralegal_eagle

Individually we have little voice. Collectively we cannot be ignored.
But in silence we surrender our power. Yours in Peace -- BR

THE GREAT DIVIDE

2008-08-29T14:00:00.002-05:00

I have blogged about the growing societal divide between the haves and the have nots many times, but just came across a paper that takes a current look. It’s called Executive Excess 2008 and can be found at eshttp://www.ips-dc.org/reports/#623. Here are some of the highlights from the summary:

CEO-WORKER DIVIDE: CEOs in the United States, despite our current hard
economic times, continue to pocket outlandishly large pay packages. S&P 500 CEOs
last year averaged $10.5 million, 344 times the pay of typical American workers.
Compensation levels for private investment fund managers soared even further out
into the pay stratosphere. Last year, the top 50 hedge and private equity fund managers averaged $588 million each, more than 19,000 times as much as typical U.S.
workers earned.

TAXPAYER SUBSIDIES FOR EXECUTIVE PAY: Average U.S. taxpayers subsidize
excessive executive compensation — by more than $20 billion per year — via a
variety of tax and accounting loopholes. That $20 billion for America’s most powerful is more than double what the federal government spent last year on educating America’s most vulnerable — children with disabilities.

INDIRECT TAXPAYER SUPPORT FOR RUNAWAY PAY: Many billions more
taxpayer dollars indirectly encourage excessive executive pay, through everything
from government contracts for goods and services to corporate bailouts. More than
85 percent of the public companies on the federal government’s top 100 contractors
list paid their CEOs over 100 times the pay of average U.S. workers.

REFORM ROADBLOCKS: Legislation that would plug executive-friendly tax
loopholes is already pending in Congress. But this legislation has stalled — and will likely remain stalled unless the November 2008 elections change current Congressional voting dynamics.

WHERE THE CANDIDATES STAND: Senator John McCain and Senator Barack
Obama differ significantly on the executive pay reforms now before Congress, but
neither candidate has yet endorsed all the major reforms needed to start addressing
— and ending — over-the-top executive compensation.

There is a piece of legislation on the table intended to address this situation. It is called the Employee Free Choice Act. Claire McCaskill is a co-sponsor, but neither Obama nor McCain is. Maybe we should be asking why.

Incidentally, several Missouri Congress people have co-sponsored it as well. They are Carnahan, Russ (D-MO-03), Clay, Wm. Lacy (D-MO-01), Cleaver, Emanuel (D-MO-05), and Skelton, Ike (D-MO-04). Please note that they are all Democrats and tack another sticky note to your brain about how the Republicans treat the common man.

“Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!” – Patrick Henry

Be the change you wish to see in the world. -- M. K. Gandhi

The reason for going was to keep the crude flowing and raise a false flag abroad. – from a poem by Jack Evans titled 3500 Souls - http://www.myspace.com/paralegal_eagle

Individually we have little voice. Collectively we cannot be ignored.
But in silence we surrender our power. Yours in Peace -- BR

MUST SEE TV

2008-08-28T10:37:00.001-05:00

Every day on the entertainment page of the local paper, they hype one show or another as must see TV. Usually it’s just another episode of “Win-a-Million” or “Rambo XVII”, but last night was and tonight the TV fare truly is a MUST SEE. The Democratic National Convention did indeed make history last night, and will do so again tonight.

It doesn’t matter whether you are a Democrat, a Republican, a Libertarian, an Independent or an apolitical, burned out citizen. It seems to me that what matters is that what is happening in Denver this week is the culmination of the last sixty years of effort in the civil rights arena and more than 140 years of daily living since the Proclamation of Emancipation.

For most of my 65 year lifetime, the struggle to end American apartheid has dominated the civil rights forum in this country. I was born in 1943. In 1947 Harry Truman’s administration published “To Secure These Rights” a treatise designed to open up equal opportunity for federal employment to all races, and in 1948, aided by Hubert Humphrey’s fiery liberal oratory, Truman’s civil rights initiative was adopted into the platform at the Democratic Convention. Truman and Humphrey fought to outlaw lynching and were shouted down on the Senate floor, but ultimately won the argument and began to erode the Jim Crow laws that had legalized racial discrimination under the Plessy v Ferguson case of 1896. In 1950, that case was overturned by the Supreme Court, and the doctrine of “separate but equal” began to collapse.

In 1955, Martin Luther King, Jr. emerged as the primary American civil rights leader of the century by managing a year-long bus boycott which, in 1956, culminated in a Supreme Court finding that discrimination like that on bus lines was illegal. That opened the door for the great marching movement that led through Selma, Alabama to the 250,000 person march on Washington, D.C. where he delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech and on to Memphis, Tennessee in 1968 where he was struck down by an assassin while supporting a strike by that city’s sanitation workers.

Four years before that, in 1964, Lyndon Johnson accomplished passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which enabled Dr. King to carry not only the moral righteousness but also the legal right to march in the face of this nation’s obstinate refusal to recognize the right of every American to equal treatment and equal opportunity.

The law alone cannot change the thinking of a nation, but years of enforcement of such laws can erode the bigotry they address to the point where, as is the case today, overt discrimination is looked upon as outrageous by the majority of the population.

I cannot say that in my lifetime I have seen racial discrimination eliminated, but I can proudly say the I have lived long enough to see it at least suppressed to the point where a man who would not, in the time of my childhood, have been allowed to rise to the level of alderman in his home town of Chicago, can now be and has now been nominated to the presidency of the United States by a major political party. (THE PARTY I would point out that has consistently led the nation in this direction in the face of direct opposition from the other major political party. The LIBERAL arm of which has led this country out of its darkness every time it has chanced to peek out of the cave of repression, suppression and illegitimate warfare.)

So I saw last night’s Democratic Convention as a historic occasion that should be celebrated by every American regardless of his or her political affiliations. Unless you are a member of the KKK or some other racial supremacist group, in which case you obviously have no understanding of the constitution, you have no reason not to rejoice in the great distance we have traveled in the course of one man’s lifetime, and THAT made last night’s convention MUST SEE TV.

Tonight will be another evening of MUST SEE TV when Barack Obama stands on the stage alongside Congressman John Lewis, who is the last living person who stood alongside Dr. King throughout his marches into history. John Lewis spoke from the same podium as Dr. King the day he delivered the “I Have a Dream” speech in Washington, D.C. Back then Congressman Lewis was a young man and chairman of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee. As such, he was labeled by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI as a dangerous subversive. Today he serves as Congressman for the 5th Congressional District in the State of (of all places) Georgia.

I hope he will speak again tonight because the occasion of tonight as the 45th anniversary of Dr. King’s great speech and the achievement of Barack Obama is far too great a juxtaposition to ignore. And, certainly, no one is better qualified to speak to the meaning of that juxtaposition than John Lewis, who has seen it all.

I wouldn’t miss it for the world. Nor will I miss the opportunity to assist in Mr. Obama’s campaign as best I can. I hope you will do the same.

“Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!” – Patrick Henry

Be the change you wish to see in the world. -- M. K. Gandhi

The reason for going was to keep the crude flowing and raise a false flag abroad. – from a poem by Jack Evans titled 3500 Souls - http://www.myspace.com/paralegal_eagle

Individually we have little voice. Collectively we cannot be ignored.
But in silence we surrender our power. Yours in Peace -- BR

ARE YOU BETTER OFF THAN YOU WERE FOUR YEARS AGO?

2008-08-27T10:16:00.002-05:00

Four years ago??!! How about eight years ago? One of the great (and highly accurate) gripes about the way the Republicans run things is that since the days of Ronald Reagan their economic policies have consistently enriched the top 1% of earners while reducing the well-being of the rest of us. It isn’t a questionable assertion, but one that is easily supported with U.S. government data.

This morning’s paper carried a little AP article that went a long way, in my mind, toward pinpointing the economic woes we currently face thanks to trickle-down economics.

The Christian question to ask about the effect of economic policy is, “What does it do for the least of us?” The answer is it slaps them upside the head with an inability to meet necessary expenses. Oh well, the poor will always be with us, so that excuses it – right?!

> There has been no change in the overall poverty rate of 12.5% of the population, but more Latinos, children and foreign born Americans have joined that level.

> While the article contends that middle class incomes have “edged up” to $50,233, that rise of $665 was only from 2006 to 2007. In 2000, the median household income was $50,557. A rise in the past year to a level below that of 10 years ago doesn’t look to me like a rise at all.

> The first line of the article says that the number of people without health insurance fell by 1 million in 2007 and represents a gain in the number of insured people under G.W. Bush. It doesn’t say how many of that 1 million were insured through government programs.

I’m one of that million, but it sure wasn’t because my income increased. I just became Medicare eligible, or I still wouldn’t have any insurance. The article doesn’t say how many of the million got Medicare or Medicaid, but it does say that the increase was “largely because more people were covered through government programs”.

And now for the Whitehouse spin. These numbers, says Tony Fratto, are “definitely good news”. Sure they are. They’re good news if you want to ignore what they mean.

Yes, I’m happy to have Medicare, but I would have been happier to have been capable at some point in my life to have been able to afford health care coverage that paid for anything other than a catastrophe. It doesn’t help much to see your income rise by $665 a year if it costs you $2,500 more to live during that year. It particularly doesn’t help if that increase only brings you up to a level below where you were ten years ago. Claim all you want to that more people are insured today than last year, but the fact is that private coverage paid for by employers and individuals continues to decline while enrollment in Medicaid grows like Topsy.

You can pin all the roses you want to on that pig, but it still stinks.

“Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!” – Patrick Henry

Be the change you wish to see in the world. -- M. K. Gandhi

The reason for going was to keep the crude flowing and raise a false flag abroad. – from a poem by Jack Evans titled 3500 Souls - http://www.myspace.com/paralegal_eagle

Individually we have little voice. Collectively we cannot be ignored.
But in silence we surrender our power. Yours in Peace -- BR

CONDASLEEZA VEEP

2008-08-25T09:33:00.001-05:00

Here’s an interesting little news burp from CLG News:

Did McCain Help Bait Russia into Georgia? By Joe Lauria 17 Aug 2008 Who benefits most from painting this a revival of Soviet-era aggression? John McCain. The Georgian crisis has created a campaign issue McCain can run on. McCain's best chance to win, unless Obama self-destructs, is to portray himself as the Cold War-era war hero ready to do battle again against our old Cold War adversary. McCain is yesterday's man, so revive yesterday's "threat..." A compliant media will keep the phony Russian threat an issue throughout the campaign. It could even raise Condi Rice's vice presidential fortunes, as her only expertise was the former Soviet Union. The original Cold War was based on manufactured threats. The new trumped up threats about Russia will make Condi's experience "relevant" again. They can both run on Russia.

I don’t know that you can lay the Georgian conflict at the feet of John McLame, but there is no doubt in my mind that it much more the brainchild of his and W’s neocon backers than it is evidence of Russian aggression.

What the article hit on that amused me, though, was the reference to the possibility of Condasleeza Rice being McLame’s running mate. What a quandary that would create for the nation's subliminal bigotry.

As it stands the polls show McLame gaining substantial ground on Obama, which is no real surprise when you take into account the fact of this country’s racially biased history. Voters all over the spectrum are voicing euphemisms for their objection to his skin color. Donald Kaul pointed it out beautifully in a recent column revealing the real motivation in parenthesis behind the excuses; ala he’s too risky (he’s black), he doesn’t have enough experience (he’s black), he’s a Muslim (he’s black), etc., etc.

So what if McLame named Sleeza as his running mate? What would the poor voters do then? She doesn’t have any experience (she’s black, but is he blacker?). She has the heart of vulture (she’s black, but is he blacker?). The last time she laughed was when her mother fell down the stairs (she’s black, but is he blacker?). She’s a Republican (well then, he’s blacker).

The closer we get to this election the more pessimistic I become. A few months ago I did a blog about the right wingnut who called me at home to tell me that this country isn’t ready for a black, Muslim president. I told him first, of course, that he's not a Muslim and then that it had better get ready because the time has come, but as the campaign process moves along and I hear more and more euphemisms from potential Obama voters, the more likely it seems to me that the subliminal racism of this nation combined with its fear of anyone who doubts the value of war spell sure defeat for anyone who thinks as well as he does and talks about what he thinks.

By the way, just as one final effort to convince any right leaners who might happen to read this diatribe – Obama ISN”T black. He is of mixed race – just like you and me. You may not believe in evolution, but you can’t deny that the first people to appear on this planet were NOT WASPS.

“Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!” – Patrick Henry

Be the change you wish to see in the world. -- M. K. Gandhi

The reason for going was to keep the crude flowing and raise a false flag abroad. – from a poem by Jack Evans titled 3500 Souls - http://www.myspace.com/paralegal_eagle

Individually we have little voice. Collectively we cannot be ignored.
But in silence we surrender our power. Yours in Peace -- BR

REPTILIAN SYNDROME

2008-08-22T10:58:00.002-05:00

The discussion at our breakfast table this morning seemed unrelated to the newspapers spread out between us, but only on the surface. We weren’t talking about why we continue to be embroiled in a foreign war that never had any relevance to our national security. We weren’t talking about why our government’s system of checks and balances seems not to work any more. We weren’t going on about statistics like the top one percent of earners in our society increasing their wealth by 140% between 1979 and 1997 while the earnings of the middle class rose 9%. We weren’t even talking about how quickly Obama turned McCain’s unforgivable faux pas in not knowing how many houses he owns into an attack ad, or how quickly McCain’s people turned out a counter-attack ad.

We were talking about reptilian brains. We have both recently read a novel by James Lee Burke who is one of our favorite authors because he is able to paint the psyche of his characters so deftly. In this latest book, “Swan Peak”, he explored the psyche of the American male, particularly the southern-born American male, at some length and his explorations gave rise at our table to a discussion of the fear/anger circuit that currently drives the American psyche?

Throughout history political parties of all stripes have inflamed people to patriotic fervor in order to achieve their nationalistic goals. Over the past fifty years, the Republican Party has taken the process to its highest levels and reached a pinnacle few parties have ever even striven for, let alone achieved. That is the complete alienation of their followers to the messages of their political opponents – the vilification of all things leftward leaning. The phrase “bleeding heart liberal”, for instance, has no counterpart in the liberal lexicon. No one has been able to instill a phrase like “hard hearted neocon” into the language. “Gluttonous elite” just doesn’t carry the panache of “Welfare Mom”

The left has generally striven to open society to broader perspectives while the right draws its power by restricting openness. Why, we were asking, do people on Main Street accede to the demands of people on Wall Street instead of standing up for their own best interests? Why does our society so willingly spend so much on arms and warfare and so little on taking care of its own people? The answer, we concluded, lies in the fact that the majority of people do not feel a strong enough sense of personal empowerment to demand that their needs be met first.

At the very core of most Americans lies a somewhat scared, somewhat angry, privately insecure person who bluffs his or her way through life behind a wall of fear and anger that makes them susceptible to manipulation by those who understand how to turn personal fear and anger into societal action. It lies within that reptilian brain in our brainstems and reacts to sensed danger by attacking.

Today’s far right, better than any other force in American history, has learned to channel all that individual fear and anger into a refusal to consider other points of view and to support any action proposed in the name of national security. Rather than assuming that they can maintain their position in the world through the strength of their integrity and true belief in a god that teaches peace above all, our reptilian brain takes over and we succumb to the fear that someone wants what we have and that the only way to keep it to ourselves is through wars created by the same leaders who are spending so much time tweaking our insecurities.

We’ve all had experiences in life that make us feel insufficient, insecure, not as good as the next guy; learning that we didn’t make the team, being rejected by the high school ‘in group’, failing to get a date for the prom, being passed over for promotion, etc. We bury these deep inside those little turtle brains and hide our fears of inadequacy behind fierce masks designed to keep our neighbors at arms length while we wonder what they think of us. If we have faith in ourselves and get lucky, we get over it. If not, the insecurity festers unknown to us and those around us, but it makes us manipulable.

We all have had experiences in life that led us to create a bit of a chip on our shoulders. Those experiences tend to find a place somewhere deep in that reptilian cortex to lie in wait for opportunities to show themselves and scare off our “enemies”. Having difficulty loosening a nut on the lawnmower, we fling the wrench across the garage in anger for its failure to resolve our frustrations. Worn out from a rotten day at work, we stomp through the front door and kick the dog or terrorize our own children. Frazzled from the trauma of a terrorist attack, we sign up for the war our leaders create even though the target of that war had nothing to do with the attack.

It’s that chip on our shoulder that generates all that. It’s that anger and insecurity buried deep inside of us – if we have been unable to get beyond it – that allows us to accept an irrational argument for irrational action and then back it even if a half hour’s thought is all it would take to work through the insanity of it all.

Called by our political parties to vote for them, we do so in response to their negative ads because it’s a lot like kicking the dog. Answering “our country’s” call to serve in the name of freedom in a war that yields only death, destruction and restrictions of freedom is justifiable only if we can’t take an honest look at it for fear that our neighbors might disagree with us or that we might be thought unpatriotic. Our personal insecurities and buried anger make us vulnerable to the easy fix of feeding our feeling of empowerment through angry group action.

And all that’s needed to trigger it is a little flag waving and finger pointing. And that really works for any politician who wants to use it. And all that comes of it is more pain, more anger, and more insecurity that can be used against us again in the future.

It’s a cycle that needs to be broken. Got any ideas on how to do it? Put ‘em in the suggestion box. Maybe someone will act on it.

Or maybe . . . just maybe, we could take Gandhi’s advice, and BE the change we want to see in the world.

“Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!” – Patrick Henry

Be the change you wish to see in the world. -- M. K. Gandhi

The reason for going was to keep the crude flowing and raise a false flag abroad. – from a poem by Jack Evans titled 3500 Souls - http://www.myspace.com/paralegal_eagle

Individually we have little voice. Collectively we cannot be ignored.
But in silence we surrender our power. Yours in Peace -- BR

Obama Backs Bush

2008-08-20T16:13:00.001-05:00

Watching a presidential race is often a frustrating exercise, and more than usually so when a candidate leaves his principles behind in order to avoid losing support. That’s what I see in Barack Obama’s response to the situation in Georgia.

What is happening here is that two historically opposed nations that have had the opportunity to bury the hatchet over the past decade now find themselves in reversed positions from the face-off they had over Cuba in 1962. At that time, the US called the hand of the USSR, both leaders backed down and the situation was defused. Today, neither leader shows a sign of backing down, and the world is watching while the two cowboys approach each other ala High Noon.

The really disappointing thing to me is that most of the world recognizes the risk that the Bush response poses, but Obama doesn’t seem to, and if he does, it’s worse because he then appears willing to sell out his own principles and risk inflaming an already dangerous situation in order to hang onto his chance of winning the election.

This is also disappointing for his lack of faith in the American voter. Right now, most Americans seem to be supporting Bush’s position that this is a case of unwarranted Russian aggression, but if Obama and the Democratic Party had the guts to do it, they could weather the initial storm of catcalls by repeatedly publicizing the reality of the situation. At the very least, they could demonstrate that the situation is not so simple.

The American people should be given enough information to understand the absurdity of the claim that Russia has attacked a sovereign nation without provocation. (South Ossetia broke away from Georgia in the early 1990s and exists as an independent state with full Russian support. Georgian troops attacked separatists there and Russia sent troops to stop them. If you don’t believe it, Google “Who governs South Ossetia?”) They should be given enough information to understand the military relationship between America, Israel and Georgia, and they should be given enough information to understand the nature and result of Georgian president Saakashvili’s attack on South Ossetia – not to mention the motivation for that attack and US role in urging the action. They should also be given enough information to understand not only that America has (just today) signed an agreement with Poland to place defensive missiles on their soil, but also before today negotiated a deal to provide ten offensive missiles to the Polish military.

From the Russian perspective, the US has done exactly what the USSR did in placing missiles in Cuba in 1962. Instead of backing down, however, both leaders are clinging to their assertions that the other is out of bounds. The only development that has helped my knees to still their knocking is that Russia has filed a case with the world court charging Saakashvili with war crimes. If they are willing to listen to a third party regardless of the outcome, there may be hope.

Hopefully the worst thing that could come of all this is the re-opening of the Cold War. The dark side is the potential for WWIII.

Sadly, because of America’s and Obama’s reluctance to take a hard look at the situation, the most hopeful case is probably the end result that BushCo wants. America always needs an identified enemy to keep the paranoia level high, and nothing strikes fear in the American heart like the specter of domination by the godless communists, so starting the Cold War again fills the bill.

Even more sadly, Obama seems to be playing into the whole situation by backing the Bush play instead of showing the depth of his leadership and the courage of his convictions by being the one who finally points out that the emperor has no clothes. And saddest of all, the world is left, once again, under the horrible shadow of BushCo’s militarism and the threat of a face-off of gargantuan proportions between two powers that should, by all rights, be cooperating in the effort to contain the spread of nuclear materials but instead may well be seeking to add to the stockpiles of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction.

The end result is not likely to be positive for anybody but the arms manufacturers, and the voters will be left once again with two unsavory choices for the presidency.

So what’s new?

“Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!” – Patrick Henry

Be the change you wish to see in the world. -- M. K. Gandhi

The reason for going was to keep the crude flowing and raise a false flag abroad. – from a poem by Jack Evans titled 3500 Souls - http://www.myspace.com/paralegal_eagle

Individually we have little voice. Collectively we cannot be ignored.
But in silence we surrender our power. Yours in Peace -- BR

Pearl Harbor or Iraq?

2008-08-19T06:51:00.001-05:00

I recently got together with an old friend whom I love and respect, but whose political views are diametrically opposed to mine. It was a great pleasure to see him, but it was also deeply disturbing because, although he occasionally follows my blog, he could not seem to see it as anything but “Bush bashing”.

The disturbing thing for me is that the exploration of facts seems not to compute for those whose political loyalties lie on the right. I cannot seem to convince people – even old and dear friends - that I would be screaming just as loudly if the things to which I object were being perpetrated by Bill Clinton or John Kennedy instead of George Bush.

When you get right down to it, I don’t even think W is the problem. He’s just a dumb bunny with a lot of money whom the real powers see as an easily manipulated front man.

The problem is that my country has been taken down a very dangerous and downright evil path by a bunch of crazies whose goal is world domination.

At this point, my right wing friends will point at me and shout “Hypocrite” because they see that line as pure hyperbole in the middle of an essay that will discuss the need to avoid hyperbole. But the bottom line fact for me is that the line is not hyperbole at all, but a pure and clear statement about the direction my country is going.

For me, the clearest example of this is that Congress has accepted BushCo’s doctrine of pre-emptive war. This is at the top of the heap of accepted policies that I think contradict long-standing American values. In my mind, there is nothing more anathematic to the American way than pre-emptive war.

Just for clarity, consider the World Book Dictionary definition of pre-empt: “1. To secure before someone else can; acquire or take possession of beforehand. 2. To take over; displace.

Step back for a minute and examine the nature of the events we, as Americans, have always held up as examples of the greatest wrongs committed in modern times – Hitler’s invasion of Poland to begin WWII, and Japan’s invasion of Pearl Harbor that drew America into that war.

Consider both of those events from the perspective of Germany and Japan. From that view, both of those events were nothing more than pre-emptive war. Germany attacked Poland from the air without warning with the purpose of destroying the Polish air defenses to avoid the possibility of a tough initial fight in their attempt to take over the world. Japan attacked America from the air with the purpose of destroying the American naval defenses to avoid the possibility of America’s entry into the war with an effective fighting force. In other words, they were pre-emptive strikes to secure dominance.

America was rightly repulsed by the aggressive nature of those strikes and struck back in anger at the affront of the invasion of territory and power under our control. Why does any American now think that we should have the right to strike other countries before they strike us? Does this not sink us to the level of Germany and Japan in the thirties and forties? Is our interest in controlling the world economy OK while theirs was evil?

Another friend, who leans a bit more to the left than the dear friend who inspired this essay, recently sent an article by Paul Craig Roberts called, There May Be Many Mushroom Clouds In Our Future. She asked if I thought it was more politically correct than an early article she had sent and to which I had objected. This article was a bit over the top in my view, too, employing some exaggerations that took it a little too far beyond factual representation for me, but it did contain a great many truths and culminated in one that I believe to the core of my being. Its last line was, “The neoconservatives represent the greatest danger ever faced by the United States and the world. Humanity has no greater enemy.”

I know that to my conservative friend that, too, will sound like hyperbole, but it is certainly not.

Paul Roberts, BTW, was an Assistant Secretary of the Treasury under Ronald Reagan and is known as the father of Reaganomics – not exactly known as a hot blooded left winger, but definitely aware of the risks the neocons pose to the world.

Pre-emptive warfare is just the tip the iceberg of the necons’ damage to America and the world. Their approach to surveillance of the American people, torture and abuse of prisoners, and disregard for the rule of law are more symptoms of their similarity to Fascists. No American, whether Republican or Democrat, can afford to ignore the dangers these people pose to the Republic. The stakes are far too high.

Another point Roberts made in his article was that the American public has been brainwashed to the point that they can't seem to understand how dangerous our present course is. I'm afraid that's true, too. Otherwise, how could thoughtful, intelligent and caring people like my Republican friend so glibly support our nation's decline?

“Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!” – Patrick Henry

Be the change you wish to see in the world. -- M. K. Gandhi

The reason for going was to keep the crude flowing and raise a false flag abroad. – from a poem by Jack Evans titled 3500 Souls - http://www.myspace.com/paralegal_eagle

Individually we have little voice. Collectively we cannot be ignored.
But in silence we surrender our power. Yours in Peace -- BR

CALLING THE KETTLE BLACK

2008-08-15T05:39:00.000-05:00

One of the things I have noticed about political interaction is that if you want to disarm your opponent’s ability to attack you for what you do or are about to do, you first accuse him of doing it. It’s the pot calling the kettle black as an offensive tactic.

Want to start a potentially unpopular war? Start by labeling those who might oppose you as unpatriotic. Want to establish control over a foreign country? Start by calling them unacceptably aggressive. That may be what is going on in Georgia today.

The United States celebrated the fall of the USSR and the end of the cold war, but did not stop acting as though the cold war was still in effect. Right now, the Bush administration is pointing at Russian aggression in Georgia and saying that the Russians are acting as if the cold war had never ended, but we are the country that has never stopped creating nuclear weapons. We are the nation that has sought, though NATO treaties, to arm countries near the Russian borders. Georgia is just one of those countries, but it is so close that Russia sees our arming that nation the same way we saw the USSR’s arming of Cuba in the 1960s. The dangerous difference is that this time we have leaders in both countries who are much more willing to pull the trigger than were Kennedy and Kruschev.

BushCo’s desire to establish a defensive missile system in the region feeds this fire. In fact, the BBC reported this morning on the US request to put missiles in Poland. Czechoslovakia is another chosen location, but from Russia’s perspective that system could as easily be offensive, and Georgia is far too close for their comfort. If the cold war is over, they reasonably ask, what is the need for any missile defense system in the region?

The Russian bear is also awakened by the thought that the US is trying to cut off their access to Georgia as an alternative shipping site for their oil exports. There can be no doubt that we are at least trying to protect our own access to the non-Russian pipelines of Georgia.

The third thorn in the Russian bear’s paw is Georgia’s resistance to the Russian backed revolt against the government of Georgia, which is the impetus for the Georgian president’s punitive actions. From the Russian perspective, he is holding two provinces hostage so they are acting to free them. (http://www.mcclatchydc.com/227/story/46812.html) They don’t see any difference between what they are doing in South Ossetia and what we did in Kosovo.

Given the low esteem in which the Bush administration is currently held, it would be hard pressed to drum up support at home or in Europe for any kind of military expenditures in the Central Asian region (i.e. move against Russia) and it would be a stupid thing to do anyway, but if Russia could be goaded into acting first perhaps that sentiment would change. Saakashvili knew his troops would stir the Russians to respond militarily. Could it be, then, that the whole idea is to bait Russia aggression so that BushCo could legitimize its desire to protect its Georgian oil pipelines through combined action with its NATO allies while at the same time developing a NATO ‘defensive’ missile system with the smiling approval of the American people?

Thanks to vigilant Springfieldian who keeps on top of such things and freely distributes web-based information about them, we can also check these video references and explore the question:

Nuclear war by miscalculation
F William Engdahl: The geopolitics of Georgia pt2 August 14, 2008

The geopolitics of Georgia
F William Engdahl: There are far bigger stakes being played out in Georgia than a territorial dispute August 13, 2008

Who's to blame for the Russian Georgian conflict?
Pepe Escobar: Georgia is a strategic client state of the US with close ties to the Bush administration August 12, 2008

President Saakashvili definitely overshot his bounds and overestimated the willingness of the US to confront the Russians gun for gun, but the upshot of this episode is likely to be further degradation of the American image in the eyes of its allies. From the perspective of newly acquired allies like Georgia, the US has been unable to deliver on its promise of support in the face of external aggression. All the posturing and pointing in the world will not ease their feeling that an alliance with the US is an empty gesture.

Russia is not going to gain from this either. They are coming off as viciously militaristic hardliners willing to overthrow their neighbors and risk large-scale warfare to protect their own economic interests. Unless these nations’ true motivations emerge in negotiations, this messy wound is likely to fester and might ultimately have very serious consequences.

The bottom line in politics is always that nothing is what it seems to be. Exactly what this situation really is remains to be seen, but one key to understanding political action definitely is to look first at the pot that’s doing the pointing.

“Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!” – Patrick Henry

Be the change you wish to see in the world. -- M. K. Gandhi

The reason for going was to keep the crude flowing and raise a false flag abroad. – from a poem by Jack Evans titled 3500 Souls - http://www.myspace.com/paralegal_eagle

Individually we have little voice. Collectively we cannot be ignored.
But in silence we surrender our power. Yours in Peace -- BR

Lighten Up

2008-08-13T10:06:00.001-05:00

I don’t usually pass along the jokes, etc. that I receive as email, but this item (thanks, Karolyn) was so good I decided to include it in my blog archives. If this doesn’t make you chuckle you are far too deeply involved with the Republican Party. Today, let’s just lighten up:

George W. Bush Presidential Library to Open in 2009

The George W. Bush Presidential Library is now in the final planning stages.

The Library will include:

The Hurricane Katrina Room, which is still under construction.

The Alberto Gonzales Room, where you won't be able to remember anything.

The Texas Air National Guard Room, where you don't even have to show up.

The Walter Reed Hospital Room, where they don't let you in.

The Guantanamo Bay Room, where they don't let you out.

The Weapons of Mass Destruction Room, which no one has been able to find.

The National Debt room which is huge and has no ceiling.

The 'Tax Cut' Room with entry only to the wealthy.

The 'Economy Room' which is in the toilet.

The Iraq War Room. After you complete your first tour, they make you to go back for a second, third, fourth, and sometimes fifth tour.

The Dick Cheney Room, in the famous undisclosed location,complete with shotgun gallery.

The Strategic National Energy Policy Room currently under construction by OPEC/Carlyle Group.

The Supreme Court's Gift Shop, where you can buy an election.

The US Constitution Room is also under construction by the new and improved American Fascism Group aka American Enterprise Institute.

The Airport Men's Room, where you can meet some of your favorite Republican Senators.

The 'Decider Room' complete with dart board, magic 8-ball, Ouija board, dice, coins, and straws.

The museum will also have an electron microscope to help you locate the President's accomplishments.

I might add here: The Hall Of Shame ..... Lined with photos of all those who became wealthy during the granting of governmental contracts.

And one more: The Oil Slick Balcony: Dedicated to those who were slick nuff to dodge prosecution for their illegal actions.

“Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!” – Patrick Henry

Be the change you wish to see in the world. -- M. K. Gandhi

The reason for going was to keep the crude flowing and raise a false flag abroad. – from a poem by Jack Evans titled 3500 Souls - http://www.myspace.com/paralegal_eagle

Individually we have little voice. Collectively we cannot be ignored.
But in silence we surrender our power. Yours in Peace -- BR

TO DRILL OR NOT TO DRILL, THAT IS THE QUESTION

2008-08-12T10:14:00.002-05:00

McCain and Obama are going round and round about energy policy. Unfortunately, they are also going around and around the real issues. If our political process only allowed it, they might be debating the actual nuts and bolts of the issue so that voters could make a truly informed decision.

McCain wants to drill. Where, exactly? What safeguards does he plan to employ to ensure environmental integrity? When would license to drill actually produce oil for the U.S.? How much would it produce and how long would it last at our present level of consumption? What then?

Obama will drill if it can lead us to a meaningful energy program. After answering the same questions put to McCain, then, what does he mean by a meaningful energy program? In spite of the Repulsican derision, properly inflated tires would make a difference, but it isn’t exactly the solution. He says he wants to subsidize R&D, but what R&D and in what amounts and from what revenue streams?

One of the things that I find a bit disconcerting about Obama and the Demorats in general is their seeming inability or unwillingness to directly address the holes in the Repulsican arguments. For instance, the information in this piece from CLG News offers at least a telling jab for Obama to use in his sparring with McCain:

US oil firms seek drilling access, but exports soar 03 Jul 2008
While the U.S. oil industry wants access to more federal lands to help reduce reliance on foreign suppliers, American-based companies are shipping record amounts of gasoline and diesel fuel to other countries. A record 1.6 million barrels a day in U.S. refined petroleum products were exported during the first four months of this year, up 33 percent from 1.2 million barrels a day over the same period in 2007. The surge in exports appears to contradict the pleas from the U.S. oil industry and the Bush regime for Congress to open more offshore waters and Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling. "We can help alleviate shortages by drilling for oil and gas in our own country," President [sic] Bush told reporters this week. "We have got the opportunity to find more crude oil here at home."

We produce 5,064,000 barrels of oils per day in the U.S. so that means that 31.6% of the oil we refine in this country was exported to other countries in the first quarter of this year. Shouldn’t that turn up in a debate between McCain and Obama somewhere along the line?!

We import 10,031,000 barrels/day of foreign oil. Combined with the 3,464,000 barrels we keep from our daily U.S. production that is a total use of 13,495,000 barrels per day. Off-shore drilling is projected to produce a maximum of 3% of our need. That comes to 404,850 barrels per day.

That being the case, we could generate the same amount of additional oil just by curtailing the sale of 404,850 of the 1.6 million barrels of oil we export daily and not have to drill off-shore. I know it doesn’t make for a slick sound-bite, but it is the truth according to the Energy Information Administration which provides official U.S. government statistics. See: http://www.eia.doe.gov/basics/quickoil.html

Isn’t it just possible that a candidate could use this kind of information to frame an argument the average voter could understand and act upon?

“Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!” – Patrick Henry

Be the change you wish to see in the world. -- M. K. Gandhi

The reason for going was to keep the crude flowing and raise a false flag abroad. – from a poem by Jack Evans titled 3500 Souls - http://www.myspace.com/paralegal_eagle

Individually we have little voice. Collectively we cannot be ignored.
But in silence we surrender our power. Yours in Peace -- BR

AN OLYMPIAN FACE-OFF

2008-08-11T10:30:00.000-05:00

While W dozed through the opening ceremonies at the Olympics a face-off of more than Olympian proportions was building between Russia and Georgia.

This morning’s email brought a most interesting message containing a blog written by
The host of this blog is a man named Timothy Alexander who has apparently assumed the titles listed even though there is no legitimization of those titles by any authority in the British Isles. In fact, according to Baronage.co.uk, if he uses the titles in any official way he would open to prosecution.

The blog (http://europebusines.blogspot.com/2008/08/massive-us-naval-armada-heads-for-iran.html ) was loaded with details including a list of ships the U.S. and its allies have deployed to the Middle-east and the potential those deployments have as a means for kicking off a huge war over oil in that region and all the way to Georgia and Russia.

Though I have no way of verifying the military details in the blog, I think that its information about the nature of the building conflict is probably accurate. I have not found any evidence of the Israeli-Georgian oil supply agreement the discussion refers to, but Israel has been selling a lot of arms to Georgia. The bottom line issue seems to be Georgia's attempt to maintain or regain control of the two provinces that have broken off since the original break from the USSR and which are being claimed and defended by Russia. In the process the Russians are fighting against Israeli made weapons. The U.S. has an alliance with Georgia, though, and is likely to march lock-step with Israel in any way that country chooses to be involved.

The build-up of hostilities in Georgia seems reminiscent of the way a relatively obscure assassination kicked off WWII, and it is not being treated as any more important a news story than the Olympic games.

The upshot is that while our newsertainment services feed us stories about the glorious U.S. quest for Olympic gold, the world may become embroiled in a face-off that ain’t field hockey. The great fear is that the Amerikan people will go along with another (probably much bigger) war because, once again, they haven’t been paying attention.

The statements W and dick Cheney have made indicate their willingness to face off against Russia. It appears to be another variation on the missile crisis JFK faced, and the one thing we know for sure is that the enormous power now in the hands of our idiot president puts the world in even greater danger than his pre-emptive strike on Iraq.

“Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!” – Patrick Henry

Be the change you wish to see in the world. -- M. K. Gandhi

The reason for going was to keep the crude flowing and raise a false flag abroad. – from a poem by Jack Evans titled 3500 Souls - http://www.myspace.com/paralegal_eagle

Individually we have little voice. Collectively we cannot be ignored.
But in silence we surrender our power. Yours in Peace -- BR

EVERY SILVER LINING HAS A CLOUD

2008-08-07T16:09:00.002-05:00

For a long time, I’ve felt like all is darkness and there is not a chance that anyone in Congress understands the Constitution. Then today came a bolt from the blue. Seven Republican Congressmen were quoted as to their understanding of the ramifications of unconstitutional action by a president.

Take a look at this site, http://www.opednews.com/articles/3/Seven-Republican-Members-o-by-Cheryl-Biren-Wrigh-080711-38.html. Here are some excerpts from six of them:

Hon. Lamar Smith (TX) Phone 202-225-4236 . Fax: 202-225-8628 We should not underestimate the gravity of the case against the president. When he put his hand on the Bible and recited his oath of office, he swore to faithfully uphold the laws of the United States - not some laws, all laws

Hon. James Sensenbrenner (WI) Phone (202) 225-5101 . Fax (202) 255-3190…being a poor example isn't grounds for impeachment; undermining the rule of law is.
When Americans come to Washington, they see the words "equal justice under law" carved in the facade of the Supreme Court building. Those words mean that the weak and the poor have an equal right to justice, as do the rich and the powerful.

Hon. Elton Gallegly (CA) Phone (202) 225-5811 . Fax (202) 225-1100 This has been a very trying time. In a democracy, there are few more serious acts than to consider the possible impeachment of a president. I can tell you in true conscience it has caused me many sleepless nights.
I wanted to hear the evidence that would prove the charges were false. I believed that was the only fair way to proceed, and it was also my solemn constitutional duty and immense responsibility. I waited, I read, and I listened.
Mr. Chairman, I'm not a lawyer -- one of the few on this committee -- however, everyone that knows me knows I believe in the rule of law -- believe the rule of law is fundamental to our society. A society without laws is anarchy. Societies that ignore the laws are condemned to violence and chaos.

Hon. Bob Goodlatte (VA) Phone (202) 225-5431 . Fax (202) 225-9681 Mr. Chairman, this is a somber occasion. I am here because it is my constitutional duty, as it is the constitutional duty of every member of this committee, to follow the truth wherever it may lead. Our Founding Fathers established this nation on a fundamental yet at the time untested idea that a nation should be governed not by the whims of any man but by the rule of law. Implicit in that idea is the principle that no one is above the law, including the chief executive

Hon. Steve Chabot (OH) Phone (202) 225-2216 . (202) 225-3012 Thank you. Mr. Chairman, every member of our committee recognizes that this is likely the most important vote we will ever cast, and all of us would prefer that the president's actions had not led us down this fateful path. However, we have sworn an oath to uphold the Constitution and we must fully accept that responsibility.

Hon. Chris Cannon (UT) Phone (202) 225-7751 . Fax (202) 225-5629 We are at a defining moment in our history. What we do here will set the standard for what is acceptable for this and future presidents.
I believe profoundly that the behavior of this president is unacceptable because I agree with John Jay, one of our Founding Fathers, who said, "When oaths cease to be sacred, our dearest and most valuable rights become insecure."

These statements are excerpts from transcripts of the House Judiciary Committee's impeachment hearings. December 10-11, 1998. Each congressman is a current member of the House Judiciary Committee – so they were talking about Bill Clinton.

Do I think it means that we will see the impeachment of dick and W? Hell no, what it means to me is that these Republicans are even more cynical than I thought.

These folks won’t say the same thing about their fearless leader. Never mind that his actions have cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of people including nearly 5,000 American soldiers in a war that should never have been fought.

So it’s even worse than I thought. I thought they were too ignorant to understand what was going on. Turns out they are just so cynical that they don’t care what’s going on as long as it is going on in the name of their party.

These folks don’t even deserve a spit in the eye. Nothing short of vomit could send the right message, but maybe we should all call them and tell them what we think of their perfidy.

“Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!” – Patrick Henry

Be the change you wish to see in the world. -- M. K. Gandhi

The reason for going was to keep the crude flowing and raise a false flag abroad. – from a poem by Jack Evans titled 3500 Souls - http://www.myspace.com/paralegal_eagle

Individually we have little voice. Collectively we cannot be ignored.
But in silence we surrender our power. Yours in Peace -- BR

THE ROAD TO PEACE

2008-08-07T10:03:00.001-05:00

This week I attended my first Coordinating Committee meeting of the Peace Network of the Ozarks (PNO) as acting president of that organization. I put my name up for that position at the urging of Dave Davison who, being forced to give up the position as president due to pressing work issues, talked to me several times about the importance of the group within the community and the need for a strong voice for peace at its head.

Being one of the early members of PNO and always having been of the opinion that its message of thoughtful consideration of issues related to war held great value, this was a difficult argument for me to refute. I have always shied away from leadership positions, though, and was very reluctant to accept this one. The thing that decided me was the hope that I could provide a voice of reason that might ultimately be of value not only for PNO, but for the community.

The early days of PNO seemed like a no-brainer to me. I could see no reason to back a national movement toward increasing the USA’s warlike nature. While calling ourselves a peaceful nation, we have been involved in one armed conflict or another throughout my entire lifetime; while worshipping the Prince of Peace more commonly than any other deity, we have embraced arms production and sales at a level no other nation on earth has ever sought let alone achieved, and, ultimately, while saying time and again that they had no desire to go to war, the administration was building a false case for pre-emptive war against a sovereign nation that clearly posed no threat to the U.S. Understanding these things left me no choice about joining PNO.

We started off strong and could put three to four hundred people on the street to protest the obvious injustice of war on Iraq. After that war was declared interest began to wane. It became harder and harder to gather a crowd to protest the war and other transgressions committed by this administration. As the time has gone by and people have become more inured to the damage our war effort has done to America and its relationship to the world, it has become nearly impossible to draw a large crowd to any protest even though PNO still has about the same number of supporters who ask to remain on the mailing list.

People know that we are on the wrong path, but they can’t see an imminent reason to stand up and get vocal about their opposition.

Because of this, the Peace Network has been quietly evolving away from just a group gathered to protest inappropriate governmental actions and into an agency for the spread of information. As communication is probably my strongest suit, this seemed to be an appropriate time for me to step into a more visible position.

I see my role as attempting to share a belief in the need for fundamental shifts in our nation’s approach to governance and to international interaction. Please understand that I do not believe that I will ever have any effect on national policy. What I do believe, though, is that a group like PNO can affect the way the community in which it resides sees things. Further, I believe that each member of such a community who sees wisdom in proposed ideas can have an affect on other members of that community and that if the community as a whole comes to share a set of beliefs and values, it can change the thinking in other communities.

I also believe that it takes years for a sound idea to become policy in any community, so I am willing to continue the slow but inexorable process of seeding this rocky ground in the hope that some of the truths held dear by the members of PNO might take root and spread.

The direction I think PNO and its like organizations around the country must take is one in which PNO is truly a national leader. The idea that peace groups can protest enough to get those who disagree with them to come around to their position is, I think, a most unlikely proposition. Having realized the difficulty of massing people for protests here in the Ozarks over the past few years PNO, under the wise leadership of people like Joan Collins, Doris Ewing, Gene Davidson and Dave Davison, began to try instead to bring information to the Ozarks -- information that could help people to see and understand the horrible waste that war and warlike behavior cause.

Another person who has done a great deal in this area while working outside the auspices of PNO is Sue Skidmore who was instrumental in bringing in many valuable speakers including one of the nation’s finest voices of reason, ex-CIA agent and presidential advisor Ray McGovern.

My hope is to provide an inexorable, if not constant, flow of information intended to help people to understand the devastation of our national policy of spending more on “defense” than the other five of the world’s biggest military spenders combined. My fervent hope is that our nation will come to understand that our wealth could be spent in many better ways that would not only help to improve the quality of life for the people of the world, but also would improve our national security beyond anything a new bomb can do. My deepest hope is that this will happen by choice rather than being forced upon our grandchildren by the impoverishment of the world in the name of military might.

Our planet is at risk not only from the direct danger of war including potential nuclear warfare, but from the nature of the world economy. Our reliance on the production and use of arms and the production, purchase and use of petroleum is the primary reason the world is now teetering on the edge of ecological and economic disaster.

PNO has come to be seen by people of reason as a local voice of reason. My hope is to expand that voice and, thus, to increase the level of hope for the future for all of us by expanding on these themes and providing clearly stated arguments for a change in our national approach to world-citizenship. We know that such change will not come from our “leaders”. It will have to come from the demands of the people for leadership that is far more sane than we have seen to date.

In the knowledge that my readers are people who do a lot of research and hard thinking, I am asking that you send any references you come across that might help in this effort to my attention at peacenetwork@ozarkpeace.net. I also ask that you consider joining PNO if you haven’t already done so. You can visit the PNO website at http://ozarkpeace.net or just send an email to Ron at peacenetwork@ozarkpeace.net and ask him about membership.

“Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!” – Patrick Henry

Be the change you wish to see in the world. -- M. K. Gandhi

The reason for going was to keep the crude flowing and raise a false flag abroad. – from a poem by Jack Evans titled 3500 Souls - http://www.myspace.com/paralegal_eagle

Individually we have little voice. Collectively we cannot be ignored.
But in silence we surrender our power. Yours in Peace -- BR

WHERE ARE THE WAR CRIMINALS?

2008-08-05T09:12:00.001-05:00

A sidebar story in today’s Springfield News-Leader devotes three paragraphs to reporting on the first American war crimes trial since World War II.

The accused is Salim Hamdan, a Yemeni, who worked as a driver for Osama bin Laden. His prosecutors say his service to bin Laden makes him culpable for the danger his work posed for American troops. His defenders say he is just a pawn; a chauffeur who knew nothing more than what destination to drive to on a given day.

Most prisoners at Gitmo have never been tried and probably never will be. It appears to me that the administration is drawing at straws in an attempt to prove their vigilance over the nation’s safety by demonstrating that they have caught and will prosecute terrorists. But the real question on which this trial will shed light is not whether or not this man is guilty of the charges. The central question everyone will be assessing is whether the system the Bush administration put in place – from the arrest process to Guantanamo Bay to the military tribunal assigned to hear cases against prisoners – is a legitimate system or a trumped up means of denying prisoners’ rights while railroading them into sentences issued in response to baseless charges.

There is a lot of evidence that a great many of the prisoners in Gitmo are there because their enemies turned them in for the rewards offered by the American government for information leading to the capture of terrorists. It was an easy way for any Pakistani, Afghani, or anyone else to point the finger at an enemy and have him removed from the local competition for whatever power was to be had whether governorship of a municipality or just control of a fig grove.

There is also plenty of evidence of Amerikan abuse of prisoners, and a huge, though behind the scenes as far as the popular press is concerned, debate over whether the military tribunal system was structured by the administration so that they could (1) avoid habeas corpus, and (2) allow “evidence” gained through torture.

Amerika is trying the wrong people. No prisoner in Gitmo is guilty of imprisoning hundreds of people and holding them for years without stating the case against them, allowing them to have representation, or bringing them to trial. No prisoner in Gitmo has outed a covert intelligence agent for political revenge. No prisoner in Gitmo has constructed false intelligence to build a case for war. No prisoner in Gitmo is guilty of leading America away from its long heritage as a nation that does not torture prisoners. No prisoner in Gitmo is guilty of unleashing pre-emptive warfare on a country that posed no threat and possessed no weapons of mass destruction and in the process causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians and the displacement of more than two million more. No prisoner in Gitmo is now advocating doing exactly the same thing to a second sovereign nation (Iran).

My bet is that you can find more real war criminals per capita in the White House right now than in Guantanamo Bay.

“Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!” – Patrick Henry

Be the change you wish to see in the world. -- M. K. Gandhi

The reason for going was to keep the crude flowing and raise a false flag abroad. – from a poem by Jack Evans titled 3500 Souls - http://www.myspace.com/paralegal_eagle

Individually we have little voice. Collectively we cannot be ignored.
But in silence we surrender our power. Yours in Peace -- BR

SAME OL’ SAME OL’

2008-08-04T08:15:00.000-05:00

Here we are in July of a presidential campaign year, and, as usual, the mud is so thick you can’t see the issues.

McCain can’t afford to have people asking whether they want to face another four to eight years of Repulsican policies, so he chooses to undertake character assassination instead by comparing Obama to Paris Hilton and Britney Spears.

Obama has taken a higher road, but still doesn’t very directly speak to some of the issues I would like to see our nation address. Although his European and Middle-eastern tours have given him a great deal of popularity in those regions, he hardly ever points out the damage BushCo has done to America’s reputation abroad. Nor does he ever speak of how bitterly most of the world views our current warlike persona.

Neither candidate has voiced his position on trade policies, and total silence reigns on the subject of job exportation. What are they going to do to try and rebuild American eminence as a productive workplace? How do they plan to restore the value of the American dollar? What programs do they have in mind to try and combat the fact that China and India have more gifted students than we have students? How will they overcome the dumbing-down of Amerika? What can be done to reduce the world’s nuclear arms level? How can America lead the way in nuclear arms reduction? How can America divorce itself from Amerika – that nation approaching fascism and constantly threatening the rest of the world with its military power? How can the balance of powers – so dangerously o’ertipped by BushCo – be restored to the distribution written into the Constitution? What practical steps will either candidate take to ensure the universal availability of primary health care to American citizens; and at what cost to be covered from what sources? What does McCain plan to do to ensure that the Social Security program remains viable and valuable? (Obama has detailed his plan, and his thinking matches mine point for point, so I like it!!)

The one thing we know the answer to at this point is that the campaign will center on the kind of inanities that McCain has chosen to make the core of his advertising rather than spending much time on any of these questions. After all, that’s the Amerikan way. We just can’t be bothered to listen to – let alone read – lengthy explanations of political problems and their solutions.

Ultimately, instead of weighing the important issues and identifying the candidate whose approach most nearly matches our idea of correct thinking, we, like the good Amerikans we are, will try to decide which man we would rather have lunch with and then vote for him.

“Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!” – Patrick Henry

Be the change you wish to see in the world. -- M. K. Gandhi

The reason for going was to keep the crude flowing and raise a false flag abroad. – from a poem by Jack Evans titled 3500 Souls - http://www.myspace.com/paralegal_eagle

Individually we have little voice. Collectively we cannot be ignored.
But in silence we surrender our power. Yours in Peace -- BR

THE RACE CARD NONSENSE

2008-08-01T09:28:00.002-05:00

The hum on the airwaves and in the paper this morning is John McCain’s claim that Obama had played the “race card from the bottom of the deck” in his comments at Glendale High School here in Springfield Wednesday morning. That claim is so blatantly ridiculous that it is hardly worth noting, but he underlying psychology is powerful enough to justify some attention.

Barack’s comment was really made in reference to the combination of fools who have characterized him as a black Muslim and the McCain campaign tactic of pointing out his inexperience. He was pointing out that the McCain position is that a vote for Obama is a risk due to his inexperience, but that, to those fools who cannot get over their racism a vote for him, it is a risk due to his race. He made a joke about how the fact that he doesn’t resemble any of the white men on American money makes his candidacy “risky”.

The audience at the event interpreted his comment appropriately. They laughed. They laughed with him and took pleasure in his ability to so adroitly point out that he is a different kind of man than any who had held the office before him. They laughed at the idea that anyone would think that it would be appropriate to vote against this man simply because of the color of his skin. They laughed with the pleasure of the thought that they might make history by helping this man to gain the office he seeks.

The audience enjoyed his comment. They enjoyed his joke, and I venture to say that not a single person in that audience perceived the comment as in any sense being derogatory toward John McCain or racist in any way. It was a joke about the racist past of this nation. It was a satirical poke at the way this country has kept people of any other race or sex than white males from ever before having a serious chance at winning the highest office in the land. It was softly delivered sarcasm, and it was appreciated by everyone in attendance.

It was not in any sense racist, and the attempts by the McCain campaign to make it seem racist are so tawdry that I expect only the kind of thoughtless, knee-jerk conservatives that seem to be so common in this neck of the woods will stand behind Mr. McCain’s analysis.

If McCain really believes what he is saying about the remark, his thinking is so shallow that it indicates that he is not half the man Obama is. If he doesn’t really believe it, but is saying it anyway, it just points out that he is a typical Repulsican – willing to sling any mud he can dream up in order to stir up enough votes from the lunatic fringe to win the election.

The comparison of the two candidates offered by this exchange surely will swing more votes toward Obama than toward McCain. The dispute raised here by McCain is just too shallow to be given much weight by any but the weightless.

If you would like to go further in your comparison of the two candidates, here is a link that will allow you to compare their positions on various military issues:
http://www.armscontrolcenter.org/policy/iraq/articles/070108_mccain_obama_national_security/

“Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!” – Patrick Henry

Be the change you wish to see in the world. -- M. K. Gandhi

The reason for going was to keep the crude flowing and raise a false flag abroad. – from a poem by Jack Evans titled 3500 Souls - http://www.myspace.com/paralegal_eagle

Individually we have little voice. Collectively we cannot be ignored.
But in silence we surrender our power. Yours in Peace -- BR

PRESBYTERIANS SAY NO TO IRAN WAR

2008-07-30T15:57:00.001-05:00

Living as I do in a corner of the world dominated by militant fundamentalist Christians who think that their Christianity and their patriotism are somehow tied together, it was refreshing to see this notice of action taken by the Presbyterians:

Resolution on Iran passed by the 218th General Assembly Of the
Presbyterian Church (USA) June 2008:

The 218th General Assembly (2008) directs the Stated Clerk to send the
following resolution to the President of the United Stated of America and
the United States Congress:

1. That the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) supports a peaceful, diplomatic
means to resolve the tensions developing as a result of Iran's pursuit of
its nuclear program, between the United States and Iran.

2. That the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) calls for direct, unconditional
negotiations between the United States and Iran with the goal of finding and
implementing a peaceful resolution.

3. That the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) is opposed to preemptive military
action by any nation against Iran.

4. That the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) calls for a renewed effort at all
levels‹people-to-people, interfaith groups, non-governmental organizations
(NGOs), and government‹to help the United States and Iran eliminate the
tensions that have existed between our two nations and to unite the American
and Iranian people in a common effort to solve the problems of poverty,
illness, and climate change.

With all the talk that has passed back and forth over the past year over whether or not BushCo intends to invade Iran, it is easy to slip into a kind of complacency that convinces us that it is not going to happen. After all, even the Pentagon brass have come out against the idea.

Still, we cannot afford to forget the level of stupidity, cupidity and hegemonic thinking that still resides in the White House today. If BushCo ignores the advice of the intelligence community, it won’t be the first time, and we cannot afford, either, to forget that if Israel decides to attack Iran, our government will make the case that we cannot ignore the needs of such a valuable ally, and so we’ll be off to war by their side.

It didn’t help that the Council of Churches denounced the idea of the Iraq war long before it was launched, and the Presbyterians probably won’t have much more impact in this case, but you and I will be able to sleep a little better if we remind our Representatives and Senators that we agree with these two august bodies by dropping them a line telling them not to go to war with Iran. Why not do that today?

“Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!” – Patrick Henry

Be the change you wish to see in the world. -- M. K. Gandhi

The reason for going was to keep the crude flowing and raise a false flag abroad. – from a poem by Jack Evans titled 3500 Souls - http://www.myspace.com/paralegal_eagle

Individually we have little voice. Collectively we cannot be ignored.
But in silence we surrender our power. Yours in Peace -- BR

OBAMA WAS HERE

2008-07-30T14:33:00.001-05:00

I spent most of this morning standing with Dave Davison, president of the Peace Network of the Ozarks, on a parking lot outside Glendale High School.

No, we weren’t out there trying to sell anything shady to teenagers! We were waiting for the doors to open so we could go in and hear Barack Obama speak. We arrived shortly after 8:00 am. He was scheduled to speak at 10:00, but we had to park a block away, and the line already snaked from the doorway the full length of the large parking lot, around the end of the lot and halfway back down the other side.

We and our neighbors in line made lots of observations about the problems Obama faces as the first black candidate to make it this far and questions about why the other side is so fixated on the gay non-issues.

One major difference between the parties was glaring to me, though. I remembered a long-ago demonstration we held when W came to town. He was to speak in the minor league ballpark downtown (Definitely an appropriate site for him.), and, as for today’s event, people had to have tickets to go in. The huge difference, though, was that when our members, tickets in hand, tried to enter the Bush arena, they were not only rejected, but arrested for trespassing. At Obama’s rally, on the other hand, just as at the rally John Edwards held on the SMU campus, anyone with a ticket was allowed in.

If you want to draw a meaningful distinction between the two parties, you’d be hard pressed to find a clearer one than that. There are a lot of things I don’t like about the Demorats, but they do recognize that the people of America, thin wallets and all, have value, and they are far more likely to consider opposing views than their Repulsican counterparts.

Once inside, I found the electrically charged atmosphere of political partisanism intriguing, and was often moved to stand and applaud with the crowd as Obama drove home point after point about the need for our government to recognize the needs of the average American family and tailor its policies for their protection.

I found little to disagree with in what he said. Of course, most of what he said was in generalities, but he did say one thing I have waited a long time to hear, and that was that he plans to put a stop to Congressional raids on the Social Security funds and remove the cap from contributions to Social Security. In other words, to require all wage earners to pay the same percentage of their salary into the SS coffers no matter how much they make. (Actually, he suggested exempting only wages between $102,000 and $250,000 instead of all over $102,000 as is the case today, but otherwise taxing all the same.) I don’t know about you, but I’ve been waiting all my life to hear that proposed seriously. It has been the obvious – elephant in the room – solution all along.

He spoke for a bit less than an hour and then asked for audience questions, but there were only time for four or five. Dave and I conferred afterward on the questions we had come to ask. I wish we had been given the opportunity because I the questions asked failed to cover any ground Obama had not already spoken to.

Here is the question I had written out to ask him: As a Vietnam era veteran I, myself, and all who served with me showed our willingness to serve our country. But we also learned that our government had called us to serve in an unnecessary war.

The United States leads the world many times over in military spending and arms sales. President Clinton balanced the national budget by curbing out-of-control military expenditures and I believe we could regain the high moral ground by ceasing to use war as foreign policy.

What are your beliefs on these issues?

Dave had a great question that I really wish had been asked: When you are elected president, what do you intend to do to repair the damage the Bush administration has done to the Constitution?

As it was, Barack Obama got by with only softball questions being asked, but his speech was still informative and reassuring. His understanding of the fact that there are different criteria for progress on Wall Street and Main Street was made clear. His disdain for the wildly high profits being made by oil companies and the leverage wielded by lobbyist was evident. His understanding of the worthlessness of the empty promise of off-shore drilling as a panacea to our gasoline price problem was succinctly stated. And his intentions to sponsor legislation designed to help us little folk survive highlighted his understanding of the fix we are in.

He didn’t say anything about the evils of this war and the devastation to the checks and balances created by our founding fathers as perpetrated by the present administration. He didn’t make any overly wild promises about a chicken in every pot, although there was a time or two when I found myself wondering where the money was going to come from to do all he has in mind.

He did say that he believes in national service – and not just military service, but community service – in exchange for $4,000 per year college tuition credit. And he did give the impression that he is not a naïve beginner, but rather a shrewd thinker who could easily discern between DC BS and reality, and that alone ought to be good enough to earn him a berth at the Whitehouse.

I’ve threatened to vote for a third party because of Obama’s FISA vote, and I will be watching him closely to see what other signs he might give about his allegiance to the powers that be, but one thing is certain. This man is at least head and shoulders above his opponent as a candidate for the presidency, and if the country elects John McCain this fall it would be the stupidest move since they elected George W Bush to a second term.

“Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!” – Patrick Henry

Be the change you wish to see in the world. -- M. K. Gandhi

The reason for going was to keep the crude flowing and raise a false flag abroad. – from a poem by Jack Evans titled 3500 Souls - http://www.myspace.com/paralegal_eagle

Individually we have little voice. Collectively we cannot be ignored.
But in silence we surrender our power. Yours in Peace -- BR

MORE OIL?

2008-07-29T10:02:00.002-05:00

In the usual obfuscative approach to problems, the halls of Washington are ringing with calls for the right to drill for more oil.

“Tap Anwar,” the Repulsicans cry. “We need the oil to offset foreign importation and strengthen our oil independence.”

“Stop Anwar drilling,” the Greens shout back. “There isn’t enough oil there to reduce our dependence on foreign supplies, and drilling in the Anwar will devastate the region’s ecology.”

So which side is telling the truth? The answer is that it doesn’t matter. What is going on is, as usual, a lot of under-the-table dealing.

The truth is that the United States doesn’t have the capacity to refine any more gasoline than it is already producing. The truth also includes the fact that the Anwar holds a very small percentage of our current oil usage level, so all the oil in the Anwar would make no appreciable dent in our foreign oil consumption. The truth is that even if we authorized oil production in the Anwar today, it would be several years before we saw any product from that region in our marketplaces.

The real under-the-table truth is that if we did authorize drilling in the Anwar, the end result would never be increased supplies of gasoline. The real result would be increased crude oil supplies for our petro-chemical industries to make use of at their leisure timed to maximize profits from that use.

The truth is exactly what George Bush said in one of the only truthful moments of his entire political career when he told us that America is addicted to oil. The truth is that the only way for America to become less dependent on foreign oil is for America to become less dependent on oil.

The truth is that the solution to the problem is up to you and me. Yes, the major oil companies are making huge profits at our expense, but they are just the sharks that swim on the reef we occupy. They aren’t any more vicious than any other corporation that swims in these waters. They just occupy a niche that, right now, puts us right in front of their gaping, greedy maws.

One thing is certain, though, and that is that allowing them to drill in the Anwar is not going to do you or me any good no matter which side of the political spectrum we stand on.

“Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!” – Patrick Henry

Be the change you wish to see in the world. -- M. K. Gandhi

Individually we have little voice. Collectively we cannot be ignored.
But in silence we surrender our power. Yours in Peace -- BR

The reason for going was to keep the crude flowing and raise a false flag abroad. – from a poem by Jack Evans titled 3500 Souls - http://www.myspace.com/paralegal_eagle