Conservative Revolutionary American Party III

America's Two-Party System

Promoted to Headline (H3) on 2/26/09:

by David Michael Green Page 1 of 3 page(s)

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The Republican party in America faces two grave problems today.

One is Barack Obama, probably the most skilled and era-appropriate politician in a generation or more. And that, after he’s already through all of one whole month in office.

The other problem threatening the very life of the Republican Party today is the Republican Party.

It’s been some time since America had much of a real two-party system. Ralph Nader was right about that in 2000. By 2001, he was beginning to be wrong. Today, it may be the case that he is growing wronger all the time.

It’s a little hard to say, because the two great, tectonic, political questions of the moment remain unanswered, only slowly coming into focus, perhaps in part because they are moving targets, actually evolving over time toward some new equilibrium. Those questions are, Who will the Democrats (and especially Obama) be?; and, Who will the Republicans be?

My sense is that Obama is fundamentally every bit the centrist he apparently whispered that he was as a sweet nothing into Benjamin Netanyahu’s ear, on his visit to Israel last year, but that events may pull him to the left. My sense is that the Republican Party has been wholly and completely captured by the lunatic fringe, but that events are jerking its sleeve toward the center.

I don’t think we yet know the disposition of either of these ideological battles, and it is likely the case that those outcomes are just as unknown to the very leaders of each party. Indeed, they may be less leaders than presiders, as other forces prove more salient in dictating the directions that their parties take in the months and years ahead.

I think Democrats can reasonably comfortably become either the party of the center or the center-left, and can, looking ahead, forge a popular consensus-based governing regime that lasts at least a generation, and more likely two.

I doubt Republicans can survive what is happening to their party as anything other than some sort of rump, stump, latter-day Whig Party, with a solid electoral grip on the whole of the Old Confederacy, as they continue to insist on maintaining in the twenty-first century every ounce of the poverty, ignorance, prejudice and class apartheid that marked the eighteenth. The only change that would represent from the last several decades is that such sick regressiveness will no longer be quite so nationalized, courtesy of the likes of Newt Gingrich, George W. Bush, Trent Lott or Mitch McConnell, but rather will remain confined to their Bible Belt, just as Jesus intended.

Key ideological mysteries remain, but what is starkly clear, and all the more so after Tuesday night, is the stature gap between these two parties. It’s not that the Democrats stand tall. They don’t – though Obama sometimes does, so far – and the likes of Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi seem at least astute enough to get out of the way of their party’s champion as he rises precipitously in public esteem. No, it’s not that Democrats stand tall, but that, more than anything, how pathetically small now stands – or crawls – the Republican Party, the same one Karl Rove promised just a few years ago to turn into a permanent majority in America.

You could see this in the jaw-dropping sight of the Republican members of Congress stuck in their seats as the rest of the room cheered for the concept of guaranteed healthcare for children. What a notion, eh? “Hey”, you could just hear them thinking, “how can we use tax giveaways to turn mere multi-millionaires into full-on billionaires if we’re spending that money instead on keeping a nation’s youth healthy? Screw that!”

You could see it, during the same speech, as they sheepishly looked around the room, trying to decide whether to rise in applause or not, as the rest of the room cheered the concept of limiting pay to utterly failed CEOs now being rescued by taxpayers whose government they’ve spent a lifetime deriding. “Hey”, you could hear them thinking, “those are our homies you’re talking about!”

But where you could really see it is in the side-by-side comparison of Barack Obama and the champion of the opposition party, Bobby Jindal, who gave the Republican response afterwards. For every bit that Obama soared in his speech – and he did, rhetorically and even, sometimes, substantively for progressives – Jindal was a moral, philosophical and political homunculus of microscopic proportions. His speech of only a few short minutes managed to pack more unctuousness, more faux bonhomie, more “be sure to do a half-chuckle here” inauthenticity, more rank and bogus populism, and more policy solutions that were last fresh in the paleolithic era, than perhaps any single thing I’ve have seen in the entirety of my lifetime. Even David Brooks – or should I say, especially David Brooks, who sees the remaining shards of his credibility swirling down the toilet as the party to which this one-time socialist hitched his wagon these last decades – even he was apoplectic at the sight of the Jindal self-immolation. When David Brooks is describing the Republican response speech and literally using words like “insane” and “nihilistic”, you know how horrid an affair it really was.

And, oh god, was it abysmal. Imagine you were standing on the deck of a ship floating in a sea of 300 million drowning shipmates and you refused to throw them a rope, insisting instead that they simply swim harder and faster. “It’s for your own good! We must avoid moral hazard! (Except where ship owners are concerned, of course.)” Now imagine ten minutes later they all climb back on board and decide to conduct a ‘referendum’ on your future. That was the Jindal approach to a nation in crisis.

Imagine a political party in 2009 staking its claim to popularity with the voters on a demand to return to the gold standard, re-instituting Prohibition, or rejecting the Jay Treaty, and you’d be just about as up-to-date and relevant as the Republicans. Jindal sounded like little more than a sickening GOP jukebox trotting out old Reagan chestnuts that were already horrid forty years ago when they were first uttered by the B-movie actor himself, repeatedly referring, for instance, to the looming danger of government “bureaucrats” running our lives.

You could also see the difference between the parties in the very facts of Obama and Jindal. For all its faults of cowardice in the last decades and out-group Balkanization in the time before that, the Democratic Party has still done some of the hard work of inclusiveness-building in America. And, what is more, they did so at a massive cost to their popularity, as the Republican vultures swept in to pick up the racist vote, after Lyndon Johnson had shown the moral courage to do the right thing. Then they watched as the GOP grabbed the sexist vote, while Democrats tried to enact the Equal Rights Amendment. They were scorned for coddling communists and criminals, while the Kaiser’s Party won votes by opportunistically trashing the ACLU. Most recently, the Democrats have lost the homophobic vote to the GOP, while the closeted queers dressed up as the bible-thumping moral arbiters of our culture rail against the very sins they commit when the sheep in their congregations aren’t looking.

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David Michael Green is a professor of political science at Hofstra University in New York. He is delighted to receive readers' reactions to his articles (dmg@regressiveantidote.net), (more...)

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Cash-Strapped Communities Suffer as Corporations Target Water Systems

February 26, 2009 at 17:25:37

Cash-Strapped Communities Suffer as Corporations Target Water Systems

Promoted to Headline (H3) on 2/26/09:

by Food & Water Watch (Posted by Amanda Lang) Page 1 of 1 page(s)

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WASHINGTON - February 25 - A new report released today by Food & Water Watch, a national consumer advocacy group based in Washington, D.C., reveals that many cash-strapped communities across the country are experiencing rate hikes and a decrease in public services after selling their water and wastewater systems to private corporations. Money Down the Drain: How Private Control of Water Wastes Public Resources highlights cities and towns across the country that have sold their water systems to private companies to offset budget deficits in an increasingly unstable economy, and the negative economic and environmental impact of water privatization on those communities.

"Private companies claim that they provide more efficient service and that they can upgrade systems at a lower cost than their public counterparts," said Wenonah Hauter, executive director of Food & Water Watch. "Such claims are nothing but spin. Private water companies are beholden to shareholders, not the customers who rely on them for this vital natural resource. The delivery of public water should never be a profit center for privately held corporations."

Highlights of Money Down the Drain: How Private Control of Water Wastes Public Resources include:

State-by-state comparisons of public and private water bills that reveal that private companies charge consumers as much as 80 percent more for water and 100 percent more for wastewater services than their public counterparts.

How private companies inflate costs, cut corners to profit shareholders and ignore environmentally sustainable practices that might undercut profits.

That private water companies target water systems in poor, vulnerable communities with little political capacity to oppose the sale of their water.

Case studies of communities in Ohio, Indiana, California, Florida, Pennsylvania and elsewhere that have been negatively impacted by privatization and/or have canceled service contracts with private entities to provide better service to consumers.

Food & Water Watch's solutions to local and national water infrastructure challenges, including the need for dedicated federal funding for water and wastewater systems.

Money Down the Drain: How Private Control of Water Wastes Public Resources is available at: http://www.foodandwaterwatch.org/money-down-the-drain.

###

Food & Water Watch is a nonprofit consumer organization that works to ensure clean water and safe food. We challenge the corporate control and abuse of our food and water resources by empowering people to take action and by transforming the public consciousness about what we eat and drink.

Food & Water Watch Links: HomepageFood & Water Watch (Press Center)Food & Water Watch (Action Center)

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A Spiritual Guide for Economic Bailout

February 26, 2009 at 14:39:46

A Spiritual Guide for Economic Bailout

Promoted to Headline (H3) on 2/26/09:

by Rabbi Michael Lerner Page 1 of 2 page(s)

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White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel famously warned in November that "you never want a serious crisis to go to waste." But that is exactly what the White House and Congress have allowed to happen. Secular progressives are disappointed, but spiritual progressives are doubly so. This is a crisis that demands the deepest of revisions of our worldview and economics.

Certainly the Democrats have managed to do enough-in the way of restoring some of the programs cut by the Bush administration, helping the states deal with their own increasing budget deficits, and even initiating several new programs-for Congressional Democrats to feel they have prevailed. Next comes an even more massive bailout for the banks.

The underlying message of these measures is clear: to get out of a recession bordering on a multi-year depression, ordinary citizens must spend more money on consumer goods. This would generate jobs and help staunch a wave of massive layoffs that threaten to push official (and usually under-estimated) levels of unemployment up to 10 percent or more of the work force this year.

To progressives, this was a tremendously irresponsible misuse of the opportunity created by the crisis. The bank bailout was based on the old trickle-down economics that had been discredited by the years of Republican and neo-liberal policies that actually yielded the current meltdown. If you want to stimulate spending, progressives insist, give the money directly to those in need: Create a national bank to give loans to people who wish to buy homes or expand their businesses; provide funding to banks willing to forgive bad mortgages and renegotiate them to affordable levels; raise the minimum wage to a level that makes it a "living wage"; grant citizenship and rights to all the current illegal immigrants, making it easier for them too to spend more money on consumption; and fund a single-payer health care plan that would provide care for the 45 million-plus Americans currently uninsured (while simultaneously imposing strict cost controls on hospitals and other health-care providers).

Yet progressives too may be too limited in their thinking. The economic crisis is global and requires a global solution. Spiritual progressives insist that this is the moment for Americans to acknowledge to ourselves that our well-being depends on that of everyone else on the planet. Instead of each nation-state trying to develop policies meant to benefit only its own citizens, we need the world's major economic powers and representatives of the developing countries to cooperatively work out policies that dramatically reshape the way that we, the human race, produce and consume the resources of our planet.

A central part of such global thinking requires a new conception of efficiency, rationality and productivity. The old bottom line measured productivity and efficiency by how much money or material goods were produced. We need a "new bottom line" that evaluates corporations, government programs, laws, social policies, and even personal behavior by how much love and kindness, generosity and caring, ethical and ecological sensitivity, are produced and how much we are encouraged to respond to the universe with awe and wonder at the grandeur of all that is. Hundreds of years of capitalist excess made the old more narrow utilitarian attitude seem like "common sense," because it worked to generate an ever increasing accumulation of material goods.

But the societies that have bought into that old bottom line are now reeling from the economic collapse generated when tens of millions of people acted on the assumption that trumping all ethical and spiritual concerns was the obligation to maximize one's own material well-being regardless of environmental and human-relationship consequences.

Only a year ago it might have seemed "unrealistic" or "utopian" to imagine a new bottom line and a society reconstructed on that basis. But it is no longer so far-fetched when the government is spending trillions of dollars to repair a system that based itself on a fundamentalist belief that progress could be judged by how many things we accumulated. In my book The Left Hand of God (HarperSanFrancisco, 2006) I detail what this "new bottom line" might look like in our schools, corporations, health care, legal system and our approach to foreign policy.

Spiritual wisdom and daily spiritual practice may be needed by the entire human race in order of for us to develop the intellectual and psychological foundations for a green economy. There is a difficult balance to negotiate between improving the material well-being of the most oppressed and materially deprived citizens of the planet, while teaching the majority of citizens of the more advanced societies how to reduce their level of material needs. Many today feel deprived if they cannot get a new model car every few years or dramatic escalations in the capacities of their iphones and computers.

People have to get to the point where they no longer believe that their personal success is measured by how many new material gadgets, electronic devices, automobiles, apartments or houses, home furnishings, and exotic vacations they have.

Spiritual progressives believe it is time to bring into the democratic process a discussion of the kinds of consumption that are worth fostering and the kinds that actually contribute to the further erosion of our planet's life support system.

To some the conception of democratic control of an economy is going to be dismissed as nothing more than a slippery slope toward a "command economy" that failed when tried by the communists. Yet market fundamentalism is no longer an unchallengeable element of American faith, and the values of a New Bottom Line resonate not only with those of us whose spiritual consciousness already predisposes us to question the ultimacy of material accumulation but also to millions of Americans who can no longer believe that the planet can survive based on profligate consumption of its raw materials. Thinking through the details of building a society based on shared values and committed to treating the planet as more than a bottomless cookie jar-from which we can extract whatever we wish without fear of consequences-will not be easy, and will require the fostering of a new spiritual awareness. Too many liberals and progressives, lacking a spiritual and ethical foundation for making such choices, have simply embraced the notion that any kind of spending will get us out of the current crisis.

No wonder, then, that the Obama bailout seems so completely unfocused on achieving any particular social good (e.g. adequate health care, environmental repair, or elimination of domestic or global poverty). The Obama plan reflects the lack of direction or values orientation that bedevils most progressive thinking, and reminds us of the important role that spiritual progressives from Martin Luther King, Jr. to Mahatma Gandhi to Nelson Mandela have been able to play precisely because they have this other dimension in their thinking.

A spiritual progressive approach to bailout is badly needed for the U.S. This is the moment in which biblical ethics and the wisdom of spiritual traditions are actually more realistic than the plans of the capitalist economists. Ideas like the biblical prohibitions against waste; the command to be stewards of the planet; a legal system that obligates us to care for others (which thus transcends a system of rights based only on self-protection) -all these should no longer seem utopian, but instead recognized as matters of survival for the human race.

Even the amazing biblical view of a society-wide sabbatical takes on an attractive allure. Imagine an entire society that stops its production for a given year, and relies on the food, fuel and wealth that has been accumulated during the other six years and now gets redistributed equally to everyone for the sabbatical year, meanwhile freeing the entire population from work so that they can participate in everything from job retraining to get new skills to pure vacationing with the planet to democratic assemblies in which people collectively define their societal priorities for the coming six years. A sabbatical year for every person once in seven years is a practical work benefit that should be a right of all workers. But this takes on a whole different meaning and opens up amazing possibilities for everyone if everyone takes off the same year, creating a festival of freedom and creativity that would be experienced by many as a far greater reward than any material benefits that they were giving up because their society had taken itself off the productivity grid for a year. Yes, there could be enough food and fuel and health care-though this will take careful planning for many years before implementation. But the idea itself points us into unexplored terrain: what if we really didn't have to work all the time, what if the world and our own personal world could survive on less? If, instead of appearing to be a huge sacrifice, the reduction of consumption was experienced as part of an exciting spiritual journey, it might just be possible for us to get off the juggernaut of endless material "progress" before it destroys everything.

Don't we need to work to have enough money to buy food? Well, this begs the question. We have enough food for everyone on the planet. Money has become the distribution mechanism, making it possible for some people to have way more food than they need or is good for them, while others living only miles away, don't have enough money to buy the food they need. The same is true of health care, education, and even energy. By having a year in which these goods are distributed equally and for free may be the necessary first step toward making it possible for people on the planet to imagine a world in which money is no longer the arbiter of essential goods and services.

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http://www.tikkun.org

Rabbi Michael Lerner is editor of Tikkun and national chair of the Tikkun Community/ Network of Spiritual Progressives. People are invited to subscribe to Tikkun magazine or join the interfaith organization the Network of Spiritual Progressives-- (more...)

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Current Comedy 2/23/09: Not Only of Cowards

February 27, 2009 at 11:02:47

Current Comedy 2/23/09: Not Only of Cowards

by mikel weisser Page 1 of 1 page(s)

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MLKjr' Condemnation of Predatory Capitalism Again Deleted in Black History Month

Howdy ever' body, my name is Mikel W. and I am a fake.
[Crowd murmurs "howdy"? and "welcome."?]

Sure nice of you folks to have a support meeting like this here group, Fakers Unanimous. I just never knew that there were enough folks in America willing to face up to their own falseness to where we could even have such a support group. I never would have guessed this many Americans were finally ready to acknowledge our economy, our country's sense of self, in fact our very existence has been a-swirl in a Chomsky-esque wash of necessary illusions and the truths that were always mounting behind the masks are now massing to destroy us. The threads are at last unraveling; and the emperor's new suit has arrived worn and wrinkled, shoddy and soiled.

And we ourselves are to blame.

Yipes! I am duly impressed by the pitiless self-awareness of the members of the F.U. group; but I am not sure I am ready to join just yet. There's all that stuff about admitting we are powerless to our weakness, acknowledging our mistakes, making amends. Twelve steps may be a little bit further than I am currently willing to walk to change the channel. I am an American after all.

I want my MTV. I want all that and a bag of chips. I want to feel wanted and safe and plush and adorned and forever young and forever oblivious and I am willing to spend like crazy to get that feeling. I want it my way or the highway.

Look, I've already spent all of your money and all of mine. Talk about generational theft, I've already spent your kid's future and my parents' past. Yes, like most Americans I want more than my share and want you to leave me alone about it, OK? I mean it's a free country, isn't it? I can believe what I want to believe. I've got the right to do what I want, even the right to be wrong.

So that's why I don't want to make the effort to fix our health care and education systems. We know both continue to slide in comparison to the rest of the civilized world. In health care you have a better chance of getting struck by lightning than of affording health care that can save your life and at least with the lightning the charges would make more sense. In education, American urban high school students rank in achievement somewhere between Romanian meth-baby dropouts and moldy sweat socks.

It's easier to pretend it's not broken than to try to seriously fix education, so that's what we do. We say schools are about the joy of learning then budget-cut all the fun out of it. We say there is so much they need to know then only teach them how to pass one test. We teach our kids to glory in stupidity then wonder why they're not bright. We create every convenience item we can imagine then wonder they're so lazy. We make money off of the punks and twerps and criminals we sell to them as idols and then wonder how it happened we've raised all these punks and twerps and criminals. We teach them sluts are cool, and then wonder why abstinence-only education isn't the only thing around here that sucks.

We also tell our children how important learning is then invent every other way for them to fill up and thus empty their time. We say we love entertainment because it relaxes our mind when in fact we know it destroys it. The visual mediums, whether TV or the Internet, are meant to limit our interests not expand them. Megabyte by megabyte we get trained to learn nothing quite so much our impatience for the next thing to the point we understand no thing as seriously as our urgency for the new.

I would Twitter you about it, but if I tried to actually discuss substantial ideas then this paragraph is too long and I haven't even said--

Economy's a fake, entirely. The people on top won't stop selling us the idea that we could spend all the money in the world because they make all the money in the world peddling the idea to us like dope. Since they won't stop selling it, we don't stop buying it and over-spending on it, even though for years folks have been telling us we should know better. We did know, but we did not care.

Small wonder this whole hopped-up fantasy economy had to crash. Every few years a new speculative bubble built up to bursting--now our very homes. Too many houses sold, some say; but from where I stand I see too many houses foreclosed. ARMs made to strangle the homeowner, the banker's handshake that turned into a clenched fist.

Pundits like to rag on the buyers they claim should have known better. But buying a house is the American dream. It is what we were told to do. We looked to the experts, our realtors and our banks, who told us they were out for our trust when in fact they were just after a piece of our ass. The deals seemed too good to be true, but the banks and the realtors said it would work. We wanted to believe it would work, so we did. We signed on the dotted line, just like they did; but the difference is they knew it would all have to collapse one day. They simply had already planned their way to make their pile of dough first off of our dimes. Become too big to fail, so the poor have to feed the rich.

And it wasn't just banks. If you really want to see where to start fixing the problem, look in the mirror. Everyone knew that that same house we sat in for five years while the paint rotted did not legitimately gain 100K in value. But somebody told us it did and some other idiot offered us the crazy money for it. We knew we'd get ahead so we went along.

Everyone took a hit. It was the drug of choice. Government officials swam in seas of lobbyist lucre and bent the rules for their newfound friends. Big business and big banks bent the rules for each other. Everyone was the richer. No one was the wiser.

It wasn't like we'd learn anything from the news. News is a fake. Once upon a time news worried about its myth of impartiality. Now no news is safe from the TV newsreader's opinion of it. Press can purport a new doggedness claiming they regret the slack attention they paid to Bush. So they pretend to be aggressive in their examination of every potential Obama flaw on the horizon. But this isn't a case of new dogs up to old tricks. They are mostly aping the Elephant line. After 8 years of cheerleading for Bush they don't know where else to go. So nowadays CNN starts every story with a hostility they'd never have dared with Bush. Perhaps they've become "fair and balanced."

Maybe so, but I think they're fakes. I think Holden's right, they're all fakes, phonies. That's why I'm here, with all of you at F.U. because I'm a fake too. And it takes one to know one. So, so are you too.
[Crowds grumbles]

War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength.
[Crowd murmurs in ascent.]

And Eric Holder is also right: we are a nation of cowards, merely faking it when it comes to race relations and many other taboo topics as well, and not in that ultra-qualified and mitigated way Holder used when he spoke commemorating Black History Month. Still right wing pundits from Rush Limbaugh to Anderson Cooper umbrage at his remarks, offering us yet another opportunity to watch rich white guys scold a black man because he doesn't understand race relations.

But if America now attempts to claim to be a post-racial society, it is not because we no longer act based on the built-in biases 400 years of subservience cannot help but inbreed, it's not because we no longer see in black and white. It's because we're all just wearing masks.

Happy Black History Month, Mr. Holder, no faking.
--mikel w. writes from the left coast of AZ.

Born the son of a nightclub singer, Mikel Weisser watched anti-war hippies getting beaten on TV during the Vietnam War and decided to devote his life to protest against unreasoning authority, but not to getting beaten. Though he spent almost two (more...)

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MLKjr' Condemnation of Predatory Capitalism Again Deleted in Black History Month

February 27, 2009 at 09:41:25

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Click here to see the most recent messages sent to congressional reps and local newspapers

As this year's Black History Month closes, we quote, by popular request, passages from last year's OEN article on Black History Month, regretting the careful avoidance in public events and comemerative writings, lectures and studies of any reference to Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.' sermons condemning predatory capitalism and an imperialist foreign policy of wars of occupation in the Third World by the U.S. military and CIA. It's compalint is still applicable.

"What is strikingly absent from standard and corporate media Black History time lines, are quotes from, or references to, the more poignantly educating and sorely needed critical statements of black historical celebrities on United States foreign policy - notably missing are the biting condemnations of America's imperialist wars and predatory international capitalism by Dr. Rev. Martin Luther King Jr."

One begins to wonder if there is perhaps an unwritten law that keeps even black leaders from quoting Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.' 1967 condemnations of U.S. wars and covert criminal CIA activities to support overseas investments and trade. During Black History Month, leaders of all political factions in American society, including of course black leaders, as usual, quoted Rev. King Jr.' inspiring civil rights, equality and antiracism pronouncements. Full Stop. As usual.

One did not hear Andrew Young, Jessie Jackson, Rev. King Jr.' widow, Rev. Sharpton or Barack Obama refer to Rev. King Jr.' 1967 denunciations of U.S. foreign policy in their statements to the public.

Representatives Barbara Lee, John Conyers, Charles Rangel, Jessie Jackson Jr., and all the other congressional black caucus and progressive caucus members have NOT been quoting Rev. King Jr. on the floor of Congress to try to stop the Democrats from continuing to fund the wars of occupation and to unblock the Bush and Cheney impeachment bills pending. If they had, we would have witnessed such bold moves on C-span telecasts of sessions of the House of Representatives, and most likely the conglomerate owned entertainment/news channel would have felt forced to give coverage as well.

Although the onus for confronting the gung-ho promotion of wars for whatever pretense, excuse or reasoning is firmly on the white community rather than on Afro-Americans, and King's 67 blistering anti-war words are public domain and right there on the internet for the googling by any and all sincerely motivated activists for peace and justice, one cannot help but wonder at the recalcitrance of those highly profiled Afro-Americans in the public eye to come forward and pick up where King left off - in a pool of blood.

If the hesitancy to quote King's call for each of us to protest America's wars and covert actions in third world nations be out of fear? 'There is safety in numbers': numbers of us quoting the words of the only American allotted the national recognition of a public holiday honoring his birth. How dangerous would that be? (Almost like quoting the bible.)

One and all could simply quote King verbatim without interpretation or making unnecessary connection to current wars, which the mass media could slander and call 'unpatriotic'.

Sound bites of a few words:

"My country, the greatest purveyor of violence in the world!"
"Silence is treason!"
"Everyone must protest!"

Some will muse, 'ah, but our present wars of occupation are justified, America was attacked.' Yes, America was attacked, but by Saudi Arabians, not by Afghanis and Iraqis. The lies to justify wars in Third World nations are different, but the slaughter is the same.

King's anti-imperialism speech in New York one year to the day before his assassination remains an embarrassment for all members of the establishment, an establishment which felt obliged to make King's birthday a national holiday.

Rather than educate, President Obama feels it necessary to go out of his way to praise those who were sent to war in Vietnam War along with those who fought and are fighting a war in Iraq which the President himsellf had called a "dumb" during his campaign for election.

When King's thundering against, and teaching about, imperialism, now deleted from Black History, becomes known by America's young, the nation's true interests will become more important than the interests of its capitalists.

(For those readers wishing to read the whole article of March 1, 2008, click on

Black History Month Ignored MLKJr. Condemnation of U.S. Wars, Predatory Capitalism

Take action -- click here to contact your local newspaper or congress people:
Ask why 1967 MLK Jr condemnations of war are suppressed?

Musician and writer, who has lived and worked on all the continents and whose articles on media have been published in China, Italy, England and the US, and now resides in New York City.

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The Great American Hysteria

February 27, 2009 at 09:19:04

The Great American Hysteria

by Randy LoBasso Page 1 of 1 page(s)

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Mostly, We are Idiots. So How Did We Elect a Genius?

Back in 1998, redneck hysteria had hit new heights.

Allegations were made that the all-trash brawls on The Jerry Springer show were fake, and set up beforehand. It was claimed that the people on the show were actors.

At the time, one former unnamed Guest told Extra TV: "We acted everything. When you have to do this, when you have to punch, when you have to push. They wanted us to wrestle and throw each other around. They said 'We want four fights'."

As time wore on, the Jerry Springer controversy became a bore. No one cared, and ratings soared. Americans would rather watch fake people beating the heck out of each other for fake reasons than have real people maybe-or-maybe-not fight for real reasons. Conflict is what made the show. These counterfeit antics, which made good television then, continue to make the tube watchable.

We live in a country where things we are told are true are not, and we know it. We accept the lie because it's better than boring old truth.
It's not just Springer. There's manufactured make-believe all around us: Music has American Idol. The memoir has James Frey. The sports world has professional wrestling and Barry Bonds. Politics has Rush Limbaugh.

It took all the way to Inauguration Day to hear Rush Limbaugh utter the direct words, "I hope Obama fails." This was a storyline created by Rush for the ones who listen to his daily story. And the problem is, they think he's serious. When Rush Limbaugh says something, there are people – otherwise rational people – who take it at face value.

There's been a little blowback to the right-wing entertainment industry trying to take over the Republican Party, but certainly not enough. In an interview with Real Clear Politics on Wednesday, Governor Mark Sanford was asked about the "view that perhaps Republicans are rooting for President Obama to fail." He said, "Anybody who wants him to fail is an idiot."

As of the time of this article, Sanford hasn't called into the Limbaugh show to kiss the ring of the don, as Rep. Phil Gangrey did when he accidentally said something almost negative about El Rushbo. Though Sanford's Communications Director said, "the governor was not referring to anyone." Thursday, in defiance of the quote, Limbaugh filled part of his three hours with this: "So, after he said, 'Anyone who wants Obama to fail is an idiot,' then went on in his own way to say, 'Gosh, I hope this doesn't work'... He just had to say, 'We don't want the president to fail'...Hell we don't! We want something to blow up politically. We want something to not go right."

That's why Limbaugh is filling his time slot with made-up quotes from our president, the same way he made up news reports about Hillary Clinton killing her lawyer in the 90s. It's why he started calling the economic crisis the "Obama Recession" back in December and still lays claim that Chris Dodd created the entire financial crisis on purpose in order to get a Democrat elected.

People believe him. He doesn't become the most listened to radio host in America for nothing. And he's hosted presidents, senators, governors – you name it – on his show. He's got a following of fans.

And he's spawned an entire Professional Wrestling-Jerry Springer culture in our political discourse. Internet commenters steal his one-liners like "porkulous bill" and even make up some of their own, like "libtard." It's just bad discourse meant to make people stupid. And it works. Otherwise, Limbaugh's protégé, Lil' Sean Hannity, would have been tossed out the bottom of the porn industry years ago, before he had the chance to call any of his callers 'Great Americans' simply because they call his show.

If I was in front of daytime TV and saw an intelligent conversation on Jerry Springer, I'd change the channel. If Jerry Springer didn't openly offend the free world with his "Final Thought" every single time his show aired, it wouldn't be a show.

Maybe that's why the protests didn't last too long back in 1998. Springer was giving the people what they wanted: good TV. It was a half hour out of the day when you just didn't have to think. You sat back and said, "My life isn't that bad; I'm not these people." And sometimes, when I'm listening to Rush Limbaugh, I say the same thing. "My life isn't that bad; I'm not one of these callers telling Limbaugh 'dittos' or on my cordless phone, waiting with the anticipation to call Sean Hannity a 'Great American'." Meanwhile, both these men openly hope for a brittle America to shatter to pieces so a politician they don't like can be shamed. Maybe I should start listening between the lines. Because with all this hope that America fails, you've got to wonder if 'Great American' is actually just code-word for something else.

Randy LoBasso lives in Philadelphia, PA. He's a freelance editor and writer and has worked on everything from memoirs to self-help books. He's also been published in a bunch of places like The Philadelphia Daily News, Inquirer, and other (more...)

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Mostly, We are Idiots. So How Did We Elect a Genius?

February 27, 2009 at 09:13:42

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by Allan Goldstein Page 1 of 2 page(s)

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Until I got into this blogging business I thought internet porn was about sex. Man, was I an idiot. The real internet porn is obscene, masturbatory political attitude tarted up as opinion.

Blogs are depressing, don't you think? I mean, unless you really need to find a place where your prejudices are shouted back at you in the world's biggest echo chamber at the speed of light, it's kind of a downer.

Call me Dilbert and pass me the dunce hat. I thought the web had the potential to host a highly diverse, highly individual, people-to-people dialogue. We could come here and share our thoughts, our thoughts, not the prepackaged suite of mascot issues and fetishes that comes with membership in one or another ideological fan group.

The web is like a superconducting magnet--everything is pulled powerfully towards the poles, left and right. The loneliest four words in the blogs are "on the other hand." Kindergarten fights have more nuance.

Conspiracy theories abound, on both sides. If you are looking for the absolute gold standard test for stupidity and irrationality, you'll find it on the web, and it goes by different names.

The right calls it the Trilateral Commission and the black helicopters. The left calls it the 9/11 plot, the JFK plot, and the CIA caused AIDS plot.

The difference between the bigoted right and the bigoted left? The right-wing bigots blame the Jews for all our problems. The left wing bigots blame Israel.

The left wing netroots are all ablaze right now over the delicious prospect of bringing the previous administration to the dock and extracting a legal pound of flesh from Bush and Co., and we all know which pound of flesh. The arguments for and against prosecuting Bush administration people for supposed crimes and abuses are more or less valid, but beside the point. The point is revenge and anyone who tries to tell you otherwise is a liar or a hypocrite.

Do I go too far? Perhaps. This is a blog. But if your priority is to advance a truly progressive agenda in these oh-so-desperate times, if your philosophy tells you our very survival as a nation depends on that, would you be having wet dreams of sending Dick Cheney to Guantanamo to be Alberto Gonzales's prison b*tch, or would you be looking forward? Aren't the political obstacles to social justice, universal health care, economic recovery and educational reform high enough already? Is it rational to turn opponents into sworn enemies? And what happens when the Republicans win again, as they will, some day in the distant future? You better be prepared to lawyer up, because they'll be coming after you, just like you did to them.

I'm telling you, it's a foolish dead end. The Move On Dot Org crowd needs to move on.

The right is no better and probably worse, but they are in eclipse right now. They still think that government is the root of all our problems. The idea of using any intelligence accumulated by homo sapiens in the past fifty-thousand or so years to change the workings of implacable nature "otherwise known as the free market'' strikes them with fear and loathing. The retard right doesn't believe in evolution, but, when it comes to the economy and government, they are strict Darwinists. They believe in the survival of the fittest, in the markets, with little or no government intervention. Evolution, in other words.

There is no more philosophical or moral consistency to the conservative's love for law and order in society, and hatred for regulation in the economy, than there is in the left's love of the people, while disdaining all the people who don't think like them, recreate like them and hate like them. And it's all on display on the web, every day, endlessly.

Do you believe in miracles? Well, we're living one, right now. Because somehow, out of this witch's brew of fifth-hand opinions, steaming plates of anger and hatred, unexamined attitudes and confused philosophies, out of this cauldron of error, lies and misinformation, we managed to elect Barack Obama as our leader. Out of 320 million Americans we seem to have picked just the right individual, a man who possesses almost all of our virtues and precious few of our extravagantly numerous faults, to be our president.

Are we lucky or what?

I think what. I think that the collective wisdom of the American people transcended the individual follies of the American people. Somehow we dumped all our prejudices, all our anger, for the corporations, big oil, big pharma, big anything and big Bush/Cheney on the one side and for San Francisco liberals, the gay agenda, secular humanists and godless baby killers on the other side into a big pot, set the flame on boil, filling the air with the acrid fumes of our burning bile and Barack Obama came forth. Cool, sweet reason, sparkling, unprejudiced brilliance, smiling reassurance and a forward, yes, progressive vision that looks at what should be, not at past injuries with diseased dreams of revenge. That's what we got. That's what we gave ourselves.

One day of reading blogs is enough to send me to the depths of despair. So much passion, hatred, stupidity and delusion, all the Rolaids in the world and a titanium stomach can't stop the heartburn. A people that agitated, that divided, so prone to believe the worst of one another, so deluded by straw men, conspiracy theories, political hallucinations and bogus arguments can't possibly choose a leader with none of those pathologies, can they?

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allangoldstein.com

Allan Goldstein is writer living in San Francisco. His op-ed column, "Caught off Base," has appeared in the West Portal Monthly for the past decade. Satire and invective are specialties. His other work includes fiction in various literary (more...)

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Housing Price Decline Accelerates

February 27, 2009 at 08:32:44

Housing Price Decline Accelerates

by Dean Baker Page 1 of 1 page(s)

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